The Bill
Waldman, Steven
BOOK REVIEWS 0 f the three major books published so far about Bill Clinton's administration-inprogress, Steven Waldman's The Bill may be the best, and the one most likely to last. It has a narrower...
...No problem...
...that's yesterday...
...Covering the story for Newsweek, where he is a national correspondent Waldman witnessed many pivotal moments firsthand...
...he defanging occupies the bulk of T Waldman's book, and in his masterly account it is comic, pathetic, gruesome, and never short of fascinating, as a car wreck is fascinating...
...But the dilemmas they faced were grown up...
...Banks complained about being cut out of the loans...
...Pundits like to call this "hubris...
...The press is already uncovering the inevitable abuses—underthe-table payments to volunteers, servers who serve as agitators rather than dogooders—and House Republicans vow to defund the program entirely...
...He got a front-row seat...
...On second look, of course, and in practice, it isn't and doesn't—a minor inconvenience Waldman overlooks...
...As the New Democrats saw it, means-testing would have undercut the whole purpose of national service, sucked it into the "poverty program trap...
...It's enough to restore your faith in democracy...
...It is not a story for the faint of heart...
...And howdoes one define diverse...
...Neoliberalism, like a second marriage, is the triumph of hope over experience...
...That's okay, since the book's great strength lies not in its propagandistic value but in the comprehensiveness of Waldman's reporting, and in his ability to create from a sprawl of complex material a crisp and compelling narrative...
...The Office of National Service in the White House was, naturally, "staffed with earnest men and women in their late teens and early twenties, some wearing shorts and T-shirts...
...ite so many DLC L ideas, national service was based on several confusions simultaneously...
...That's old-fashioned...
...The president himself says that he will never again launch a program of which he's so proud...
...Educrats worried that a dangerous precedent might be set—kids would have to work for their money...
...wonders Waldman...
...National service, Waldman writes (in propagandistic mode), "could be the public policy equivalent of a Swiss Army knife, performing numerous useful functions in one affordable package...
...Trouble began instantaneously, when the flacks set up the camera backdrop for the vice president's oration...
...There was, for example, the Summer of Service training week...
...The vultures struck...
...National service Andrew Ferguson is a senior writer for the Washingtonian...
...The campaign for national service became a carnival of mau-mauing, guilt-tripping, and moral preening—a living illustration of the liberal crack-up...
...The first of these was that Americans will volunteer only if they get paid for it...
...others, bolstered by exhaustive reporting, he reconstructs with a sure gift for character and scene-setting...
...So the candidate promised some more, flexing his jaw as the applause swelled...
...Against some of this pick-pick-pick the New Democrats held firm...
...The third confusion was that "national service," in Clintonian terms, was somehow equivalent to military service...
...prevent crime...
...New Democrats hope to ensnare everybody in government programs and ruin their lives...
...In its purest form, then, national service is a social-engineering scheme of breathtaking scope and ambition...
...Several sharply drawn episodes linger long after the book is put down...
...In particular they managed to fight off a demandthat the benefits be "means-tested"—that is, offered only to poor people...
...By tracing the evolution of a single Clintonian idea, "national service," from half-baked campaign pledge to half-baked government program, Waldman has written the definitive study of the neoliberal, New Democrat mind in the throes of governance...
...paid for in the form Clinton promised...
...Service programs nationwide sent representatives...
...It is less exhaustive but livelier than Elizabeth Drew's On the Edge, and shorter, too...
...Backstage the campaign's numbercrunchers worked furiously, only to discover that the program could never be THE BILL: HOW THE ADVENTURES OF CLINTON'S NATIONAL SERVICE BILL REVEAL WHAT IS CORRUPT, COMIC, CYNICAL— AND NOBLE—ABOUT WASHINGTON Steven Waldman Viking/301 pages / $22.95 reviewed by ANDREW FERGUSON 64 The American Spectator May 1995 incapable of working toward a broad national purpose...
...Then a Native-American complained that there were no Indians in the center bleachers...
...reduce class- and race-consciousness...
...It is the trans-ideological idea, "neither liberal nor conservative...
...Then other African-Americans complained that being moved to the front led to a feeling of objectification...
...This is the kind of conundrum that could daunt the most seasoned Clintonite, even one in his mid-twenties...
...The system," Waldman writes glumly, "often seemed was a pet of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the New Democrat hothouse that Clinton helped found...
...By embracing national service, the candidate embraced his moderate brethren...
...Waldman is drawn to this idea for Clintonian reasons, for at first blush it seems to satisfy the quest for the New Democrats' grail...
...If you do that service for two years at a reduced salary," Clinton began saying, "then you don't owe any money [on your student loan] any more...
...Poverty pimps complained about the middle-class subsidy...
...Defeating Hitler was just a happy coincidence...
...That's the future...
...Somehow his neoliberal faith survives even the squalor of the tale he has to tell...
...For a precedent, boosters often—relentlessly, in fact—pointed to basic training in World War II, when the bootblack from Queens shared a latrine with the Scarsdale blueblood, instilling in both a sense of "shared sacrifice" and "national community...
...It has a narrower range than Bob Woodward's The Agenda but is more reliable as a result...
...Is fifty-fifty black-Hispanic `diverse,' or does the term require whites...
...C3 The American Spectator May 1995 65...
...Without intending to, Waldman may have written the obit for a certain kind of liberal dream...
...Sponsored by the White House staff, the event was meant "to give the media some living, breathing examples of service as Congress considered the legislation...
...Clinton had boomed the idea as a way of reforming student loans, but after the election the loan reform and the service were decoupled for legislative purposes...
...Labor complained about below-market wages...
...What if it is class-homogeneous and race-heterogeneous...
...AmeriCorps, as the national service program is called, was signed into law almost two years ago, but it is a mere shadow of the bright, bold vision Clinton lied about during the campaign...
...We too can hope...
...Actually, this is by design, as a quick flip through the Federalist Papers will show...
...The bleachers were to be filled with the ecstatic faces of young "servers," but one server complained that "the rows directly behind Gore were fifty-fifty white-black, even though the program on the whole was 75 percent minority...
...it subsumes both the hard-headedness of the right and the selflessness of the left...
...It also proved to be a wow on the campaign trail, which deepened Clinton's attachment...
...Oh, and save money, too...
...increase voluntarism...
...Along with the quotidian good works of helping the poor and cleaning rivers, etc., national service would: help everybody go to college...
...The system" is supposed to stymie grand, comprehensive schemes to remake the "national character...
...School bursars complained about administering the cash...
...In barest outline, national service allows young folk to pay off federally subsidized student loans with "voluntary" good works—tending the poor, cleaning rivers and streams, restoring America's greatness—under the nurturing hand of the federal government...
...A New Democrat understands that the Old Democrat ensnared poor people in reckless government programs and ruined their lives...
...At one point, said an administration official, "I almost thought we were going to have a riot" You think it's easy being a liberal in the '90s...
...He begins with "Anatomy of a Campaign Promise...
...The flack moved the whites to the back, blacks and Asians to the front...
...It got even worse—no one had arranged meals for the vegetarians...
...Diversity cops complained about all the white kids...
...And so on...
...Day by day, the promise grew more extravagant...
...Is a corps that mixes rich and poor whites considered diverse...
...It is, though, a story that Waldman himself finds ennobling...
...Yet another confusion was that a single policy proposal can accomplish many objectives at once while escaping the law of unintended consequences...
...A simulacrum of Clinton's grand and comprehensive scheme survived in the end, but it had been almost thoroughly defanged...
...A second was that the problem of rising college costs could be solved by adding to the cause of the problem, which is the easy availability of college loans...
...0 r maybe not...
...After the campaign, the platform pledge ran up against reality—at least as Washington defines reality—in the form of budget constraints, special-interest demands, and the blast and rumble of the congressional sausage factory...
...The president wanted national service to be diverse...
...Al Gore was sent as White House emissary...
...and, most deliciously, "build character...
...develop local economies...
Vol. 28 • May 1995 • No. 5
