Conflicted President, Undefined Presidency

...Perot: The Misread Middle An oxymoronic political strategy underpins both the primacy given the deficit and the ascent of figures like Panetta and Gergen: establishmentarian populism...

...That was the lesson of the ill-fated $16 billion stimulus package...

...Where's the left...

...choices impend...

...But these are not options he can take without drawing the fire of the financial community and the Beltway punditocracy...

...the governing parties in Japan and Italy die without a credible national opposition being born...

...his raid on Iraq produced a brief upward bounce in his support...

...And it's jobs, not the deficit, that loom largest in the minds of the voters...

...Senior policy adviser Ira Magaziner had no position until Hillary Rodham Clinton insisted he head up the health care task force...

...In fact, they haven't...

...How many more students, the papers could have pondered, would go to college...

...The voters don't want palliatives...

...It's directed at improving productivity by increasing worker training, workplace participation and cooperation, worker incomes, and—if nobody minds and if nobody's looking— unionization...

...The economic progressives in Clinton's entourage were relegated to secondary positions...

...I hear from gays on the military ban...

...How high does unemployment have to rise, or how long does it have to hang at 7 percent, before Clinton is allowed to move off that position...

...Not that I have anything against Wall Street doing well," Clinton interjects quickly—so quickly that the interval between the booing and Clinton's backtracking shall forever come to mind when I hear the word "millisecond...

...I don't hear from unions...

...From the thirties through the seventies, Western governments used instruments of national politics—unions, social legislation, fiscal policy, and public investment— to foster broad-based prosperity...

...This is the first recovery in American economic history to drag the economy downward— and it could drag Clinton down with it...

...It has vanquished communism and weakened social democracy...

...Investment economics bring together the Democratic coalition...

...It's no secret that many commission members favor greater workplace unionization...

...As is usually the case with this administration, it's strategic...

...Clinton has come to power at the very moment that capitalism is both triumphant as an ideology and staggering as an economics...

...Indeed, it's precisely the small scale of the program that enabled the Republicans to block it for a time...

...Ignored by the press, the investment side of Clintonomics was also scaled down by the demands of deficit reduction even before it reached the Hill...

...Reich is pro-union...

...But after a half-year in the White House, it's clear that Clinton's aversion isn't just to false choices...

...the substitution of government for banks as a source—a cheaper source—of loans...

...Jane Harman, a first-term Democratic member of Congress from L.A.'s South Bay area, represents a Republican district that until last November hadn't sent a Democrat to Congress in decades...

...The $80 billion in infrastructure reconstruction Clinton spoke of on the FALL • 1993 • 439 Conflicted President campaign trail became $35 billion in the budget he submitted, and looks to come in at $20 billion when Congress gets through with it...

...A Los Angeles Times poll showed that over half favored "an activist government that has an obligation to help people when they are in trouble...

...Like Tsongas, Panetta is a converted Republican— driven from the party by its rightward drift on social issues, but not now or ever remotely a Keynesian...

...But in politics as well as economics, the establishment and its ideologues pervade the administration...

...His position on gays in the military is broadly, if shallowly, supported...

...From Broder to Brinkley, the election was redefined as a mandate for fiscal conservatism and shared sacrifice...

...but he's reluctant to say anything more than that the playing field between management and workers should be leveled," one source close to the Labor Department comments...

...they want serious and substantive action on the deficit...

...One Washington journalist swears that some congressional Democrats are playing the game of making-it-worse-to-make-it-better: going along with this year's budget in the expectation that it will push a teetering economy just far enough over the edge to pave the way for a stimulus in next year's budget...

...I look at five of them here...

...They know the literature, know that the United States is regularly out-produced by the more secure, highly trained and highly unionized workers of Germany and Scandinavia...

...Being booed by this crowd only reinforces his populist bona fides...

...The first nation in history to produce a majority middle class is now producing an onslaught of contingent jobs—the current term-of-art for independent contractors, part-timers both voluntary and (increasingly) not...

...With the election over, the elites appropriated the Perot vote to their own purposes...

...The original sin of this administration," says one self-proclaimed New Democrat more accustomed to disparaging liberals, "was the decision to reassure the financial community by appointing the establishment types—members of the nomenklatura...

...But a liberal economic consultant sees no such light at the tunnel's end...

...Some Strategies In the coming year, there will be a number of economic policies on which Bill Clinton will have to make some strategic choices...

...Then, to the crowd's rising roar, he continued: "Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today...

...The primary advantage that hiring a temp confers on an employer, of course, is that the employer avoids having to pay increasingly expensive benefits, health insurance above all...

...Nor are lower interest rates sufficient to boost consumer purchasing power in an economy than continues to shed jobs...

...Clinton owes his victory in some key Sunbelt states, California above all, to Bush's suicidal insistence on a laissez-faire non-response to the decimation of defense, and his own vague commitments to planned conversion...

...But there's not much in Clinton's current budget that translates his rhetoric into programs...

...In those dimly remembered days when unions had power (the economy's glory years, the forties through the seventies), they "took wages out of play" —that is, negotiated industry-wide contracts that enabled companies to improve productivity and efficiency but not at workers' expense...

...Let's just do it," Perot was given to saying, and his supporters were the action faction of American politics...

...There may be political space for more such programs in next year's...

...The White House political apparat has itself taken a more centrist turn with the appointment of David Gergen as presidential counselor...

...The administration is circulating a document that claims its budget will in the fullness of time create jobs, but this runs so counter to Keynesian verities that even Republican economist Herbert Stein has written that he can find no theory supporting the notion that this plan could increase employment...

...It is time to draw some lines, welcome some hatred, return to Wall Street, and let the boos roll on.q 446 • DISSENT...

...It's not that the world's leaders are pygmies, as the news magazines lamented during the recent Tokyo meeting of the G-7 powers...

...Do you sell a health care program that will make a small change, make everyone a little happy, bend no one out of shape, excite no one, and pass easily up here...

...Democrats will only reach these voters," pollster Stan Greenberg has recently written, "if they can position themselves as outsiders against the establishment...

...Where national politics has ceased to deliver, it really doesn't matter much which national party governs...

...Neither one has had much experience with unions, and both have been so wary about expressing any admiration for unions' role in industrial democracies that they seem to hold as their national ideal a union-free social democracy...

...One of America's two or three leading liberal theorists, serving as secretary of labor in a Democratic administration, is reluctant not merely to support unions but even to acknowledge them as a historic fact...

...From Lyndon Johnson through Reagan and Bush, defense spending was the Sunbelt's industrial policy of choice...

...The justcompleted Chicago conference on the workplace is the first in a series of events that will showcase the new industrial harmony—to a business sector that seems steadily more indifferent to such issues...

...The Tsongasites really don't see the middle class as a victim for the past twenty years," he says...

...Is this peace-keeper from a dysfunctional family capable of welcoming hatred at all...

...That leaves the "populists" as the only other players in the economic wars...

...And Perot voters crave performance...

...But then, it emerges from a self-subverting administration...

...he remains a minority president...

...Suppose it's winter and unemployment still hangs at 7 percent, with the only new jobs part-time ones—not a particularly far-fetched scenario...

...FALL • 1993 • 445 Conflicted President That is why the same bewildering phenomenon is popping up throughout Europe, North America, and Japan—a decline in the fortunes of the governing party without a concomitant rise in the opposition...

...Now, though, the powers that be are having second thoughts about the campaign...

...No one has written this office demanding higher taxes on corporations...

...In each instance, the economic and political case against greater public investment and in favor of deficit reduction comes down to not wanting to alarm the markets in general and Alan Greenspan in particular...

...fourth: The smarter (unionized...

...The chief concern is jobs, of course, then the decline of local services—police, schools, libraries—and then deficit reduction...

...The press coverage all but ignored it—documenting to the penny what a two-proctologist family in Provo, Utah, would owe in new taxes, but making no attempt to calculate, say, the savings that would result from taking banks out of the business of college loans or the aggregate effect of extending governmental loans to every qualified student...

...By the time of the Little Rock economic summit in December, deficit reduction had joined public investment atop Clinton's agenda, and they got equal time in Clinton's February State of the Union address, the high point to date of his presidency...

...Our program's a compound sentence that we connect with 'and' but that some people connect with 'but,' " one ranking administration official argues...

...and, above all, a massive increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit that will measurably reduce poverty among lowwage workers and their families...

...Social democracy ensured that the wealth created under capitalism was distributed widely enough to guarantee demand...

...the "motor-voter" registration act, which may bring millions of poorer and younger Americans into the electorate...

...It isn't...

...So carefully, in fact, that in a recent New York Times op-ed column, Reich contrasted the American economy's pattern of low-wage job creation with Germany's pattern of high-wage job retention and didn't mention unions even once...

...On matters economic, all politics are national— and strikingly ineffectual in the brave new world market...

...I hear from blacks on Lani Guinier...

...Were this the case, then a lasting realignment would involve little more than Clinton turning himself into a Tex-Mex Tsongas...

...This summer, the first two in-depth polls of Perot supporters have been released, and have exploded any lingering notion that deficit reduction is the way to the Perot supporters' hearts—or to a Democratic realignment...

...The press failed to connect it at all...

...The program to establish inner-city community development banks has been reduced from $850 million to just under $400 million, and Congress has yet to go to work on it...

...At the direction of DNC Chair Wilhelm, political organizer Celia Fisher and Citizen Action founder Heather Booth were hired to head up the drive...

...Paradoxically—call it the revenge of the dialectic—it needed both...

...There's enormous interest in defense reinvestment programs, in dual-use technology ventures...

...Rivlin is Tsongas with a worse one...

...What the Wall Street retreat foreshadowed was Bill Clinton's postelection transformation—not total, but disastrous withal—into Paul Tsongas...

...Campaign Speech, New York, 1936 By contrast, let's close with Franklin Roosevelt, who at the moment of his greatest triumph went out of his way to offend the very powers with whom Clinton finds it hard to break...

...But to anyone who has actually seen a Perot rally or looked at the demographics of his support, this is a wildly fanciful reading...

...If the economics of deficit reduction are shaky, the politics are worse...

...The crisis isn't merely economic, either...

...Its initial, commendable, impulse was to plot a mobilizing campaign of almost CIO-like dimensions— one that could set in place a national activist structure for future campaigns as well...

...This is Roosevelt gloating in anticipation of the kind of majority Clinton has never come close to...

...Indeed, a Stan Greenberg survey for the DLC shows that the deficit ranks well beneath the economy, and no higher than health care and jobs, in the concerns of Perot voters—and that the quarter of Perotistas who singled out the deficit were more often well off and Republican than the three-quarters who didn't...

...They marked a deliberate break from the socially liberal and economically conservative approach of candidates Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis...

...At his best, he fused a middle-class populism with a rhetoric of national renewal—but it was a fusion made possible by his emphasis on public investment...

...Second: Industrial policy/defense conversion...

...Or do you take on the special interests, make it tougher up here on the Hill, but really energize the grass roots...

...The South Bay may be home to a greater concentration of aerospace than any other congressional district, and its residents, says Harman, "include unemployed workers who are heavily white collar...

...Except, they're not policies his administration has agreed to nationally, let alone globally...

...During the months leading up to his campaign, Clinton frequently remarked that he subscribed to Washington Post writer E.J...

...However much Gergen may personify the bipartisan center of American politics, he personifies even more the bipartisan center of Beltway careerism...

...It's certainly not the JFK-FDR prescription for recovery...

...It was an innovative but inadequate step forward: what the global economy needs is a transnational policy of public investment, job creation, and a managed trade policy that seeks to level upward such less-developed nations as Mexico...

...Clinton had acknowledged the deficit, too, but not enough to satisfy elite opinion in the markets, the editorial pages, and within his own nascent administration...

...If real funds for light rail and electric cars were put into the next budget, there'd be support for them—and not only from Democratic members...

...He has answered his own outburst: the left has gone particularistic, lost its center, broken into tribes...

...Even in contrast to the Carter years," says one longtime Washington liberal activist, "we don't have a liberal political movement with a clear set of goals for this administration...

...The final economic strategy Clinton needs to pursue is an internationalist response to such changes as the demise of unions and the decline of living standards throughout the advanced industrialized world...

...What we know from the '92 campaign is that this is a charge Clinton is capable of leading...

...In less decisive moments, Roosevelt was every bit as capable of equivocation as Clinton...

...Politics is rotting...

...Throughout the '92 campaign, the Perotistas had more in common with Jerry Brown's and Pat Buchanan's supporters than they had with Tsongas's or anyone else's: they were economic nationalists, raging against elites — corporate, political, labor, media...

...The third, Gary Hart alumni, still seem to have no beef—no distinct policy perspectives nor animus against any other group...

...conservatives, social democrats, and socialists all decline throughout Western Europe...

...A White House Divided At the center of the administration— "controlling the numbers, which is a major source of power," says one White House insider—are the deficit hawks: Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, Office of Management and Budget Director Leon Panetta, and Associate Director Alice Rivlin, and Director of the National Economic Council Robert Rubin...

...There are four other loose tendencies on the administration's domestic and economic side, but of these, two—the Democratic Leadership Council types and the standard-issue liberals —define themselves chiefly around social policies of race and entitlements and leave macroeconomics alone...

...Bill Clinton has introduced the first program in decades to move America in a mildly more equitable direction, but during those decades, the institutional forces for greater equity, unions in particular, have dwindled to virtual insignificance...

...Let's freeze the frame right here, before Clinton has had a chance to respond, and consider his options...

...You tell me where the left has gone...

...Even worse, at a moment when factory orders are dropping and the Conference Board predicts an anemic 1 percent job growth for the second half of the year, Congress is poised to enact a deficit-reducing budget that can only cost more jobs...

...By making the argument that deficit reduction is the way to growth Clinton has trapped himself...

...In the mid-seventies, Panetta was the one member of California's Democratic congressional delegation to oppose the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Bill...

...But there's an even longer list of programs that have been scaled back to symbolic dimensions only (worker retraining, national service, the stimulus), of policies negotiated down to near nothing (Bosnia, gays in the military), of appointments proferred and withdrawn (Zoe Baird, Lani Guinier...

...Dismissing out of hand the Perotistas' opposition to free trade, they labeled the bloc as a swing vote for deficit reduction only...

...The deficit matters to Perot voters, but chiefly as a symbol of government's incapacity to perform...

...Just five years ago, one in four American jobs was contingent...

...All right, it's an unfair comparison...

...Economically, without the kind of job creation and industrial renewal fostered by the investment agenda, it's ludicrous to think lower interest rates will reverse America's industrial decline...

...Both polls made clear that Perot supporters, like Democrats, favored governmental activism, but believed, like Republicans, that government is incapable of deliverFALL • 1993 • 441 Conflicted President ing...

...During the debate, according to one source close to the populists, the two groups put forth diametrically opposed perspectives on how the middle class lives...

...Even the ones that wouldn't get through, though, would offer him a more compelling platform with which to campaign against Congress than the mish-mash he brought to the Hill earlier this year...

...If gridlock is as irksome to the Perotistas as the deficit (and if some of them fume at the deficit precisely because it deepens the gridlock), then GOP filibusters and Dole's odes to inaction aren't likely to entice many of these swing voters...

...In supporting this budget, many congressional Democrats are whistling past the graveyard: their own Joint Economic Committee has produced a study that shows it to be contractionary, but a number of Democrats have suspended their judgment and bought in to the argument that deficit reduction will lead to lower interest rates, which in turn will produce growth and jobs...

...Is there a credible alternative next year, though...

...It's not much of a case...

...The economy has not only triumphed over politics and democracy...

...Indeed, Clinton was the first Democratic nominee in decades to offer broad-based programs...

...The fundamental problem isn't organizational...

...It also suggests that the obstructionism of Bob Dole and the Congressional Republicans may misfire...

...In Tokyo, Clinton moved as far as the balance within his own administration would allow...

...Nonetheless, the constraints of this year's budgetary plan make a 1994 increase in public investment difficult for Clinton, save in the special case of national health...

...One of the less contentious forms of stimulus is industrial policy—partly because it helps develop crucial and innovative industries, partly because it's a jobs program for skilled workers and professionals, who are nowhere so politically marginal as inner-city youths working on federally funded summer jobs...

...Today, public investment lacks the transcendent purpose provided by the cold war...

...Which suggests that the way to align Clinton's Perot periphery with his Democratic core isn't so much deficit reduction as economic investment...

...Which is why Clinton's Wall Street stutter is so ominous: it illustrates not simply his aversion to choice but his reluctance to take on an economic establishment that stands athwart any 438 • DISSENT Conflicted President serious effort to rebuild America and that despises the populist (and discreetly social democratic) politics he advanced in the '92 campaign...

...Third: Taking benefits out of play...

...We're looking in vain for one administration insider who is articulating the jobs concern, the need to create jobs next year," he says...

...While he downplayed the middle-class tax cut soon after the New Hampshire primary, these universal entitlements remained the centerpiece of his campaign...

...As the Clinton Administration gears up for its battle over health insurance, it has had to grapple with the disintegration of the classbased left it needs to campaign for its program...

...deficit reduction reunites the Republican...

...unions' power...

...workplace...

...He has just upbraided the American speculator—as politically vulnerable a target as a Democrat could ever hope to affront...

...What would be fatal—not just to Clinton but to the Democrats and the progressive project generally—is an inability to deliver on the one thing he was elected to do: fix the economy...

...I ask him...

...The constituency for such universal programs as a fully funded national service program or national health includes both middle class and poor...

...They think they've been coddled...

...Actually, he was a lot better at it than Clinton...

...Whatever misgivings the public may have on a range of Clinton policies, his polling has risen and fallen in tandem with public support for his economic plan...

...Rubin comes to the administration from the investment banking house of Goldman Sachs...

...Polling by Public Opinion Strategies (a GOP firm) over the past six months shows that while the percentage of voters identifying themselves as Democrats has declined from 41 to 34 percent, the percentage identifying themselves as Republicans has remained anchored in the 30 percent to 32 percent range...

...Some sources close to the Labor Department argue that the commission is labor's and the administration's way to vamp until business is ready—if that day ever comes...

...It's a risky course of action," says California representative Howard Berman, "counter-intuitive, actually...

...I get more NAFTA mail from Perot voters than from union members...

...They reviled government but were light-years from prescribing laissez-faire policies...

...Today, one in three is...

...We lobbied as an institution," one veteran union lobbyist comments, "but it was too small for our members to involve themselves—or even notice it...

...He's proceeding very carefully...

...And when Clinton won, he was entitled to the presumption that this reinvention of an activist government meant more to the public than the deficit obsessions of his defeated predecessors and rivals...

...voter turnout is down throughout the West (except, for once, in the United States...

...Six months into Bill Clinton's presidency, his Wall Street two-step still looms in memory, prefiguring the problems he has inflicted upon himself...

...By bringing Gergen aboard, Clinton has struck a Faustian bargain...

...Beyond its decision to thwart Clinton at every turn, the right remains as beleaguered and divided on strategy as—well, as the left...

...It's the opposite of what he needs...

...What's emerging is a strategy that makes an explicit case for cooperative worker-management relations—and an implicit (at times, barely visible) one for unions...

...Dionne's argument that American politics was beset by false choices—between, for instance, the right to reproductive freedoms and support for family values...

...In short, Clintonomics has become selfsubverting...

...Fifth: Globalized Keynesianism...

...The White House knows how to talk to reporters now...

...He's defined success over the next eighteen months as deficit reduction," says a liberal economist, "and that has to mean slower job growth...

...There's growing interest throughout Congress for public investment in FALL • 1993 • 443 Conflicted President new high-tech ventures: New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan is pushing to build Maglev trains from the airports to Manhattan...

...Still other key progressive advisers from the campaign barely made it into the administration at all...

...his biggest applause lines were invariably his statements of commitment to national health insurance, worker retraining, universal college loans, and the national service program...

...but as George Bush can attest, social and foreign policy are sideshows...

...Let Clinton Be Tsongas The transformation began with the establishment's rewriting of the election...

...The result has been what at best could be called a confusing presidency...

...The last rally of the 1936 campaign brought Franklin Roosevelt to Madison Square Garden, where, three days before the most decisive popular landslide in American political history, he sought to draw a new political alignment...

...The administration's industrial relations commission, chaired by former Labor Secretary John Dunlop, has been charged with rethinking such matters as workers' rights, including the Big Question: does America need a reform of labor law so that workers can once more organize with legal protection...

...Gergen's faith in elites seems boundless—he's the man who believed the Watergate tapes would exonerate Nixon...

...The most prominent populists are Clinton's political consultants—James Carville, Paul Begala, pollster Stanley Greenberg, Democratic National Chair John Wilhelm—and junior alter ego George Stephanopolous...

...If it doesn't, there's almost no indication that either Clinton or Reich wants to push the issue...

...I just want everyone to do as well as Wall Street did...

...Only 26 percent of Republicans felt the same...

...what's not clear is whether they can persuade any significant business groups to join them...

...Now, unions can no longer be spoken of in polite society...

...In a series of administration policy debates, the populists have tended to line up with Reich (on the stimulus) and Hillary (on an ambitious national health insurance plan) against the deficit hawks...

...Clinton has had some genuine achievements: family leave...

...Clinton sinks, but the Republicans stay anchored to the bottom of the polls...

...I'm talking about this one afternoon with the administrative assistant to a liberal senator from one of the largest states...

...It is imperiling tolerance and social cohesion as well...

...What matters is economics—and the irony is that here, Clinton has nose-dived not for advancing the economics on which he successfully campaigned, but for espousing an economics he ridiculed during the primaries...

...First: A stimulus package in the 1994-5 budget...

...The constituency for deficit reduction includes both middle class and rich...

...Robert Reich in the Department of Labor and Laura Tyson at the Council of Economic Advisors have emerged as the foremost advocates for Clinton's investment agenda...

...Without the middle-class taxes, the package would have lost the Tsongasites' support...

...In the parlance of political scientists, they were frustrated, enraged, farmisht...

...The State of the Union the public saw and liked (Clinton's polling immediately soared) devoted twenty minutes to the investment agenda...

...But they've been unable to overcome the inside clout of Bentsen, Rubin, Panetta and Rivlin...

...If the world cannot be changed, it can perhaps be kept away...

...But like his colleagues, Berman saw no credible alternative to supporting the budget...

...What will matter to them most," says Greenberg, "is jobs and health care...

...indeed, the press begins to wonder if this may be a calculated insult, like his attack on Sister Souljah and Jesse Jackson earlier in the year...

...Increasingly, the problem for the American economy isn't just that we continue to lose jobs in the midst of a recovery, but that the jobs created aren't nearly as good as the ones lost...

...They're into pain and suffering...

...He is the president who will not choose—populist or establishmentarian, outsider or insider, liberal or centrist...

...and purchasing power has eroded broadly across the West— through reduced incomes in the United States and chronic joblessness in Western Europe...

...He might be able to do it again—if he can make some choices...

...Tell Me Where The Left Has Gone It's the frustrated and alienated—not the left or the right—who are filled with passionate intensity these days, whose voices dominate talk radio and the calls to congressional offices...

...public policy professor Derek Shearer was relegated to a position in the Commerce Department (which he's since left...

...They are unanimous in their hatred for me—and I welcome their hatred...

...he explodes...

...The problem, says one Capitol Hill lobbyist for an industrial union, is that "the policy isn't real enough yet...

...The American economy's response to the globalization of markets has been to turn us into a nation of temps...

...Some, like a more fully developed industrial policy, may have a good chance of enactment...

...The Compleat Perotista, according to the estab-pops, cares mainly about deficit reduction and social moderation—concerns that coincide, quite amazingly, with the preoccupations of the Beltway establishment...

...He was referring, he told the crowd, to "old enemies: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism . . . government by organized money...

...What's required to restore some balance to this equation is a new coordination among the major industrialized countries...

...It is a tremendously damaging impression, but not in itself fatal...

...It is an index of 440 • DISSENT Conflicted President the Democrats' decline that their administration's leading populists are those members of their elite paid to monitor and shape public opinion...

...The proposal is one of Clinton's most popular—but unless it affects a significant number of people, there won't be much popular outcry if it's derailed...

...In the absence of politics, we get purity: regional parties in some of the western states, nativist pressures in all of them...

...Problem was, an agenda of deficit reduction and public investment was an agenda divided against itself...

...As Rubin reassured Wall Street, Gergen reassures K Street, the permanent government of Washington lobbyists and pundits...

...But even allowing for the vagaries of political fortune, there remains a question of character that in this instance is a profoundly political question: whose hatred does Bill Clinton welcome...

...Most, though not all, present him the option of choosing an investment strategy over one of deficit reduction—and, should he take that option, of generating jobs and strengthening both the Democratic base and its ties to the Perot bloc...

...It's that national politics can no longer deliver as it did in the post–World War II era...

...It's to choices altogether...

...On the budget, they argued that taxing people with annual incomes under $100,000—a proposal originally slated to bring in 25 percent of the new revenue under the administration's budget—was a major political mistake...

...There's no guarantee, of course, that Clinton would be able to move these policies through 442 • DISSENT Conflicted President Congress any more successfully than he has his current agenda...

...They also say that no one is more responsible for those limits being there in the first place than Rubin, who opposed a more generous stimulus package and who's argued against a more expansive (and expensive) program of national health insurance...

...What they chiefly want government to do is to address the nation's—and their own—shaky economic condition...

...Clinton is the only head of state who could lead the charge on these policies...

...What American workers need now (and what an economy with chronically diminished purchasing power needs as well) is for the state to take benefits out of play...

...They also know that American business has all but broken the union movement here and that the continued globalization of the economy means the continual diminution of U.S...

...Congressional Democrats are about to teach Clinton something he should have learned from Paul Tsongas in last year's Democratic primaries and from Ross Perot in the general election," the Washington Post's David Broder wrote in the early weeks of the Clinton presidency...

...We're way past the point where socialism is the ideology that dare not speak its name...

...in return, it has placed the most establishmentarian functionary in America at its presumably populist heart...

...The question here is how much Clinton and Reich want to push the unionization part—the 444 • DISSENT Conflicted President linchpin of workplace reform, but politically the most perilous...

...The problem with the past twelve years," Clinton told a noontime rally in the financial district, "is that Wall Street's gone up, and up, and up—the market's tripled in value over the last twelve years—while Main Street hasn't gone anywhere at all...

...The national service program, conceived as a way for many thousands of young persons to repay college loans, will enroll between twenty thousand and twenty-five thousand students in its first year, now that it has survived a Republican filibuster...

...The question will be decided by the legislation itself," says the Senate aide...

...Panetta is Tsongas with a better personality," says an administration intimate...

...Each of these three strategies—nationalized benefits, a targeted industrial policy and Stimulus II—would force Clinton to restart the establishment/populist conflict that arose over this year's budget...

...Decoupling health insurance or vacations from the realm of company discretion, officials in Reich's Labor Department are arguing, would enable firms to hire more full-time workers and give workers the freedom to change jobs without fear of losing their benefits...

...White House officials say that within the limits of such spending as the budget permits, he favors liberal, even inner-city, priorities...

...Cheaper credit will not create jobs when even the most profitable companies, swimming in cash, are continuing to downsize...

...The most effective way to curtail temping, then, and to slow the rush toward a two-tier work force, is to take benefits out of the realm of employer discretion altogether and vest them in the state...

...Another strategy that Clinton is pursuing lies outside the realm of fiscal policy and therefore doesn't pit cutters against investors...

...At which point, the crowd began to boo...

...He called for a meeting of finance and labor ministers to coordinate job policies—though by this, he meant the kind of workplace and labor-market policies that he can pursue without increasing public investment substantially...

...It's hard to think of anybody who by career and temperament would be more estranged from a typical Perot voter...

...Thereafter, the increased globalization of capital stripped from nations much of their control over their own economies...

...I'm not sure what campaign Broder was following, but in the one I covered, Clinton attacked both Tsongas and Perot for focusing exclusively on the deficit and ignoring the decline in the public sector's investment in America's workers, students, industries, and physical resources...

...Communism, particularly in the United States, provided the rationale for public investment (on weapons—but, to paraphrase Keynes, a buck's a buck...

...The zigs and the zags have created the impression of a president with no center, who promises first and extricates himself later...