Clinton on welfare and free trade - 18 November 1994

I don't know about you, but I'm bewitched, bothered and bewildered by the confidence and range of the newspaper and television commentators who have told us even before the American electoral earthquake has stopped rumbling and crackling exactly what is going to happen to Mr Clinton, to the Congress, to domestic policy, to the conduct of foreign policy, to everything. In the next two years of what they assure us is going to be a lame-duck presidency.

Of course, we all know but it's one of those obvious things we forget all the time that all newspapers in the Western world are too fat and the big shots have to write something every day. You know newspapers started growing I suppose invisibly what 70, 80 years ago when Alfred Harmsworth one of 14 children of a freewheeling free-drinking barrister decided that newspapers were for the ordinary or, as we said in those days without condescension, the common man. Before Northcliffe, as he became, newspapers were designed to inform and educate the minority of people, men mostly who were already educated. Northcliffe, a good deal more honest about his intentions than many later and famous press tycoons, simply announced to the world one day, "God made people read so that I could fill their brains with facts, facts, facts – and later tell them whom to hate and what to think".

With the invention of the so-called penny paper, the whole conception of what should be in it changed from information and moralising to entertainment. And let's face it before the movies, radio, television, first Northcliffe's papers and then those of his imitators brightened up the few spare hours of the mass of working people. And by now or by about maybe 30 years ago, the pressure on the eyeballs of television and the fact that it was there all the time morning, noon, night and dawn forced the serious papers to spread their coverage of affairs, foreign, domestic and sexual to bring in motoring and cooking and crosswords, a big catch-penny that, and gossip and rumour and reviews of all the other entertainments. And in general, to try and transfer into print the titillation offered by what the telly did with pictures, voices and music.

So, to repeat, newspapers are too fat everywhere especially at the weekend, which means that to earn their keep journalists have to deliver a 1,000 words or more a running stream of words of thought perhaps on everything that happened yesterday or today.

Well only so much has happened, so they have to write a lot of guesswork about what is going to happen. And so when the election was over, I found without a moment's hesitation Democrats writing about how the country was plunged into gloom, predicting the country would be run almost at once by the way-out fundamentalists, Christians, by the waggish new Speaker of the House Mr Newt Gingrich and, God save us, by Mr Jesse Helms, the tobacco senator from the Carolinas who has is ideas about foreign policy – the less the better – and talks as if were president of the United States.

Then turn sharp right and run in to your Republican friends and almost without exception they are tickled pink full of sass and vinegar predicting with William Safire exciting days ahead and a new lease of democracy and with George Will that Ronald Reagan has in his old age achieved his third electoral victory. Never mind for the moment what's going to happen, let's take another quick look back at why Mr Clinton came such a cropper.

I spent most of the last talk on trying to show what constitutes successful presidential leadership, how you don't need to be a tiring intellect to be a great president, but three presidents this century, Roosevelt, Johnson and Reagan and perhaps I should have added Truman also demonstrated that you must have a few simple big ideas and the ability to sell them to most of the Congress and turn them into laws.

Now apart from detailing the dreadful long history of the failure of Mr Clinton's healthcare plan, I ought to have mentioned his other big ideas. Mr Clinton as you surely know is against poverty and against crime and throughout his first two years, ever since he's been in the White House, every poll of public prejudice, public fear has shown that crime is the main anxiety on the minds of ordinary Americans. And, after that, disillusion about the general failure of welfare, the alarming emergence of a fact that the widespread abuse of welfare has created a more or less permanent underclass of the dependent poor.

Now throughout the campaigning summer of 1992, Mr Clinton went on and on about reforming welfare and solving the crime problem and its disreputable pimp the drug dealer. True, Mr Clinton signed a crime bill, which was not his idea but the Republicans, a bill expressing the idea, the slick slogan "three strikes and your out", no matter what your history or your age, three crimes however petty and you took the risk of being put away for life. It sounded manly and downright and practical, but already all sorts of injustices are springing up over young offenders who don't deserve anything remotely like a life sentence.

I think the constitutionality of that bill is bound to be challenged and maybe I shouldn't guess but I will that the Supreme Court at the latest would overturn it on the ground explicitly stated in the constitution that prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. So how about poverty, illiteracy?

The overriding popular concern here is about single mothers to whom the welfare system gives a home, which they may keep unless they marry, so why not have more babies, stay single and enjoy it more with welfare payments. This used to be a cruel automatic complaint of hard-line conservatives of the coals-in-the-bathtub type, but today unfortunately and unquestionably it has become the preferred way of life among hundreds of thousands, probably millions of young unmarried mothers.

One of the loudest of Mr Clinton's campaign promises was the reform of welfare. There has been so far almost no federal movement. The only big idea that was achieved during Mr Clinton's reign so far was the North American Free Trade Agreement, but here's a rub. It was really the last thing that the president could boast about because over 100 of his own party voted against him, while the opposition, the Republicans, came to his rescue with I think something like 125 supporting votes.

Now enough has happened on this point this week to help us forget all the profound prophecies, the doom ridden ones and the joyful ones and get a pretty good idea of the approaching Republican tactics anyway. As I just said, the North American Free Trade pact went through both Houses squeaked through with the help of the Republicans who said they believed with the president that the agreement would create millions of jobs in the United States. Whereas the opponents and all his own party rebels saw the pact as depriving Americans of many many thousands of jobs exporting them as they said to the slave labour of Mexico and other Central American countries.

If anybody had asked me last Wednesday to find the silver lining in the black cloud of Mr Clinton's future, I should have said "well at least after the North American Free Trade vote, GATT is safe, congressional approval for the general tariffs and trade agreement ready to be sealed with America signature by 123 nations", but suddenly and to the shocked disbelief of the White House and its unhappy residence Senator Helms, that sweet talking courteous old Southerner, the tobacco champion has spoken out. Senator Helms is the new incoming Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and if he can't dictate foreign policy, he can be an unshakable nuisance.

Now before he's even hopped into the chairman's chair, he's written to the president asking him not to bring GATT to a Congressional vote until next year, he'd like to hold further hearings, another droning month in sight, and look into it further. And which great Republican supporter of the North American Trade Agreement has also cried "hold, enough"? None other but the new majority leader in the Senate, Senator Dole. He's all for passing GATT now, but on condition that a quick bill is passed, which would allow this country to check out of GATT if things go badly for the United States. The immediate administration response came from vice president Gore, who has been Mr Clinton's chief advocate on international trade, he said, "because GATT represents the biggest tax cut in the history of the world, since tariffs would be reduced, so probably a delay in voting here would hurt our country immeasurably".

Well, Senator Dole's request or warning suggests of course the invention of an American veto, which the World Trade Organisation doesn't permit any other member. And Senator Helm's ploy could rob the president of the only initiative he has left in the matter for the president has authority to put the GATT approval up to Congress in the form of a simple yes or no vote, no debate but only until 1 January. After that, his executive authority such as it is expires then they'd have to start debating it all over again.

I can only say with no supporting evidence whatsoever that I don't think the Helms and Dole move will stop the vote this year. Between now and the opening, the assembling of the new Congress, other voices, other forces will be heard from and if the rest of modern American history is anything to go on they will echo the more moderate and sensible views of a majority of the American people who do not believe that America can ever again shrink back behind its own ramparts and revive the frantic slogans of the 1930s "stay out of Europe" and "America first".

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