President Clinton's first week in office - 29 January 1993

An astonishing bit of news out of Los Angeles this week will give a long and thoughtful pause to people, of whom there are millions, both here and abroad, who think of California as, if not the most progressive state, then certainly in many social and material things, the way of the future. Los Angeles was 59 years ago called 20 suburbs in search of a city.

Today it's about 50 subdivisions of a metropolitan sprawl and from the start it had, and has, only the skimpiest public transport, because even 20 years ago a population of three millions owned three and a half million automobiles. The Second War froze the growth of Los Angeles, as it did everywhere else, but soon afterwards, in the late '40s, more and more Americans decided California was the home for them.

By the 1960s, 1,200 a day were coming in, mostly in their cars, however ramshackle. So came four-lane highways and then they started, or borrowed from the East, the divided highway, what about 15 years later would come to Britain and be slangily known as the dual carriageway, with three, then four, then six lanes each way. I remember the hushed pride with which Angelenos in the '50s would take you on one of the new, marvellous eight-lane freeways, so called because unlike the Eastern parkways, which still banned commercial traffic, and turnpikes, you don't pay a toll.

Well, by now, long before now, driving on the huge coiling spaghetti network of Los Angeles freeways had become a nightmare by daylight and finally the city fathers have cried, enough, no more motor highways. Last Saturday something magical and quaint happened. A tube, an underground train ran. It's been building for some time, most people, according to a survey, looking to the prospect as either outdated or visionary. At the moment the track, through tunnels linking five downtown stations, runs only 4.4 miles but not to laugh, the designs and the money call for at first a 22-mile subway system, linked to a 400-mile surface railway commuter system. The surface trains abandoned 50 years ago, street trains, have been replaced by modern, I think Italian, models on gleaming airborne tracks. They've been going for some time. Well, who would have thought that Angelenos, and there are thousands of them, would ever come to envy anybody, anywhere who lives in a town or village with a good public transport system.

There are several odd social items that caught my eye recently but, for the moment, they must be filed and not forgotten. To ignore two social problems, that have suddenly turned into national controversies, would amount, on my part, if not to dereliction of duty, then to blandly fiddling away in the heat of the Roman bonfire. Usually on the days after the inauguration, we see pictures of the new president taking his first stroll on the White House grounds and then we read about an appointment he's made and there'd be speculation among the pundits about his coming State of the Union address and his economic message, calm after ecstasy, port after storm.

Well, I can tell you, I don't remember a first week anything like this. It's as if we'd elected the wrong man and the White House was inhabited by an impostor on the rampage. Commentators have been stumped to find a sufficiently rambunctious metaphor to describe the alarmed perception of the new president. What has he opened up? Pandora's box. What does he hear buzzing about his ears? A hornet's nest. What are they calling him? Bumbling Bill. The Republicans, not on the floor of the Senate, of course, extreme courtesy prevails in both houses, but other places joke about not so slick Willie.

First, he has hung up some sort of record in the speed with which he has regretfully reneged on two or three big campaign promises. Reneged is the wrong word, it suggests stealth, sneakiness. Not at all, he's just come out frankly, regretfully, and said, sorry about my promise of a middle-class tax cut. Let me remind you that 85% of Americans think of themselves as middle class, which may be impossible mathematics, but when they like you, is a whacking great political asset. Then remember he deplored President Bush's cruel policy of stopping the boats that carried escaping Haitians to Florida. Let 'em come in, cried Mr Clinton, the campaigner. The poor and desperate among the Haitians cried, glory be and stayed up nights for two weeks, building boats, for, it was estimated, 200,000 rejoicing refugees. Mr Clinton's team quickly admitted they'd never expected anything like that response. Mr Clinton cried, wait, stop, hold, stay home.

Then surely we all remember the admirable seriousness with which campaigner Clinton insisted time and again, on the urgent need to cut the deficit. First aim to halve it in what, two years, maybe four. Now his team it never guessed the deficit would be bigger than the Bush estimates, though every banker, economist, Fiscal wizard had assumed it. So sorry again, but the economy needs a spending stimulus. Forget, for the time being, the deficit. And meanwhile how about a national sales tax? That would effectively be borne by middle and lower income people, the mass of Clinton voters on 3 November.

But these budgetary surprises are merely what the New York Times, a staunch Clinton supporter, now calls a three-ring circus of mistakes by a novice. But there are two issues that have inflamed the country. One was an early cabinet appointment and the other is a new policy, affecting the armed forces, which Mr Clinton wants to enforce now by executive decree. The cabinet appointment was in trouble even as President Clinton was revelling in the inauguration parade. He had appointed as attorney general a lawyer, a woman who is an extremely able corporate lawyer, earning half a million dollars a year with an insurance company. Incidentally, a beautiful woman, 40 and if looks and general ability were enough, she would have gone sailing through the confirmation hearings of the Senate Judiciary Committee which must pass on all judicial appointments, as you may ruefully remember in the case of Judge Robert Bork, rejected, and Anita Hill versus Judge Clarence Thomas, barely accepted.

Mrs Zo‘ Baird then had not been in the witness chair 10 minutes before the Senators brought up an awkward fact. She had employed in her house in Connecticut two Peruvians, as nanny and chauffeur, both of them good, sensitive helpers but both illegal immigrants. They'd been employed for two years and Mrs Baird and her law professor husband had not paid for them the required social security taxes. Surely Mr Clinton knew about this. It came out he knew about the illegals, evidently thought she'd get away with it, but he had not enquired carefully enough to know about the non-payment of taxes. Both acts of default are against the law.

Many people said but thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of professional people, with a working mother and father, employ the nine million illegals in this country, everybody does it. That might be true but everybody is not being appointed to the post of the chief law enforcement officer of the United States, overlooking the work of enforcing the law by 9,000 subordinates. Mrs Baird was repentant. It wasn't enough. While they were questioning her, the Senators were hearing by phone and mail, from the voters and they were as staggered as Mrs Baird was, as the president was. Throughout the country the sentiment was hot and heavy and running 50 to 1 against what most people saw as a rich woman trying to get away with something that poor couples had to scrape and improvise to avoid. The president was sorry to. He was to blame, he should have found out more, amen. Mrs Baird withdrew.

The second issue is not one that thundered and reverberated through the campaign. Some occasion, I believe it was before the Naval Academy, Mr Clinton mentioned his decision, when he got in, to lift the ban, which is uniform throughout the armed forces, the ban against having homosexuals, men or women. But, in another blunder of timing, Mr Clinton was no sooner in the White House than he called in his new, his secretary of defence and said he would get out now an executive order abolishing the ban, after a six month interim period of not enforcing it.

This is suddenly an issue that has divided the country, set the Congress, most members in both Houses, against the president and left him standing alone and defiant against all the chiefs of staff, beginning with General Powell, determinedly seconded by the chiefs of the air force, the navy and the marines. They say some prudent, careful compromise will be worked out, though I can't think what it might be. The Democratic leaders have warned the president that if he goes ahead with his executive order, Congress will pass a law reinstating the ban and probably has the votes, two thirds majority in both Houses, to override his subsequent veto. This is something so serious, so surprisingly complex and again a reaction so unsuspected by the White House, that we'd better wait a while. With canny timing, a long preliminary discussion with the chiefs of staff, a sounding out of Congress, this might have been an issue as painless as the stroke of the pen which Harry Truman, in 1947, integrated blacks into the forces. But an offhand, though sincere campaign promise was rushed into and has blown up in the president's face.

The most frequent response heard in the White House these days is, imagine, we never expected. If Mr Clinton had former Mayor Koch's habit of sallying out on to the streets and crying, "How am I doing?", the answer would be, "Stumbling".

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