Clinton: Prosperity and popularity - 1 August 1997

Dare I say – I will, I do say – I don’t want you to turn off just because I’m going to talk about government.

I know there are people who groan at any mention of politics. And then (I have a batch of letters to prove it) there are people who say they don’t get enough of such talk. A pox on them!

Well quite simply, in the past fortnight we’ve had the most vivid and dramatic demonstration of one fascinating difference between American and parliamentary government.

There’s a common delusion, encouraged by Americans themselves, that the President of the United States is the most powerful man on earth. Not at home, he isn’t. Let’s say in the making of laws, he takes a distant second place to the prime minister of any parliamentary system. In, for instance, the making of the national budget.

A couple of smart, young friends of mine, college-age Americans who are interested in government and no doubt will be taking courses in political science, they were aghast and amazed when they read in their papers one morning that the Chancellor of the Exchequer – that would be the secretary of the treasury here – had presented to the House of Commons the budget. Presented? What did the man mean? What had the Conservatives to say about it? How about the Liberals? Had they raised hell?

Here’s one man speaking for the prime minister and his administration, simply declaring this is the way it’s going to be. These young students couldn’t decide whether it was an awful difference or a marvellous one.

Now here, President Clinton and his party have been arguing for over two years with the hated Republicans about what the imminent budget was to be. There have been two winters and summers of crisis. One day you may remember, when the Republican leader in the House, Mr Newt Gingrich, refused to consider the president’s proposed budget even though the country was running out of ready cash – the money that keeps the national institutions working, parks, libraries, memorials, not to mention the Internal Revenue, the tax people.

Mr Gingrich said, “No, we won’t vote on that bill. You’ve got to change it.” The president wouldn’t. So Mr Gingrich shut down the government, the civil service. You couldn’t go into the Lincoln Memorial or up the Statue of Liberty or enter any of the national parks.

It was a symbolic act, symbolising the great power of the speaker, the leader of the opposition.

It turned out to be the most foolish act of his political life. It was about as sensible and ridiculous as if a politician had put together a serious, complex, praiseworthy, civil rights bill, say, and then added a rider abolishing Mother’s Day. The country came down on Mr Gingrich like a landslide. What, can’t go up the Statue of Liberty? Forbidden to enter the Library of Congress, the national parks? What sort of tyrant, dictator did he think he was?

It is exactly true to say that Mr Gingrich has never since recovered either his good name or his power. There’s a constant rumbling, conspiratorial noise in the cellars of the House Republicans to overthrow him. Not now, maybe, but one day sooner or later.

This huge difference between Washington and London in the way a budget is put together and approved was startlingly clear to Washingtonians when this week finally – after 30 months of dog fights, insults, declarations of war, the rise and fall of several political reputations – finally the president and his party and the Republican leaders agreed on a budget, which would balance by (wait for it) – 2002. When, incidentally, all the current political big shots will be retired or reelected or dead or forgotten.

Both Mr Clinton and the Republican Leader in the Senate took part in separate ceremonies, each claiming a victory of statesmanship (for his party of course), both declaring it was an historic event. The passage through the House was overwhelming on Wednesday and was going to be in the Senate shortly thereafter.

The only dissenting cries came from the extremist wings in both parties. I think "extremist" is a needlessly strong word to use these days. In the Republican right, it’s a few yelping juniors who believed that Reagan’s America had prescribed a continuous tax-free society, and they think their party has made too many concessions to Mr Clinton.

The left, or liberal, wing of the Democrats, Mr Clinton’s own party, is a little more vigorous since it includes its leader in the House who thinks the party has come too close to the Republicans. It’s the old, now new, story that Clinton won again by running as a Republican for Clinton just as Mr Blair won by running as a Conservative for Blair.

The fact seems to be in the prospering countries of the West, no matter what the ideologues say, what theories the old Conservatives and Liberals and Democrats and Socialists hold or held. What drives and satisfies most of the people who vote is the slogan the Democrats adopted with such success the first time round, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

And I don’t know how it is in your country, but here, if I were asked to say what’s happening that’s noteworthy and then what matters most, I’d have to say that in spite of hair-raising testimony coming out of Senator Thompson’s senate investigation into the wholesale laundering of Asian money in the 1996 Clinton campaign, in spite of the continuing procedure of Miss Paula Jones’s case against President Clinton on the ground of gross sexual harassment, President Clinton still rates well over 60% popularity; and that what seems to matter most to the great majority of the people is that the economy is as good as it’s been for more than 25 years, unemployment is lower over a longer stretch than at any time since the second war, that inflation hardly seems to exist.

Is it very materialistic to feel that these good things matter? You bet. And if you want to get ideological about it, think of all the socialist governments and liberal governments and Swedish governments which maintained that the chief aim of government was full employment in peacetime and no inflation – an ideal that has never been achieved; indeed, to many economists it’s a contradiction in terms.

But the fact is that, for better or worse at the moment, no scandal you can imagine, no dramatic disclosure that comes out of Senator Thompson’s committee can override or diminish the popularity of a president who is in the White House while these good things are happening. If those last six words were in print, they’d be underlined – while these things were happening. That’s the point of Clinton’s success. That’s why he could play golf the other day and have pictures of him doing it with no fear that he would be next day accused, like Eisenhower, of fiddling with a putter while Beirut burned.

In all the lessons that my two young college friends will learn in their courses on political science, I doubt they’ll ever be taught one that seems never to be broken: the reputation of a president depends at the time on how prosperous most people think they are.

The fatal thing is to be in the White House when things go bad. The 1929 crash was worst of all, and in the following election President Herbert Hoover was thrown out in a Roosevelt landslide. Not because Roosevelt had demonstrated remarkable powers of anything. In fact the wisest pundit of the day wrote, "Governor Roosevelt is a very amiable man who would like very much to be President of the United States without possessing any noticeable qualifications for the post". Hoover was thrown out on the iron principle of American football: if the team keeps losing, you fire the coach.

When I came to this country in the depth of the Depression, Hoover’s name was a mockery, and very soon Franklin Roosevelt was the saviour. It took a long time for the jokes about Hoover’s ineptness, his indifference to the poor and the desperate to die down. Many thousands of shacks, of tar-paper shacks, lined all the riverbanks of America. They were homes for the homeless. They were called Hoovervilles. He bore a terrible stigma.

Well, the years go by. I came the other day on a famous pamphlet by the one man who (more than any other) inspired the economic policies of Roosevelt and the New Deal. John Maynard Keynes taught Roosevelt in person that he, Roosevelt, could do for government what the bankers did as routine: he could borrow and borrow and borrow beyond his means. Deficit financing, it was the investment capital of modern liberalism.

Well in Keynes’s famous pamphlet, which is a devastating attack on the peace treaty that finished off the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles, in the middle of his well-read destruction of the main players – Lloyd George, Clemenceau, most of all President Woodrow Wilson whom he saw more as a Methodist preacher than a statesman – in the middle Keynes wrote this passage, "He was the only man who emerged from the ordeal of Versailles with an enhanced reputation. This complex personality with his habitual air of a weary Titan, his eye steadily fixed on the true and essential facts of the European situation, he imported into the Councils of Paris precisely that atmosphere of reality, knowledge, magnanimity and disinterestedness, which, if they had been found in other quarters, would have given us the Good Peace."

Keynes was writing about a good man who, unlike Mr Clinton, happened to be in the White House at a disastrous time: Herbert Hoover.

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