Bill Clinton is a bore. He’s back to his pre-Dick Morris habit of blathering endlessly and turgidly about issues he is desperate not to discuss. Last week, at a press conference, he gave an answer about his stand on a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution that was a masterpiece of windbaggery and so confusing that his treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, had to come out two days later and clarify the president’s views. (Clinton is still against the amendment, it turns out, but you would never really know that from listening to the president himself.) His answer, in full:
“You know, my problems with [the balanced-budget amendment] always were — you know, I lived under one as a governor, and we produced 12 balanced budgets and I’m trying to get back to a balanced budget system here. My problems with a constitutional amendment were always more a question of how to manage the larger economic problems of the country — the nation’s budget is different from a state, and I just want to make sure that if we have one, it needs to be clear in terms of how — and it needs to really give us the possibility of dealing with a recession. You don’t want to wind up with a Congress someday in a recession raising taxes or throwing unemployed people off health care because they’re trying to get to a balanced budget. Then you could actually wind up making the deficit worse.
“If it sets a framework and says that in the 21st century in the economy we’re going to be living in, other things being equal, we ought always to be balancing our books, I agree with that. I just don’t think you — we may tie our hands more than we will achieve. So what I’m going to focus my energies on is getting the balanced budget. But I don’t have a vote in the Congress. My voice counts, presumably, but I don’t have a vote. But I do have the responsibility to help the American people get the balanced budget, and that’s what I’m going to focus my energies on. . . . I don’t believe we need it, and it can’t be an excuse — for a long time I was afraid it would be an excuse to throw the burden on somebody else, by the Congress, because by definition you have to have it down the road. It takes a while to ratify. But my belief is that you — I don’t believe that we need it, but if we have it, it ought to be able to be implemented in a way that actually works and gives the country what it needs to manage a recession because, you know, we won’t always have — someday down the road we’ll have another bad patch in the economy. I mean, we just know that’s going to happen.”
WAIT! THERE’S MORE!
“You know,” the president continued, “you don’t have — no one has a total trouble-free life, no country has a trouble-free economy. Someday down the road — and we just don’t want an amendment to wind up making our recession worse and causing us to do things that are counterproductive that you would never do in a recession. In a recession you would never raise taxes, and you wouldn’t throw people who are unemployed through no fault of their own off of health-care eligibility because you were trying to balance the budget.
“So that’s the only thing I’m — if the escape hatch is good, then we’ll manage it the best way we can. The American people — we’re a very practical people. We’ll find a way to deal with the amendment if the amendment — the thing I want us to do is, if you look at this global economy, look how much more economic activity was generated in America when we lowered the deficit and lowered interest rates, and it totally overwhelmed the contractionary effects of reducing the deficit by holding spending down. And we would be better off in this kind of economy always targeting a balanced budget unless there is a substantial recession, in which case we don’t want to raise taxes on people when they don’t have as much money as they should anyway. That’s what I’m worried about.
“So that’s why I’m telling you, I’m going to be working on putting a balanced budget in there. If we get it, if we can get the Congress to pass a plan that will achieve that, we’ll have the desired economic effect, short term and long term, and then whatever happens with the amendment will happen.”
Keep talking this way, Mr. President, and those approval ratings you love so much are going to go down, down, down.
