JUDGED AS RHETORIC, STATE OF THE UNION addresses are always failures, and the great flopping mess that President Clinton dropped on a joint session of Congress last week was no different. Like all previous efforts in the form — and indeed like his own presidency — the speech was themeless, meandering, and much too long.
Still, it was notable, maybe even history-making, for several reasons. The most striking fact is that it was delivered at all. For five days, millions of strangers had been discussing the most intimate and embarrassing aspects of Bill Clinton’s personal life: his erotic tastes, how he defines adultery, and whether his wife hates his guts. Most normal men would take this as an invitation to fly to Madagascar and never return. But Clinton is not a normal man. He could stand before the world and speak of policy, knowing as he did so that his vast audience was staring at him and thinking: How did he get it on her dress? He may look soft and puffy, but if anyone doubted it, the State of the Union speech proved the truth: Bill Clinton is made of brass.
The speech was a historic occasion for reasons far beyond the personal, however. It suggested that Clinton’s effect on the tone and substance of American politics may well be indelible. Clintonism is undemanding and incoherent and politically successful, all at once, and therefore highly infectious — so infectious that the president’s political opponents have succumbed, too.
The essence of Clintonism is to trivialize the important and aggrandize the trivial. The State of the Union is thus the perfect vehicle for its expression: a riot of policies, a mob of initiatives. Each of these, taken individually, is small, even infinitesimal, in scope, and none bears any coherent philosophical relationship to the others; but they are served up with a rhetorical extravagance that obscures the dozens of internal contradictions.
The most obvious of the contradictions is also the largest, concerning the role of government. The president has told us before that the era of big government is over, and he repeated the point at the top of his address. “We have moved past the sterile debate between those who say government is the enemy and those who say government is the answer,” the president said. “My fellow Americans, we have found a third way. We have the smallest government in 35 years, but a more progressive one. We have a smaller government but a stronger nation.”
The assertion raises several questions. First, its premise is false. It is true that the federal government employs fewer people than it has in a long while, but this is a consequence of layoffs in the military since the end of the Cold War. The federal government in fact absorbs a larger portion of national income than ever before, and its regulatory power has been vastly extended in the last five years, as it had been in the previous four. And in his address the president sought to expand it further — through a tobacco settlement, for example, and in his demand for a higher minimum wage, and by roping large numbers of new recruits into the Medicare system. The third way, upon examination, turns out to be the regulatory leviathan.
If his premise is so patently false, what then could the president have meant? In a strict sense, he didn’t mean anything. Words in a Clintonized politics are not used to convey an idea but to elicit favorable responses from the people who hear them. Focus groups have shown contemporary politicians that Americans are ambivalent about government. They hope it will be smaller while relishing the favors it dispenses. Hence the oxymoron: ” smaller government” that can, and does, do anything.
Anything: Clintonism transforms your most parochial worries into matters of state. The president’s address, like all State of the Union speeches, quickly devolved into a laundry list of initiatives. No overarching theme bound them together, except that each appears to meet some concern of some discrete group of constituents. Having trouble sending your kids to college? Worried they might start smoking? Can’t find a good day-care center? Read the speech. Everything that might make you uneasy has been nationalized. The president is on the case.
Ideology is the animating force of politics, the thing that gives it significance and weight, but Clintonism has drained it all away. To see how thoroughly Clinton has triumphed, consider the speech Trent Lott gave immediately following the State of the Union. It was called the Republican Response, but it is really the Republican Gloss, a slightly different take on the national agenda as defined by Clinton. All of the elements of Clintonism are here. Issues are chosen by polls, phrases are fashioned by focus groups, and any attempt to make an ideological point has been sunk.
Lott, too, disdained Big Government in his speech, before laying out a series of policies designed to make government the Third Parent — within, of course, the context of the traditional, two-parent, God-fearing family. Curiously, Lott opened his homily with an attack on the IRS. “We are going to stop the abuses the IRS is inflicting on American taxpayers,” he said. ” You’ve got our word on it.” This broadside was unrelated to anything that carne before or after. It was inserted at the top of the speech for a single reason: Two years of focus groups show that Americans hum with pleasure when a politician attacks the IRS. Lott’s speechwriters wanted to begin on a positive note.
But there are problems. The majority leader then pledged to “eliminate the IRS as we know it today.” And replace it with . . . what? The conventions of Clintonism do not require that Republicans answer the question. This is good for them, since their two alternatives, a national sales tax and a fiat tax, carry difficulties of their own. The sales tax would require monitoring far more intrusive than the IRS, and the flat tax is politically unsustainable. Lott would never burden his listeners with arguments about either, though. All that matters, in Clintonism, is the assertion: If you hate the IRS, we’ll get rid of it. “You’ve got our word.”
Lott pledged as well that Republicans “would not spend any balanced-budget surplus on unnecessary government programs.” But what is unnecessary? The Republican version of Clintonism — Clintonism Lite, if you can imagine such a thing — offers no guidance. Suppose that millions of children in low- income families go to bed at night without brushing their teeth. The threat of gum disease is very real — a national scandal — and the United States has the lowest flossing rate of any industrialized country in the world. Are toothbrush tax credits therefore necessary? We will have to wait and see. “We care so much about those families,” Lott said.
Caring, now, is at the heart of our politics, thanks to Clinton. His mother had to work when he was a boy, so the president favors federally subsidized day care. Al Gore’s sister died of lung cancer, so he knows the need to outlaw tobacco advertising. Republicans have learned the lesson. In discussing the Republican approach to education, Lott identified himself as a father, a “prospective grandfather,” and a son. His mother, “God bless her, taught public elementary school for 19 years.” If you have doubts about the Republican program, remember: Trent Lott is a father and a son. Q.E.D.
Immediately after the president’s speech last week, members of Congress gathered in the Capitol to meet the press. I asked one of them, a Republican from the Northeast, whether the president’s “program” had a chance of success in the coming months. “A pretty good chance,” he said. “Remember, he laid out an agenda that probably polls at 70 percent.”
Will the president resign? Will he be impeached or permanently crippled? It really doesn’t matter. The president may come, the president may go, but Clintonism is here to stay.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
