On the morning of November 13, Bill Clinton began the Budget War of 1995 . What he said was not important — he was vetoing the first continuing resolut ion sent from Capitol Hill for his signature and offering some reasons why What was important was the stagecraft — speaking to the nation from the Oval Of fice, holding the very pen that Lyndon Johnson had used to sign Medicare into l aw 30 years before, and wearing some very strange glasses. Perched halfway down his nose, right below the bridge, were these half moon spectacles, the kind fav ored by teenage actors who need to appear middle-aged when they play Mr. Webb, the small town newpaper editor in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, in a high-sch ool production. Mr. Webb, for those who have never had to suffer through the pl ay, is a man of utter conviction, a leader of the community, a righteous fellow , who se gruff demeanor masks a heart of gold.
Nobody wears half moon spectacles these days. Optometry has gotten more sophisticated. And, though they helped him look the part he was trying to play, Clinton clearly had no idea how to use them. He kept looking over the specs, or under them, to read the text, and just stumbled his way through. Soon thereafter, the half-moons were retired from public view, perhaps to Dick Morris’s display case, but they had already served their purpose. They had helped establish the late-model President Bill Clinton — gray-haired, sober, attractive, the pious and principled representative of the little man. The kind of man who calls a spade a spade, who knows what’s right and wrong and isn’t afraid to speak his mind.
It’s all a lie of course Like a teenager playing Mr. Webb, Clinton is a mere simulacrum of honesty, probity, and righteousness. It has been a rare and remarkable performance, because for two months now Bill Clinton has been saying things he knows to be untrue day in and day out — sometimes saying one thing in one meeting to congressional Republicans and then five minutes later sending out his lapdog vice president to deny he ever said it. This is not the Bill Clinton we have come to know, the one who seems to believe whatever he is saying whenever he says it. For three years now, those of us on the right who do not reflexively hate Bill Clinton have been puzzled by the extreme vituperation the very mention of his name can cause in conservative circles. After all, Clinton is not George Mitchell, or Tip O’Neill, or Tom Foley, or Jim Wright — the Democratic party leaders of the 1980s committed to the demonization and, in some cases, literal criminalization of those in the opposite party. He is a politician without conviction, desperate to be liked, full of natural charm, whose purpose in life is to be all things to all people.
What has happened in the past two months is this: Clinton is no longer the likable rascal he seemed to be in his first three years. He has become a genuinely bad guy — someone who is deliberately, self-consciously trying to put over a massive deception on the American people. He has been so corrupted by cynicism that, like Tartuffe in Moliere’s great comedy he is consciously using piety as a tool.
“I will continue to fight for my principles,” said the letter he sent Congress on November 13 detailing the reasons for his veto of the first continuing resolution. “A balanced budget that does not undermine Medicare, education or the environment, and that does not raise taxes on working families. I will not take steps that I believe will weaken our nation, harm our people and limit our future.”
The next day, he said: “It is my solemn responsibility to stand against a budget plan that is bad for America and to stand up for a balanced budget that is good for America. And that is exactly what I intend to do.”
Only his administration had no plan to balance the budget then, good or bad. And he knew that, but he lied, and he knew he lied. When his administration finally submitted a supposedly balanced budget on December 7, the Congressional Budget Office did the math and discovered that it would lead to a deficit not of zero in seven years, but of $ 115 billion. This came three weeks after he had signed a law committing him to accept a seven-year balanced- budget plan based on CBO projections. No matter; his spokesman, Mike McCurry, denied the law said any such thing, offering instead the head-shaking suggestion that only the final deal between Congress and the White House needed CBO approval. Like his boss, McCurry knows full well that at the beginning of his administration, Clinton insisted that all budget projections be CBO’s because the White House’s numbers were always cooked politically. They knew all these things, and they lied, and they knew they lied.
The Republicans, Clinton said on December 15, “would not even continue to talk unless we agreed right now to make deep and unconscionable cuts in Medicare and Medicaid” — knowing full well that the Republican proposal to cut the growth of the two entitlements is almost exactly the same proposal he had offered in 1993. What’s more, that plan increases Medicare spending by 62 percent in seven years; his increases spending by only a fraction more.
“What they really want,” he said on December 20, “is to end the role of the f ederal government in our life, which they have, after all, been very open about .” That is a remarkable statement in and of itself the sort of wild exaggeratio n that, were a comparable one made by Newt Gingrich about the Democrats, would be a three-day news story And in any case, Clinton knew it not to be true. He k new full well that under the Republican plan the size of the federal budget in 2002 will be larger than it is now. This has actually been a severe disappointm ent to the libertarian wing of the Republican party, which was hoping for real cuts in the size of gove rnment, not merely a slowdown in its growth. He knew it, and he lied anyway. Usually, at this moment in a political discussion, some cynic will go straight to the Casablanca quote about being “shocked, shocked to discover gambling going on here.” This is politics. Politics is hardball. If you want a friend in this town, get a dog. And so on. Bill Clinton seeks political advantage by lying? So what else is new?
Here’s what’s new: This is not presidential politics as usual. It is campaign politics as usual, and campaign politics are different from the politics of governing. Candidates for office do spend months-years-lying through their teeth, promising everything to everybody and knowing full well that they are usually making promises they cannot possibly keep. “We just need to get to November,” say the campaign managers; “you can’t get anything done unless you’re elected.” If their electoral efforts are succcssful, politicians must then spend years trying to reconcile the responsibilities of governance with the lies they have told.
Becoming president usually forces a certain measure of responsibility even on the irresponsible. That responsibility can lead presidents to disastrous error, as it did when George Bush agreed to increase taxes in 1990 and when Ronald Reagan decided to negotiate with the Iranians in 1986. But there was nothing craven in either action; it was taken out of a misguided sense of what would be best for the country.
Bill Clinton has, instead, embraced irresponsibili ty. When it comes down to it, he is not proposing a vision of Washington, or of politics, or of government, much different from the Republican vision. He doesn’t oppose a balanced budget, which would be a defensible position, especially for a Democrat. No, he wants one — in four years, in ten years, in seven years, by CBO figures, by OMB figures, by whatever time-frame or vehicle he says he believes in today. His Medicare plan barely differs from the Republican proposal — a couple of dollars a month per recipient, $ 62 billion over seven years. He wants a tax cut, just a smaller one. He even wants a capital-gains tax cut, just a different one. This is the principle for which he is so determined to fight that he has vetoed appropriations bills and refuses to sign the continuing resolutions sent him by the Republicans? Of course not.
Up to now, Clinton has seemingly believed his “spin; though he is prone to telling fibs (as Carl M. Cannon detailed in his article, “Bill Clinton’s Pathetic Lies,” in the Oct. 2 WEEKLY STANDARD), they have usually been remarkably unconscious ones. But that is not true of what he has done in the budget battle. Everything — everything — he and his people have said and done for the past two months has been a conscious deceit. The Big Spin has become the Big Lie.
And it has, so far worked for him. His poll numbers rose; Republican poll numbers plummeted. It goes without saying that it would be a disaster for Washington, for the presidency, for the very idea of principled governance, if such raw, naked cynicism proved successful in the long run. Clinton’s defeat in November is therefore essential simply to teach politicians the corollary to the lesson they learned from George Bush’s loss in 1992. Just as no one can be a successful president by openly and nakedly going back on a firm and unambiguous promise (“no new taxes”), neither can a president be successful if he undertakes a knowing campaign of cynicism, deception, and fraud merely because he is so desperate to hold on to power that he will say anything.
By John Podhoretz
