AT HIS OVAL OFFICE PRESS CONFERENCE following the off-year elections, President Clinton cited only a single result as having “national significance. ” It was the defeat in Houston, 55 percent to 45 percent, of an initiative to ban racial preferences in city contracts and hiring. Of course, there wasn’t much else the president, as a Democrat, liked in the election results. “The only other thing he could have pointed to was the Des Moines mayoral race going from Republican to Democrat,” said a White House aide. So, without being asked about it specifically, Clinton brought up the Houston vote, saying he was “profoundly grateful” the people of Houston “voted to retain their affirmative-action program.”
The fixation on Houston reflected the White House’s drift to the left in the president’s second term. No, Clinton hasn’t changed his public position on any issue, or at least not much. But in emphasis and tone and selection of issues on which to concentrate, he has changed. Rather than draw from his conservative side, as he did last year while running for reelection, Clinton is now stressing his liberal leanings. Why? One reason is he’s not as beholden to public opinion now because he doesn’t have to run for election again. Another is his fear of independent counsel Kenneth Starr and congressional investigations. His response is to shore up his party base, which is predominantly liberal. And the tilt to the left also seems to fit with Clinton’s personal sentiments.
Once a racial moderate, the president is now obsessed with preserving most affirmative-action programs. At the White House, aides monitored the voting in Houston. And even before the polls had closed, they began notifying journalists, including Tim Russert of Meet the Press, that the effort to ban preferences would fail. Meanwhile, Clinton is deeply involved with his advisory board on race. Headed by scholar John Hope Franklin, the board has focused chiefly on white racism, which Franklin says is rampant. Clinton, meeting with the board on September 30, commented, “There is more housing discrimination in America than I had thought when I became president.” But the president also wants the board to have “a broader debate” on race and not look solely at white racial bias, according to senior aides. For one thing, he suggested it look into the problem of gangs. At the same meeting, however, Vice President Gore echoed Franklin and declared “race is a pervasive if often unacknowledged part of every issue, controversy, indeed conversation in the United States of America. And those who pretend it’s not are in danger of deluding themselves.”
The president has shifted his position on tobacco. Bruce Lindsey, the White House attorney and close Clinton friend, kept in touch with the talks among tobacco companies, plaintiffs’ lawyers, and state attorneys general. In fact, the White House privately approved the settlement announced June 20. Then the president was pressured by the public-health lobby, Gore, and Donna Shalala, the secretary of health and human services, to take a tougher stand. On September 15, he did, demanding stiffer regulation of tobacco and stronger steps against tobacco companies.
On health care, Clinton hasn’t so much adopted a new position as re- emphasized an old one. Having failed spectacularly in 1993 and 1994 to achieve national health care, Clinton all but dropped the issue in 1995 and 1996. Now, he’s back with the same goal but a new approach. Since the effort to enact a national program in one swoop was a non-starter, he’s turned to an aggressive, incremental strategy. “Now that what I tried to do before won’t work, maybe we can do it in another way,” he told a conference of the Service Employees International Union in September. “That’s what we’ve tried to do, a step at a time, until we eventually finish this . . . . We’ve got to do it right so we can go on to the next step and the next step and the next step.” The initial steps, he said, were making health insurance portable and expanding taxpayer-funded insurance for kids. In 1998, he wants more regulations on health insurance, including a patients’ bill of rights that a Clinton commission on “quality” health care is drafting.
This has alarmed both insurers and Republicans. Insurance companies are afraid federal quality standards will drive up premiums, create more uninsured, and generate new pressure for nationalized health care. In a memo to House Republicans on November 3, Majority Leader Dick Armey warned that the president’s “new offensive on ‘health-plan quality’ follows a common Clinton pattern: First he identifies a ‘crisis,’ usually in the fall before an election year. Then he highlights it in his January State of the Union. And then he calls on Congress to send him by Election Day some Kennedy-Blank bill to ‘solve’ the crisis. His actions on health-plan quality follow this pattern to a tee.” The president, Armey insisted, “has never changed goals, only strategies.” Of course, this is no secret; Clinton openly admits it.
On two other issues — taxes and gays — Clinton hasn’t repositioned himself but has changed his rhetoric. Campaigning for Democrat Don Beyer in the Virginia governor’s race on November 4, Clinton characterized those eager to abolish the state’s hated car tax as “selfish” and willing to let education funding lag. “How could you knowingly damage the education of children and the future of your state for something that will be immensely satisfying for about 30 seconds, maybe an hour, maybe a week at most?” That’s a question Clinton would never have asked last year. Nor would he have spoken at the dinner of a national homosexual organization, which he was to do on November 8.
Maybe I’m making too much of this, but Clinton mentioned one candidate in his post-election press conference, Jim McGreevey, the Democrat who narrowly lost the New Jersey governor’s race. “I was surprised and terribly impressed by the remarkable campaign of Mr. McGreevey,” the president said. Remarkable? McGreevey’s distinguishing political feature was unrepentant liberalism of the left-labor variety. Yet Clinton, an aide said, “thought he ran a better campaign than a lot of others.” That includes Beyer, who styled himself after Clinton as a New Democrat. Clinton, taking a more liberal tack now, didn’t appreciate the imitation.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
