Transcript
Panel II: transcript
MR. ARMACOST: Good morning everybody. I'm Mike Armacost.
It's my pleasure on behalf of the Brookings Institution to welcome you this morning to a national issues forum on the Clinton legacy. Some may regard it as a bit premature to make such an assessment, the president still has 10 days left in office. And I think as Ari Fleischer was saying the other day, he's been a busy beaver issuing new regulations while still in hot pursuit of a peace deal in the Middle East. But it is clear that time is running out on the Clinton presidency. A lot of news organizations and others have been very active in expatiating on his legacy. And while interest in the subject is high, it seems an appropriate moment to make the first pass at assessing the achievements and the shortcomings of the first baby-boomer president.
It's clear that the president's supporters and his detractors are hard at work seeking to shape the way historians will remember him, as is the president himself. In some ways, one of the defining characteristics of Mr. Clinton's legacy may be the self-consciousness of its pursuit. Historians and scholars with the benefit of time and a measure of detachment will provide the authoritative judgments concerning what Mr. Clinton has accomplished, what was left undone. Our efforts this morning fall more into the category of trying to make an outline or, thus, a first draft of history for others to fill in or to round out.
I expect the draft will be neither black nor white, and it's clear that during President Clinton's watch, the economy has flourished as almost never before. It's true also that not least because of this prosperity, we've seen rather dramatic progress on a number of social indices, and I expect there historians will mainly argue over how to divvy up credit for these very benign and welcome developments. In the field of foreign policy, too, there have been undoubted accomplishments, most notably in the field of trade with the ratification of NAFTA and GATT, and in the field of peacemaking and peacekeeping. And yet, even in an area like the Middle East, where the president has undoubtedly made extraordinary personal efforts, there is more turmoil perhaps now than there was in January of 1993 when he assumed office.
And finally in the areas of major reform, it's currently welcome that an issue like Social Security Reform is no longer taboo, it's out on the table, politicians actively debate it. And yet the opportunities for reform, heretofore at least, have seemingly slipped through the cracks, and perhaps the personal scandals in the White House did something to affect the practical possibilities for reform as they impinged on the national political climate.
So, I expect the balance sheet will be a mixed bag now and perhaps later. But to help us formulate this first cut at a balance of the Clinton legacy, we've organized two panels this morning. The first features Brookings scholars, Richard Haass, Belle Sawhill, Bob Litan and Tom Mann, and it will be moderated by someone you all know and we're proud to have as a journalist in residence at Brookings, Jon Rauch. This panel will assess the Clinton presidency in specific areas of foreign policy, social policy, economic policy, and politics and governance.
The second panel, moderated by Steve Hess, will feature Clinton biographer and Washington Post writer David Maraniss, ABC TV correspondent Ann Compton, Newsweek journalist Michael Isikoff, and White House Special Counsel Lanny Davis. They'll take a look at the Clinton years through a somewhat wider lens, reflecting on changes he brought to the tone and the process of American government, the meaning and lasting impact of the Lewinsky scandal, and Mr. Clinton's place in the history of the American presidency.
You can get a full transcript of this event, as well as full audio and video recording, as well as additional background materials on our website, www.brookings.edu, and during the course of the program, we'll be taking some questions that come through the Internet.
There was one other note that I was supposed to mention, that is, if you're watching this and have work to do on the computer, you can watch and listen to this event on your computer via live streaming video and audio. You'll have to ask someone else how you do that, but I know it's technically possible.
And with that, let me turn the program over to Jon Rauch.
MR. RAUCH: Hi. Thank you, Mike.
My name is Jonathan Rauch, and I'm a writer here in residence here at Brookings. I write a column for National Journal Magazine, and write articles for many others, including, for example, the Atlantic Monthly. One of the great joys of being here at Brookings is the extraordinary depth of knowledge of this place, administrations going back, I think, to Kennedy. And a remarkable amount of policy experience, a good deal of which is sitting to my right. Welcome to you all. Welcome also to C-SPAN viewers who are with us today.
We're going to spend about the next hour, perhaps an hour and 15 minutes, talking about policy during the Clinton years. We'll have brief statements by each of the panelists to sort of create a context for their overall view, then a discussion amongst ourselves, and hopefully involving you. We hope to keep it informal and lively and interactive, as they say.
Many of you will already know all the folks up here. To my immediate right, Bob Litan, vice president, director of the Economics Studies Program here at Brookings, the author, or co-author, or editor of more than 20 books, and more than 125 articles also extremely relevant today, a former Clinton administration official, served in the Office of Management and budget in 1995 and '96, where he oversaw six cabinet agencies. And before that, in 1993 to '95, deputy assistant attorney general who was in charge of civil antitrust litigation and regulatory issues, which put him in the middle of some of the key fights that have gone on since then, including the Microsoft dispute. And then, in the '70s, he also worked on President Carter's Council of Economic Advisors. Thank you for coming, Bob. That's an extraordinary depth of experience.
To Bob's right, Richard Haass, vice president, director of Foreign Policy Studies here at Brookings. Richard worked, as many of you know, in the Bush administration for four years, where he was special assistant to President Bush, and senior director for Near East and South Asian Affairs on the National Security Council. He has also worked in various roles for the Departments of State, Departments of Defense, he's the author or editor of nine books on American foreign policy, and something I didn't know until just a few days ago, also the author of a book on management called The Bureaucratic Entrepreneur. He is also, by the way, the formulator in the most concise terms I've ever heard of the Clinton Doctrine, which is perhaps something he'll share with us when he talks to us later on.
To Richard's right, Belle Sawhill, Isabel V, officially, senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, also a former Clinton administration Office of Management and Budget official where she dealt with the human resource programs for the federal government, which, of course, account for something like a third of the government's budget. I know of no one who knows more about welfare and thinks harder about the issues of human capital in American society for more years than Isabel Sawhill, who also has long and deep experience at the Urban Institute, and has written any number of books including on welfare reform, on social mobility in America, on the social contract, and also at the moment is doing something I think is exceptionally important, which is she's president and one of the founders of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, an extremely important endeavor, I think.
Finally, at the far end is Tom Mann, who is senior fellow in American Government for many years here, from 1987 to 1999, director of Governmental Studies. A truly distinguished political scientist, a former executive director of the American Political Science Association. He's written or edited at least 10 books, I sort of lost count after ten on everything from the media and polls, campaign finance reform, an area Tom has been active, both as scholar and as a doer, congressional elections, you name it, Tom has been involved in it in the political arena.
By my very rough count, we have on this panel at least 20 years in government under at least three administrations, and we have 30 or more books, and I don't know how many articles. With that, let me start with, I suppose, foreign policy is a good place to begin, let's start with Richard Haass.
MR. HAASS: It's so rare that foreign policy gets to begin anything that I'm reassured already.
We were asked to discuss Bill Clinton's legacy, so let me talk about Bill Clinton's legacy in the realm of foreign policy. Well, first off, what does it take to have a legacy? And I would say it takes one of two things, either one has to bring about great accomplishments on the ground or, secondly, one has to change the way the people in the country, in this case the United States, think about foreign policy. And by either of those measures, either great accomplishments or fundamentally altering the way Americans think about foreign policy, I would argue that Bill Clinton lacks any foreign policy legacy. He has none.
Why is this the case? I would cite three reasons that Mr. Clinton essentially does not possess a foreign policy legacy after eight years. First, there was no foreign policy framework. Instead, policies were essentially ad hoc, they were not consistent, they were not additive. The few attempts at articulating frameworks, for example, the idea that we would be believers in assertive multilateralism, well, that lasted a few weeks until Somalia. Or democratic enlargement, well, that couldn't be the direction for foreign policy because in too many situations democracy could not be given a central place. Or Jon has already referred to the Clinton Doctrine, well, that basically talks about intervening except where the costs get too high. So, for all these reasons, there was no attempt to articulate or, more important, to stick with any framework. So that's the first reason there was no legacy.
Secondly, the Clinton administration was addicted to politics. It's not the first administration, it won't be the last to obviously have politics influence policy, but did bring this to a new height or, if you'd prefer, to a new depth. And more often than not, foreign policy was seen through the prism of domestic policy, and that, again, made it all too vulnerable to change to avoiding doing what was difficult or right simply because it was not politically popular as the polls of the day showed.
And, thirdly, the reason that there's no foreign policy legacy is, at least until the end of Mr. Clinton's tenure, foreign policy received an awfully low priority. In the first term, it was essentially missing. One of the things I did in writing about it was just add up, for example, all of his Saturday radio talks, and it turns out that only about 10 percent, 30, roughly, out of 300 were devoted to the world. And a similar percentage of his States of the Union. And that simply tells you something, it's very hard to build a foreign policy legacy if you're only going to devote approximately 10 or 12 percent of your calories to that task. So it ought not to surprise us that there's not much to show for eight years.
What you end up with instead is a report card, or a checklist. And what one has on that checklist are a number of accomplishments, and there I'd add such things as the NAFTA agreement, the trade agreement with the United States, Canada and Mexico, the World Trade Organization, the rescue of the Mexican economy, the denuclearization of several of the foreign Soviet Republics, including the Ukraine, the Chemical Weapons Convention, the agreed framework with North Korea, and the humanitarian interventions in the Balkans. And I would say all of those, and arguably some other foreign policies, would clearly go, for the most part, on the positive side of Mr. Clinton's ledger. Unfortunately, there are also some things to put on the negative side of the ledger, and there, again, an incomplete list would be on the trade front the lost of fast track negotiating authority and ultimately the debacle in Seattle, for the loss of control over trade policy, the proliferation of economic sanctions, the failure to bring about any major arms control agreement with Russia so that arsenals of the two great powers still look pretty much like they looked during the Cold War, the erosion to a significant degree of the anti-Saddam Hussein coalition, the fiasco in Somalia, the non-intervention in Rwanda, I would add the Middle East peace process to this list. The fact that the Middle East that Mr. Clinton is going to bequeath to Mr. Bush is far worse than the Middle East he inherited from Mr. Bush's father, and lastly the failure to define post-Cold War relationships with China, with Russia, with Europe, with Japan, with India, essentially not working out a new basis for American foreign policy with the other key centers of power in this world.
And this last point is illustrative, and I'll essentially end here. Bill Clinton will be seen by historians who look at his foreign policy record as a transitional president. Yes, he was the first president whose entire term occurred in the post-Cold War world. Indeed, Bill Clinton's two terms as president were essentially the same as the first decade of the post-Cold War world, but I would say he didn't really define this world in any lasting way. He didn't build any lasting institutions. And he didn't come up with an approach to the world that will last after him. He did not give the American people a handle, a philosophy, a doctrine, a policy that will essentially guide them through the second decade of the post-Cold War world. Now, could he have done so? I would say, yes, I think there were many areas to do so.
So, as a result, when foreign policy historians look at Bill Clinton, I think the verdict will be a mixed record, but ultimately a squandered opportunity to build a lasting foreign policy legacy.
MR. RAUCH: Thank you, Richard. Bob Litan, you want to talk for a little bit about the economic legacy?
MR. LITAN: Well, I think there the news is a little better than what Richard has outlined. Let's remember that Bill Clinton ran on a campaign of, it's the economy, stupid, and I would suspect that the portion of calories he spent on the economy was well over 50 percent. And I think what the big debate is going to be, and I predict that you'll see tons of Ph.D. theses that will address the following issue: How much credit will historians and economists give to Bill Clinton for the remarkable economic performance of the 1990s? Because, by all measures, it was remarkable. We had low and unexpected inflation, extraordinarily low unemployment, far below what we thought was possible at the beginning of the decade. We converted a record deficit into a record surplus in the span of eight years, something I don't think anybody here would have predicted. And you add all that up -- and Alan Blinder has been quoted in another context saying that if you had had to place a bet in 1992 on what the gross macro outlook would have looked like at the end of 2000, the outcome that we actually reached was probably a one in a million shot. I mean, that's how extraordinary the performance was in the '90s.
And one other piece of evidence just to support that, is that from 1995 to the year 2000, we had something that was totally unexpected, we had productivity growth, which is the engine for the growth of living standards essentially advancing at 3 percent a year, the fastest pace of advanced, sustained advance, basically since 1973. And one that was totally unexpected, and one that occurred toward the end or the middle of the end of an expansion, something that no one would have predicted in advance.
So now the question is, how much does Bill Clinton get credit for this? I'm going to give you my first draft, it is totally non-scientific, purely judgmental and anecdotal, but I would assign Bill Clinton approximately a third of the credit for this, with the other two-thirds being split between Alan Greenspan and the enormous energy and vitality of the private sector. I mean, people will quibble, some people will say the third to Clinton is too high, some will say it's too low. But let me give you six policies which make up that one-third, or at least support the view that Clinton had something to do with this.
Number one, overall budget policy. We had two deficit reduction packages, one in '93, which was the biggest, and then another one that was smaller in '97. The '93 one, by the way, was not as big as the Bush deal in 1990, something that people forget. And so I think any fair historical reading of the decade would have to give, I think, substantial credit to President Bush, father, as well as Bill Clinton for turning us toward a deficit reduction path. And we all know that that fateful decision by President Bush to embrace the tax increase probably cost him the election.
But in any event, budget policy was critical. The '93 budget package was passed by one vote. Now, it's true the '97 package probably would have never happened had it not been for the '94 elections, where the Republicans came in and swept Congress and forced Clinton from a budget, which was basically $200 billion in deficit as far as the eye can see, to a much more aggressive deficit reduction package. But taken as a whole, that deficit reduction package lowered interest rates, and helped sustain the recovery.
Second, early support of free trade, both NAFTA and the WTO. I underscore the word "early," because I agree with Richard. Toward the end of the term, Clinton, I think, lost a lot of enthusiasm for free trade, helped contribute to the debacle in Seattle. But that early support of NAFTA and the World Trade Organization helped encourage global forces to contain inflation, and spurred economic growth around the world.
Third, I would say the strong dollar policy, give big credit to Bob Rubin, here, who ran against the conventional wisdom of a lot of economists who would have said in the face of a very large trade deficit that what you ought to do is talk down the dollar so that American goods will get cheaper and, thereby, you can close the deficit. Rubin had exactly the opposite view. He said always talk up the dollar. And Larry Summers continued afterwards. And I think it is now conventional wisdom, something I think will be embraced by the new Bush administration, don't talk down the dollar, because a strong dollar basically allows you to run a low inflation economy, you don't import inflation from the rest of the world, and helped Alan Greenspan keep the economy going because he didn't have to worry about inflation as much as he would have otherwise.
Fourth policy were the various financial rescues, Mexico and the IMF rescues in Asia, under heavy criticism from conservative wing of the Republican Party, and also from the left. The administration, nonetheless, supported these rescues, and I would argue that in retrospect they helped keep the expansion going, not only here, but contained the damage in Asia. There will be debates about this I think for years to come. We may get a change in policy towards the IMF in the Bush administration, but certainly in the 1990s, these rescues kept things going.
Fourth, welfare reform, Belle is going to talk about this. But welfare reform unexpectedly brought a lot of people into the labor force, we know at the low educational level, but essentially this helped contain inflation because we didn't run out of workers. And so that was an important contribution. People will say, well, look Bill Clinton caved in to the Republicans and eventually embraced something that was advocated by Republicans, but give Bill Clinton credit for having the guts to sign welfare reform, and realized the results, the rather unexpected and remarkable results that have followed so far.
And, finally, this is an area of personal interest, that I think the shift in policy towards antitrust enforcement at the margin also was an anti-inflation force, with very aggressive antitrust enforcement. American firms knew they are not around to fix prices; people knew there was a cop on the beat; and, other things being equal, it had the effect of putting a lid on inflationary pressures. I wouldn't rank it among the other top initiatives, but it certainly was an important element in the Clinton program.
So add all that up, and I think you can make a respectable case that Clinton deserves a third of the credit for what happened.
MR. RAUCH: Thank you, Bob. Belle Sawhill, a few words about the administration's record on domestic policy and social reform?
MS. SAWHILL: Yes. First, two adds before I begin, one is that there is a book that I co-authored that came out this summer, which is out on the table there called Updating the Social Contract, and which has a chapter in it which covers this whole question of Clinton's handling of the economy and of domestic policy more generally.
Second, in your packets that you got when you came in, there is a table that I prepared with the help of my wonderful research assistant comparing various statistical indicators of where we've been over the 1990s and compared it to the 1980s, basically compares the Clinton years to the Reagan years. And I think some of the data there are really quite interesting. Just as a teaser, let me mention one, recall that Clinton is a New Democrat, that he has said the era of big government is over, and notice what the data show, which is that as a proportion of GDP federal outlays are almost 3 percentage points lower now than they were when he took office, compare that to the supposedly conservative Reagan years, and you can see that the federal government has shrunk far more during the Clinton years than it did during the Reagan years. So that's just one teaser.
Now, I want to make sort of three points about domestic social policy. I think the first is that Clinton's biggest legacy, and Bob has already mentioned this, is that he transformed a social policy based on welfare to one based on work. The most obvious thing he did there was to sign the Welfare Reform Bill in 1996. Less obviously, but very important, was a major expansion of something called the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is now by far our largest antipoverty program, and which is distinguished
These two initiatives along with the strong economy have led to a sharp drop in welfare caseloads, over 50 percent since 1994, and also, interestingly enough, a sharp drop in the poverty rate, despite the fact that when this law was signed into law most of its critics were predicting that the poverty rate, particularly the poverty rate amongst children would increase substantially.
Second point, when Clinton came into office, he really wanted to increase investment, both private investment by reducing the deficit, getting interest rates down, but also public investment in research, in education and training, and in infrastructure, highways and the like. He believed that we needed a mixed strategy here, that public and private investment were complementary. His efforts where were stymied, I think, by two things, first of all, simply a lack of money, the fact that if you're trying to reduce the deficit you don't have much money for anything else. And, secondly, the difficulty of reordering budgetary priorities in the face of interest group pressures to maintain existing programs and, of course, after 1994, a Republican Congress.
The result is that this strategy was somewhat stymied. These public investments are now a lower share of the budget than when he took office. However, I think that bigger picture masks somewhat some success, some smaller successes on a number of fronts. I would mention as examples here increasing enrollment in Headstart, improvements in child nutrition, more spending on education in the context of much greater emphasis on educational standards, and a number of other smaller initiatives.
Also, I would maintain, although others might disagree, that he earned his reputation for being a true policy wonk by doing a pretty good job of sorting the effective from the less effective programs within the domestic social area, increasing the ones that had the best performance records.
Third point, two areas where I would have to give him much lower marks. First of all, and most obviously, the failure of healthcare reform in 1993. He should have done welfare reform before healthcare reform, something that he now concedes in recent interviews. As a consolation prize, he got a $24 billion program in 1997 that helps states pay for healthcare for poor children. But, there hasn't been a huge amount of progress here. The number of uninsured is higher now by four million than it was when he took office.
Second area where I would have to give him lower marks is more incentive omission than commission, and that is the failure to do much to start the process of restructuring Social Security and Medicare to deal with the impending baby-boom retirement. He could have done this with the political capital that he had during his second term, blame it on Monica Lewinsky if you want to, but it didn't happen.
On a more positive note, in the minds of many, he erected a brilliant defense of his hard won earlier victories on the budget battlefield, by arguing that we shouldn't have a tax cut as the Republicans were arguing, because we needed to "save Social Security first". But, keeping those surpluses intact for progressive purposes really required putting Al Gore or some other Democrat in the White House and hopefully changing the composition of the Congress, as well. That obviously hasn't happened, so this may be a case of winning the battle and losing the larger war.
I'll leave it there for now.
MR. RAUCH: Thank you, Belle. Tom Mann, what's Clinton's legacy in politics in America.
MR. MANN: Well, on the one hand and on the other, triumph and defeat, success and failure. It's become a cliche, but, alas, sometimes cliches are true. And the overriding question really is will scandal and impeachment trump the positive elements of the Clinton years.
I think from a longer historical perspective that will depend, in part, on how the Democratic Party fares in the 2002 and 2004 elections. Is the George W. Bush presidency a brief interlude in a period of Democratic strength, or, in fact, does this become a reversal politically.
Secondly, how durable will the productivity gains of the '90s turn out to be, and how much will we look back on this extraordinary economic performance as setting the stage for a long period of prosperity or rather a temporary boom or bubble.
And finally, what will the former President Clinton do with the rest of his life, and how will that in turn shape the way we view his political legacy. And in the same with what will Senator Clinton make of her life politically, and how will that have a bearing.
I really think the way to think about the political legacy of Bill Clinton is to view it from the lenses of on the one hand and on the other. And let me give you a series of such tensions. I would submit, Bill Clinton is the most gifted American politician since FDR, in every respect, intelligence, policy, knowledge, political skill, capacity to relate to the American people. Yet, he was also the one who was impeached and almost driven from office. As Bob said, Bill Clinton presided over and contributed to a period of extraordinary prosperity, yet leaves office with a widespread sense of squandered opportunities, Belle identified two, the area of health reform, and social insurance reform. On the latter one might argue that the success of fiscal policy has indirectly improved the health of our social insurance system, yet alas he certainly intended to do more and would have, had other matters not overwhelmed him.
He rebuilt a national Democratic Party to be competitive in presidential elections, destroyed the wedge issues that had made Democrats perennial losers in presidential politics, and yet he also saw Democratic fortunes decline at every other level of political office. He provided the conditions for the likely victory of his Vice President Al Gore, both the extraordinary prosperity, the repositioning of the Democratic Party to the center, the enunciation of an issue agenda that clearly resonated with the American people, I would submit much more so than that put forward by the Republican Party. Yet he also planted the seeds of Al Gore's defeat, through his own personal misbehavior. Just run through the game, the intellectual game, if Monica Lewinsky had never entered -- if the words Monica Lewinsky never entered the political lexicon how different do you think the Democratic campaign would have been, and how different would the outcome of that election have been.
Bill Clinton moved the Democratic Party to the center on crime, on welfare, on fiscal responsibility. Alas, he made paying down the debt an instrument of progressive policy. Yet, he enjoyed his strongest support among the party's core constituencies. Bill Clinton declared in that famous state of the union speech, the era of big government is over. Yet, he created the political basis for activist government, though on a more fiscally disciplined set of terms.
Bill Clinton suffered a chaotic transition, and disorganized early presidency, yet he adapted brilliantly to the election of a Republican Congress in 1994, and to the demands of governing in the age of a permanent campaign. Alas, I suspect that future presidents will find themselves taking notes from Bill Clinton, rather than reversing his means of elections. Our politics have been transformed in the idea that you can roll back to a period in which the permanent campaign did not exist strikes me as fanciful, and I think historians may well look back on his adaptations as setting the stage for governance in the future, for better or for worse.
Bill Clinton saw many of his close aides crushed by misfortune or turn on him after leaving the White House, yet had a Cabinet in many respects characterized by stability, loyalty and competence. It really is striking to realize that at HHS, at Education, at Interior, at EPA, for the most part at Justice, you had the longest tenure of any Cabinet members. In many respects I think we saw genuine sort of competence and the best of public management, in spite of the criticism that's been leveled at some of those Cabinet members.
Bill Clinton was reviled and pursued by conservative activists, and not a few establishment journalists. Yet, his adversaries were often more diminished than he. I'd give as my favorite nominees in that score the editors of The Wall Street Journal editorial page, who seemed consumed with assembling their own investigative staff to challenge perhaps the best reporting staff in the country on the news pages of The Wall Street Journal. I'd name Kenneth Starr, Dan Burton and Michael Kelly, a superb journalist who Clinton drove crazy. And we've had to suffer once a week as a consequence.
Clinton had a consuming interest in polls. This man could never get enough reports about polling, yet probably had more substantive policy knowledge and interest than any other contemporary American president. Go figure. He was widely viewed as unprincipled, and protean in his political views. Yet, his presidency was remarkably faithful to the values and goals he set out in his 1992 campaign, I recommend for your reading pleasure the 1992 Democratic platform, and the little paperback book he released in the campaign. You go back and reread that and look to see what he tried to do, and did do, during these eight years, and you will see more stability than change.
Finally, in a personal sense, Bill Clinton was compassionate, empathetic, optimistic, energetic, and remarkably hearty. To be willing to get up and continue with the job when most of us would have abandoned it long before, yet also proved thin skinned, undisciplined and self destructive. Remarkably complicated political legacy. I suspect historical assessments of his presidency will undergo many revisions over the next decades, but I also believe the first two-term Democratic president since FDR will not be easily dismissed
MR. RAUCH: Thank you, Tom. As a journalist it seems to me it's appropriate for me to ask a first question that's simplistic and reductive. So let me ask each of the four of you briefly as a way to sum up, in the pantheon of, say, post-war presidents where do you put Clinton?
Why don't we start with Tom and work our way back.
MS. SAWHILL: Post which war?
MR. RAUCH: You pick the war
MS. SAWHILL: The Civil War?
MR. MANN: Or the War of 1812?
Probably somewhere in the middle. But, alas, it's deceptive for the very reasons I suggested. It's there because of an averaging of the sort of the highs and the lows, which inevitably sort of moves him into the middle rank. Let me leave it there, and then respond where my colleagues put him.
MR. RAUCH: Does anyone else want to try and slot him in? Richard?
MR. HAASS: I'd say on a foreign policy ranking he's somewhere towards the lower end of the scale, when you think of the foreign policy records of Truman, the other president who ran into massive political problems Nixon, again, though gets very high marks I would argue for he most part on foreign policy, Reagan, Bush. I would essentially put Clinton in the lower half on a foreign policy ranking
MR. RAUCH: Down there with Carter, maybe Johnson?
MR. HAASS: Vietnam obviously becomes the overwhelming thread that undid several presidents. But yes, essentially and clearly Johnson it was the weakest part of his, and Carter was a fairly unsuccessful president, as well.
MS. SAWHILL: I think we have to give this a little more time, and let history make that verdict, as Mike said earlier. So I would duck that question. I would use it as an excuse to point out that one area that none of us has talked about up here, because none of us knows a lot about it, is what happened in the area of the environment and natural resources, and I'm told that Clinton was concerned about his reputation here, particularly recently. And that Bruce Babbitt understood that if he could get the president to understand that he could actually outdo Teddy Roosevelt in his commitment to saving public lands, that that would be a nice legacy. And recently, as we've seen, he's done quite a bit on that front.
MR. RAUCH: Bob, do you want to take a crack at my simplistic, reductive question? Be irresponsible.
MR. LITAN: Yes, the way I would be irresponsible is to go on a one to ten ranking. I'll take a weighted average of his domestic and his foreign policy initiatives, and I'll give him two rankings. One with and without Lewinsky. If there had been no Monica Lewinsky I think historians would rank him an eight, and with Lewinsky a six.
MR. RAUCH: That's a good way to think about it. I took the liberty while you were all speaking of assigning a numerical score to what I interpreted to be your points of view. And I won't insult you all by telling you how I interpreted your long and thoughtful, nuanced discussions as a single number. But, I will tell you that when I averaged the four of you the number I came out with was 5.5, on a scale of one to ten, where one is Andrew Johnson and ten is Abraham Lincoln.
The one common thread, it seems to me, of what you all said is that this is a man who possibly had the potential to be a paradigm shifting president, a major figure, who wound up being an incrementalist, a hedger, a guy with a lot of pluses and a lot of minuses, but no consistent legacy.
A question for anyone who wants to take it, who served in this or the previous administration, in the real world of Washington today is it realistic to expect a president to be an overarching figure who does great things, or is in fact Bill Clinton doing about as much as a president can do these days?
MS. SAWHILL: I would say that -- Richard made the distinction right off the bat between getting people to think differently about issues, versus actual accomplishments. And the accomplishments can be somewhat incremental, whereas the use of the bully pulpit to be a paradigm shifter, and to get people to think about the issues differently is another role for a president. I think Clinton did that extremely well. I would give him very high marks there. I think he was much more than just a tactician. I think he really did change the debate, update the Democratic Party, as Tom argued, modernized the welfare state, brought it into the 21st Century.
His new Democratic ideas, which I could go through a list of what they were, but they became a model for Europe, as well as for the United States. And they set the stage for progressive government to move forward again, politics permitting, now politics don't look as if they're permitting right now. But, I do think he was a paradigm shifter.
MR. HAASS: I would split it off and say, in foreign policy it would have been difficult to make Americans think different about foreign policy, because with the end of the Cold War foreign policy has lost some of its salience or traction, and Americans are essentially indifferent to foreign policy. So I think that would have been possible, but extremely difficult. And it would have meant using a lot of his discretionary time at the bully pulpit to essentially educate Americans on foreign policy, and clearly that wasn't his priority when he came to town. His motto was, it's the economy stupid, not it's the world stupid. I understand that.
Where I think that he fell short was in his ability to really change things. Bill Clinton came to office at a time of unprecedented American primacy. If there ever was a moment that the United States had the potential to build institutions, and essentially build a new order, this was the moment, with the end of the Cold War. And just think of what he could have done if, for example, he hadn't abandoned trade. If Bill Clinton had built on his NAFTA and WTO accomplishments, which were bipartisan, and essentially said over the next then six years that I have, after those first two years, I was going to make the institutionalization of open trade the priority for my foreign policy, he would not have allowed sanctions to proliferate, he would have had all sorts of fleshing out of the WTO, he would have used that bully pulpit argument and so forth. He didn't do that.
Imagine if it had been nuclear weapons, if he had said I am going to bring about massive cuts in nuclear weapons so the arsenals are fundamentally different, one-fifth what they were during the Cold War, and allow a certain amount of defense to enter the strategic balance, that could have been a paradigm shift, or on humanitarian intervention. If he had articulated a serious doctrine and followed it through consistently, and hadn't done things like taking ground forces off the table in Kosovo, or hadn't run out of Somalia, or hadn't stayed out of Rwanda, but basically had the courage of his own convictions and said, this is going to be the hallmark foreign policy contribution I'm going to make. I am going to try to develop new thinking about sovereignty, create a new norm that governments are not free to massacre their own people, or see them massacre, and I am going to try to transform our armed forces to do more and so forth.
So he had major opportunities, given American advantages in strength to do these things, and he simply chose not to.
MR. RAUCH: Tom?
MR. MANN: Yes, I tend to be more on the upbeat positive side of this. Think for a moment what the sentiments toward government were in the late 1970s, the proposition 13, the tax rebellion, Ronald Reagan's first election, first inaugural, government is not the solution, government is the problem. Now, fast forward to the late 1990s, the view of government is really quite different. Sure, if you pose would you rather have a smaller government and fewer services, a larger government, people ideologically will opt for smaller government. But, the reality is everyone across the political spectrum now accepts a vibrant role for the government. Even the Supreme Court when it comes to the matter of administering elections. So I think there's really been a sea change in the view of the role of government. Now, Clinton might have done more on this score, and certainly it's an exaggeration to say he saved "a place for government", as FDR saved sort of capitalism back in '32. But, it's sort of the same general idea.
Secondly, I think he actually demonstrated how it's possible to govern during a period of divided government, when you face a polarized Congress controlled by the other party. He adapted a style of governance that was tactical, that was defensive, that made heavy use of executive orders, that involved a good deal of sort of campaigning, that actually allowed him and his party to pursue a number of objectives, many in the environmental area, that Belle had mentioned. And I suspect in terms of institutional innovations, and given the changing nature of the world, that we're not going to have the great transforming presidencies until we have a great crisis facing the country. And that Clinton's adaptations will prove to be quite innovative and lasting in their impact.
Just finally a little word on trade. I think the story is more complicated. I think, first of all, there was PNTR late in the game, and secondly I think there also were a host of other trade agreements, with Africa, and Latin America, and a whole host of others that were negotiated during this time. I think the whole domestic politics of globalization has come to the fore not just in this country, but all around the world and the idea that somehow we're going to return to an era of "principled free trade" I think is unrealistic. And Clinton didn't solve this problem, but he helped people understand that it is with us, and we will be dealing with environmental and labor issues in future trade agreements, whether we like it or not.
MR. RAUCH: For anybody who doesn't know, PNTR is permanent normal trade relations with China, which Clinton managed to push through.
Let's go to the audience. We also have for C-SPAN viewers, and people who are people who are watching live on the Brookings web site, you can submit questions for the panelists by sending an email to communications@brookings.edu, note that's dot edu and not dot com. Members of the audience themselves, please wait for a microphone to come around so that TV viewers can hear you, and then please identify yourself. And please also keep your questions short.
Young man in the front row here, there's a microphone on the way.
Q: George Condon, with Copley News Service. Some people judge presidential legacies in terms of great things that transformed the country, whether it's Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase or Teddy Roosevelt's park system, or the interstate highway system with Eisenhower. Was there anything that President Clinton left behind that in any way is big, or changed the country. And in a sort of related question, none of you had mentioned, does he leave the presidency itself, the office of the presidency, weakened because the rulings that were made?
MS. SAWHILL: I would say the big accomplishment was the one that Bob Litan talked about, the surpluses that we now have compared to the deficits he inherited. That's a huge change, and changes the whole fiscal landscape, both in terms of money, and in terms of the Democrats now being viewed much more as the party of fiscal responsibility. And the second half of your question. I'll turn it to Tom or someone.
MR. MANN: Let me just take up on that. By the way, I think Richard's litany of squandered opportunities in foreign policy are striking. And I'm not going to dispute those. But, in the realm of economics, and again this gets into a dispute about how much we give Clinton credit for, but historians will look back on the 1990s as a decade and compare it to the 1980s. And for just all of us in the audience, just think about the 1980s mind set that we had. We all thought that we were going to be creamed by Japan, right. We thought that we were a losing power. Toward the end of the Bush administration there was worry, even though we were in the stages of economic recovery, Clinton clearly won because the recovery still hadn't manifested itself, and there was a lack of confidence. Most of us never thought we could surmount this deficit problem. A footnote, by the way, is Ross Perot's one contribution to American politics is that he did put the deficit issue on the agenda, and he ought to be getting some credit for that.
But, just think about now in the year 2000, just the sea change in psychology that's happened in the economy. Except for the recent down turn and the slow down in economic growth, Americans in the 1990s have been ebullient. We're the envy of the world. People come from all over the world to see Silicon Valley, to see how venture capital, and see how high tech is transforming the world. I mean, this is an enormous, you want to talk about paradigm shift, this is huge. It's one of the biggest turnarounds between decades that I can think of in my lifetime. So in that sense it will be transformative.
On the issue of the legal rulings that you were talking about, I'm not sure exactly which ones you meant. Forcing testimony by Secret Service agents, and the whole question of executive privilege. I mean, what I'd say on that is that Clinton further fueled the criminalization of politics. A sort of politics by other means that began well before Bill Clinton came to office, but the very sort of nature of the man and the situations he found himself in, with Whitewater and various other investigations, and then really culminating in that extraordinary Supreme Court decision of Clinton v. Jones, which sort of opened up a civil proceeding against him, which is what caught him in the Monica Lewinsky matter. I think all of this has done damage not just to the presidency, but to the sort of texture and nature of American politics.
Fortunately, we did allow the independent counsel law to expire, although we haven't been able to bring to an end a number of independent counsel investigations that continue on, and may continue on indefinitely. There's no way of bringing them to a close. But, also during this period we saw really the use of civil litigation and discovery motions as political weapons. I'll tell you, if the political left follows the model of Larry Klayman's Judicial Watch on the political right, during the Bush presidency, this will be one of the most horrible legacies of the Clinton years. If this legal battle, which is really a cover for a political struggle, continues in this fashion, it will be quite constructive.
It wasn't Clinton alone, it was Clinton and his adversaries. But, it's also permeated the press, because now the rewards go so much toward looking for scandal, imputing nefarious motives, I'd like to say Bill Safire has had sort of a tremendous career in uncovering 19 of the last 5 scandals in American politics. And that's pretty much the way in which our politics operates now, and that has all been fueled by the Clinton presidency.
MR. LITAN: Can I say one thing? I think there's also a point that has nothing to do with Bill Clinton, which is the change in the context for presidents of the future. With the end of the Cold War, clearly the commander in chief role is less central than it was. With some of the powerful forces of globalization, it's a threat to governance, and to nation states. Again, it has an impact on the presidency. Several decades of federalism, of revenue sharing, of clearly pushing power back to the states, the power of the economy is clearly to some extent reduced the role of the federal government.
So for reasons that had nothing to do with Bill Clinton, for better and for worse, I think just for where we are in history you could argue that the presidency, all things being equal, is a somewhat less central institution than it was.
MR. RAUCH: Good point. Let's go, gentleman in the back.
Q: Thank you. My name is Popov. I am from the Embassy of Bulgaria. My question is for Mr. Haass. When he listed the accomplishments and shortcomings of Mr. Clinton's legacy, he did not mention, I believe, the expansion of NATO, and I would like to ask him to comment on it, in light of aspirations of other countries, my country included, to join NATO.
MR. HAASS: I didn't list NATO enlargement, simply because of its controversy, and there's a debate over whether it ought to be put on the positive or negative side of the column, depending on your political views. I myself would put it more on the positive side of the column, but others would feel differently. So it was clearly something that happened, but again the sign you would put on it is something that clearly is quite subjective, depending upon your foreign policy perspective.
MR. RAUCH: On this side.
Q: For a kind of field manual --
MR. RAUCH: Identify yourself, please.
Q: Yes, Marvin Leibsdown, Global Security Journal. For a kind of field manual on how to be a successful American president, I wonder if each of you would translate your assessments of Mr. Clinton into a couple of dos and don'ts for future American presidents to follow.
MR. RAUCH: I'll modify that question by suggesting that two of us do that, since four of us would take rather a long time. Does anyone want to take a crack at that?
MS. SAWHILL: Well, there's one very obvious one --
MR. RAUCH: Skipping that one.
MS. SAWHILL: No, it wasn't going to be the one you thought it was. After don't order pizza in, and particularly relevant for Bush, and we hope that one isn't relevant for Bush, is don't overreach in your first couple of years, because it will come back and bite you in the midterm elections.
MR. RAUCH: Anyone else have any quick lessons for George Bush coming off of Bill Clinton.
MR. MANN: I think the real question is sort of context. Presidents are elected in certain times, under certain conditions of their election, with a certain array of preferences in the public, and in the congress, with an inherited agenda and set of problems. And the question is how do they sort of relate to and try to make a difference, given those particular circumstances. I think we'd probably say, as Belle suggested, Clinton didn't pay enough attention to the constraints implicit in his ascension to the White House initially. And now there is a very lively debate going on as to whether or not President Elect Bush is paying the right amount of deference to the circumstances of his ascension to the White House.
One strategy says, you stick to your guns, this is the nature of the campaign, you hold on to your base, and then you begin dealing toward the center. Another is, in doing so you set up very high expectations of what you're going to achieve, and you're almost certainly going to fail in doing so, so better early on to send a very different kind of signal. It will be interesting to see whether the lessons drawn by this new administration prove to be the correct ones.
MR. LITAN: I would say one do, and it's something that Clinton eventually learned from Ronald Reagan, is keep the message simple. Now, he eventually got to this, but it took him a while. But, when we were in the government we called it M2E2, all right, it was Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment. He eventually got to that in the mid-1990s, but then they did it again, and again, and again, and again, and it worked. It worked for Reagan, because you knew anti-communism and no taxes. People could summarize what they thought about the man by just a couple of things. So I think presidents are well advised to try to boil their message down to something really simple.
MR. RAUCH: A reminder, we're taking questions by email. Send your email to communications@brookings.edu. Who else would -- gentleman in the far corner there, if we can get a microphone to you.
Q: I'm Stanley Newman, recently retired from the federal government.
Dr. Haass, in your assessment of foreign policy you didn't give any credit to the president for the peace in Ireland. In terms of Kosovo and Bosnia, at a point where Europeans and the rest of the world didn't seem to care, Clinton stopped the killing. You criticized him for not sending ground troops, I would say that if he tried to do that, he would probably have been impeached. There was no political support for that. On Israel, I thought you were very unfair on Israel. I don't think any president has tried harder to get peace. Had he had a leader of the Palestinians that didn't live up to the adage that the Palestinians always lose an opportunity to lose an opportunity, we might have peace in the Middle East. Would you care to comment?
MR. HAASS: I should have mentioned Ireland on the positive side, although it's final resolution is still somewhat in doubt, shall we say, so whether he actually for all of his efforts will have an enduring monument to them is up for grabs. I did mention the Balkans as a list of accomplishments, both Bosnia and Kosovo, although I think he was late to intervene with both. And I do think that extraordinary suffering took place in Kosovo because of our refusal to put ground troops on the table. You say he would have met political resistance, I agree. Last I checked, though, that's what presidents get paid for, it is to overcome political resistance. That's a perfect example of not being poll-led, but instead going out and selling the policy you believe is right.
On the Middle East, we just disagree. You don't give presidents high marks for efforts. You give presidents high remarks for results, and you give presidents high marks for doing the right thing. I simply think it was a flawed act of diplomacy to have convened Camp David when it was done, and to have sought a final status agreement without having shaped in any way political perceptions or the context that would have increased the chances of success.
Indeed, the speech the president gave a few nights ago, I think it was Sunday night in New York to the Israel Policy Forum, that's the sort of speech he should have been giving for the last few years. You create a context, and then you negotiate within it. But to try to launch a negotiation of unprecedented ambition without having first tried to make the situation ripe or conducive for it seems to me an extremely dangerous way to go. And the fact that it failed is not cost-free. The violence we are now seeing, the sense of despair, the sense of frustration are all in part linked to the fact that what we've now done is exposed the myth that there really was something at the end of the road called peace. And I think that was not inevitable. If it was done differently, it's possible things would have worked differently. So, yes, I am quite critical of Mr. Clinton and the fact that he's tried awfully hard and dedicated himself I think is laudable, it's worthy, but it's not enough.
MR. RAUCH: Gentleman on the left side with the beard.
Q: Ken Fireman from Newsday.
Halfway through his second term, the president tried to elevate his political approach into something of an international movement called the Third Way with the help of some like-minded partners in Europe. I'm wondering what your view would be whether any of that will survive him, or whether that whole notion of the Third Way will simply disappear along with Bill Clinton on January 20th?
MR. MANN: Thank you. I think sort of intellectual purists find the offering of the Third Way a little threadbare at times, and yet as a set of sort of political values, guidelines, aspirations, it's provided a basis for the election of center-left governments around the world, certainly in Europe. So, I actually think there's something to it, not so much in its detail or nuance, but in a general sort of sensible approach that if government is to play an important, active role and it needs to, then it has to be disciplined in important respects, that markets are crucial, but markets operate best in a legal environment set by important government policy. So, I actually think that beneath the jargon and the pretentiousness of much of the writing and discussion of a Third Way is an approach to governance that is more likely to survive and be a basis for center-left governments doing rather well for decades to come.
MR. RAUCH: We could argue that at least he's shown, at a minimum, and it's important, you an be pro-government and pro-market at the same time.
MS. SAWHILL: As I said earlier, I think this is a very important change that's occurred. I would not say it was just a temporary thing at all. I think what we have now is a model of smaller, but smarter government. And a different way of doing things. Let me just tick off a few examples. The Clinton administration, instead of emphasizing as previous Democratic administrations had, unemployment insurance and adjustment assistance for unemployed workers, emphasized instead job placement and retraining, and a strong macroeconomy
Instead of fighting the whole idea of partnerships with the states, and block granting various programs, the Clinton administration embraced the idea of block grants, but with some standards and accountability, what were often called performance partnerships. We saw that in welfare, we saw that in the education and training area, particularly workforce training. Tom mentioned that liberalism had earlier gotten a bad name on issues like crime, welfare, drugs, so forth. The president, I think, made a number of efforts in those areas and talked about those issues in a very different way. In the Education Department we had a shift from an emphasis on a lot of small categorical programs that were intended to serve various disadvantaged groups, the handicapped, bilingual education, so forth, and so on, to much more of an emphasis on standards and excellence. So, it was a shift from an equity theme to an excellence theme.
In the healthcare area, the emphasis was not just on expanding healthcare, but also on finding ways to constrain healthcare costs. So I would just cite those as some specific examples of this shift that I think may be here to stay.
Q: And you'd say all of this goes beyond just splitting the difference between left and right?
MS. SAWHILL: Yes, because I think that Clinton articulated what's often called a new form of the social contract, or a new social covenant, in which he said government has certain responsibilities, but that has to be combined or balanced with the responsibilities that we ask of individuals, and this balancing of personal responsibility on the one hand with government responsibilities to help those who exercise personal responsibility is, I think, a theme that has caught on and resonated with the public.
MR. RAUCH: Had to happen, Dan Schorr.
Q: Dan Schorr of National Public Radio.
I admire the sense of ambiguity and nuance which Tom, Belle and Bob discussed the domestic record of President Clinton. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about Richard Haass' presentation of the scoreboard on the foreign side. If you take a look at eight years of a president and say, has he left this world safer or less safe than he found it, and you look at the easing of our problem with North Korea, that Taiwan and Mainland China have started now trading with each other, that Kosovo and Bosnia, which were threats at one point, now have eased as threats, add Northern Ireland, and you say he may get some credit for things that were going to happen anyway, but he will get blamed for things which were going to happen anyway. I find that the low score given to President Clinton on the foreign affairs side I think misses a lot.
MR. HAASS: Well, that's why this is subjective, and that's why you have horseraces, Dan. We just disagree. I did give him credit for many things in the trade area, in the Balkans, the denuclearization of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, the Mexico rescue which, again, is important also because it was one of the few times in the foreign policy realm he went against the polls to do something that was good and right. North Korea I mentioned is an important accomplishment.
But I think there are certain areas where the world is a more dangerous place, the Persian Gulf is one. I think the treatment of Saddam Hussein was not good. I think the coalition has eroded. I think the use of military force against Saddam Hussein as recently as two years ago was essentially feckless, so I think we have paid a price there. We've already discussed the Middle East. But I think, to put it bluntly, if the Middle East were a share of stock, it's value now would be below what Mr. Clinton inherited eight years ago.
On Taiwan, I'm not as sanguine as you are. I hope you're right. The situation in Colombia is clearly demonstrably worse. The situation in Africa in many cases is demonstrably worse. There are situations that are better. But I think at best it is a clearly mixed record. And, more important, I think it could have been better. I think it was well within Mr. Clinton's capacity to have done better than he did on foreign policy, and that is essentially what I am criticizing.
MR. RAUCH: We have a couple of email questions. One of them, I think is a natural for Bob Litan, if you don't mind considering it. The questioner says: One of the most significant developments during the Clinton years was the growth and impact of the Internet. Two questions. One, do any of your panel believe that actions or policies of the Clinton administration helped or hindered Internet development or changed its course. And, second, did the Internet have an impact on the Clinton administration's policy in Washington and politics itself?
MR. LITAN: Okay. On the first question, did Clinton contribute to the growth of the Internet, the most important thing that Clinton did in the area of the Internet was say, hands off. He put, of all people, in charge Ira Magaziner in charge of the Internet, and to everyone's consternation after the health care plan, Ira comes out with a free market approach to the Internet which is being modified now because now we see that there is going to be the need for some kind of government regulation of parts of the Internet. But generally speaking, if you ask most high-tech and Silicon Valley types, they'll say that Clinton had it right, keep your hands off.
Now the second part of the question was, has the Internet changed politics in Washington. That's better for Tom, but my first instinct is, it's beginning to, but not as much as the cyber enthusiasts predicted. I mean, we had people telling us three or four years ago that the net was going to change politics forever, Congressmen were going to be dealing with constituents via email all the time, that you were going to raise money predominantly on the Internet, and so forth. And at the end of the day, what we saw is, we got some dollars, McCain and Bradley raised money on the Internet. But if you look at the government as a whole, our government actually is less webified, if you will, than other governments around the world. So that, for example, in Singapore, or Estonia, this is a little known fact, these are two countries now where citizens now regularly interact with their government over the Internet. They get all kinds of things from the Internet, and we in the United States actually are way behind.
MR. RAUCH: Tom, do you want to say anything else about that?
MR. MANN: Well, I'd just say, e-government is proceeding more rapidly than e-democracy. That is to say, you're beginning, although mainly at local levels, and you see it in some cities and some states, the real embrace of the Internet for the delivery of government service, and that's beginning to penetrate the federal government as well. But, on the e-democracy front, for the most part, the Internet has reinforced existing patterns of information seeking and political participation rather than complemented or supplanted them.
I think the biggest impact is among those of us in this room, that is, people who make politics and government a livelihood. We depend upon the Internet to get information and to disseminate our work. It eases our task, but hasn't changed the basic character of democracy.
MS. SAWHILL: What about e-campaigning and the McCain phenomenon?
MR. MANN: Very little. I mean, more hype, as Bob said, than real results. John McCain raised some millions of dollars quickly on the Internet, but much more money was raised by McCain in conventional ways. We still haven't had the blossoming of new political communities. For the most part, the well-visited web sites are the newspaper and television network sites. Many of the so-called "grassroots citizens organization" sites are collapsing, they haven't proved commercial viable thus far. So it's mainly a way for us to get quicker information from Washington Post and ABC reporters, and not wait for the next evening's news or morning's newspaper.
MR. HAASS: Just two quick footnotes on the Internet, there are two areas where it has had a significant impact, the international campaign against land mines was organized by the Internet, and secondly the Seattle protest would not have happened without the Internet.
MS. SAWHILL: And one more footnote, you may now more about this than I do, Bob, but there was an attempt to address the digital divide by making sure that rates for schools were kept low so that everybody could have access.
MR. LITAN: That's true.
MR. RAUCH: Let's go back to the audience for another question. There's a gentleman way in the back there.
Q: Michael Davidson.
Some thoughts of the panel about these years and how we relate to each other as a people of race, ethnicity, how we debate issues that divide us on moral views, such as abortion, have these years helped? How do we look forward 50 years when people don't quite remember the conflict in Northern Ireland, or particulars about the economy, but we are still a people who have to deal with each other?
MR. RAUCH: An interesting question. A lot of commentators are saying we're closer than before on policy, but further on culture.
MS. SAWHILL: That's such a tough question that I hesitate to try to answer it. But I think this president obviously was, as Tom's earlier remarks suggested, both good and bad in this area. Obviously in terms of his own personal behavior, he set us back. And yet, at the same time, he was out talking about these issues in a way that previous presidents hadn't. And on race, he did have a race initiative, as you know. He recognized that there needed to be some amendment of affirmative action, and he tried to spark a better conversation about race in America. I'm not sure how much was accomplished there. The conventional wisdom seems to be, not much, they didn't produce much, but if all of this is about our talking more, then he certainly tried to catalyze that. He certainly was the country's best moderator of a national conversation that you could have. So, I don't know what else to say about this. The cultural divide, I think, is very much with us. I'm not sure it's shrunk at all.
MR. MANN: George Bush campaigned for the presidency in part speaking in very soothing and reassuring racial terms. We did not see the racial polarization that occurred, say, in the 1988 election when his father first ran for the president. He did that not with the expectation of garnering a substantial share of the African American vote, but in part because he felt that would play well with white suburbanites. That it's no longer acceptable in this country to engage in sort of race baiting electoral politics. And that's the good sign, Michael.
There's a sense at which the whole sort of tenor and character of race and ethnicity has improved in America, and yet at the same time in the aftermath of the Florida count, seldom have I seen such anger and distress among civil rights activists as I've seen now. Intensity, passion, a sense of having had their votes devalued in the system, and that's going to play out in a very important way. And the way in which the new Bush administration handles this is going to, in turn, set the tone for these matters in the future.
So it's good news/bad news. Some say three steps forward and one step back.
MS. SAWHILL: It might be worth just noting also that in terms of immigration, the '96 welfare bill, as you may recall, denied benefits to most legal immigrants for most purposes. The president fought hard in 1997 to amend that so that many of those benefits, although not all of them, were restored. And so, I think we have a very deeply divided country in terms of what our stance should be towards those who are not citizens, and I think that particular battle was a good manifestation of that.
MR. RAUCH: It is time for our next panel. I hope some of you will get a chance to raise some of the questions that remain in the next session.
Many thanks to our four scholars, and to all of you for some marvelous questions.