After his first week in office, the assessment of Bill Clinton's political astuteness changed 180 degrees. Prior to his inauguration, pundits could not say enough about his political skills, but shortly thereafter wags were saying: "It's only the first week of February and the Clinton administration is in its final days."
It took more than failed nominations to his Cabinet to cause such a drastic reassessment of our 42nd president. As Ben Wattenberg, a columnist and moderate Democrat who supported Clinton, says, "All the signals he is sending are the opposite of what he conveyed in the campaign."Clinton was going to stop government from eating us alive. Instead, he put us on the menu. The middle class tax cut immediately gave way to consideration of every conceivable kind of tax increase. Clinton's advisers are debating new taxes on medical benefits, pensions, energy, consumption and employment.
In office the populist candidate, who ran as "the one person in this race who really comes from the great American middle class," has surrounded himself with the intellectual elite of his party's left wing and is devoting himself to their cultural concerns: gays in the military, abortion rights, feminism.
Clinton's promise to help the economy foundered on his party's antipathy to the private sector. Too many Democrats view the private sector as the place where sacrifices are made in order for the government to grow. Cutting back on government to balance the budget makes no sense to people who believe all unmet needs are in the public sector.
If government growth could create jobs, the United States would have become a fully employed society long ago. The latest employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals that in the United States, government jobs now outnumber manufacturing jobs by 18.7 million to 18.1 million. A country that employs more people to produce red tape than manufactured products is in serious trouble.
Clinton's prescription for the economy will worsen this imbalance. He wants higher taxes, more public works spending and more regulation. One of Clinton's first actions was to kill the Council on Competitiveness, which worked with the Office of Management and Budget to make regulations cost-effective. Now under way is a White House plan to curtail OMB's authority to block wasteful regulation.
There are so many regulations, often conflicting, that it is impossible to operate many businesses without being in conflict with some of them. In effect, business is being criminalized by regulators, creating an increase in "white collar" crimes for government prosecutors to target.
Clinton is justifying higher taxes in the name of deficit reduction, but if higher taxes could reduce the deficit, the deficit would not keep rising. Tax hikes failed to reduce the Reagan and Bush deficits, and they won't reduce Clinton's deficit either.
We have a president who is an expert at sweet talk. What we need is one who will keep his promise to cut back on government and allow the private sector to grow.