Even though he gets little credit for it, President Clinton has energetically encouraged a government-business partnership and pursued policies that have been good for the economy generally and big business specifically.
By contrast, the Democratic president has been notably restrained in his enthusiasm for many goals of big labor; the word "union" never passes his lips, nor those of Secretary of Labor Robert Reich.Yet this election season it is the business world that is out to tie the president's hands by giving him a Republican-controlled Congress and the labor unions that are campaigning hard for Democratic candidates who support him.
Old political habits, it seems, die hard.
A recent survey shows that only 9 percent of the chief executive officers of major corporations think Clinton is doing a good job as president. Business political action committees and the movers and shakers of Wall Street and corporate finance have consistently opposed Clinton's budgetary priorities and sided with GOP candidates who campaign with promises to thwart him at every turn.
This is in spite of an economic recovery for which his insistence on deficit reduction deserves considerable credit. It has produced the highest productivity and lowest inflation rates in 20 years, a surplus labor pool to fuel further growth, astoundingly high executive salaries and stabilized workers' wages at the lowest levels in ages.
It is also in spite of extraordinary administration efforts to peddle American products abroad. This has involved not just fighting for the North American Free Trade Agreement but specific intervention to help General Electric sell goods in China, Motorola sell products in Japan and AT&T and McDonnell Douglas sell wares in Saudi Arabia. Secretary of Commerce Ronald Brown has become a supersalesman of U.S. goods to the world.
And the president's two Supreme Court appointments, although moderate on civil liberties, have been by inclination and public record conspicuously pro-business.
Regardless of this, conservative financial circles continue to complain that Clinton is a liberal determined to redistribute wealth to the undeserving poor and punish hard-working entrepreneurs with excessive federal interference.
That is definitely not how labor, which would presumably be the beneficiary of such Clinton policies if they existed, sees it.
Even so, the unions have nowhere else to go and know it.
And their political clout has steadily dwindled in the past decade. Corporate downsizing in the large manufacturing industries, a federal policy tilt in favor of management and a younger generation with no union history combined to reduce union membership to 12.5 percent of all private sector workers. Even adding public employees, such as teachers and government staffers, the union total is only about 17 percent of the national work force.
Big labor can no longer dictate policy in the Democratic Party, as it did in the '60s and '70s when a union endorsement was often tantamount to election. Now it is only one part of a coalition that Clinton is desperately trying to hold together.