Move over George Washington, Lincoln, and FDR! Alan Colmes writes in his new book Red, White & Liberal that Clinton “may, through the lens of history, go down as one of our greatest presidents, ever.”
I like Alan Colmes, who is a genuinely nice guy and kept his criticism of the Iraq war within legitimate and patriotic bounds during the fighting. But–please. His argument that Clinton achieved presidential greatness has an obligatory feel to it. Indeed, he writes, “My fondness and respect for Clinton continues to cause hypertension among Clinton haters. The more their bile level increases, the more I care to embrace him.”
This is exactly the dynamic that so helped Clinton during his eight years in office. Liberals loved him so because of his enemies. And there wasn’t much other reason to embrace him, as Colmes inadvertently demonstrates.
He writes that “the facts show that Bill Clinton was instrumental in creating the longest-running expansion of America’s history,” without summoning any of those facts. I spend an entire chapter on this topic in Legacy. Clinton’s 1993 economic plan demonstrably didn’t cause the economy to grow, the deficit to decline significantly, or interest rates to fall.
Where Colmes and other liberals can score some points is poking fun at congressional Republicans who predicted gloom and doom from the Clinton plan. But it was commonsense to argue that a tax increase would hurt the economy. Some of Clinton’s own economic advisers said the same thing, and some Democrats in Congress worried as well about the plan’s potential drag on the economy. It may well have dampened growth somewhat, although it wasn’t significant enough to derail the recovery.
The rest of Colmes’s case for greatness is a mishmash of Clintonian detritus. It’s all in a minor key. The Family and Medical Leave Act. It mandated unpaid leave for workers with urgent family needs. The Kennedy-Kassebaum “insurance portability” bill to prevent people from losing coverage if they switched or lost a job, or from being denied coverage for pre-existing conditions. It did nothing to increase insurance coverage, and may even have decreased it slightly, since the regulations increased the price of premiums. The State Children’s Health Insurance Program. It was basically defensive, intending to make up ground after Medicaid usage had declined with the passage of welfare reform.
Colmes writes that the COPS program put 100,000 cops on the street, which it didn’t. The actual number is controversial, but is much less than that. He suggests that this was responsible for the fall in crime rates, without adducing any evidence for it–because there is no good evidence. He writes that the drop in crime occurred around the time that the Brady Bill passed, remarking “what a coincidence!” Actually, that’s right. There is no evidence that the Brady Bill reduced violent crime. Crime rates fell because of soaring rates of imprisonment, new, tougher policing practices, and the bursting of the crack craze.
Finally, there’s foreign policy. Give Clinton NAFTA and NATO expansion. After that it gets thin. Colmes claims Bosnia as a great accomplishment, but it is mitigated by the two-and-a-half years it took Clinton to do anything there (and at the prodding of Bob Dole). Northern Ireland is a peace deal that hasn’t yet entirely unraveled. But giving Clinton credit, as Colmes does, for the Wye River accords without noticing that the Oslo process came to nothing–except grief and death–is sort of silly. Colmes doesn’t deal with Clinton’s Iraq policy, with North Korea, or with Rwanda–since what happened in those places is very hard to defend. Afghanistan also gets scant treatment–understandably.
And this is greatness? Come on, Alan. I don’t blame Colmes for the rather pathetic weakness of this case. It’s the material he had to work with. Sidney Blumenthal, Hillary Clinton, Joe Klein–none of them were able to do any better.