Nation Topics - Bill Clinton | The Nation

The author comments on the media in the U.S. A dichotomy between the public and the elite media can be found on the topic of presidential lying. Most American Presidents have found it necessary to lie to the American public. And, with some exceptions, many have also found it desirable to become involved with women other than their wives. For reasons of history and culture, the mainstream media decided that both these longstanding traditions must end with President Bill Clinton.

The article presents reviews of a number of books. Included are "Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy," by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, "Death by a Thousand Cuts," by Michael J. Graetz and Ian Shapiro, "Stand Up Fight Back: Republican Toughs, Democratic Wimps, and the Politics of Revenge," by E.J. Dionne Jr., and "The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House," by John F. Harris.

Mentions the so-called liberal media in the United States and discusses John Harris' book "The Survivor". Harris' views on the administration of U.S. President Bill Clinton; Various criticisms that show how the President was judged; Idea that Harris avoided the issue of major news media such as talk-radio; Harris' rendering of the Whitewater/Lewinsky investigation.

Reviews the book "My Life," by Bill Clinton.

Editorial. The article looks at lying in United States politics as of July 2004. When presidents use lies, repeated over and over, to deceive their own people, democracy is at risk. The U.S. went through a week of celebration of the life of former president Ronald Reagan--a celebration that itself was a kind of lie, since it left out any mention of Reagan's own lies during the Iran/contra crisis, which was a grave assault on the Constitution. Now another ex-President, Bill Clinton, is back in the limelight flogging his bestselling book. Clinton also misled the nation. But he was lying not on matters of war and peace, or subverting the Constitution, but about a private sexual affair. Also in the news have been the lies the President George W. Bush Administration fashioned to sell the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The latest ABC/Washington Post poll shows that 52 percent of U.S. citizens say the Iraq war was not worth fighting. Approval of Bush's campaign against terrorism has plunged, and Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry is running neck and neck with Bush on who can be trusted to fight terrorism. When Vice President Dick Cheney denied three times that he had claimed there was a meeting in Prague in April 2001 between 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and the head of Iraqi intelligence, he was unambiguously lying.

The author argues that U.S. presidential candidate John Kerry is a middle-of-the-road Democrat who would bring back the economic and foreign policies of Bill Clinton. Behind all the liberal hysteria over Bush as a demon of monstrous, Hitlerian proportions, I get the sense of a certain embarrassment, that the man is bringing the imperial office into disrepute. into disrepute. Hence we are served up those plaintive invocations of the distress of "America's allies," to be cured by a competent steward of empire like John Kerry. With leadership of barely conceivable arrogance and incompetence, the United States has managed the amazing feat of uniting Iraqis in detestation of its presence, and of leaving itself with zero palatable options. Amid this bloody disaster, with popular distaste for the occupation of Iraq swelling up in the polls, Kerry, with McCain at his elbow, has been goading Bush into sending more troops. As a prospective rationalizer of empire, Kerry sends forth the word that the Democrats are the Second Party of War. With hardly a backward--or forward--look, the bulk of the surviving American left has blithely joined the Democratic Party center, without the will to inflect debate, the influence to inform policy or the leverage to share power. In line with these same imperatives of the corporate system, Kerry announced on April 7 that his primary economic policy initiative would be deficit reduction. Deficit reduction will do nothing to directly promote the growth of jobs, which is the fundamental problem in the economy now. There are progressive ways to close the deficit.

The author argues that U.S. presidential candidate John Kerry should define himself more clearly to voters, and avoid mimicking the policies of Bill Clinton. John Kerry is borne aloft by party unity and the overriding imperative of defeating Bush, but the senator has entered a perilous zone where the outcome may depend more on the content of his character. During the next few months, Kerry must somehow fend off the smears and caricatures broadcast by Bush's attack machine and, at the same time, define himself in more convincing terms for the broad audience of voters, many of whom know little or nothing about him. I hope that judgment is premature, but the candidate does not have all summer to craft a compelling self-portrait. It's forming right now in the public mind and sounds more wonkish than inspiring. Kerry, for instance, proposed to reform corporate taxation--closing the loophole by which American multinationals avoid US taxes by holding profits offshore--as a way to encourage job creation at home. The loophole reform is itself a worthy idea--more ambitious than anything Bill Clinton ever attempted--but the cuteness of the overall package reminds one of Clinton's habit of always trying to have it both ways. Do something symbolic for the folks worried about globalization--but not so much that it will upset the corporations. Kerry, in fact, has assembled the old crowd from the Clinton White House to cook up such ideas. His economic team is led by investment banker Roger Altman, Clinton's Deputy Treasury Secretary, and the ubiquitous Gene Sperling, the Clinton economic adviser who shared his views with many of the Democratic contenders (even Howard Dean).

This article discusses the major reform of the United States failed immigration policy by George W. Bush. The proposals would make many of the estimated 8 million to 14 million undocumented immigrants in the United States eligible for temporary legal status, with new guestworker visas renewable for three-year periods. In this election year, however, scores of Republican Congress members, ensconced in safe, conservative, mostly white districts, find no allure in appealing to Latinos, and a restrictionist view on immigration prevails within the Republican caucus. In other words, unless Bush makes a full-court press against the bulk of his own party--much as Bill Clinton did to pass NAFTA--his immigration initiative will be DOA. Bush's plan is a few tortillas short of the "whole enchilada" of immigration reform that former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda says should be on the table, but it's doubtful that Congress will go even that far.

The author argues that a Democratic president is unlikely to address the problem of economic inequality in the United States. So just get a Democrat, any Democrat, back in the White House and the skies will begin to clear again. But suppose a less forgiving retrospect of the Clinton years discloses that he did nothing to alter the rules of the neoliberal game that began in the Reagan/Thatcher era, With the push to boost after-tax corporate profits, shift ever more bargaining power to business, erode social protections for workers, make the rich richer, the middle tier at best stand still and the poor get poorer. We now have just such an unsparing scrutiny of Clintonomics, in the form of Robert Pollin's "Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity." At the end of eight years, when the bubble tide had ebbed, what did workers have by way of a permanent legacy? Clinton, Pollin bleakly concludes, "accomplished almost nothing in the way of labor laws or the broader policy environment to improve the bargaining situation for workers .... Moreover, conditions under Clinton worsened among those officially counted as poor." In a piece of original and trenchant analysis Pollin shows that almost two-thirds of Clinton's fiscal turnaround can be accounted for by slashes in government spending relative to GDP (54 percent) and by capital gains revenues (10 percent). You think the next Democratic nominee is going to address the horrors engendered by the neoliberal credo to which Clinton paid such fealty? Of course not.

The author criticizes a new book by economist Paul Krugman, arguing that Krugman defends the neoliberal policies of former U.S. President Bill Clinton. Enter the world of Paul Krugman, a world either dark (the eras of Bush I and Bush II) or bathed in light (when Bill was king). Near the beginning of his collection of columns, "The Great Unraveling," Krugman looks back on Clinton time. Across the past three years Krugman has become the Democrats' Clark Kent. A couple of times each week he bursts onto the New York Times Op-Ed page in his blue jumpsuit, shoulders aside the Geneva Conventions and whacks the bad guys. Krugman paints himself as a homely Will Rogers type, speakin' truth to the power elite from his virtuous perch far outside the Beltway: "Why did I see what others failed to see? he asks, apropos his swiftness in pinning the Liars label on the Bush Administration. All of which is self-serving hooey. The homely perch is Princeton. Krugman shares, with no serious demur, all the central assumptions of the neoliberal creed that has governed the prime institutions of the world capitalist system for the past generation and driven much of the world deeper; ever deeper, into extreme distress. The fact that he skirts Cuba, can't be bothered even to address the consequences, or even contours, of the shift in Third World economic strategies in the postwar period, tells us how little Krugman is prepared to look with any honesty at his own economic ideas in the mirror. Krugrnan is a press agent, a busker, for Clintonomics.