Clinton: Two Mysteries

All ambitions are lawful except those which climb
upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.

Joseph Conrad

Preface to A Personal Record (1912)

TWO MYSTERIES: (1) Why does the right wing hate Clinton with a greater passion than it had for former Democrat Presidents? and (2) Why do many leading feminists love him so much?

First mystery: Clinton has been a far more effective activist and spokesman for the ruling class in the age of globalization than Lott, Armey, Burton, Gingrich, et. al. He has engineered the triumph of GATT and NAFTA; and, in the Welfare Reform Law, he has helped realization of a plank of the Republican Contract With America, one of the only two planks to date that have been made viable (the other is the balanced budget). And he has masterfully sold both, as well as the balanced budget, to the American people. Gingrich could never have done this.

Moreover, Clinton deflected the movement for a Single Payer Health Insurance Plan with his (and Hillary's) Byzantine scheme that was doomed at the outset. In retrospect, if I were not adverse to conspiracy theories, I would think it conceivable that this was the intention.

And in his balancing the budget, he has continued to veil the fact that the huge Social Security tax revenue has been beefing up the budget, continued, that is, a practice begun by Lyndon Johnson, who attached the Social Security budget in order to hide the costs of the Vietnam War. Clinton was disingenuous in January when he announced that he would protect Social Security by using budget surpluses to shore it up. The surpluses, of course, were Social Security tax revenues! He said nothing about paying back the nearly 1/2 trillion dollars that the federal government has "borrowed" from Social Security and other funds, nor did he propose that the Social Security Fund be returned to its former position independent of the federal budget. (Many state governments are prohibited from touching pension funds, some by law.)

A word more about Social Security, the destruction or partial destruction of which may be Clinton's fourth and perhaps final triumph after the derailing of the Single Payer Health Insurance Plan, NAFTA and GATT, and the Welfare Reform Law. Clinton began by proposing to have a thoroughly democratic process in which forums all over the U.S. would freely debate Social Security issues. Whom did he appoint to organize and conduct them? The Concord Coalition and the America Association of Retired Persons. The former was formed with the purpose of destroying Social Security (that has been its raison d'etre); the latter, a conservative group founded by a private insurance company, adamantly opposes removal of the cap on income taxed by Social Security (currently pegged at $68,400) so that the rich would pay taxes on all their income, as they do now for Medicare. Removal of the cap alone would raise $80 billion annually, more than enough to bring into balance Social Security revenue and payments over the next 75 years or more. I participated in one of those forums and can testify that they were rigged. Clinton's fake democracy will prove far more effective than Lott-Gingrich's heavy-handed autocracy.

HERE ARE A FEW POSSIBLE ANSWERS TO THE FIRST MYSTERY:

(a) The center of power in the ruling class has shifted from manufacturers to financiers. While no one could accuse Henry Ford of liberalism, he wanted the masses to be able to afford his products. Financiers do not. It may be irrelevant to them if millions of "surplus" people, that is, those who don't fit into the hi-tech economy, are employed gainfully or join their brothers and sisters in the burgeoning prison population. (George Soros and a few others are exceptions.) Is this characterization of the new ruling class far-fetched? A few months ago we were treated by one of the television news magazines to the spectacle of a bank employee who, having been fired after a merger, had mixed reactions: as an employee, she regretted losing her job; but as a stockholder, she heartily applauded the downsizing. The new ruling class has been seceding from the rest of the nation, with their own schools, their own clubs, their own police force (private security guards now outnumber public police), their own gated communities, etc. Add to this is the alliance that the new ruling class has made with the religious right. If the right wing that disliked Kennedy or Johnson or Carter was conservative, the current right wing that loathes Clinton is reactionary and cannot abide Clinton's sugared rhetoric even though he does their bidding.

(b) Right wing politicians must feel that Clinton has usurped their program and left them rudderless and hence vulnerable to removal.

(c) Right wing politicians must despise Clinton's successful opportunism. He is the consummate Student Government president, someone who seems unbeatable and who scores with all too many women.

THE OTHER MYSTERY IS EQUALLY DIFFICULT TO FATHOM. Betty Friedan, the doyenne of the feminist movement, says she resents "women being used in an attempt to bring down a president whose policies have been very good for women and families." (Boston Globe, 4/23/98) Very good for the welfare mothers who may soon be thrown out onto the streets with their children because they cannot find jobs paying enough for child care and bare essentials? Very good for the working women who lost their jobs after the passage of NAFTA and GATT? Very good for the Mexican and Indonesian women who got those jobs and found themselves working for pittances and living in a noxious environment unprotected by the treaties?

Sadly, many leading feminists have turned their backs on their poor sisters. All white women in the U.S. Senate voted for the new welfare law, as well as 26 out of 31 women Democrats in the House. Not a proud day for Emily's List. And a NOW-Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDEF) appeal for contributions to support an economic justice litigator "aroused so much hate mail that NOW-LDEF stopped doing direct mail on the welfare issue."^*

Ellen Goodman, a feminist pundit, said that Clinton's sexual crudity differs from Robert Packwood's or Clarence Thomas' because he respected the woman's "No." This gave material to the conservative cartoonist Bruce Tinsley, who suggested that, just as James Monroe became famous for the Monroe Doctrine, history would remember Clinton as the One Grope President. All are entitled to an infinite number of gropes as long as they do not grope any one target more than once (if she objects).

Let me state here that I do not believe NOW was wrong to back away from the Paula Jones suit. It has been a murky case, since it is difficult to show damages. Some cases of "hostile work environment" do show intolerable behavior and should be prosecuted (e. g. employers demanding sexual favors as a condition of employment or advancement, construction workers or firemen persecuting their female colleagues); others can be quicksand out of which swamp creatures like Kenneth Starr crawl.

WHICH BRINGS US TO THE CURRENT INVESTIGATION. I see four sleazes:

• the Beverley Hills/Hollywood sleaze;

• the Clinton sleaze;

• the media sleaze; and

• the right wing sleaze.

Unquestionably, the last is the most dangerous for all of us. The whole matter of investigating politicians so that you can ferret out those whom you cannot trust reeks of an archaic concept of finding rulers who can rule (over us) peerlessly, like sun kings. Psychobabble aside, the sexual liaisons of Cleveland, Wilson, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Clinton, et. al. tell us nothing about their policies.

From its inception, once it emerged from the student movement of the 60s, the feminist movement has been dominated by middle and upper class women mostly concerned with reproductive rights and career advancement (and, to be fair, violence against women). The title of a recent book by Randy Albelda and Chris Tilly sums it up all too well: Glass Ceilings and Bottomless Pits (South End Press, 1997).

The success of any progressive struggle depends, ultimately, on the coalescing of many discrete movements: those of blacks and other racial and ethnic groups, gays and lesbians, workers, unemployed, environmentalists, and feminists. We are a long way from that coalition, but one of our jobs is to point to one of the roadblocks to it: William Jefferson Clinton.

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* Gwendolyn Mink, "Feminists, Welfare Reform, and Welfare Justice," Social Justice, v.25, no. 1. See also Felicia Kornbluh, "Feminists and the Welfare Debate: Too Little? Too Late?" Dollars and Sense, Nov.-Dec., 1996, p.25. return

Contents of No. 25