A revised reconsideration of Clinton.

Smith, Sam

First, a confession. I have already speculated on Clinton's second term and blew it badly. A little over a year ago, I publicly suggested that he wouldn't have one. This prediction was based on the massive accumulation of evidence concerning the mal-, mis-, and nonfeasance collectively known as Whitewater, a naive faith that the media would finally start paying attention to these matters, and several reports of attempted interventions on behalf of a Clinton withdrawal by key Democrats.

I still believe that, in the end, it win be mainly my timing that was a little off and that we currently know only a portion of the events leading up to Clinton's successful re-election. Nonetheless I shouldn't have done it and feel as close to remorse as is possible for one of my trade journalists may safely interrogate, investigate, predicate, cogitate, debate, and even advocate, but they speculate knowing that the best prediction to come of such behavior is that they may end up looking very foolish.

No matter that I got Clinton's final percentage right on the button and missed the electoral total by only fifty-six votes. And no matter that the line between Sunday morning talk shows and psychic hotline infomercials has become increasingly blurred journalists still better spend their time describing what is rather than guessing what will be.

Which is all very well and good until one is asked point blank on live television to prognosticate or is invited by a distinguished journal to wantonly flaunt your hunches. If you duck, you sound not only dumb but priggish as well. So adapting a rule I learned decades ago on some playground, I shall risk being proved an idiot in order not to be called a bad sport and offer herewith revised speculation on Clinton's next term:

1. Clinton will be found to be subject to the law, after all. The law in question is that one of physics which says that when too much matter changes what it's doing, all hell can break out rather quickly. The scientific term for this is a phase transition. An example: the eruption of a volcano. While it is difficult to predict exactly when this will occur, even the naked eye can recognize that things are getting warmer and busier. In the case of Clinton, nothing about Whitewater has cooled or calmed since it first came to notice and there are growing hints of a pending blow-off. After all, how many presidents have needed a legal defense fund to defend what their legal defense fund has been doing?

2. Clinton will be hit by a wave of program selling. Although Wall Street has instituted rules to lessen the effect of such dumping in the stock market, no such limits exist in Washington. Hot politicians, like hot stocks, can fall a long way and signs are that the smart money in the capital isn't ready to take the ride down with Clinton. By late last year the media was already showing more interest in what might be called the president's Asian free trade policies dun it had displayed in all the previous years of Whitewater. Even among the most post-modern pressies there seems a growing consciousness that something is amiss. As Eugene McCarthy has pointed out, reporters are like blackbirds on a telephone wire; when one flies off, they all fly off

3. The unraveling of Whitewater will involve new cover-ups, just as the S&L bailout itself became a scandal--property recovered on behalf of taxpayers being massively dumped at fire sale prices--so the deconstruction of Whitewater will undoubtedly be manipulated to make sure that the truth doesn't send too many to jail or set too many of the rest of us free. It's already happening. The D'Amato and Leach investigations, for example, both stopped where foreign policy is meant to begin: at the water's edge of bipartisanship. And the Fiske investigation of Vincent Foster's death was, to put it kindly, disingenuous.

To many Democrats, the Whitewater affair has been mistakenly seen as a GOP plot against their leader. In fact, the Clintons are merely prominent among the beneficiaries of the massive corruption of American politics, economics, and law enforcement--an ubiquitous corruption with roots in the drug trade, BCCI, and the S&L industry. The resolution of Whitewater may well, in the end, require impeachment, but it mostly cries out for an American glasnost, a broad understanding of what several decades of bipartisan mob politics have done to us.

4. Americans will learn that balancing the budget isn't all it's cracked up to be. States and localities are already tallying up the true costs of devolving social programs without devolving the tax dollars to support them. As deficit cutting shifts from abstract national policy to specific tales of suffering, it may even become permissible to speak once more of compassion as well as of bottom lines.

There's also the little matter that investment manager Warren Mosler has noted: every time we reduce the deficit as a percentage of the GDP, a drop in economic growth or a recession follows. History offers no exceptions.

5. Americans may learn that social security reform is to social security as welfare reform is to welfare. Polls show that a majority want to protect social security. Most of the most publicized strategies for social security "reform" would either reduce guaranteed benefits, increase risks, or both.

Out of the social security debate could well arise a populist rebellion against the corporatist politics that have dominated America since 1980. The rebels may note, as journalist Doug Henwood already has, that the social security trust fund is only in serious trouble if one assumes a future full of depression-era economic growth--in which case we've got a lot more than social security to worry about. They might suggest that if social welfare is to be trussed up in a trust fund, then why not corporate welfare as well? That way, business subsidy programs could go broke just like social security. Finally, they might argue that one nifty, although so far totally ignored, reform would be to have some of the reformers pay social security tax on their second $62,700 of income--and their third and fourth, if need be.

6. If you think saving social security is going to be hard, try getting at the truth using only your zapper. The decline of the news industry as a source of information has been underway for some time, but it has gone into near free fall with the arrival of Melrose Place media such as MSNBC and the Fox news network. These infotainment services cuddle the politically entrenched not because of their ideology but because of their celebrity, providing yet another redundant gift to tenured politicians. Understanding what is really going on will become that much harder as other TV news imitates the newcomers, much as older dailies plagiarized USA Today.

7. We will discover that global competition mainly occurred in the last half of the twentieth century. Starting in the first half of the twenty-first is a bit late. In 1991, the Conference Board did a study of the 100 largest economies of the world; forty-four of them were corporations. The Institute for Policy Studies did a similar study for 1995; now fifty-one corporations are on the list. But a more significant difference is that every American corporation on the 1991 list has fallen in rank and there is only one U.S. newcomer. (Wal-Mart is now the twelfth largest corporation in the world and the forty-second largest economy--bigger than Poland or Portugal.)

A number of American firms on the 1991 list have fallen off the top 100 completely, including Texaco, Boeing, and Occidental Petroleum. Meanwhile, Japan, which had a GDP 56 percent the size of America's in 1991, has grown to 69 percent of ours in just four years. And meanwhile, a visitor to an air show at Andrews AFB outside of Washington reports buying an Air Force One souvenir coffee mug. Upon turning it over, he discovered the words: "Made in China."

8. We will increasingly feel (even of we still don't understand) that there are too many of us. As the arguments over global warming ebb and flow, the effects of having too few jobs for too many workers, too little atmosphere to soak up too many emissions, and too many cars lined up in front of us will become ever harder to ignore. At some point, the question of population may even enter our political discussions.

9. Our civil liberties will continue to deteriorate. Bill Clinton has yet to meet a civil liberty worth standing up for. Absent a far more vigorous willingness of Americans to fill this void, we will end Clinton's second term as we ended the first--less free than when we started.

10. The Democrats will discover that they haven't really been in power; only Bill Clinton has. Currently, many Democrats are under the illusion that they run the country. But as Michael Barone pointed out recently, since 1992 the Democrats have lost twelve Senate seats, about sixty House seats, eleven governorships, and about 500 state legislative seats. Says Barone: "No Democratic president has seen such harm come to his party since Grover Cleveland in his second term 100 years ago."

11. Old truths will become self-evident again. This is more of a desire than a prediction, but in an era when myth and fact have become indistinguishable, what's wrong with that? I therefore both speculate and dream that we will rediscover what originally brought this country into being--which was a desire to form a more perfect union, and not to create a more perfectly down-sized government. As the real costs of ignoring this truth become more apparent, and as we relearn the enormous efficiency of collective decency, the voice of the turtle may be heard in our land once more.