Bill Clinton is not, was not and never will be a liberal

By Ben Fritz

Being President is not an easy job. Although having the cool house, the posh transportation, and the personal pastry chef makes the experience a little bit more livable, Presidents also constantly have to make crucial decisions that will affect our nation for a long time to come. They must try to balance their personal judgments with the will of the people and the desire to be re-elected. Our current President has an especially hard job, constantly facing attacks from both sides. The Right believes him to be a closet liberal - the personification of the degradation in personal character present in '60s baby boomers. The Left questions not his personal character but his convictions in supporting dangerously conservative ideas such as welfare reform and NAFTA.

With all this in mind, I'm going to take on the common belief that Bill Clinton is a wuss. While part of me is tempted to concur that our current President is indeed a "weenie" (and that the Speaker of the House is a grade-A "doodoo head"), I think that this view is one that is easy for us Swatties with a progressive attitude and an American Politics paper due tomorrow to make, but doesn't really take into account who Bill Clinton is and what he's always stood for. In fact, he's done a fairly good job of actually doing what he said he would.

Now, don't get me wrong. As anyone who knows me will testify, I'll be the first one on this campus to list the litany of sins President Clinton has committed in the last four years, including ignoring urban policy, engaging in budget-balancing hysteria, signing the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), and enabling and executing the abolishment of our nation's commitment to poor children. Sometimes I wonder why we should even bother to have a Democratic president when his policies make a Republican president of only 20 years ago look like a progressive in comparison. But Bill Clinton has been clear from the beginning about who he is. Liberals just wanted to believe that he was different.

Part of the problem with the condemnation of President Clinton is every Swattie's, and really every Democrat's, desire for the President to be exactly the kind of Democrat they are. It's a natural, but ultimately frustrating, tactic to expect that President Clinton must realize that DOMA is wrong or we don't need to balance the budget. All liberal Democrats want the President to govern with the progressive vision we have, but the fact is that if we separate ourselves from our own political views for just a moment, it becomes clear that our expectations of a liberal Clinton are based on our irrational hopes. We got so excited about having a Democratic President that we forgot just who that Democrat is.

Clinton had been talking about Contract with America style ideas like tax cuts, budget balancing, and welfare reform long before Speaker Gingrich and his posse took over. When Clinton signs the Defense of Marriage Act or welfare abolishment/reform, we must keep in mind that he has always been against gay marriage (despite an overall progressive record on gay rights) and that he was talking about time limits on welfare for quite a while. Although on some issues, especially welfare, we may be surprised that he compromised as much as he did to find common ground, an analysis of Clinton's campaign platform and record should leave us satisfied that Clinton has basically governed as we should have expected him to when he first ran four years ago.

Clinton ran in '92 on a platform that specifically rejected old-style tax and spend liberal Democratic politics. Calling himself a "New Democrat", Clinton articulated a vison of a government that can help empower people, but cannot be expected to solve all of society's problems. Clinton was a centrist Southern governor and a chair of the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization whose goal it is to "mainstream" (code word for make more conservative) the Democratic Party. And for the most part, he has, presenting a budget plan whose main focus was deficit reduction, expanding free trade, "reinventing government", and proposing health care reform that embraced private insurance companies. Clinton did pursue a progressive agenda on civil rights, abortion, and expanded access to education, as his record in Arkansas suggested he would do, but in no way could either Candidate or President Clinton be accused of embodying that vile "L-Word" that felled Michael Dukakis and so many other Democrats.

After losing control of Congress due to missteps on health care and political reform, among other reasons, Clinton decided to pick his fights with the Republican Congress. Sometimes he moved toward it and embraced its principles, such as balancing the budget and cutting taxes, while at other times he stood firm, allowing the government to shut down rather than give in to budgetary demands he thought unreasonable. Although we may deplore his willingness to compromise on Newt Gingrich's radical agenda, why should we expect anything different from a President who ran as a centrist and has always praised the "common ground" of politics?

Whenever I find myself criticizing Clinton, however, I stop to consider the atmosphere that has allowed the Republican party to gain and hold a Congressional majority. The GOP demonizes its opponents as being "liberals" (which most of them aren't) and promotes an agenda that casts government, the agent of the people, as the greatest public menace since Adolf Hitler. Thus, I think we may be lucky to even have a modestly activist President as we do now.

I do not want to sound like a Clinton apologist, because I am not. I believe that he has put being electable over having a proactive agenda and has done practically nothing to bring his party together and make the Democrats stand for something again. Like all of you, I hoped and continue to hope that President Clinton will stand up for the progressive agenda I believe in. But when he does disappoint us liberals, as he has and surely will continue to, we must remember that he is not being a "weenie", but is simply being the same Bill Clinton he has always been. We don't need Bill Clinton to have more conviction; we need a Democratic President who will stand up for the progressive agenda that America is in desparate need of.

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