Clicking on banner ads enables JWR to constantly improve
Jewish World Review Jan. 29, 2001 / 6 Shevat 5761

David Frum

Frum
JWR's Pundits
World Editorial
Cartoon Showcase

Mallard Fillmore

Michael Barone
Mona Charen
Linda Chavez
Ann Coulter
Greg Crosby
Larry Elder
Don Feder
Suzanne Fields
James Glassman
Paul Greenberg
Bob Greene
Betsy Hart
Nat Hentoff
David Horowitz
Marianne Jennings
Michael Kelly
Ch. Krauthammer
Lawrence Kudlow
Dr. Laura
John Leo
David Limbaugh
Michelle Malkin
Jackie Mason
Chris Matthews
Michael Medved
MUGGER
Kathleen Parker
Wes Pruden
Sam Schulman
Roger Simon
Tony Snow
Thomas Sowell
Cal Thomas
Jonathan S. Tobin
Ben Wattenberg
George Will
Bruce Williams
Walter Williams
Mort Zuckerman

Consumer Reports


Ambitions of American libs have abated when it comes to economics


http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- BILL CLINTON'S people left the White House in the same way they had occupied it: in chaos. Computers were vandalized, obscene messages left on answering machines, the faceplates of telephones switched so that numbers rang in the wrong places all over the West Wing and Old Executive Office Building. The Clinton staffers were only following the example of their boss, who ended his chaotic eight-year tenure by pardoning fugitive billionaire Marc Rich.

In a statement issued after he left office, Clinton explained his surprise last-minute pardons by saying that he was restoring rights to people who had "paid in full." Rich has spent not even a minute in jail -- raising the question of whether he had "paid in full" in some other currency than remorse.

Nothing could be more different than the style of the incoming Bush administration. Jeans have been banned from the executive offices and the staff has been formally reminded that in this White House, shoes must be worn at all times.

But if the two outgoing and the incoming governments diverge in manner, they are in interesting ways converging in substance. In his two first unsuccessful years in office, Bill Clinton tried to govern as an old-fashioned Lyndon Johnson Democrat, raising taxes, calling for lavish grants to big cities for public transit and subsidized housing, proposing a sweeping new system of national health insurance. That misreading of public opinion cost the Democrats the Congress in 1994.

Dismayed, Clinton retreated and regrouped. He welcomed the new Congress with a January 1995 State of the Union address that declared "The era of big government is over" -- a sentence fated to be the second most-quoted of his presidency, second only to "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is."

Over the six years to come, Clinton presided over a government that, despite its many scandals, practiced surprising moderation on taxes, spending and regulation. It championed free trade and market-oriented reform in Latin America and Eastern Europe. It made debt repayment -- not increased spending -- its first fiscal priority, if only to stave off the threat of Republican tax cuts. It signed a budget agreement in 1997 that imposed strict, possibly unrealistically strict, limits on government spending. Even on taxes, Clinton yielded yardage, accepting a cut in the capital gains tax to 20 percent.

Everybody knows the next chapter of the story: In the wake of the administration's right turn, the United States launched into one of the greatest economic booms in world history. The prosperity of the years from 1995 through 2000 has remade the United States in many ways, and one of the most surprising is the change that the boom has wrought in American politics. After the triumph of 1994, Republicans attempted to steer as sharply right as Clinton had steered left in 1993 and 1994. They interpreted their stunning victory as a mandate for hacking at the cost of government more boldly than Ronald Reagan had ever dared. And like Bill Clinton's, that misreading too came within an inch of costing the Republicans control of Congress in 1996.

The Republicans have since snapped back, sort of. They held the Congress, barely, through the next two elections and won the presidency in a squeaker in 2000. Now for the first time since 1954, they hold all the elected branches of government. There is also a thin but real conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Can they exercise power more wisely and effectively this time than they did five years ago?

To do so, they must first make sense of what went wrong then. Here's my best guess: When the era of big government ended, so too did the era of antigovernment. Back in 1994, Hillary Clinton's healthcare program looked threateningly like -- and could be attacked as -- a throwback to the days when Jimmy Carter tried to seize control of U.S. energy production or when Harry Truman wanted to nationalize the steel industry. Clintoncare looked like socialism and it could be fought as socialism.

Since 1995, however, the ambitions of American liberals have abated, at least when it comes to economics. And as the pretensions of pro-government liberalism have faded away, so too has the public's receptivity to antigovernment conservatism. Conservatives have never been anarchists. They have always believed that government was necessary and that, in its proper sphere, it was even a positive good. But in reaction to the terrifying excesses of government in the 1960s and 1970s, conservatives sometimes talked like anarchists. As government ceased to look so terrifying, the conservative reaction against it came to seem to many nearly as excessive as government itself had once been.

The job George W. Bush has taken on himself is to develop a conservatism that accepts and uses government while also confining it to its proper limits -- and not just to develop it, but to explain it. And I'm going to be doing my small part to help with that explanation.

Tomorrow, I will be joining President Bush's White House staff to write his speeches on economic subjects. This will therefore be my last column for some time. My most grateful thanks, as ever, go to the readers who have paid me the honor of reading my word, both those who read them with approval and those who read them in horror. I promise the first group and warn the second: I'll be back!



JWR contributor David Frum is the author of How We Got Here : The 70's--The Decade that Brought You Modern Life--For Better or Worse. Comment by clicking here.

Up

01/11/01: In California, they just don't get it
12/23/00: Despite study's findings, cell-phones are dangerous!
12/15/00: Dems making nice-nice? Fahgetaboutit
12/06/00: What this country needs more than new voting machines
11/22/00: Could spoilsports Sore/Loserman's tactics actually be helping the country?
11/22/00: Why the Electoral College is not a constitutional mistake
11/15/00: From now 'til Jan. 20
Florida struggle isn't Dems revenge for impeachment
11/15/00: Bush will prevail because of the solidity of the American legal and constitutional system

© 2000 Creators Syndicate