Here we have another case of a governor with no federal experience running for president.
When will they ever learn?
I’m talking about both the egomaniacs who run for office who aren’t prepared to deal with Washington politics, as well as the voters who put them there.
That’s a rhetorical question, of course. They’ll never learn.
So Clinton made mistakes aplenty, both while he was running for office and during his first couple years there, and as a result he lost his Democratic majority in Congress. In the mid-term elections in 1994 there was a swing of 54 seats from the Democratic Party to the Republicans, which gave the GOP control of the House for the first time since 1952.
It was the largest seat gain for either party since 1948 and a political realignment.
Unlike Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton was a quick study, and he learned from his mistakes.
Still it was too late for some things. On the campaign trail, he had indicated he was open to allowing gay people to serve openly in the military, so when he got into office the homophobic Republicans like John McCain and even some Democrats like Sam Nunn were ready for him, and before he had figured out how things worked in DC, they rammed through the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell measure.
Once Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House, the GOP lost any real desire to legislate; all they cared about was trying to prevent Clinton from being re-elected, and once he was re-elected they just kept plotting to stymie him at every turn. Compromise was no longer in their vocabulary.
The Republicans tried to drum up scandals over anything and everything that Bill and Hillary Clinton did. When the Clintons fired employees of the Travel Office for financial improprieties, the Republicans yelled foul, even though those employees served at the pleasure of the president and could be dismissed without cause. Of course, the Republicans found a willing press in all this, as many reporters had been cosy with those Travel Office employees, so naturally it got blown up out of all proportion into TravelGate.
When longtime friend of the Clintons committed suicide, even that wasn’t a bridge too far for the Republicans to exploit, and they began to circulate stories of his murder.
The New York Times published a piece about Whitewater Development Corporation that nobody could understand, but it sounded murky. After years of investigations involving special prosecutors who found peripheral wrongdoing among former law partners of Hillary Clinton, when the dust settled it turned out that as far as the Clintons were concerned, Whitewater was a real estate deal where they had lost money.
It’s a tribute to Clinton that he managed to get anything done at all.
The Republicans did carry things too far, however, when they impeached Clinton and tried to remove him from office. That also led to Gingrich losing the speakership, although he’s still around making ludicrous statements on, where else, Fox “News”.
If Clinton had had some experience with federal government, perhaps he wouldn’t have made those initial blunders and so wouldn’t have lost his majority in congress. Then he may have been able to achieve more. We’ll never know. But I’m giving him a thumb up for keeping the GOP congress in check.
But wait, there’s something else.
It is so easy for a person in power to forget the effects that his or her actions will have on people.
Did LBJ think about all the lives he was going to affect when he escalated the war in Vietnam? Did he even care?
Or Jimmy Carter’s pointless boycott of the Olympics. So easy for Carter sitting there in his Oval Office to just wave his hand, sign on the dotted line, and poof! That’ll teach the Soviets a lesson, by gum. Did he even care about all the young athletes he was using as pawns in his silly chess game?
There are so many things that presidents and legislators do that affect people’s lives in small and large ways.
Bill Clinton famously said, “I feel your pain.”
Perhaps that was a ploy, a way to win votes, but he managed to connect with people in a way that most other politicians only dream of. And I think he genuinely thought through the effects his actions would have. He had a gift for connecting with people, and it drove Republicans and members of the press crazy.