Even the pundits are waking up. David Broder, the terribly sober dean of Washington correspondents, had his eyes opened when he discovered the latest Clinton-clause. (Clinton-clause, n.: The scarcely detectable escape hatch in almost every presidential promise or program which provides a way for Brave New Leader to do the opposite of what he seems to be promising or planning at the time.-Greenberg’s Political Lexicon)
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It seems that when President Clinton promised families earning less than $30,000 a year that they would pay nothing under his program, he wasn’t using the ordinary definition of income-the kind you pay taxes on-but an obscure economic measurement that statisticians in the Treasury Department have been using since the late ’70s to measure what they call Family Economic Income.
This figure includes all kinds of non-cash and non-taxed and even not-very-clear income. It counts not just pension and health benefits, real-estate appreciation, and tax-exempt interest but ethereal sums like “imputed rent”-the theoretical difference between what you could rent your house for if you rented it, and how much you pay to maintain it. By expanding the definition of income, folks who were making less than $30,000 a year can appear to be making 20 to 40 percent more (ta-da!) and must pay higher taxes (uh-oh!).
Slick.
To quote David Keating of the National Taxpayers Union on the president’s promise that no family making less than $30,000 a year will pay more in taxes: “This is the equivalent of a gas station putting up a sign saying that high-test is 68 cents a gallon. Yes, that’s literally true. But they aren’t counting the 35 cents you pay in federal and state taxes.” In short, if neighborhood service stations were as truthful as the President of the United States, they’d be up for consumer fraud.
The director of the Congressional Budget Office, the president’s favorite number massagers, concedes that this definition of family income is not one “that would be recognizable to the average person when they were filling out their 1040 form.” But what th’ heck, the suckers fell for it.
They’re still falling for it. The president’s numbers continue to hold in the polls. Only the press and the politicians show occasional signs of catching on here and there, as when David Broder permits himself to be shocked in the most dignified way.
Over at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that tends to take numbers seriously, economist Daniel Mitchell notes that the Clinton Plan will actually bite into family incomes as low as $22,000 a year. His conclusion: “Unquestionably, unambiguously, it was a deliberate intention to mislead them.”
Such an accusation is scarcely fair to our president. It overlooks all his art. On the evidence, this was a highly ambiguous way to mislead people. Slick Willie was never one for simple falsehoods. They’re too honest. This boy went to the best schools.
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I hope I’m not revealing any state secrets when I note that the president of the United States is a disingenuous bore. How he manages to swing and sway his way through various promises is no longer of great interest to those of us who have been watching him surf over, under, and through the statistical waves for years. Only novices at Clinton-watching still seem capable of showing anger and a sense of betrayal. I envy them. They are still interested.
” ‘Tis new to thee,” Prospero tells Miranda at the end of “The Tempest,” when she admires all those beauteous creatures, who are really the same old schemers, in her brave new world. Not the least of Prospero’s burdens is that he’s seen it all before. This is where he came in.
For some of us, the major interest in the show lies with the supporting actors. How long do you suppose Leon Panetta, who is reputed to be an honorable man, will go on playing with these funny numbers? And to see Al Gore echo the latest line is a bit like watching a wooden Indian being trained to jump through a hoop.
As for George Stephanopoulos, he is a veritable artiste of flackdom. The presidential press secretary makes ordinary PR types look flat-footed, clumsy, obvious. He scarcely even sweats any more as he twists and turns and evades and temporizes and dances around whatever the highly fungible truth is today.
Politics, like much of life, remains a fascinating contest between the boundless demands of ambition and the simple, abstemious requirements of human dignity. It is much more entertaining to watch the contest in others than to note it in ourselves.
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One of the reasons Bill Clinton is so good at this low sport is that he is always finding new audiences. If his old act loses interest for some of us, ’tis new to them. Our agile president moves about the country to keep from being filtered through a national press corps that may have been ga-ga about him last summer, but now begins to notice the Clinton-clauses and entertain doubts. With the exception of a few ideologues who make a principle of gullibility, the usual pundits lose their utility for him as they catch on. But luckily for our always new president, it’s a big country.