Members of Congress and players in the Clinton administration cleared out of town over the Thanksgiving weekend, many of them longing to spend a few days on the couch not thinking about the president’s agenda.
The holiday weekend, and the winding down of the first session of the 103rd Congress, effectively marks the end of President Clinton’s first year in office.
Like it or not, folks, the record indicates that Clinton didn’t come to Washington to get his picture taken.
Final passage last week of the Brady bill, which sensibly and modestly requires a five-day waiting period for handgun purchase, added a grace note on Clinton’s first legislative go-round and lifted the hearts of the estimable Jim and Sarah Brady.
Clinton’s exhausted allies in Congress now understand that the president came out of the Ozarks with double-wide load of domestic issues.
And while you’re welcome to long for the foreign policy wit and wisdom of Henry Kissinger when you consider Haiti and Somalia, you shouldn’t complain that the president came to the job without a sense of what he wanted to get done.
In the fun-house atmosphere that clouds Washington, Clinton has gone from the cover of Time as “The Incredible Shrinking President” to the reincarnation of Lyndon B. Johnson, cutting deals and working the phones to collect bipartisan support for the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Neither characterization is accurate, of course. But the administration closed with a flourish, from NAFTA to the Brady bill to the successful intervention in the American Airlines strike.
Here, in no particular order, is how the tribunes of the people, under Clinton’s baton, occupied their time on Capitol Hill.
After losing his $16 billion “economic stimulus plan” to a GOP filibuster, Clinton and the Democrat-controlled Congress passed a five-year deficit-reduction plan designed to reduce the deficit by $496 billion (scaled back to $433 billion by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office).
In getting it done, Clinton had to abandon the ambitious public-works program he built into his budget, a program to be paid for with a broad-based energy tax, known forever in congressional lore as the Btu tax.
Despite what you might think if you get your news and weather from Rush Limbaugh, Clinton did keep a few campaign promises. He signed:
– A family-leave bill, which requires companies with 50 or more employees to provide up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for workers with new children or ailing family members.
– A national service program, set up to offer students up to $9,450 in educational aid for performing various types of community service.
– A “motor voter” bill allowing people to register to vote when they get driver’s licenses, go to the welfare office or join the military.
Along the way, the administration made an honorable attempt to throw a lasso over the cowboy welfare state (Montana and Wyoming come to mind) by increasing the grazing fees for use of public land.
Western senators, the same gang that’s forever mewling about food stamps and failed social programs in America’s cities, staved off this needed reform.
Less honorably, the administration tried to save the $11 billion superconducting supercollider, a jobs program for Texas masquerading as a science project. But Congress terminated the digging on the 30-mile hole anyway.
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Polls indicate that most Americans are underwhelmed by Clinton’s performance, and the same surveys indicate that the Congress will get little or no credit for what was a remarkably productive session.
Back home, members of Congress will face the ire of a public that proclaims its contempt for government, all the while complaining that government doesn’t do enough to help.
They’ll be hectored by Perotistas, lectured by deficit-reduction crazies, ridiculed by the term-limits crowd, sniffed at by columnists, roared at by angry union members and generally treated like Ross Perot on a state visit to Mexico City.
Sometimes, although it is blasphemy to say it, they deserve better.
As for Clinton, there’s nothing facing him but a promise to overhaul the nation’s creaky health-care system.
In a CNN/USA Today survey last week, 66 percent of those asked agreed with the idea that Clinton “can get things done,” and 68 percent, perhaps stunned by NAFTA’s passage, said he “works well with Congress.”
With his health-care proposal on the horizon, Clinton better hope those assessments are correct.