Overall, Clinton’s Doing A Good Job

My, my, my. I know the fashion is for political folks to bash Hollywood these days, but if you’ll permit, I’d prefer to bash Washington for a bit.

Sometimes, this place strikes me as politically toxic. It’s practically radioactive, just pulsing out all this conflict and controversy and clawing down other people for self-gain.

It sure is the great steaming, bubbling center of the “Get Clinton” movement. And I’m not talking about only Republicans.

Assume for a moment that President Clinton is everything his worst enemies say: vacillating, passive, non-confrontational, unable to make up his mind, frozen into indecision by the downside of every possible course of action. Then why did he have a remarkably successful first two years in the presidency and why did no one notice?

I’ve never seen anybody else get it both coming and going the way Clinton does. The latest ploy in the “Get Clinton” war is to point out that the man had not vetoed a single bill until Wednesday - unlike ol’ Harry Truman, who vetoed up a storm.

Excuse me, but since no one else seems to have noticed, Clinton had a Democratic Congress during his first two years in office, and until the health care fiasco (hundreds of millions of dollars were spent by special interests to beat that one), he got what he wanted out of Congress: family leave, AmeriCorps, his budget, which led to two solid years of steady economic growth, etc.

Now, six months into the new Republican Congress, the House of Representatives has passed a bunch of bad bills that only now are working their way through the Senate and giving Clinton something to veto.

The other favorite “Get Clinton” topic is Bosnia.

The clever ones say Clinton’s Bosnia policy is terrible; the cleverer ones say, “What Bosnia policy?”

Excuse me again. Can anyone up here criticizing Clinton tell us just what the hell we can and should do about Bosnia?

Nope. Nobody has an answer - because there isn’t one - but everybody sure is willing to kick Clinton for not finding it.

“Weak on foreign policy,” says Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., that shining lamp of knowledge on the rest of the world, who also declares that Clinton is unfit to be commander in chief.

Well, let’s see. He has brought home the American soldiers who had been sent to Somalia by George Bush. He has brought peace to Haiti, which everybody said was flat impossible. He hasn’t sent the Marines anywhere so he can look tough and they can sit in a barracks where they can be blown up by terrorist bombers. Having failed to do that, he has not had to invade some country the size of Grenada and whip it in a fair fight to take everybody’s minds off all the dead Marines. And he is the toughest president we’ve ever had in dealing with postwar Japan.

All by himself, without any Republican Congress to help, Clinton has cut billions out of the federal deficit and downsized government by tens of thousands of workers. He and Vice President Al Gore have fixed the Pentagon procurement system so the folks in uniform can go out and buy their hammers from Wal-Mart instead of paying $650 a copy for the tools.

Without a lick of help from Republican presidential candidates Bob Dole of Kansas and Phil Gramm of Texas, Clinton has put 100,000 more policemen on the streets - something the Republicans are planning to undo.

He also has put two decent people on the Supreme Court without anyone saying they’re either nut cases or personally obnoxious.

We wouldn’t be having this screaming match about Medicare if Congress had voted for Clinton’s managed health care plan. (Do you just love hearing the Republicans talk solemnly about getting everyone into health maintenance organizations now? Where have we heard that before?)

If Congress had voted for Clinton’s health care plan, we could reform the welfare system now so we could get recipients into jobs instead of pushing them onto the streets.

But can you find a soul in Washington who has a good word to say about the man? The guy is criticized for every single thing he does and every single thing he does not do. Dole managed to sneer at Clinton on television last week twice in the span of one minute for being too tough and not tough enough in Bosnia.

Now, it is clearly true that Clinton does not like to make people mad. He’s not a joy-of-battle fellow. He’s a compromiser, a persuader, a consensus-type guy. Like all politicians, he likes to be liked. He does not like to polarize people.

Normally, that’s advisable political conduct. But the nation seems to be, in the jargon of psychobabble, addicted to anger these days. The “hottest” figures of the day are indeed hot; they’re good at pushing people’s buttons, stirring them up, making them mad as hell at somebody.

I still believe that if Clinton keeps plugging away at making government work better, somebody’s bound to notice sooner or later.

xxxx