How Clinton Failed (The Left's attempt to re-write history )

How Clinton Failed
The Left's attempt to re-write history

It wasn't because of Paula Jones or the cocaine ring at Mena Airport or the stories about Arkansas troopers soliciting girls for Bill Clinton that I wrote "The Trickle-Down Economy” in 1993 for Barron's.

No, that article was about economics and jobs, not sex and drugs. I quoted Winston Churchill: “Some see private enterprise as a predatory target to be shot, others as a cow to be milked, but few see it as a sturdy horse pulling the wagon.”

On the campaign trail, candidate Clinton had talked as though he knew that small business was the horse, the one healthy sector of the economy that was creating most of America's jobs. "My plan will not add new taxes on small business," he promised. “I know that 85 percent of all the new jobs in this country are generated by small businesses and I am committed to helping them prosper.”

Instead, what we got right out of the chute was a Clinton plan to “grow the economy” through the largest tax hike in history, disproportionately targeting precisely the job-creating small businesses that he'd pledged to help prosper, a new Labor Secretary that was anti-entrepreneurial, and a proposed broad expansion of government mandates that would dramatically raise small business costs. Clinton, in short, was quickly, energetically, and thoughtlessly pushing an agenda that would kill the Golden Goose of job creation in the U.S. economy.

The impact was immediate. The 4.8 percent annual growth rate in GDP that Clinton inherited from the final quarter of 1992—the strongest growth in five years, a condition that Clinton labeled "the greatest recession in American history" —had collapsed to an annual rate of 0.7 percent by the first quarter of 1993.

For many small business owners, and I was one of them, the caution lights began flashing in 1992 during Bill Clinton's Democratic Convention speech. “I have news for the forces of greed and the defenders of the status quo,” he declared. “Your time has come and gone.” It was a safe bet that he wasn't talking about money-hungry trial lawyers or overpaid bureaucrats, or people who steal silverware and sell pardons.

For others, the clearest signal of the Clintons' combination of arrogance and ineptitude came during a 1993 visit to Capitol Hill by Hillary Clinton. Asked by Virginia Congressman Norman Sisisky what could be done to ease the burden of her health care mandates on small business, the First Lady retorted in her best let-'em-eat-cake style, “I can't go out and save every undercapitalized entrepreneur in America.”

Her verdict on business owners who couldn't afford to give 100 percent health care coverage to 100 percent of their employees was loud and clear: Go out of business if you can't pay for my vision. “Your time has come and gone.”

Piling on was Robert Reich, straight from Harvard, tapped to be Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor. Charged with maximizing jobs for “labor,” Reich looked at the nation's millions of successful entrepreneurs and small business owners, the people who create most of America's jobs, and proclaimed that their time had, as his boss had said, “come and gone.”

In Reich's Ivy League version of reality, “the American myth of the Triumphant Individual may have outlasted its time.” Plugged into the First Lady's collectivist paradigm, Reich declared that “success can be measured only in reference to collective results.” He warned against an economy that relies too much on individualistic endeavor, explaining that the “investments of wealthier Americans no longer trickle down to the rest of the American people.”

These were strange words to the ears of America's entrepreneurs and small business owners, a truly foreign philosophy—anti-individualistic, anti-capitalist, anti-rich, anti-investment, anti-growth, anti-freedom.

GRASSROOTS REBELLION

The result was a backlash that hit in the 1994 elections, giving Republicans control of both houses of Congress for the first time in nearly half a century. House Speaker Newt Gingrich pointed to the pivotal role played by small business in this political upheaval: “It began in 1994 when millions of small business people, outraged by the Clinton administration's health care reform plan, became politically energized as never before. They had simply had enough and were determined not to take it anymore from a big government. The elections of 1994 and 1996 have witnessed the first full muscle-flexing of the small business community.”

With 215,000 member companies across America in every line of business, 96 percent with fewer than 100 employees, Richard Lesher, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has his finger directly on the pulse on Main Street U.S.A. He, too, saw firsthand the same grass roots earthquake: “Rage against regulatory overkill—especially among small business people—was a critical factor in the political revolution of 1994. Every new regulatory program, every new mandate, every haughty bureaucrat, every new federal record-keeping requirement reinforces their perception of a government out of control. In 1994, this cauldron of discontent exploded, sparked by Clinton's health care plan, the single most polarizing issue that forced small business to the barricades in almost unanimous opposition. It was that one single issue, more than any other, that led to the massive turnover in Congress later that year."

I was there, at the barricades, and Lesher and Gingrich have it exactly right. The Clintons were de-railed by Main Street, brought down by people who wouldn't let the American dream of business ownership be turned into a nightmare by government elitism, bureaucracy run amok, confiscatory taxation, a blizzard of paperwork and an epidemic of zany lawsuits.

Simply put, the entrepreneurial men and women who value their independence, the people who wouldn't buy the idea that they were obsolete, and the business owners who get up every day and create the bulk of the nation's new jobs had a message for the Clintons: “Your time has come and gone.”

RE-WRITING HISTORY

And now, right in The New York Times no less, we're told by Paul Krugman in his article "The Smoke Machine" that none of that happened, that Bill Clinton's downfall was engineered from behind a curtain by a small right-wing gang of super-rich crazies, that all the hoopla was about an innocent Whitewater investment and things that should have remained private, like sex.

Commenting on David Brock's new book, "Blinded by the Right: The conscience of an ex-conservative," Krugman argues that Brock shows that the "scandal machine that employed Mr. Brock was, in effect, a special-interest group financed by a handful of wealthy fanatics --- men like the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, whose cultlike Unification Church owns The Washington Times, and Richard Mellon Scaife, who bankrolled the scandal-mongering American Spectator and many other right-wing enterprises."

And, says Krugman, we were all too dumb to realize that these "wealthy fanatics" had simply manipulated us into hating Clinton: "It was effective because the typical news consumer didn't realize what was going on."

Bottom line, Mr. Krugman paints the criticism of Bill Clinton as just so much smoke, generated by, in columnist Andrew Sullivan's words, "a plutocratic-funded smear machine."

Wrong. It was the opposite. I was there.

Some day, all the planets will line up ...and we'll have a free-market, anti-socialist President and a friendly Congress.

The courts will return to normal. The programs will be slashed. No more income tax.

It will be like a 100,000 mile tune up of a Ferrari.

Purr baby, purr.

the caution lights began flashing in 1992 during Bill Clinton's Democratic Convention speech. “I have news for the forces of greed and the defenders of the status quo,” he declared. “Your time has come and gone.” It was a safe bet that he wasn't talking about money-hungry trial lawyers or overpaid bureaucrats, or people who steal silverware and sell pardons.

For others, the clearest signal of the Clintons' combination of arrogance and ineptitude came during a 1993 visit to Capitol Hill by Hillary Clinton. Asked by Virginia Congressman Norman Sisisky what could be done to ease the burden of her health care mandates on small business, the First Lady retorted in her best let-'em-eat-cake style, “I can't go out and save every undercapitalized entrepreneur in America.”

Nice to see this in print... I have never forgotten it-

Points taken, but this is doubtless the weakest one:

The impact was immediate. The 4.8 percent annual growth rate in GDP that Clinton inherited from the final quarter of 1992—the strongest growth in five years, a condition that Clinton labeled "the greatest recession in American history" —had collapsed to an annual rate of 0.7 percent by the first quarter of 1993.

Nothing Clinton proposed had been implemented in the first quarter of 1993. This is no less absurd than the left pouncing on the 1981 recession, a hangover from the high-tax Carter tax and regulatory code on Reagan simply because he was physically in office. Ditto for last years howls about the "Bush recession."

1993 finished with annual growth over 3%. But it had not a whit to do with Clinton's tax; increase it was simply the normal behavior of the business cycle, as the recovery had began a full two years earlier.

That single poor quarter is not even necessary to demonstrate the negative impact of Clinton's plan. From 1994 to 1996, economic growth was below par for economic recoveries to that point. It was only by 1997, when the internet explosion began, that we saw the blistering rates of growth of the late '90's that Clintonphiles like to claim for themselves.

"wealthy fanatics" had simply manipulated us into hating Clinton.
No, I hated Clinton from the very start because he was and is nothing but a low class lying sack of hillbilly sh*t. Most normal people have met someone just like him at 18 at a carney show (smiley face bullsh*tter that will trick you out of your money) and have learned to beware of people like him.

No, I hated Clinton from the very start because he was and is nothing but a low class lying sack of hillbilly sh*t. Most normal people have met someone just like him at 18 at a carney show (smiley face bullsh*tter that will trick you out of your money) and have learned to beware of people like him.

Well said and what you said.

It was all of that, and more. The Clinton's earned the ire of America because they supported anti-American treaties such as the Kyoto Accord on Global Warming, tried to usurp the American judicial system by attempting to place our Supreme Court UNDER the International Criminal Court, fired ALL U.S. federal attorneys, pushed gun-control, repealed their own ethics rules (e.g. EO #12834) so that their buddies could lobby our government; LIED about why they bombed a factory in Sudan, a Chinese embassy in Serbia, civilian targets such as TV stations in Kosovo, as well as lied about "ethnic cleansing" in those areas; the Clinton's lied about Bill's affairs as well as lied about those who Hillary was illegally meeting with (e.g. Ira Magaziner) in secret while she plotted to nationalize, in the worst spirit of Castro and Stalin, the American health care industry.

The Clinton's couldn't explain why and how secrets were being stolen from Las Alamos as well as from laptops at the State Department. They imposed "sensitivity" standards on our military and CO2 restrictions on our national electricity production. They let 400,000 Rwandans get slaughtered and they aided the slaughter of scores of Branch Davidians at Waco.

The plain truth is that the media was so complicit, and the Clinton's anti-American actions so numerable, that the American public simply couldn't grasp the full scope of just how bad the Clinton's were and are.

But they figured out enough to vote their administration out of power, never to return again.

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