This is an entry in my Presidential Rankings series. To see the most up to date full rankings, and where each president ranks follow the link here: Presidential Rankings
Bill Clinton entered the presidency after being a long-time governor of Arkansas, winning the three-way election of 1992 against George H W Bush and Ross Perot. Clinton as a person, and as president, was in many ways similar to Warren Harding. Both men were personally likable and great campaigners. After the end of the cold war and World War I, people wanted a return to normalcy and were more worried about domestic rather than foreign affairs, which each focused on. There were also swirling rumors of corruption under both presidents, but most of it remains unproven. Both men also engaged in marital affairs during and before their presidency. These two men also presided over a period of peace and prosperity as president.
There were no major wars during Clinton’s time as president, but there were several military interventions. Shortly before Clinton became president, U.S. troops had been sent to Somalia on a humanitarian mission to protect aid workers distributing food and medicine. Clinton turned this humanitarian mission into a military one, where troops were sent on several missions to hunt down war lord Muhammed Farah Aydid and his top lieutenants, ending in the battle of Mogadishu. After the battle, which resulted in 18 dead and 84 wounded U.S. soldiers, Clinton pulled all U.S. troops from Somalia. Some state that the resulting removal of U.S. forces emboldened terrorists. Osama Bin Laden, who had some involvement in the attack, has pointed to this incident of the United States pulling out of foreign intervention when there were significant casualties.
Another major foreign policy setback Clinton had was with North Korea. Clinton made an agreement with North Korea for them to freeze their nuclear program in return for lifting sanctions and normalizing relations. North Korea almost immediately broke the deal and re-started its nuclear program in secret. North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, never had any intentions of stopping the program, and was only using potential nukes as a bargaining chip to get concessions out of the United States. The nuclear agreement was born out of a naïve belief that all nations want to be peaceful, and their leaders are good at heart. It should be noted that appeasement rarely works with despots.
Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act, which called for regime change in Iraq, and the ousting of Saddam Hussein. After signing the act Clinton stated:
“Over the past few months, as [the weapons inspectors] have come closer and closer to rooting out Iraq’s remaining nuclear capacity, Saddam has undertaken yet another gambit to thwart their ambitions by imposing debilitating conditions on the inspectors and declaring key sites which have still not been inspected off limits. …
It is obvious that there is an attempt here, based on the whole history of this operation since 1991, to protect whatever remains of his capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, the missiles to deliver them, and the feed stocks necessary to produce them. The UNSCOM (United Nations Special Commission) inspectors believe that Iraq still has stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions, a small force of Scud-type missiles, and the capacity to restart quickly its production program and build many, many more weapons. …
Now, let’s imagine the future. What if he fails to comply and we fail to act, or we take some ambiguous third route, which gives him yet more opportunities to develop this program of weapons of mass destruction and continue to press for the release of the sanctions and continue to ignore the solemn commitments that he made? Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, some way, I guarantee you he’ll use the arsenal.”
Clinton’s other major foreign policy interventions both involve the former Yugoslavia. After the end of the cold war and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia remained the last socialist country in Europe. Because of its socialist status, NATO wanted to break up Yugoslavia and encouraged civil war there. The Bosnian War was a conflict that pitted Croatia vs Bosnia vs Serbia, with all sides fighting against each other at one time or another. Even though there were atrocities committed all around, NATO focused its efforts on Serbia, and its leader Slobodan Milosevic, as it was the strongest nation, and it favored a unified Yugoslavia. Serbia was made out to be the “bad guy”, while Bosnia’s culpability was ignored. Clinton avoided putting boots on the ground and used the air force and bombings to force Serbia to capitulate and to agree to the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995. Even though Clinton was successful in winning the war and getting a peace agreement to his liking, the United States would have been better off staying out of the internal affairs of Yugoslavia to begin with.
The second incursion into the former Yugoslavia was in the Kosovo War, a province within the borders of Serbia. Once again, Milosevic was made out to be the “bad guy” with reports of Serbian atrocities being way overblown. Some news outlets even stated that Milosevic was committing genocide against the ethnic Albanians, despite the fact that Kosovo committed 80% of the cease fire violations. The United Nations supervised Kosovo Supreme Court ruled, after the fact, that genocide did not occur, which was the reasoning for the mission in the first place. The KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) committed most of the atrocities and was in fact a terrorist group that frequently attacked Serbian law enforcement groups. The KLA restarted the attacks knowing Milosevic would overreact, hoping to cause an international incident. Clinton and NATO justified their campaign as a “humanitarian war”, and Serbia was once again forced to capitulate. Clinton refused to use ground troops again, instead opting for high level aerial bombings. This was another situation where Clinton won the war, but he would have been better off avoiding the conflict to begin with. The internal affair of Yugoslavia held no vital national interests for the United States.
One of Clinton’s major foreign policy priorities was the expansion of NATO into former eastern bloc countries. During Clinton’s term three new countries were added to NATO: Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. During the Washington Summit in 1999 the Membership Action Plan was approved, which standardized the process for new members to join NATO and has led to several new countries joining the alliance since its passage. In fact, fourteen of the thirty members of NATO have joined since Clinton became president, with several others going through the process in order to join. The five different measures that are used to gauge whether a country is ready for membership are the following:
- Willingness to settle international, ethnic or external territorial disputes by peaceful means, commitment to the rule of law and human rights, and democratic control of armed forces
- Ability to contribute to the organization’s defense and missions
- Devotion of sufficient resources to armed forces to be able to meet the commitments of membership
- Security of sensitive information, and safeguards ensuring it
- Compatibility of domestic legislation with NATO cooperation
One has to ask whether or not NATO expansion eastward has been a good idea though. One of the main reasons that Vladimir Putin listed for going to war in Ukraine was Ukraine’s preliminary steps to joining the alliance. George Kennan, the man who was the architect of the “containment” policy toward the Soviet Union wrote in 1997 that “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post–Cold War era.” Kennan continued: “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the Cold War to East-West relations; and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.” Putin believes that the United States promised Russia that NATO wouldn’t expand eastward after the fall of the Soviet Union, and he sees NATO expansion as a betrayal. According to Stephen Kotkin, a professor of Russian history at Princeton University, Putin believes that Russia rightfully deserves a sphere of influence on its borders. Putin believe that Ukraine and Belarus should be part of this sphere.
Clinton did preside over an era of extended domestic growth, but this was due to several things. First of all, Clinton inherited an economy on the rebound. Domestic GDP growth in 1992 was 3.4% for the year and 4.1% for the fourth quarter. He cut the capital gains tax in 1998 from 28% to 20%, which unleashed capital for increased investment. He ran a mostly austere economic program, cutting and controlling spending levels. The tech boom further invigorated the economy during his term, and he left office just as the tech bubble was bursting. Clinton decided to keep Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve, even though he was originally a Ronald Reagan appointee, rather than replacing him with a Democrat. As you can see Clinton does deserve some of the credit for the good economy, but he was also lucky as well.
The biggest piece of legislation passed during Clinton’s term was Welfare Reform. The bill granted the states the ability to design their own systems as long as they met federal requirements. The bill required recipients to work within two years, placed a lifetime limit of five years on benefits and enhanced enforcement of child support among other things. Not only did the law reduce budget deficits by lowering costs, but it also helped the economy by the government no longer paying people not to work with a lifetime benefit. Instead, people had to go out and get a job that would gainfully add to the economy. Some decry welfare reform as “punishing” poor people, which is factually wrong. Clinton’s program gave a helping hand for those struggling without trapping them into a lifelong dependency like Lyndon Johnson‘s programs have. The only “punishment” that the program offers are to people who want to live off of the taxpayers with cradle to grave benefits. Welfare reform was a major success as the number of Americans receiving cash public assistance declined from 12.2 million in 1996 to 5.3 million in 2001, without any increase in the poverty rate.
Due to programs of austerity, combined with the economy, Clinton was able to greatly reduce the budget deficit. Even though the government showed a surplus in the last years of Clinton’s presidency, the federal debt went up each year. The surplus was in social security taxes, which are due to future generations. Clinton was also aided in budget constraint by The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990, which was passed under George H W Bush, and had two main provisions:
- It Introduced spending caps on discretionary spending. If the caps were breached through new legislation, they would trigger sequestration and across the board spending cuts.
- It introduced pay as you go aka “PAYGO” procedures that required any new spending increases or tax cuts to be offset by spending cuts or new tax increases. Once again sequestration was the enforcement device.
Early in Clinton’s term he passed the Revenue Reconciliation Act of 1993. It increased Income Taxes, Corporate Taxes, gas taxes, gift tax, estate tax, and Medicare (payroll) taxes among other things. Touted as a tax on the rich only, it raised taxes on nearly everyone. Clinton also recommended a BTU tax, that was an energy tax that would have raised over $30 billion a year and would cost $300 per family per year. Thankfully the BTU tax failed, as it would have been a regressive tax, like the gas tax. Clinton was lucky that the economy was growing strong enough that it didn’t trigger another recession, although it did slow down the rate of economic growth though. In 1992 economic growth was 3.5%, in 1993 it fell to 2.9%. The tech boom also sustained economic growth in the 1990s.
In Clinton’s first year in office, he focused his energies on healthcare reform. Rather than have a bill constructed in a bipartisan way within Congress, Clinton decided to put his wife in charge and have the program worked out in private. By excluding input from Congress, Clinton severely undercut the chances of passage. The bill couldn’t even pass the Democratic controlled Congress as the tax increase had. Even though Clinton couldn’t get his sweeping plan through, he was able to pass the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) in 1997, that gave matching funds to states to provide health care for uninsured children. Clinton’s failures during his first two years led to a Republican takeover of Congress in 1995. Oddly enough, Clinton was able to work better with the opposition Republican Congress than the Democratic one. After the Republicans took over Congress in the 1994 election Clinton and political consultant Dick Morris created a strategy of triangulation, where Clinton co-opted the most popular ideas of moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats which allowed Clinton to boost his popularity. Between the 1994 election and the 1996 election Clinton went from what many analysts at the time were predicting as a “one-term failed president” to securing an unlikely electoral victory.
During the Paula Jones sexual harassment case, Bill Clinton was asked questions about a relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Rather than tell the truth, or simply refuse the answer the question, which was Clinton’s right under the 5th Amendment, he chose to lie. Clinton further asked Lewinsky to lie about the relationship. Clinton clearly committed perjury and obstructed justice, and these charges led to Clinton’s impeachment, but not removal from office. Whether you believe Clinton should have been impeached or not, he caused a constitutional crisis because he decided to lie. It could also be argued that Clinton severely undermined the judicial process.
During Clinton’s presidency four actions happened that helped lead to the economic collapse of 2008. Two of these were not entirely Clinton’s fault, although they were modified under his watch. The first was the Community Re-investment Act, originally passed in 1977, it was meant to help poor families buy their own homes. Changes to the act required banks to give out loans with little to no down payment and also required banks to relax income and credit requirements. The second was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buying up the bad loans, basically putting a government guarantee on such loans, which would lead to more banks making these loans. Clinton also passed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which changed the regulations on over-the-counter derivatives. Clinton further passed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act which repealed parts of the Glass Steagall Act. Whereas the deregulation under Clinton would generally be a good thing, the governmental intervention in the housing market caused a dangerous situation that was exasperated by that deregulation. If the government had not forced and encouraged banks to give out subprime loans, or otherwise interfered in the housing market, the regulations wouldn’t have been needed to begin with, so removing them was only unwise because of the influence of other dubious government programs.
Clinton had two major policies directed towards gays and lesbians. The first was the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which stated that the military couldn’t ask members about their sexual orientation, and that gay members couldn’t reveal their orientation without fear of being discharged from the military. The policy was Clinton’s attempt to walk a middle ground, but most found it offensive, and some found it silly. Those against allowing gays in the military didn’t like the idea that they could remain as long as they stayed in the shadows. Those in favor of allowing gays in the military were upset that the policy forced gays back into the closet. There were also reports of anti-gay witch hunts within the military as well. The second action was the Defense of Marriage Act, which stated that the federal government only recognized marriage as a union between a man and a woman. The act further allowed states to refuse recognition of same sex marriages that were granted in other states. Both of these policies came to be seen as homophobic less than twenty years after Clinton left the White House.
Under Clinton the now controversial Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, also known as the 1994 Crime Bill, passed. The act included the “assault weapon” ban, which banned weapons based upon having a certain number of features, many of which were cosmetic and didn’t make the weapons any more deadly than counterparts that lacked these features. Weapons were banned more for looking scary than actual capabilities. When the assault weapons ban expired in 2004, there was no statistical uptick in crimes committed with these weapons, showing the ban’s futility. The act had several good provisions however, including extra funding for police, the Violence Against Women Act, the Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act, as well as provisions to upgrade and expand the prison system. Unfortunately, being tough on crime has gone from being a bi-partisan consensus and many politicians have turned their backs on the law in spite of its effectiveness. From 1994 to 2000, crime fell 23% and violent crime fell 30%, clearly the act has a positive impact.
Bill Clinton’s term can be seen as the center of a Bush sandwich, as he was preceded by George H. W. Bush and followed by George W Bush into office. Clinton also served in the period between the Cold War and the War on Terrorism, so Clinton’s term in office was largely a transitional one. Clinton does deserve credit for keeping the economy going and reducing deficits, but this is somewhat offset by his impeachment. He did involve the U.S. in foreign policy initiatives that he should have avoided, but he didn’t get the United States into a long, drawn-out war like Lyndon Johnson did in Vietnam.
Presidential Rankings 