THE PERFECT TRIANGLE
bryan beller (03.05.01)

It is now beyond fashionable to trash Bill Clinton in totality. The words being used to describe him are agonizingly close to the caricature previously only painted publicly by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Bob Barr, Tom DeLay, etc. - and they're being spoken by Democrats ranging from Jimmy Carter to Jimmy Carville. It's mainstreamed to the point that Dan Burton - he of "Bill Clinton killed Vince Foster" fame - can hold Pardonscam hearings and be portrayed (accurately, I hate to say) by moderate conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan as the broken clock who's right twice a day. From all across the spectrum, you can hear the collective voice of complete rejection. He did nothing. He was nothing. His legacy is Monica, cigars, pardons, and a Republican majority in Congress.

But look deeper. The moral legacy left by Clinton is laughable, but what of the political legacy? At the most basic level, every topic on the Washington table can be boiled down to cold, hard political reality. I never did write a column about Florida, but if I had, its essence would have been this: winning trumps ideology, every time. That's why conservatives were busy reconstructing the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause and liberals were rediscovering states' rights and strict adherence to statute (hopelessly flawed as it was in Florida's case). The Big Prize was at stake and, for six harrowing weeks, literally up for grabs. You ever wonder what goes on at the bottom of a rugby scrum? Now you know.

And so W comes out with the ball in his hands. And he talks of reconciliation. And he goes to visit the Democrats' private caucus. And he gives them nicknames. And he appoints a mostly moderate cabinet. (OK, there was that guy Ashcroft, but the Dems practically made him swear under oath not to be himself by making him proclaim Roe v. Wade to be the accepted law of the land. Did you notice where Bush was during the Ashcroft confirmation hearings? You guessed it - the ranch in Crawford, Texas, presumably happy to be without cable television. It would at least appear that bones thrown to the right wing have to do their own heavy lifting in this administration.)

Bush wasn't done. He met with the Congressional Black Caucus. He invited Democratic Congressmen and Senators alike to the White House for face time and photo ops. Then, with the Dems dazed and confused like a drunk, smitten schoolgirl, and Clinton in the process of self-immolation, Bush took to center stage for a prime time address of a joint session of Congress, and spoke words that betrayed Bill Clinton's true legacy:

"Year after year in Washington, budget debates seem to come down to an old, tired argument: on one side, those who want more government, regardless of the cost; on the other, those who want less government, regardless of the need. We should leave those arguments to the last century, and chart a different course."

Triangulation la perfecta. Dick Morris must have been spinning in his Fox News chair. It wasn't just a play out of the Clinton playbook - it was the playbook. Bush went on to spend nearly thirty minutes embracing every Democratic issue you can think of: increased funding for public education, Social Security and Medicare; a patients' bill of rights; prescription drug benefits for seniors; expanded benefits for Americans with disabilities. He even instructed Attorney General Ashcroft to get to the bottom of racial profiling! (Ashcroft must be feeling like Job by now, first having lost his Senate seat to a dead man, and now finding himself Head Conservative in Charge of Causes Conservatives Detest.) Bush drove down the middle so ferociously, why, even ultra-liberal Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee - a woman who walked out of Congress during Bush's official Electoral College victory on January 6 - hugged him afterwards. Oh, also, there was something in there about a $1.6 trillion tax cut. Some piffle about top rates coming down six points, even for billionaires.

It's a winning strategy, to rip the ideological teeth from your opponents' argument by agreeing with him when he's shouting from the rooftops. W knows, because that's how Clinton beat his father. Sure, Bill was tough on George Sr. during the '92 campaign, but it's all too easy to forget that balancing the budget, reforming welfare, and espousing personal and familial responsibility were exclusively GOP issues up until the very moment the "New Democrat" was born.

Why was it possible? The end of the Cold War defanged one of the most polarizing political issues of the past forty years. The battle of how best to deal with the Soviet Union encapsulated moral, economic, and pure ideological conflict into a single, neat, superheated little package. In 1984, a Democratic moderate would likely have been torn in two by being forced to support either the massive defense buildup or the nuclear freeze movement. In hardball economic terms, it was money for missiles vs. money for Medicare (forget for a moment that everyone eventually chose both, increasing spending across the board and giving birth to the deficit that would dominate the politics of the next decade). These were life and death national security issues; there wasn't a lot of room for fancy geometric positioning.

Not so in post-Cold War economics, and certainly not so in 1992. Suddenly there were more "moderate" (read: malleable) voters than hardcore members of either party. Ross Perot, with his funny charts and his brief but incredible poll numbers, proved it. Clinton saw it, grabbed those moderate positions before Bush Sr. knew what hit him, made them his own in the public's eye, and held onto them for dear life for the majority of his tenure.

The talk of eight years was constant and consistent. The era of Big Government was over. Welfare reform was passed. Millions of new jobs created. More cops on the street. Record budget surpluses. Moderate blah, moderate blah, moderate blah. Oh, and no tax cuts - they're reckless, and besides, you gotta keep that budget balanced.

End result: for six years, the GOP Congressional majority looked as if they were standing on the lunatic fringe of the debate, wondering how they got there.

So, if Clinton was a "moderate" and felt that tax cuts would threaten the economy and the budget, and if Bush is a "moderate" and wants to pass a big tax cut because the budget is in surplus and the economy needs it, and anyone who disagrees with a moderate is somehow chemically imbalanced, then what's a moderate? Is it someone who occupies the middle of the political spectrum like a hilltop, simply because it is the safest position from which to attack?

It is said that when Bush and Clinton met after the election finally ended, they blew off their scheduled forty-five minute timeframe and shot the shit for a full two hours. Maybe Clinton shared the secret of his success in dealing with Congress over budget battles, maybe he didn't. Maybe he didn't have to. If, in the post-Cold War era, the media-driven appearance of being a moderate is the key to summoning popular will behind an agenda, then Clinton's true legacy already exists, and will live long after his despicable pardon-related and other affairs disappear from the editorial pages of the East Coast establishment. Hell, everyone knew Clinton was a rogue all along, and he still made it a winning formula. Bush must be guffawing on the inside, knowing how much easier it will be to run Clinton's oh-so-moderate playbook without feeling the need to have a cheerleader fellate him every two years.

As for what Bush actually does, as opposed to what he says and who he hugs, well, that's what all the eye-gouging and groin-kicking was about down there in Florida a short while ago.