Clinton keeps up sad push for leftist ideas
By Tony Snow
Gannett News Service
November 9th, 1999
WASHINGTON -- Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, the twin towers of Nouveau Liberalism, recently have experienced contemporaneous spasms of public dyspepsia. Blair entertained the British public recently by hinting that his political opponents were guilty of, among other things, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He also labeled Prince Charles a "goon" for refusing on human-rights grounds to dine with Chinese President Jiang Zemin.
Bill Clinton in similar fashion has tossed the race card on the table with unseemly liberality, claiming that bigotry was responsible for the Senate’s decision not to elevate a Missouri jurisprude to the federal bench and Sen. Jesse Helms’ request that the administration forward investigative files pursuant to former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun’s nomination as ambassador to New Zealand. Braun is an ex-senator in part to a series of imaginative financial irregularities, ranging from the use of office funds to purchase jewelry to the misappropriation of Medicare money intended for her mother.
Clinton and Blair are the first baby boomers to head their respective nations, and they respond to adversity the way many in their (our) generation do: They whine and cry out for immediate, universal attention.
The irony is that Clinton and Blair are the last toadies for ideas that long ago lost their luster and power. Despite the palaver about "third way" politics, the two guys are troglodyte left-wingers who still want to impress their old professors.
But look around. The act is wearing thin. Gerhard Schroeder rode the Clinton-Blair wave to victory in Germany, and his coalition is beginning to collapse already. Germany doesn’t have the luxury of a booming economy and domestic harmony. Its voters need results now.
Unfortunately, results are the one thing the apple-polishing left-wingers can’t produce. They’re gifted primarily in the art of promising. They have retailed the idea that government can achieve virtually anything and have adopted sales techniques pioneered by the Jimmy Swaggarts of the world. They tell deeply personal tales. They gush emotion. They express their yearnings as achingly as any public figure in recent memory. They press their palms against their hearts, look toward the skies and ask in agony, "Why, oh, why?" And they portray their foes as stooges of Satan.
The principle difference between them and Swaggart being that the huckster’s victims can stop writing checks when they figure out that they’re being bilked, while heads of state can continue to exact tribute through the force of law.
In this sense, the apple-polisher leftists have demanded much from their countrymen but given little. Only a few hopeless saps actually believe that the government can "ensure" health by mandating health-care coverage. Most understand that any "universal" government program ensures universal incompetence and inconvenience. So now Clinton has shifted the debate. He now portrays conservative reform as a vicious assault on innocents: Social Security reform is tantamount to war on the elderly, Medicare reform is an attack on the poor, resistance to hate-crimes legislation or gun control constitutes a tacit endorsement of racism and murder.
Clinton had to make a choice some time ago about whether to use his final months forging bipartisan agreements on pressing matters, such as Social Security and Medicare, or clubbing Republicans like baby seals. He chose the latter because it is easier and more fun. For him, politics is a venue not for shaping history, but for pounding competitors.
The result is that his final days will be marked by increasing acrimony and bellyaching. He will divide the public in such a way as to weaken both parties -- and in a fitting finale, he will blame the mayhem on someone else.
Write Snow at Gannett News Service, 1000 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, VA 22229-0001.
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