[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 88 (Thursday, May 25, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1127-E1129]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                          BILL CLINTON RECORD

                                 ______


                          HON. BILL RICHARDSON

                             of new mexico

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, May 24, 1995
  Mr. RICHARDSON. Mr. Speaker, during the more than 2 years that 
President Clinton has been in office, he has withstood a great deal of 
criticism from an array of opponents. He has been attacked from all 
directions. The number of lies that have been told to tarnish the 
President's record has been astonishing.
  But, President Clinton has not only survived the attacks, he has 
excelled in his duties. This isn't just my opinion. This is the 
conclusion of an outstanding nonpartisan article published in the May 
edition of the Washington Monthly.
  The article's author, Daniel Franklin, compares President Clinton's 
record with that of President Truman. Mr. Franklin's conclusion is 
that, ``Clinton's first 2 years have put Truman's to shame.'' Mr. 
Franklin cites many of President Clinton's successes including his 
handling of the economy, the creation of 6 million new jobs, his 
passage of numerous legislative initiatives from the Family and Medical 
Leave Act to a domestic Peace Corps, and his foreign triumphs from 
trade pacts to Haiti to the Middle East peace process.
  For those of my colleagues who have taken the time in the past to 
criticize our President, I urge you to take the time now to read this 
fair, objective, nonpartisan analysis of the President's first 2 years 
in office. The article which follows should be a must read for all 
Americans.
                [From the Washington Monthly, May 1995]

                          He's No Bill Clinton

                          (By Daniel Franklin)

       It was tough year for the President. Foreign policy errors 
     bogged down his domestic programs; nominations were 
     stonewalled by a hostile Congress; party insiders even 
     considered recruiting a challenger for the Democratic 
     nomination. He was, in the words of one journalist, 
     ``essentially indecisive * * * essentially vacillating.'' 
     Quite simply, Americans began to doubt seriously that he had 
     the character to be the country's top executive.
       Yes, 1946 just wasn't Harry Truman's year. But he bounced 
     back, won reelection in 1948, and has received from history a 
     reverence that borders on the Rushmoric. For many Americans 
     now, Truman is seen as a model president--a man of integrity, 
     modesty, and decisiveness. Walter Isaacson of Time called him 
     ``America's greatest common-man president.'' Eric Sevareid 
     said that ``Remembering him reminds people what a man in that 
     office ought to be like * * * . He stands like a rock in 
     memory now.'' So revered is the Man from Independence that in 
     1992, both parties' nominees fought to be considered ``the 
     Truman candidate.''
       Now that Republicans have both houses of Congress for the 
     first time since 1946, Clinton aides are scanning David 
     McCullough's best-selling Truman biography in search of the 
     magic bullet that will hand Bill Clinton a Trumanesque 
     comeback in 1996. Clinton took the Truman title in 1992, but 
     now the country--and the press--is skeptical. ``Bill 
     Clinton,'' wrote historian James Pinkerton in the Los Angeles 
     Times, ``is no Harry Truman.''
       That's true, but those White House staffers looking for a 
     magic bullet are missing the point. Clear away the historical 
     fogs and set aside the acerbic press coverage and you cannot 
     escape a startling conclusion: Clinton's first two years have 
     put Truman's to shame. By April 1995, Clinton has 
     accomplished far more for the American people than ``give 'em 
     hell'' Harry had by April 1947. Clinton has guided the 
     economy more successfully. He has enacted more laws with real 
     impact. Yet while Truman is held in near-Jeffersonian regard, 
     Bill Clinton is written off as a Warren Harding in jogging 
     shorts.
       Consider one of the core issues of any presidency: the 
     economy. With the war over, the country began the painful 
     conversion to a peacetime economy. Hundreds of thousands of 
     veterans returned from World War II to an economy that had 
     reached record production levels without them. In Chicago 
     alone, at least 100,000 veterans were jobless. Major 
     industries--including coal, railroad, and steel--convulsed 
     with labor strikes that threatened to paralyze the entire 
     country. Truman's response was heavy-handed and ineffectual. 
     He threatened to seize coal mines and draft striking railroad 
     workers into the military. Both measures were rebuffed by the 
     Supreme Court and Congress, respectively, for being blatantly 
     unconstitutional.
       The economy grew but the growth was more than overshadowed 
     by inflation rates that soared to 14.6 percent in 1947. There 
     were shortages in many of the products people needed, 
     including housing, automobiles, sugar, coffee, and meat. And 
     with the Great Depression fresh in the American memory, many 
     wondered whether another economic crash, one even greater 
     than before, was just around the corner.
       Truman could have prevented the inflation. After the war, 
     Republicans in Congress launched an effort to repeal wartime 
     price controls. Truman saw that decontrol had to be gradual, 
     so that it would not unleash inflation. But, as The New 
     Republic's ``TRB'' columnist wrote in 1946, ``The trouble is, 
     Truman didn't make a real fight. . . . He didn't carry 
     through. . . . He saw and predicted the recession but let 
     Congress and business have their way. Truman won the argument 
     all right, but that isn't quite enough in politics.''
       Clinton knows this. He is the first president in the last 
     30 years to achieve both job growth and low inflation. The 
     ``misery index''--inflation plus unemployment--is currently 
     below nine; under Bush it was above 11; under Truman it was 
     nearly 20.
       The key to this achievement is Clinton's budget plan, which 
     passed through Congress in 1993 only after a knock-down, 
     drag-out fight led by the President--a fight won with only 
     the votes of fractious Democratic party, and against a 
     vehement and united Republican front. Phil Gramm was one of 
     the loudest critics, predicting that ``hundreds of thousands 
     of Americans will lose their jobs because of this bill.''
       Gramm was dead wrong. By cutting the deficit to $192 
     billion in 1995, from $290 billion just three years ago, the 
     President has succeeded in bringing down long-term interest 
     rates and encouraging business investment that has stimulated 
     extraordinary job growth. Already, the economy has produced 
     nearly six million new jobs--five million more than it did 
     during Bush's entire term. The unemployment rate, which was 
     7.6 percent when Clinton took office, has dropped to 5.5 
     percent.
       In his first two years as president, Truman never seemed to 
     have the stomach to enter the ring and fight like Clinton 
     has. In September 1945, Truman delivered a 21-point program 
     to Congress that rivaled the New Deal in its scope. The plan 
     increased federal funding to agriculture, housing programs, 
     and a variety of public works projects. But Truman let nearly 
     every major component of his domestic program go down in 
     defeat without a fight. In a way, says McCullough, that was 
     the point. ``His whole strategy on these domestic issues was 
     to go for the high ground. Be more liberal in the program, 
     and if they knock it down, you'll have something to run on.''
       This is fine if your only concern is winning reelection, 
     not so fine if you want to solve the country's problems. 
     Clinton has staked his presidency on the passage of his 
     economic and social programs and fought like a junkyard dog 
     for his victories. Elizabeth Drew recounts in On the Edge 
     that during the battle to pass the North American Free Trade 
     Agreement, ``Clinton threw himself into the fight--meeting 
     members of Congress in one-on-one sessions, making many phone 
     calls to them, giving speeches, meeting with opinion leaders, 
     meeting with individual members. Shortly before the vote, 
     there were White House dinners for undecideds.'' He brought 
     the same energy and conviction to the fight to pass the 
     Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Clinton was willing to 
     alienate the labor interests that are among the Democrats' 
     strongest constituents because he believed that the treaty 
     would produce jobs for the country. Regardless of your 
     opinion of these treaties, you must respect 
     [[Page E1128]] the fact that he risked his neck to get them 
     passed.
       Clinton has stuck to the path of ambitious achievement 
     throughout his presidency and tried to avoid the partisan 
     posturing that might serve him better at the polls. His 
     success, by any objective measure, has been astonishing. 
     Eighty-six percent of the legislation he endorsed has passed 
     through Congress, a record unmatched by any president since 
     Johnson.
       The bills he has passed will make real contributions to the 
     welfare of millions upon millions of Americans. Take 
     education policy. While the economy has changed, putting a 
     higher premium on education and skills, the American 
     education system hasn't. Everyone knows that a high school 
     diploma no longer guarantees a good job. But before Clinton 
     took office, high school graduates who did not go on to 
     college--nearly 40 percent--were stranded because the United 
     States was the only major industrial nation without a 
     vocational apprenticeship program.
       Clinton's Schools-to-Work program created a network of 
     apprenticeship programs to give those students real job 
     skills that can't be learned in high school. The students 
     intern with workers--electricians, plumbers, carpenters--and 
     learn the skills needed to find and keep a job. When the 
     program reaches full implementation, one-half million 
     students will be enrolled annually. That's one-half million 
     more skilled workers entering the workforce every year than 
     before the program.
       To counter the staggering growth in college tuition, 
     Clinton reformed the student loan program so it would lend 
     money directly to college students, and collect the debt as a 
     percentage of their income. Previously, students received 
     their college loans through banks and paid back a set amount 
     for 10 years. From 1985 to 1991, the size of the average 
     college graduate's total debt had jumped 150 percent. For 
     many, the debt was stifling; 40 percent of graduates said 
     their debt payments forced them to work two jobs.
       But under Clinton's plan, defaults will be cut drastically 
     because the debt payments, extended over a 25-year-period and 
     based on the graduate's income, are manageable. A graduate 
     with a $30,000 income and a $50,000 debt will pay $345 per 
     month, instead of the $581 under the previous plan. As 
     graduates' salaries rise, so do the amounts of their debt 
     payments. As a result, graduates are able to perform low-
     paying but meaningful work, such as teaching or social work, 
     that the country desperately needs.
       Then there's Americorps. While Republicans seek to slash 
     this domestic Peace Corps, 20,000 volunteers are on the 
     streets immunizing babies, restoring national parks, and 
     counseling troubled teens. For their 10- to 12-month 
     commitment, the volunteers earn vouchers worth $4,725 toward 
     tuition or for paying off student loans. And, carried out 
     properly, the program has the potential to radically change 
     the way Americans view community and national service. ``It 
     provides what might be called a social glue,'' argues Labor 
     Secretary Robert Reich, ``by bringing young people from all 
     different backgrounds and incomes together to work on 
     community projects, and enhance the health and safety or 
     beauty of a community. It not only improves community but it 
     creates community * * * connecting people to other people 
     across socioeconomic barriers.''
       Truman's contribution to equal opportunity and economic 
     fairness--the heart of the Democratic Party--was meager 
     during the first two years of his term. Yet again, his 
     proposals that did aim to aid the poor--unemployment 
     compensation, minimum wage increases, and housing funds--were 
     all abandoned to high-minded defeat in Congress. As with his 
     economic programs, and in stark contrast to Clinton, Truman 
     refused to enter the fray. ``I don't think,'' says Stanford 
     historian Barton Bernstein, ``Truman really committed 
     himself,''
       Even Clinton's harshest critics must grant that the 
     President is committed to economic fair play. An that 
     commitment has led him to push through a program that gave 
     significant help to the most deserving group of society: the 
     3.2 million working poor, who are struggling to break 
     themselves out of the cycle of poverty. The Earned Income Tax 
     Credit (EITC) guarantees that any person working 40 hours a 
     week, even at minimum wage, will not fall below the poverty 
     line. Whereas earlier a mother of two may have received more 
     money by staying on welfare and other aid programs, the EITC 
     goes a long way toward making work more profitable than the 
     social dole. Thus, without any of the messy bureaucracies 
     that rankle conservatives, Clinton made the road out of 
     poverty substantially easier. And to pay for his deficit-
     reduction program and the EITC, Clinton wisely raised taxes 
     on the very rich, who have benefited most from this country 
     and can afford to give something back.
       Nearly as significant has been Clinton's fight to reform 
     and expand Head Start. Nearly one out of every five children 
     in the country lives in poverty. Head Start takes poor 
     children as young as three years old and gives them pre-
     school education, immunizations, healthy meals, and other 
     services. Clinton increased federal funding by nearly 50 
     percent from 1992, and added 100,000 children to the 
     program's rolls. And Clinton moved to address the 
     deficiencies in individual Head Start programs by instituting 
     rigid quality standards. If a program does not meet the 
     standards, the government can cut its funding and find a more 
     worthy recipient. Even if Congress fails to pass a single 
     line of welfare reform legislation, between the EITC and Head 
     Start reforms, Clinton will have made one of the more 
     significant contributions to social policy in decades.
       And let's not forget Clinton's efforts to solve what many 
     consider the most serious and vexing of America's problems: 
     crime. Amid the partisan attacks and counterattacks, which 
     the press recorded faithfully, the clear benefits of the 
     President's bill were lost. Even the most conservative 
     estimates say that the bill will put around 20,000 more 
     police officers on the nation's streets through support to 
     community policing programs. And the $8.8 billion that 
     Clinton's bill allocates to prisons will help ensure that 
     violent criminals are not forced back on the streets due to 
     overcrowding.
       Clinton is also the first president in history to have the 
     courage to take on the 800-pound gorilla of special 
     interests: the National Rifle Association. The organization 
     is the ninth-largest PAC in the country, donating nearly $2 
     million to congressional campaigns in 1994. For years their 
     money and ability to mobilize their 3.3 million members led 
     many to consider them the single most powerful interest group 
     in Washington. For the past 25 years, their friends in 
     Congress have stalled the banning of armor-piercing bullets 
     and assault weapons. But Clinton has defied the gun lobby, 
     including in his crime bill a provision that bans 19 
     different kinds of assault weapons. He also passed the Brady 
     Bill, which requires five-day waiting periods for all gun 
     purchases so background checks can be conducted. The law, 
     which had been stonewalled by the NRA's congressional proxies 
     since it was first introduced in 1986, prevented 44,000 
     convicted felons--and 2,000 fugitives--from purchasing 
     weapons in the first year of its enactment.
       Other domestic triumphs? The President early in 1993 passed 
     the Family and Medical Leave Act, which ensures that family 
     members who take time off from work to care for a newborn 
     child or a sick relative will have their jobs waiting for 
     them when they return.
       And his ``Reinventing Government'' initiative has had 
     several notable successes, such as the elimination of over 
     1,200 field offices of the bloated and overextended 
     Department of Agriculture. Perhaps no government function is 
     more burdened by red tape than the government procurement 
     process. Before the President's plan, buying an office 
     computer could take as much as three months of wading through 
     the swamp of regulations that nearly doubled the retail cost 
     of computers. Now a government worker can go to a computer 
     store and buy one off the shelf like anyone else. This may 
     sound picayune until you realize that 70 to 80 percent of 
     government acquisitions are small, everyday purchases like 
     these. And it is only through this concern for government 
     reform, for which Clinton is unique among recent presidents, 
     that government will begin to work under the guidelines of 
     common sense.
       One of the most lasting legacies of any president is the 
     lifetime appointments he makes to the nation's highest court. 
     In this, too, Clinton outshines Truman. Stephen Breyer and 
     Ruth Ginsburg breezed through Senate confirmation with 
     bipartisan support both on Capitol Hill and within the legal 
     community and are universally hailed as being pragmatic, 
     intelligent, and moderate. ``These two have helped calm the 
     waters and soothe what had been an inflamed Supreme Court 
     process--inflamed by Bork, inflamed by Thomas,'' says Yale 
     Law Professor Akhil Amar. ``The long-term stability of the 
     Court and the Republic is not well served by confirmation 
     donny-brooks and spectacles.'' In his first two years, Truman 
     nominated Fred Vinson and Harold Burton, two men whose mark 
     on the Supreme Court was far from exemplary. It was Chief 
     Justice Vinson who, with Burton's assent, delivered one of 
     the most damaging blows to the First Amendment in the Court's 
     history. The Dennis v. United States decision, written by 
     Vinson, declared that even the teaching of communism was 
     illegal and punishable by imprisonment.
       Truman himself didn't have the most pristine record on 
     civil liberties. He instituted the Federal Employees Loyalty 
     Program, which directed the FBI and the Civil Service 
     Commission to weed out those federal employees suspected of 
     communist or socialist activities. As a result, 212 federal 
     employees were dismissed; thousands more resigned in protest 
     or fear. It was, writes McCullough, ``the most reprehensible 
     political decision of his presidency.''
       It had its competitors. Under Truman, Navy ships were 
     ordered to sail into the fallout zone around Bikini Island 
     after a nuclear weapons test. When the tragic effects of the 
     test were brought to Truman, he decided to keep them secret 
     for fear the embarrassment would hurt the country's nuclear 
     programs--and his reelection changes. This set an ugly 
     precedent: In succeeding years, the government tested the 
     effects of radioactivity on humans and then covered it up.
       By marked contrast, it was under Clinton that the 
     government began an active effort to reveal incidents 
     ostensibly classified for national security, but actually 
     hidden to prevent political embarrassments. And it has been 
     under Clinton that the government has finally made a 
     concerted effort to make reparations to the victims of the 
     nuclear tests.
       In general, Truman steered clear of the nation's dealings 
     with nuclear issues. In one cabinet meeting, Truman admitted 
     to not [[Page E1129]] knowing, and not wanting to know, the 
     exact number of nuclear weapons in the country's arsenal. `` 
     Mr. President, you should know,'' said Secretary of 
     Agriculture Henry Wallace. But Truman kept his distance, 
     leaving nuclear arms production to the military and Atomic 
     Energy Commission.
       Once again, it is Clinton who has stepped up to plate and 
     explained the extent of the mess: It will take, the 
     administration announced, 70 years and between $230 and $350 
     billion to clean up the toxic waste produced by the 
     production of nuclear arms.
       You do not have to stop at our shores to come to the 
     conclusion that Clinton has thus far outshone Truman. The 
     great foreign policy decisions attributed to Truman, 
     remember, did not come until later in his term. In the spring 
     of 1947, the country was reeling from the succession of 
     communist victories. Every Eastern European country had 
     fallen to communism except Czechoslovakia, which would not be 
     far behind. China's fall to communism was imminent. And with 
     the reckless use of its veto in the United Nations, the 
     Soviet Union was halting American efforts to shape the post-
     war world. The United States, it seemed, was on the ropes.
       Meanwhile, Clinton's foreign policy, though ridiculed 
     mercilessly by Republicans, has been, on the whole, 
     refreshingly successful. The passage of NAFTA and GATT were 
     hard-fought and significant victories. Other successes have 
     been jawdroppers. Answer me this: If you were told two years 
     ago that Israel would sign peace agreements with the PLO and 
     Jordan; that Haiti would have a democratically elected 
     president; that there would be a cease-fire in Northern 
     Ireland; and that the third-largest nuclear power in the 
     world would voluntarily disarm its nuclear capability, what 
     would you say? That's what I thought.
       All four developments, to varying extents, can be credited 
     to a foreign policy team that has been derided as hopelessly 
     incompetent. The success has even impressed Owen Harries, 
     editor of the conservative National Interest. ``The charge 
     against the Clinton Administration has been that it is all 
     show and no substance,'' Harries wrote in The New Republic. 
     ``But the opposite may be nearer the mark.... [S]ome sensible 
     decisions have been made and some dangers avoided. It could 
     have been a lot worse if the advice given by many of the 
     people now criticizing Clinton had been followed.''
       Take Ukraine, a newborn Soviet successor state with a 
     government considerably less than stable, which suddenly 
     found itself holding the third-largest arsenal of nuclear 
     weapons in the world. Clinton, Gore, and Secretary of State 
     Warren Christopher pressured and cajoled the country to 
     abandon its hopes of becoming a nuclear power. Under this 
     constant pressure. Ukraine agreed last November to dismantle 
     its 1,800 nuclear warheads. Kazakhstan and Belarus, with 
     considerably smaller nuclear forces, followed suit, giving 
     the world three less nuclear nightmares to worry about.
       In the Middle East, the first praise for peace accords 
     certainly goes to the major players: Israel, the PLO, and 
     Jordan. But the Clinton Administration deftly walked a very 
     fine line: Israel would never have agreed to the deal without 
     a strong friend in Washington, while the Palestinians and 
     Jordanians would have balked if they felt the administration 
     was one-sided or unfair to their concerns. It is a testament 
     to the trust won from both sides that the peace treaty was 
     signed on the White House lawn.
       Most pundits felt that democracy in Haiti was a pipe dream. 
     Bush hemmed and hawed as the military junta settled in and 
     terrorized the Haitian people; thousands fled to the United 
     States. But Clinton's policy, despite messy appearances, has 
     led to the bloodless overthrow of a military dictatorship and 
     the restoration of that country's first democratically 
     elected president.
       And in an effort to bring an end to the decades-long 
     fighting in Northern Ireland, Clinton has stood up to England 
     (our ``special relationship'' notwithstanding) to force it to 
     deal with its troubles in Northern Ireland. When in 1993 
     Clinton agreed to grant a visa to Sinn Fein leader Gerry 
     Adams to visit the United States for the first time, British 
     legislators openly insulted the President, saying that 
     America had betrayed its trust. But over British objections, 
     Clinton has allowed Adams to return twice more to meet with 
     the administration and continue the push for peace. Eight 
     months into the cease-fire, Clinton's persistence has paid 
     off in lives.
       True, there is no ``Clinton Doctrine'' by which to measure 
     every foreign policy question that comes down the pike. It 
     would no doubt make things easier if there were. But simple 
     doctrines work in simple worlds. Presidents from Truman to 
     Reagan could vow to fight communism wherever it reared its 
     head. Whether or not they met their promise, they at least 
     had the pose.
       Clinton, then, is being penalized because there is no 
     mortal threat to the country. The vast majority of armed 
     conflicts in the world today are either civil wars or ethnic 
     conflicts. No simple formula applies. The process has at 
     times seemed messy, but in a subtle and deft fashion, Clinton 
     has loosened diplomatic knots of Gordian complexity.
       Truman went on, of course, to make some the shrewdest and 
     politically courageous decisions of the century: the Marshall 
     Plan in the summer of 1947; the desegregation of the military 
     in 1948; and the Berlin Airlift that same year, which, 
     without provoking war with the Soviet Union, broke the 
     blockade of West Berlin. While pundits hang the lame-duck tag 
     on Clinton, they ignore that if Clinton maintains this pace, 
     and continues to better Truman domestically and abroad, 
     Americans could see an enormously successful presidency.
       Similarly, the predictions that Clinton has no chance in 
     1996 miss a crucial point. Like Truman, Clinton has an 
     uncanny ability to project an empathy with the American 
     people. Truman was profoundly unpopular at this point in his 
     first term. In November of 1946, his approval ratings stood 
     at 32 percent. But in 1948, voters compared the warmth and 
     humility of Truman to the arrogance of Thomas Dewey and chose 
     the man they felt cared most about their problems. By this 
     standard, Bill Clinton will never suffer from comparison to a 
     man like, for example, Phil Gramm. Clinton could still pull 
     off that Trumanesque comeback, and those who wish to make 
     parallels between the Man from Independence and the Man from 
     Hope will have one more comparison to draw.
     

                          ____________________