From the Washington Post, September 5:
Bill Clinton looks back on his presidency and the impact of globalization on the US economy and politics
When he left the White House in 2001, Clinton’s public approval rating was a remarkable 66 percent. The U.S. economy had boomed on his watch; almost 23 million more Americans were working at the end of Clinton’s presidency than at the beginning. Abroad, he had presided over an era of U.S. supremacy. Former adversaries in Moscow and Beijing cooperated with Washington, hoping to imbibe the secrets of American prosperity.
More than two decades later, the glow of those years has dimmed. Clinton’s captaincy of global integration no longer looks like an unalloyed success. The most recent book-length study of his presidency was entitled “A Fabulous Failure.” Clinton’s management of globalization, and its consequences at home and abroad, now draws criticism from across the political spectrum.
On the left, the Democratic Party’s progressive wing disdains his market-oriented economics. The most recent Democrat to occupy the White House, Joe Biden, scorned Clinton-style trade deals, choosing instead to promote domestic manufacturing. It was an article of faith in the Biden White House that voters injured by foreign competition helped deliver the presidency to Donald Trump.
Conservatives, meanwhile, assail Clinton’s handling of China. He was naive, they say, to believe that Chinese Communists would ever surrender their monopoly on power, even if in western eyes full economic liberalization required political reform. Like many others, Clinton wrongly expected technology to erode Chinese authoritarianism.
On a mid-winter day in early 2024, Clinton was ready to talk about globalization – the greatest engine of prosperity the world has ever seen – and how it went off track. Thinner than in his White House years, thanks to the vegan diet he had adopted after a brush with heart disease, he still had a thick head of hair. His eyes were clear. On his wrist, he wore an Apple Watch with a band of safety-vest orange.
“It’s gotten to be that there’s not a lot of clear thinking about the upsides of globalization,” he said at the start of a 75-minute interview in his midtown Manhattan office.
Leaning back in his chair, with his legs stretched out before him, Clinton acknowledged that events have not turned out as he had expected. He agreed that U.S. leaders failed to provide the help they had promised for those Americans left behind in a globalized world and had underestimated the resentments percolating among the working class.
Part of the problem, he said, was that the private sector had outfoxed the public sector. As capital grew more mobile, governments struggled to raise enough money by taxing corporations and the wealthy to pay for the social programs that would have softened the blow for workers.
“Look, I was amazed that we held off as long as we did in this kind of nationalist reaction, because you could see all over America and all over the world that the thing that was killing globalization was that the policies had to be ratified by nations. But their ability to nationalize the benefits was limited, either by their tax base or their wealth or their understanding or whatever – it was just limited,” he said. “So there was going to be a reaction sooner or later.”
When the reaction came in the United States, it revolved around trade and immigration. As Clinton spoke, in fact, Washington was convulsed by the latest political crisis over the nation’s porous southern border. Chronic chaos there was “deeply unsettling” to voters and was sapping the Democratic Party’s appeal, he said. The biggest drop in Democratic Party support anywhere in the nation had occurred between San Antonio and the U.S.-Mexican border.
“I carried that area,” Clinton said, referring to his election triumphs in 1992 and 1996. But by 2020, Democratic backing there had withered. In rural Jim Wells County, just west of Corpus Christi, where Clinton had beaten George H. W. Bush by a margin of better than two-to-one, Trump romped.
A few months shy of his 78th birthday, Clinton was by turns formidable and nostalgic. His comments were punctuated by a nagging cough, but his political memory was undimmed: He accurately quoted the vote shares that Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale received in their 1984 showdown and retold with relish detailed stories of his career in Arkansas. Reminded at one point of election night in Little Rock in November 1992, he said with a wistful smile, “That was a good night.”
His Clinton Foundation office was not particularly imposing. A pair of photos hung on the wall behind his desk. One showed his wife Hillary, the former secretary of state, standing with her hands clasped in front of her, head thrown back in laughter. On the opposite wall was a black-and-white image of the Oval Office: Clinton and George W. Bush in conversation, with Barack Obama looking on.
Clinton boasted of completing nearly 300 trade deals during his eight years in Washington. Today, neither political party shows any interest in matching that record. In a bitter twist, aggrieved Rust Belt voters, feeling themselves victims of Clinton’s trade policies, wrecked his wife’s 2016 presidential bid.
Long before Trump came on the scene, public discontent was evident, Clinton said. Relentless automation and a rising tide of Chinese imports destroyed five million manufacturing jobs while the response to the 2008 financial crisis compounded the pain. Each aspect of globalization – trade, finance, technology, ideas and people – raised difficult questions that Washington struggled to answer. Sometimes, it barely seemed to try.
Those who failed to flourish in what Clinton once called “the new economy” turned against the conventional wisdom on trade, immigration and change itself. “You could just see it. They were just…seething,” he said.
The old politician understood the anger among those who were ill-equipped for this new, borderless world. He just thought his wife could outrun it. “We didn’t appreciate how much built-up frustration there was,” he said.
The irony in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat lay in her husband’s earlier clairvoyance. As president, Clinton had warned that support for trade deals would evaporate if the government did not help those who lacked the skills or education to capitalize on the globalized economy. Yet Washington failed to act. In his first years in the White House, Clinton prioritized deficit reduction. Then, Democrats lost control of Congress, making new social spending politically impossible.
Clinton had an ambitious safety-net agenda of health care reform, universal training and place-based investments, according to Gene Sperling, who directed Clinton’s National Economic Council. But the Republicans who controlled Congress for six of his eight years in office, neutered it. “Looking back, he feels we should have insisted that the major domestic investments and protections happen before or at least at the same time as any market opening. And it clearly pains him that it didn’t,” Sperling said.
From his first days as a politician in the mid-1970s, Clinton drew support from rural voters and blue-collar whites. His political base overlapped with Trump’s.....
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