The second reason for the brief notoriety of the tapes was the appearance on one of them of John Huang, a Chinese financier and fund-raiser with intimate connections in Beijing. He is shown shaking Clinton’s hand on June 18, on the only tape which has no audio. Because the soundtrack was sadly missing, allegations from other witnesses that Mr. Huang opened the proceedings with a fund-raising appeal could not be confirmed. It is not legal to use the public-business spaces of the executive mansion—the Oval Office, the Roosevelt Room, and the Map Room—for the shaking down of the well-heeled, and most especially not for the shaking down of the well-heeled emissaries of foreign despotisms in China, Indonesia, and the Middle East. Donald L. Fowler, national co-chairman of the Democratic Party, shows a lively and acute awareness of this when, on a videotape from the Map Room on December 13, 1995, he is heard declining an offer of five checks from an unidentified guest as the President discusses golf. “As soon as this thing is over, I’ll call you,” says Fowler, while making a suggestive passing reference to the legal profession. “I’m sorry. I can’t take this. I apologize to you, and we’ll get it done.” It got done, all right.
The pen of a Thomas Nast would be required to do justice to Lanny J. Davis, a “special counsel” to the White House. “Holding this type of event was legal and appropriate,” he said on October 5, 1997. “There is no suggestion that there was any solicitation for money.” On the same day he added: “These tapes are not inconsistent with what we have previously described to be the purpose of these coffees: to encourage people to support the President and his programs and that included financial support.” So checks were written but only after the event and were thus, he maintained, “incidental.” As for keeping those innocuous tapes from the later Senate inquiry: “That was inadvertent. We have always acted in good faith.” Several senators mentioned the ominous words “obstruction of justice.” (In late 1998, Mr. Davis’s skills were required again to stave off impeachment, and he returned from private practice to the White House team. Shall I ever forget appearing with him on TV on the day of the impeachment vote, and hearing him say that there was nothing Nixonian about Clinton, before urging all good men and women to support the “censure” compromise dreamed up by the Nixon-pardoning Gerald Ford?)
It may be worth noting that Mr. Clinton took federal matching funds from the taxpayers to keep pace with his exorbitant spending, and never pretended to be “out of the loop.” One video of a high-tab feast at the Hay-Adams Hotel, on December 7, 1995, has him gloating to his contributors: “We realized we could run these ads through the Democratic Party, which means we could raise [soft] money in twenty, fifty, and one-hundred thousand-dollar blocks. We didn’t have to do it all in thousand-dollar contributions and run down what I can spend, which is limited by law. So that is what we have done.” A video of another Lucullan repast at this hotel, on February 19, 1996, has him thanking his benefactors in the same fulsome way: “In the last quarter of last year… we spent about $1 million per week to advertise our point of view to somewhere between 26 and 42 percent of the American electorate… The lead that I enjoy today in public opinion polls is about one-third due to that advertising… I cannot overstate to you the impact that these paid ads have had.” Since soft money is by definition not to be lawfully spent in promoting a candidate, Mr. Clinton appears to have been more unbuttoned and candid to his bankrollers than he ever was with the target voters. But that’s populism for you. Dick Morris did not lie when he said that “Every line of every ad came under his informed, critical and often meddlesome gaze. Every ad was his ad.” In other words, Clinton’s the one.
So much so, as it happens, that somebody managed to move large sums of the soft money raised by the agile internationalist Charlie Trie, and transfer them from the coffers of the Democratic Party to the account of the Clinton Legal Defense Fund. Here is the perfect paradox of public and private: where the Democrats are a public and accountable party dealing in deniable and surreptitious funds, while the president in his legal capacity is a private citizen subject to audit and disclosure. Even so, the two wires became inextricably crossed. That could have been embarrassing, if anyone had cared to make anything of it. Generally speaking, though, the Clinton forces have always been able to count upon Republican discretion—even understanding—when it comes to difficulties about political money.
For all that, the 4,878 pages of the report by the House Committee on Government Oversight may be reduced to one single sentence: “Because of the unprecedented lack of cooperation of witnesses, including 120 relevant individuals who either asserted Fifth Amendment privileges or fled the country, both the House and Senate investigations were severely hampered.” By February 1999, this number had risen to 121. The Committee’s indispensable report provides partial but illuminating accounts of covert donations by the Chinese military-industrial complex and its Indonesian surrogates, of favors returned to those who could produce brown bags of funny money (Charlie Trie was appointed to the Commission on U.S.–Pacific Trade and Investment Policy), and of mutual stroking between the Clinton administration and a number of foreign dictatorships. And it makes one thing piercingly clear. Those one hundred and twenty one potential witnesses who either left town or took the Fifth, who either “fled or pled,” had as urgent a need as the President to assert their right to privacy.
On September 18, 1997, the Senate inquiry called Roger Tamraz, who revealed that he had paid $300,000 for his coffee at the White House and—showing the contempt which the “donor community” manifested throughout—added that next time he’d make it $600,000. Dick Morris was not called to testify, but did submit a 500-page deposition in which he proudly recalled his delight at finding a way through the legally imposed spending limits. By using “soft money” for “issue ads,” and dumping a fortune into early TV spots, and by the not-unrelated tactic of stealing the Republicans’ clothes (because big donors don’t show up for campaign breakfasts to “keep welfare as we know it”), Morris was able to buy a commanding lead in the polls. Mr. Clinton evidently regarded Mr. Morris’s covert control over policy, and his personal “cut” of the take amounting to almost $1.5 million, as a price well worth paying. I remember George Stephanopoulos ruefully reminiscing: “For eight months of 1995 and 1996, Morris was the president.” And the scandal is not so much that nobody voted for Morris. It’s the fact that, for much of that time, he operated under a Clinton-assigned code name and nobody knew he was there. By the time the stolen and bought and staged election was over, and the Democrats were hastily paying back the millions they had accepted from crepuscular overseas sources, the damage was done, and the entire electorate had been triangulated by a man whose only mistake was to be caught having illicit sex. (I allude, of course, to Mr. Morris.)
In the critical days of his impeachment struggle, Mr. Clinton was often said to be worried sick about his place in history. That place, however, is already secure. He will be remembered as the man who used the rhetoric of the New Democrat to undo the New Deal. He will also be remembered as a man who offered a groaning board of incentives for the rich and draconian admonitions to the poor.
The centerpiece of his legacy was “welfare reform.” The passage of a timely pre-election bill, removing federal guarantees from impoverished children for the first time in sixty years, became essential not only to President Morris but to President Clinton as well. Not only did it annex the main “issue” from the Republicans, it also provided background and depth to the unending Clintonian homilies about moral continence, thrift, and family values. It signaled, to approving audiences among the better fed, that for the indigent, “the party was over.” The many who had never been invited to this supposed party were less inclined to vote, and less able to register. And the children among them, of course, did not vote at all. Nor were their opinions solicited by Mr. Morris’s expensive pollsters.
As Peter Edelman, the most dedicated and expert worker in the field of welfare and family, pointed out to me:
Ther
e is a submerged class question here. I always get at it in my speeches by pointing out the hypocrisy in the rhetoric as to who should stay at home with their children. Many on the right (and elsewhere) are saying mothers should stay at home with their small children because the new research data on brain development shows that small children need that stimulation. These same people then turn around and say poor moms have to go out and work immediately. (Many states have work requirements beginning when an infant is twelve weeks old, and the vast majority of the remainder require work when the child is a year old.) That’s a pretty clear class distinction.
But, as we are endlessly instructed, while rich people will not work unless they are given money, poor people will only work if they are not. (These are the two modern meanings of the term “incentive”: a tax break on the one hand and the threat of the workhouse on the other.) And, once the Democratic Party had adopted this theology, the poor had no one to whom they could turn. The immediate consequence of this was probably an intended one: the creation of a large helot underclass disciplined by fear and scarcity, subject to endless surveillance, and used as a weapon against any American worker lucky enough to hold a steady or unionized job.
The evidence lies all around us, and will be around us for some time to come. Whether it is gleaned from the most evenhanded and “responsible” reporting, such as that of Jason DeParle atop the great rampart of the New York Times, or from writers like Christopher Cook in the Progressive, we shall have to accustom ourselves to stories like this. In Missouri, under the Direct Job Placement scheme (such schemes are always known officially as “initiatives”), the state bureaucracy mutates itself into a hiring hall for cheap labor in junk-nutrition conglomerates such as Tyson Foods. Welfare recipients are told to sign on and gut fifty chickens a minute, or be wiped from the rolls of the new Poor Law. They are directed to an industry which is well used to turnover among employees:
As one woman on welfare discovered never mind her name, even having a newborn baby and no means of transportation is no excuse. When the thirty-year-old mother informed her case managers of these extenuating circumstances, they were not sympathetic. “They told her she had to work at Tyson’s even if she had to walk to get there—a six-mile trek,” says Helen Chewning, a former family advocate with the Missouri Valley Human Resource Center in Sedalia. “They sanctioned her while she was pregnant,” and then ordered her to work at Tyson’s when her baby was just eleven days old. She hasn’t had any income for six months. How are they supposed to live?”
The process of “sanctioning”—the new state euphemism for coercion via the threat of cut-off—involves facing defenseless people with the rather old choice between “work or starve.” It is the tactic by which welfare rolls are being “trimmed,” if you will allow another Clintonian euphemism. You can be “sanctioned” if you refuse any job, or miss any interview.
I did not select Missouri because it’s a famously unsentimental state. I selected it because President Clinton, in an August 1997 address to businessmen in St. Louis, touted it as the model laboratory for his welfare reform. It’s useful only for dialectical purposes to mention that Tyson Foods uses the Direct Job Placement scheme as its taxpayer-funded recruiting sergeant. The first shock of recognition, experienced by those who are supposed to be grateful for a dose of nonalienated and dignified labor, is the “puller job.” This involves gutting birds—later to provide tasteless nourishment at the tables of the badly off—at a rapid rate. The fingernails of the inexperienced are likely to be the first to go; dissolved in bacteria and chicken fat. Of Missouri’s 103,000 poultry workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, almost one-third endured an injury or an illness in 1995 alone. That this may be an undercounting is suggested by the experience of one hard-pressed toiler on the Tyson chicken-thigh assembly line named Jason Wolfe: “They want you to hang forty or fifty of these birds in a minute, for four to six hours straight, without a break. If you miss any, they threaten to fire you.” He himself was fired because of too many “sick days.”
Supplied by the state with a fearful, docile labor force, the workhouse masters are relatively untroubled by unions, or by any back-talk from the staff. Those who have been thus “trimmed” from the welfare rolls have often done no more than disappear into a twilight zone of casual employment, uninsured illness, intermittent education for their children, and unsafe or temporary accommodation. Only thus—by their disappearance from society—can they be counted as a “success story” by ambitious governors, and used in order to qualify tightfisted states for “caseload-reduction credits” from the federal government. The women among them, not infrequently pressed for sexual favors as the price of the ticket, can be asked at random about the number of toothbrushes found in the trailer, and are required by law to name the overnight guest or the father of the child if asked. Failure or refusal to name the father can lead to termination of “benefits” or (an even better word) “entitlements.” We were once told from the bought-and-sold Oval Office itself, that “even presidents are entitled to privacy”: it seems now that only presidents and their wealthy backers can claim this entitlement. I pause again to note that Tyson Foods, which is based in Arkansas, has spread a banquet of donations before Bill Clinton ever since his boyhood as a candidate, and that its famously colorful chairman Don Tyson sits in a corporate sanctum modeled to scale on the Oval Office itself, with the doorknobs shaped in ovals to resemble chicken eggs. Truly was it said that the poor have such people always with them.
In the great city and state of New York, once the redoubt of Democratic liberalism, a federal audit in January 1999 found that “city officials routinely violate the law by denying poor people the right to apply promptly for food stamps, fail to screen families for emergency food needs, require the poor to search for jobs before receiving help, and cut off food stamps to needy families who were still eligible for those benefits.” As for those who had—in Mayor Giuliani’s boastful words—“left” the welfare rolls for gainful employment, a state survey of those dropped between July 1996 and March 1997 found that only 29 percent of those dismissed from welfare had found employment—“employment” being defined as earning $100 over three months. Many of the rest, as in even more exacting states like Wisconsin, had simply gone missing. So had their children, because as already noted children don’t vote while—as nobody understands better than Clinton—retired people do. These vanished Americans had merged into a ballooning underclass which is not even head-counted in the age of cheerful statistics, and which will show up only on the other side of the shining span of bridge that beckoned us to the 21st century.
Should all else fail, the poor of Missouri or any other of the fifty states could enlist in the employer of last resort, the military, where they could be subjected at random to mandatory drug tests (which are well on their way to becoming a craze in private industry as well) and legally prohibited from committing adultery. Should their personal tastes have ripened to warmth in the embrace of their own gender, they could be hounded and prosecuted by the Navy Investigative Service or its equivalent. If they were ostensibly male and wed and heterosexual and even suspected of deviance, their wives could also be visited without warning by the NIS and asked such leading questions as: “Did he ever fuck you up the ass?” (This question and others like it were documented by the late Randy Shilts, a real hero among the chroniclers of gay history and experience.) Failure to cooperate, or to incriminate others, could lead at once to unemployment or to disgrace—or both at once—and, in not a few cases, to incarceration. Such persecutions markedly increased during the Clinton era, with discharges for sexual incorrectness touching an all-time high in 1998. Mr. Clinton can also claim credit for warrantless searches of public housing and the innovation of the “roving wiretap.” If any successor to Arthur Miller wanted to depict a modern Salem, he would do better to investigate the hysteria of the war on drugs, where to be suspected is to be guilty. In 1995, arrests for drug offenses that involved no violenc
e were numbered at 1.5 million per annum, having climbed 31 percent in Mr. Clinton’s first three years of tenure. The crime and terrorism statutes enacted in the same period caused even his most dogmatic apologists—Anthony Lewis, most notably—to wince.
An early and demagogic adoption of mandatory sentences, of the moronic chant of “three strikes and you’re out,” and of the need for speedy capital sentences was, of course, part of the Dick Morris strategy. But it was also an element in Clinton’s attempt to distance himself from the bleeding hearts of the Democratic Party and to recast himself as a Southern sheriff. As a direct and intended result of this make-over, minors and the mentally ill are arraigned for the death penalty in America, the appeals procedure from Death Row has been abruptly and arbitrarily curtailed, and there is an execution every five days. The protection of habeas corpus has been withdrawn from immigrants, life sentences may be mandated for stunned defendants and imposed by shocked judges for the possession of cannabis alone, and sentences for possession of “crack” cocaine, a poor people’s drug, are ten times harsher than those for possession of the powder cocaine consumed by the rich. The prison economy outperforms the college economy even in states like California, and the incarceration rate for American citizens is many multiples higher than that of any European nation, and barely trails behind that of Russia.
By 1997, all economic analysts were showing an abrupt and widening gap in income distribution in the United States, with many more super-rich and many more abjectly poor, and an astonishing increase in the number of “working poor” who, even with tough and unrewarding jobs, are unable to earn enough to transcend officially defined poverty. (Income distribution is often compared by classical economists to a diamond diagram, with an upper and lower apex and a thinner or fatter middle. A diamond diagram, of course, is two triangles piled on top of one another.) In softer and apparently less coercive tones, meanwhile, the First Lady appeared on platforms to tell people what was in their own best interests, and to demand a tobacco-free and “buckle-up” society as well. For millions of people living in the Clinton epoch, “the era of big government” was by no means “over.” It had, in fact, just begun.