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Jewish World Review June 5, 2000 / 2 Sivan, 5760
Chris Matthews
on his achievements
Oddly enough, Clinton remains as tongue-tied in
showcasing his contributions as he has been in confessing
his abuses. Rather than offer some grand public
accounting, he seems intent on hedging his bets.
He is the most pro-trade Democrat since John F.
Kennedy yet seems strangely ashamed of that distinction.
He won approval in Congress of the North American
Free Trade Agreement and expects to establish
permanent normal trade relations with China, but in both
cases he avoided the national, primetime appeal that put
all the marbles on the table. Even in triumph, he has acted
as if some other team scored the victory.
He signed the welfare reform bill, a step that sealed his
re-election. Yet here again he has refused to take a bow.
He pushed through the deficit-destroying budget of 1993
but apologized later for the tax hikes that were at its
heart.
He fought the air war in Kosovo but failed to (a) bring the
country into the battle with a national call-to-arms, and (b) take credit
afterwards for having honored the post-Holocaust commitment of "never
again!"
He began a national dialogue on race but let it fade. He takes up verbal arms
against the gun lobby but sends signals that, unlike Vice President Al Gore, he
is not a man that gun owners should fear. He is not the type to go man-to-man
with Charlton Heston any more than he's the kind to arm-wrestle with Jesse
Helms over an ambassadorial appointment.
You could conjure excuses for these failures of grandeur, of course. Clinton
didn't want to brag about the economy getting stronger when some at the
bottom remained stagnant. He couldn't brag about free trade with labor calling
globalism an evil empire and two-thirds of his party opposing him.
He couldn't take credit for signing a welfare bill that ended the poor's
entitlement to a minimum income. He couldn't brag about cutting deficits if it
meant taking enduring blame for raising taxes. He couldn't show pride in
Kosovo, not knowing the ultimate outcome in that Balkan powder keg.
But the net effect is to send Clinton packing next January with a plethora of
tasks and successes behind him, an uncertain legacy before him.
Maybe Clinton fears contradiction, worries that future events will overtake and
diminish what he's done. Perhaps he lacks the same faculty for bragging that he
has lacked for confessing, that some unadvertised quirk of humility
accompanies his infamous talent for denying.
It could be that the guy simply needs a better
06/02/00: Pelosi, a voice for human rights
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