Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, July 7, 1994 TAG: 9407080030
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-15 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ray L. Garland
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"Americans," the man wrote, "are fed up with liberal rhetoric about morals and honor. It's in vogue for our president to borrow conservative themes ... and use them to mask his true agenda." Not fair, a woman wrote: "He's trying to help America ... and his attackers' viciousness says a lot about their character."
While Clinton undoubtedly has a reservoir of firm support, what is it that causes so many to view him with disgust? The fact that a sizable majority (57 percent) didn't vote for him has something to do with it. But there's something deeper here.
Perhaps the most interesting result of the entire 1992 election was found in Arkansas, where the president served 12 years as governor. Despite the fact that Bush and Perot almost made fun of the state, Clinton received only 53 percent of the Arkansas vote. And this in a state where Republicans hold all of 15 seats in the legislature, out of 135.
The various charges against the Clintons percolating under the catch-all term Whitewater have never held public attention for long, perhaps because they seem so terribly penny-ante to a populace accustomed to more colossal fraud. But it's now been pretty well shown that Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan was mildly looted to assist the Clintons in their real-estate dealings and to clean up annoying debts from his 1984 campaign for governor.
A lottery-sodden nation has been more fascinated by Mrs. Clinton's luck in turning a $1,000 initial investment in cattle futures into nearly $100,000 during 1978-79. After initial proclamations of total innocence failed to hold water, it was admitted that James Blair, counsel for Tyson Foods, Arkansas' largest employer, had not only advised her but had done much of the actual trading. Her broker, Robert Bone, was suspended by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange shortly after Mrs. Clinton stopped dealing, mainly for improper record-keeping that had nothing specifically to do with her account.
Blair admits he encouraged Mrs. Clinton to trade cattle futures and says, "I can find no regulation of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange ... that makes it inappropriate for one private citizen to call in an order for another private citizen." Maybe. But does anyone really believe an agent for a company heavily dependent upon the governor's good will would encourage the governor's wife to enter one of the world's most esoteric markets and then stand idly by and see her lose money? Wasn't this really a Tyson gratuity the Clintons could put in their pockets with little chance it would be traced?
Then there's the matter of David Hale, a Clinton-appointed municipal judge in Little Rock who passed out $3.4 million in loan guarantees from the Small Business Administration, now mainly in default. Currently under indictment for an illegal SBA-guaranteed loan to himself and two colleagues, Hale claims that then-Gov. Clinton pressured him to make a $300,000 SBA loan to his partner in Whitewater.
We could go on, but what's the point? The point is that turning over a rock on the Clintons' own dealings in Arkansas points to the almost inescapable corruption that occurs when government takes the initiative in deciding winners and losers in the private sector. That is, without federal deposit insurance up to $100,000 per account, Madison Guaranty never could have taken taxpayers for $50 million, etc.
But examine the new policies the Clintons are most ardently pushing: national health, national service tied to college loans, national competitiveness grants to aid "promising technologies" and national goals for public schools. These are precisely the items that will bring larger slices of the American economy into the maw of federal authority. Yet, we have pretty good evidence of the great difficulty it has now in honestly and efficiently running that one-quarter of the economy already under its control.
All that stuff back in Arkansas helps illustrate why big business has so little problem with Clinton. Take national health, for example. Sure, he was going to sock big business with some additional levies. But by starting Medicare at 55 instead of 65, he was going to save business a bundle in paying the cost of health insurance for early retirees. On the other hand, what happened to the great old American principle of sharing costs 50-50, as embodied in Social Security? But the Clintons knew most Americans would be incensed in being asked to pay so much as half the freight, so they came up with employers' paying 80 percent.
The president now knows he can't get the incredibly complex plan he first proposed, but he may not care exactly what he gets so long as he gets something. To get an idea of what's at stake, consider what the Congressional Budget Office says will happen under the president's Health Security Act. The CBO estimates that without Clinton's health plan, federal spending will grow from $1.543 trillion in 1994 to $2.524 trillion in 2004. If the president's original bill passes, it would be $3.090 trillion, or $566 billion more, and health would consume 44 percent of all federal expenditures!
In his speech accepting the presidency of Czechoslovakia after the fall of communism, Vaclav Havel spoke of the horror of "living in a decayed moral environment." We see the painful result of that process in Russia today.
But it has reached an advanced stage of development in all the great democracies. The sad part is our political dialogue has reached a stage of decay in which Clintonism must be opposed not by sound, factual arguments, but by recourse to taunts of Whitewater, draft-dodging and Paula Jones.
Ray L. Garland is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB