THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, August 23, 1996 TAG: 9608230367
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A19 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: KEITH MONROE
LENGTH: 79 lines
It's customary for political conventions to devote some of their energy to lambasting the opposition. Last week, Republicans frequently attacked President Clinton's failure to keep his word. To hear Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and Rep. Susan Molinari tell it, the Clinton administration has been a trail of tears, one broken promise after another.
Clinton has waffled visibly on a number of high-profile issues and flip-flopped even more dramatically on others. He bopped George Bush on Bosnia and China policy but has pursued similar courses himself. He promised campaign-finance reform but has done nothing about the sea of money that floods campaigns except to take all he could get.
Clinton also promised to deliver both a middle-class tax cut and deficit reduction but found that they were mutually exclusive. He opted for deficit reduction. Since the Dole campaign is promising an even more implausible economic hat trick, a Dole administration could be forced to make a similar choice.
But overall, how's Clinton's record of living up to his promises? Is it as lame as the GOP claims? It turns out that answering that question is surprisingly easy and the answer itself is surprising.
Following Clinton's election in 1992, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain compiled a list of Clinton promises culled from stump speeches, debates, position papers and a campaign book called Putting People First. It might better have been called, Promising Voters Things.
As displayed by Knight-Ridder, the list of promises took up an entire newspaper page of fairly small type. I remember thinking at the time that this was somewhat cruel fun. Most politicians go around promising things, but here were all of Clinton's boasts in black and white forever.
Cruel or not, I clipped the page and tacked it on my wall, planning to see how badly the president performed. But during the ensuing years the sheet turned yellow, I changed offices, the list got lost. Not to worry, however. It's back! The Knight-Ridder people have resurrected it and tallied Clinton's performance.
The big surprise? Despite his reputation for promising more than he delivers, Clinton's record is good. Voters may not care for what Clinton has done, but he's done a lot of what he said he'd do. He's batting .660 which isn't bad in any league and is more than respectable in Washington. Here's how it adds up.
Clinton made a total of 160 promises and failed to keep 50 (about 31 percent). He achieved 106 of the objectives he set for himself for a 66 percent success rate. Furthermore, the tabulators argue, Clinton tried to keep another 23 promises but Congress refused to pass his legislation.
For example, eight promises had to do with health care. They perished horribly when his Rube Goldberg reform was shot down. If you give Clinton credit for making an effort to keep those 23 additional promises, his batting average rises to .790. Here are a few of the 106 promises he kept:
Clinton made pro-choice appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court, approved testing of abortion pill RU486, closed 1,200 Department of Agriculture offices, increased funding for AIDS by 39 percent, supported ratification of START I and II arms-reduction treaties.
Clinton reduced the deficit by half, cut 237,000 federal jobs, required federal managers to cut administrative spending by 3 percent, fully funded the WIC program, created urban enterprise zones, provided grants for cities to hire 100,000 more police, banned 19 types of assault rifle, restricted development of Star Wars.
And a few more. The administration signed Goals 2000 legislation, the motor-voter law and a bill to prevent oil drilling in an Alaskan Wildlife refuge. It made more money available to the United Nations for population control, imposed restrictions on lobbyists, signed the Family Leave Act, increased the minimum wage, expanded the earned income tax credit for the poor, raised taxes on those in the top bracket, allocated more money to mass transit and light rail, and has taken both credit and heat for ending welfare as we know it.
The beauty of all this activity is in the eye of the beholder, of course.
As promised, Clinton ended the gag rule that restricted abortion counseling. This made right-to-life advocates gag. They will regard this list as an irrefutable argument for giving him a pink slip. Others will see in it solid reasons for re-electing the president. But love Clinton's promises or hate them, he does appear to have made a largely successful attempt at keeping them. MEMO: Mr. Monroe is editor of the editorial page of The
Virginian-Pilot.Mr. Monroe by CNB