United States in 1993

The United States of America is a federal republic composed of 50 states. Area: 9,372,571 sq km (3,618,770 sq mi), including 205,856 sq km of inland water but excluding the 156,492 sq km of the Great Lakes that lie within U.S. boundaries. Pop. (1993 est.): 258,233,000. Cap.: Washington, D.C. Monetary unit: U.S. dollar, with (Oct. 4, 1993) a free rate of U.S. $1.52 to £ 1 sterling. Presidents in 1993, George Bush and, from January 20, Bill Clinton.

William Jefferson ("Bill") Clinton (see BIOGRAPHIES) swept into the White House in 1993 on a wave of high expectations. As the candidate of "change," a word he used often during his presidential campaign against incumbent George Bush, President Clinton was committed to a dramatic reversal of the economic and political stagnation he had blamed on 12 years of conservative Republican rule. Within weeks of the January 1993 inauguration, however, Clinton’s new administration was wobbling badly, the victim of ineptitude, bad judgment, and a knack for needless controversy. Fortunately for Clinton, the freshman jitters were eventually dispelled, and the 42nd president of the United States finished the year with an impressive record of accomplishment. According to Congressional Quarterly, for instance, he succeeded in moving more legislation through Congress in his first year than any other president since Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. And he did not have to use his veto power even once, a feat not seen since Richard Nixon’s first year in 1969.

The Presidency

President Clinton’s start was one of the shakiest in recent history. Among his first acts was his declaration that he would seek an end to the U.S. military’s long-standing ban on homosexuals in the ranks. Though the move was popular among gays and many other Americans and Clinton had promised it during the election campaign, few Washington analysts thought he would move on such a potentially explosive issue so quickly. Indeed, Clinton’s declaration put him at odds with top military leaders and with a number of key civilians who had oversight responsibilities for the armed forces. Chief among the latter was Sen. Sam Nunn, the Georgia Democrat who headed the Senate Armed Services Committee. After heated debate, Clinton managed to gain support for a compromise measure under which homosexual servicemen and servicewomen could remain in the military if they did not openly declare their sexual preference, a policy that quickly became known as "don’t ask, don’t tell." Yet military officers were overwhelmingly opposed to that approach, fearing that the mere presence of homosexuals in the armed forces would undermine morale. The policy was further undermined by discrimination suits that upheld the right of gays to serve in the military without fear of discrimination. The controversy helped send Clinton’s approval ratings plunging to the lowest levels ever recorded for a first-year president and distracted the administration as it struggled to assemble its initial legislative agenda.

The White House also encountered exasperating difficulty in filling a number of high-level positions in the new government. Two successive nominations for the job of attorney general, the nation’s top law-enforcement officer, were derailed by disclosures involving the hiring of domestic help. Zoë Baird, a Connecticut insurance lawyer, was accused by Republicans of not having paid proper payroll taxes for a child-care worker; though the offense was minor and the taxes were eventually paid, she withdrew after being accused of impropriety. Kimba Wood, a federal judge in New York, was reported to have hired an undocumented foreigner for her household; though the practice was not illegal at the time and Wood had kept abreast of payroll taxes, she too was forced to withdraw. The job eventually went to Janet Reno, the state’s attorney for Dade county, Fla. (See BIOGRAPHIES.) The Baird and Wood incidents angered many women, who felt that such accusations would not have been brought up in connection with a male candidate. Indeed, Ron Brown, the former Democratic National Committee chairman whose nomination as commerce secretary sailed through Congress, admitted later--to no ill effect on his appointment--that he, too, had been less than punctilious in hiring domestic help.

One other female nominee was sidelined by Republican opposition, though in this case ostensibly for ideological reasons. Lani Guinier, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, withdrew from consideration as the Justice Department’s top civil rights official after conservatives objected to what they described as Guinier’s radical positions on voting rights and related issues. Though Guinier’s supporters protested that her views had been distorted and were hardly controversial, Clinton chose not to stand by her.

And so it went throughout the early months of the administration. The White House would announce a nomination, Republican opposition would coalesce, and the candidate would withdraw. The failure rate was remarkable for a Democratic president whose party controlled both houses of Congress. Clinton was widely criticized for his timidity in confronting the Republicans. One crucial problem for him was an unusual degree of cohesion among the opposition. Far from being in disarray after losing the White House, the Republicans were lining up en bloc against administration initiatives. Conservative Republicans hinted that they were simply giving Clinton appointees the same sort of harassment they felt that three Republican nominees for the Supreme Court, Robert Bork, Douglas Ginsburg, and Clarence Thomas, had suffered at the hands of Democrats during the Reagan-Bush years (Bork and Ginsburg withdrew; Thomas eventually won confirmation, but only after televised hearings into allegations that he had sexually harassed a colleague, Anita Hill). The Democrats, meanwhile, were just as independent-minded as ever. Under long-standing House and Senate rules designed to limit abuses by the majority, a determined minority could prevent appointments and legislation from even coming to a vote. The Republicans acted cohesively enough to take advantage of those rules; the Democrats were too fractious to stop them. As a consequence, Clinton began to look ineffective.

One of the president’s first major pieces of legislation, an economic stimulus plan, was killed by a Republican filibuster. Clinton’s next big initiative, a deficit-reduction package, ran into an early blitz of opposition from Republicans and from various special interests. That was not surprising, given its content: substantial tax increases and modest spending cuts that would affect many industries and individuals adversely. After months of wrangling, a watered-down version of the measure passed with the narrowest of margins; Vice Pres. Al Gore, in his role as president of the Senate, cast the tie-breaking vote.

The package was expected to cut $500 billion from the federal budget deficit over five years. It included stiff tax increases for upper-income Americans, a slight boost in the corporate tax rate, and a 4-cent-a-gallon (1 gal = 3.8 litres) increase in the federal excise on gasoline. Americans barely noticed the latter, since a softness in global petroleum prices and notoriously low U.S. petroleum taxes had helped keep U.S. gasoline among the world’s cheapest--about 25-30 cents a litre. The spending cuts ranged widely across the federal budget, though no serious reductions were made in such major and sacrosanct items as social security and Medicare.

As the months wore on, Clinton began to gain expertise at wooing and arm-twisting. He succeeded in gaining adoption of his $1.5 billion national service plan, under which 100,000 young Americans would earn cash and credits toward college tuition by working in public service jobs. By autumn, when he faced one of the biggest tests of his administration, he was ready to wheel and deal. The issue was congressional approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement. NAFTA had been painstakingly negotiated by administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, and Clinton had declared his support for it during the 1992 election campaign. The treaty would reduce tariffs between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico on a wide array of products and, in effect, create the world’s largest free-trade zone. Business executives and economists supported the measure by a wide margin, confident that it would spur trade and thus prosperity in all three countries. Trade union leaders, environmentalists, and a variety of other interest groups opposed the measure, fearing, among other things, that it would prompt U.S. companies to move their operations to Mexico, where wages were lower than in the U.S. and Canada and environmental standards less rigorous.

Prominent among NAFTA’s opponents was H. Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire who a year earlier had made a run for the presidency. Perot’s prediction that the measure would produce "a giant sucking sound" as U.S. jobs were lost to Mexico became a rallying cry of the treaty’s critics. As the congressional vote on the agreement approached, chances of passage seemed dim. In apparent desperation, the White House accepted Perot’s proposal that he and Vice President Gore debate the issue on national television. They appeared together on interviewer Larry King’s Cable News Network talk show, and Gore was credited by many pundits and pollsters with having got the better of his challenger. In any case, public opinion began to swing toward the treaty. Meanwhile, Clinton was wooing legislators with intimate dinners at the White House and promises of federal largesse for their home districts. In the end Clinton prevailed, and NAFTA was passed by both houses.

The victory provided the president with a measure of momentum that had previously eluded him. Capitalizing on it, he successfully pressed for the passage of a major anticrime bill that included a controversial waiting period on handgun purchases. He also intervened decisively a month later to end a strike by American Airlines flight attendants that threatened to disrupt travel over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. By year’s end it appeared that Clinton, a newcomer to Washington whose previous job had been governor of Arkansas, had figured out how to do business in the nation’s capital.

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