Back to Work - Bill Clinton [8]
CHAPTER 2
The 2010 Election
and Its Place in the History of
Antigovernment Politics
IN THE 2010 ELECTION CYCLE, I agreed to do a number of events, both fund-raisers and rallies, for people who had supported Hillary in the 2008 presidential primaries, because as secretary of state she can’t participate in partisan politics and I wanted to honor their support for her. Somewhere along the way I began trying to help other Democrats too, in what grew to more than 130 events, because I believed President Obama and Congress had done a better job than they were getting credit for and because the Republican proposals to repeal health-care reform, college-loan reform, financial-regulation reform, and clean-energy investments; cancel the unspent stimulus funding; and enact more large tax cuts and big spending cuts across the board represented an even more extreme version of the thirty-year-old antigovernment philosophy that got us into trouble in the first place.
I tried to explain in plain language what the president and Congress had accomplished in the previous two years and what both parties were proposing to do in the next two. I explained why I thought the Democrats offered America a better chance to revive the economy and create jobs, increase health coverage and quality and slow the rise in health-care costs, prevent future financial meltdowns and more bailouts, reverse the alarming decline in college-graduation rates, and, as the economy recovers, bring our budget back into balance.
I also tried to get a few laughs to break the tension that hard times bring by joking that my feelings were hurt because I wasn’t the Tea Party’s favorite political figure. After all, during my administration we had four surplus budgets and began to pay down the national debt; we eliminated sixteen thousand pages of federal regulations; we cut taxes on the middle class, working families of modest means, and income from capital gains; we reduced welfare rolls by almost 60 percent; we reduced the size of the federal workforce to its lowest level since 1960, when Dwight Eisenhower was president, and the smallest percentage of the overall workforce since 1933; and the economy produced more jobs (92 percent in the private sector, the largest percentage in fifty years) and moved a hundred times more people out of poverty than in the Reagan years (7.7 million versus 77,000).
I couldn’t win the Tea Party over, of course, because the actions they agreed with weren’t the whole story. We balanced the budget with a balanced plan: with both spending cuts and tax increases on the wealthiest corporations and individuals (the top 1.2 percent) who had benefited disproportionately from America’s growth and from tax cuts in the 1980s; strengthened regulations to get cleaner air and water and safer food; appointed an SEC commissioner who believed in firm oversight of investment banking practices; set aside more land for preservation in the lower forty-eight states than any president since Teddy Roosevelt; added years to Medicare’s and Social Security’s solvency; doubled spending on education, including the largest increase in aid to college students since the GI Bill; spent more on education, transportation, and child care to help people move from welfare to work; achieved almost universal access to the Internet in schools, hospitals, and libraries; doubled investment in biomedical research and created the Children’s Health Insurance Program, the biggest expansion of health coverage since Medicare and Medicaid; created the COPS program, which put 100,000 police on America’s streets; and enacted the Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban, leading to the longest continuous drop in crime in our history—all ideological nonstarters for passionate antigovernment advocates, but all good for America.
Of course, speeches