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president obsessed over his "legacy" as much as Bill Clinton
did. He sometimes complained that he had no enormous national crisis
to contend with, meaning that he didn't have a fair shot at attaining
historic greatness. "The first thing I had to start with was,
you know, we don't have a war," he told the New York Times
in 1997. "We don't have a depression, we don't have a Cold
War." Poor guy. He never really had a chance.
Some of us
worried whether he was up to handling Haiti, never mind a global
crisis. It's no surprise, however, that he's in a funk now, as his
successor is being lauded for his handling of a national catastrophe,
praised for delivering one of the great speeches in American history,
and hurtled into stratospheric levels of popularity according to
the opinion polls that Clinton so treasured during his tenure.
Today's New
York Times describes Clinton as lamenting that such a thing
didn't happen on his watch. Richard L. Berke reports, "A close
friend of Mr. Clinton put it this way: 'He has said there has to
be a defining moment in a presidency that really makes a great president.
He didn't have one.'"
More than 6,000
people die to terrorism, and Bill Clinton still thinks it's all
about him.
Economic Consequences of the War
Prospects
for trade promotion authority — which lets the president's
men negotiate trade deals that Congress agrees not to amend, but
only to approve or disapprove — looked pretty bleak before
the September massacres. Now they're looking, if not great, at least
better.
Part of the
reason is the bipartisan sentiment that the president should be
free to conduct foreign policy. Trade liberalization tends to be
achieved by strong presidents overcoming congressional parochialism
and logrolling. When presidents are weak, protectionism surges.
It was after the Reagan administration was crippled by Iran-contra
that Dick Gephardt was able to pass legislation authorizing retaliatory
tariffs against countries deemed to be "unfair traders."
And it was a sign of Clinton's second-term weakness that he was
unable to win trade-promotion authority (then called "fast
track"). President Bush's political strength has, of course,
increased dramatically since September 11.
Bill Thomas,
the chairman of the ways and means committee, has made passage more
likely by reaching a compromise with New Democrats. The compromise
includes some provisions on labor and the environment. But as Brink
Lindsey, a trade analyst at the Cato Institute, notes, that should
not be a red flag to free-market advocates so long as the language
is "hortatory not mandatory." Since we're not going to
be able to get other countries to sign a global free-trade deal
with such conditions, there's no reason for Bush's trade negotiators
to take the labor-and-environment provisions too seriously.
A more serious
problem is that the compromise asks negotiators to protect the country's
egregious "anti-dumping" laws, which target countries
that commit the crime of selling products to us too cheaply. This
demand should be softened: Negotiators could be asked to safeguard
the goals of anti-dumping laws, such as they are, without necessarily
committing to the laws themselves. But at least the compromise ignores
the proposal of Democrat Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance
Committee, that the president's authority not extend to any deal
that would require a change in American laws — which would
abort negotiations before they even start.
The global
economy could use trade liberalization at the moment, not that it's
relevant to the political dynamics on the Hill. After the attacks,
currency markets saw the typical flight to safety — which hit
the economies of Latin America, especially Brazil and by extension
Argentina, hard. As Mark Falcoff of the American Enterprise Institute
has noted, the continent is already backsliding from democracy.
We don't need instability to our south right now, or demands for
U.S. aid.
Wisconsin congressman
Paul Ryan, an increasingly influential voice in Republican economic-policy
debates, thinks trade-promotion authority can pass. "It's important
for the economy, and it's important for national security,"
he says. "We have no choice. We've got to pass this. It's too
important."
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