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Washington, D.C. SPEAKING to reporters at the White House on August 3, budget director Leon Panetta said of the Clinton budget plan, “The reason the President of the United States is taking on this challenge is because we’ve had 12 years of trickle-down economics, and we have paid a great price in this country for those policies . . . the plan—let’s understand—first and foremost, reverses the policies that we have seen over the last 12 years.”

If anybody needed an explanation of an economic plan that seemed, even to many Democrats, to have no economic rationale, that was it. In the end, the driving idea behind the Clinton program was not jobs, economic growth, or even deficit reduction. It was undoing the economic policies of the Reagan era, especially the hated across-the-board tax cuts of 1981. Indeed, as many Democrats have come to understand, the program is likely to slow the economy. In budgetary terms, all the President had to show for his long and demeaning struggle with Congress was a plan strikingly similar to George Bush’s ill-fated deal with Congress three years ago. How Mr. Clinton came to this pass is a tale of miscalculation he will be living with for a long time.

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Washington, D.C. SPEAKING to reporters at the White House on August 3, budget director Leon Panetta said of the Clinton budget plan, “The reason the President of the United States is taking on this challenge is because we’ve had 12 years of trickle-down economics, and we have paid a great price in this country for those policies . . . the plan—let’s understand—first and foremost, reverses the policies that we have seen over the last 12 years.”

If anybody needed an explanation of an economic plan that seemed, even to many Democrats, to have no economic rationale, that was it. In the end, the driving idea behind the Clinton program was not jobs, economic growth, or even deficit reduction. It was undoing the economic policies of the Reagan era, especially the hated across-the-board tax cuts of 1981. Indeed, as many Democrats have come to understand, the program is likely to slow the economy. In budgetary terms, all the President had to show for his long and demeaning struggle with Congress was a plan strikingly similar to George Bush’s ill-fated deal with Congress three years ago. How Mr. Clinton came to this pass is a tale of miscalculation he will be living with for a long time.