From Bubba to Barbra Streisand
I have to be a president beyond the borders.
—Bill Clinton
On November 4, 1992, I walked into the Supreme Court cafeteria to order my usual breakfast of oatmeal with a side of scrambled eggs. But smelling the greasy sizzle on the grill, I felt a wave of nausea come over me. Clerking at the Supreme Court required long hours, but the night before was different. College friends and I were up late watching the election returns to see Arkansas governor and good-old-boy Bill Clinton beat George H. W. Bush by 202 electoral votes.
A fellow clerk and close friend met me in line with his tray. We looked at each other and didn’t have to speak a word—he, too, was a strong conservative who worked for another justice. “This is going to be a long, long day,” he said. “It’s going to be a long four years,” I answered glumly. A few more clerks from other chambers came behind us in line. One, a proud feminist, looked at me, flashed a big grin, and, giving a thumbs-up, chirped: “Happy Wednesday!” “Yeah, great,” I responded sarcastically. “Congratulations on your guy winning.”
As one of the more outspoken conservatives at the Court, I knew I was in for a day (or week) of serious ribbing by some of the young Democrats sprinkled through the chambers of Justices Harry Blackmun, David Souter, and John Paul Stevens. Who could blame them? They were reveling in the fact that their long, twelve-year White House shut-out was finally over. After our one-year clerkship, many would be applying to work in the new administration, and they were excited. Still, I couldn’t complain. Clerking for Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas was as inspiring as it was educational. Against unrelenting and ugly attacks, he served with honor, worked vigorously, and made his judgments based on the Constitution as it was written. Who could ask for more?
Notwithstanding my deep philosophical difference with Bush, I supported him over Clinton. (Although I was ideologically more closely aligned with populist Ross Perot, I thought a vote for him was a vote for Clinton.) The morning after the election, I could not shake the dyspeptic feeling in my gut. And I wasn’t just sick because of the money I bet on Bush. Mainly, I was sick for the country. I worried that everything that President Reagan had achieved—which had already been compromised by Bush—would be flushed down the toilet.
I would need an ocean of ink, a year’s worth of your time, and a hazmat suit to trudge through the toxic sludge dump that is Bill Clinton’s scandal-filled political career. Suffice it to say, there is a reason Bill Clinton is one of only two presidents in American history ever to be impeached.
Nevertheless, personal foibles aside, Bill Clinton was one of the most politically gifted politicians in modern times. And he was smart enough to know that having a populist appeal is key to winning elections. The everyman veneer included everything from his bad saxophone playing to his classic line “I feel your pain.” He grew up in the small town of Hot Springs, Arkansas, not Hope, as he claimed (he even saw value in having a hometown with a populist name!).
One would think a kid who grew up middle class in middle America would have understood how important it was to keep the factories humming—those men and women who didn’t have the grades or the money to go to an elite university needed to work, too. One would think he would have understood that the trade deals America negotiated would have to make life better for the everyday American. One might also think he would have understood that farming out health care reform legislation to his wife would go over like a glass of cold chardonnay at an AA meeting.
But despite campaigning as a “New Democrat” with a “Third Way” sensibility, Bill Clinton quickly evolved from a populist Southern governor into a globalist president. Instead of offering a course correction on Bush’s New World Order, Clinton took globalism to new and disastrous heights. That Bush and Clinton’s view of the world was closer than Bush and Reagan’s is key to understanding the rise of today’s populist movement. It also helps explain the chummy relationship between the two dynastic families, which has only become clearer over the years.
Bubba Goes to Washington
For most of Bill Clinton’s first term, I worked as a litigation associate in the Washington office of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. My days were spent writing legal memos and doing witness interviews in various white-collar criminal matters. My mentor and boss was firm partner Bob Bennett, the liberal brother of Bill Bennett, the former Reagan education secretary and drug czar under Bush. (We joked that I was the only living human being to ever work for both Bennett brothers.) It didn’t take me long to realize that big law firm practice wasn’t for me. So I began writing freelance columns on politics for whatever newspaper would publish them.
The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal each gave me a byline and some ink from time to time. I covered a wide array of issues but constantly gravitated toward topics and themes connected to the populist outlook.
When the GOP Establishment began buzzing about recruiting Colin Powell as a Republican presidential nominee, I cowrote a New York Times piece with my friend and colleague Stephen Vaughn titled “Powell Is Bad for the GOP.” Our anti-Establishment argument: if Republicans nominated a candidate who “agrees with Mr. Clinton on abortion, affirmative action and gun control, why nominate anyone at all?”1
Some of my other articles used humor to make serious points about presidential leadership. I published a fun Los Angeles Times piece contrasting Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton on a host of issues. Under the section titled “Memorable presidential dialogue with repressive regimes,” I wrote:
Reagan (to Soviets): “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
Clinton (to Chinese): “Cream or sugar?”2
Those early columns allowed to me to discuss current issues through a populist lens—an approach I later applied on the radio.
Throughout the 1992 election I was intrigued by Clinton’s populist campaign style. During his five terms as Arkansas governor, Clinton had shown flashes of conservative populism that he cultivated into something he called a “New Democrat” philosophy—a break from the party’s knee-jerk liberalism. He had supported welfare-to-work policies designed to break the cycle of government dependency—a position more in alignment with Republicans than members of his own party. He touted reducing his tiny state’s welfare rolls by 17,000 people and maintained there was dignity in work. “I was always somewhat amused to hear some members of the press characterize [welfare reform] as a Republican issue, as if valuing work was something only conservatives did,” said Clinton.3 At a meeting of the nation’s governors, Clinton brought a black Arkansas woman named Lillie Hardin to testify. He asked her whether able-bodied people should have to work to receive welfare benefits. “I sure do,” she said. “Otherwise we’ll just lay around watching the soaps all day.” He then asked Hardin what was the best part of being off welfare. “When my boy goes to school and they ask him, ‘What does your mama do for a living?’ he can give an answer.” Clinton beamed with pride. “It was the best argument I’ve ever heard for welfare reform,” he said.4
His governorship had also contained moments that suggested he might be tough on crime; his support for the death penalty stood at odds with many Democrats, including failed Democratic presidential contender Michael Dukakis. One of the four inmates Clinton put to death was a black man named Ricky Ray Rector, who had shot and killed a white police officer and a civilian before shooting himself in the head, leaving himself mentally impaired. When Clinton ordered the execution of Rector during the presidential campaign, critics said he was doing so to project a “tough on crime” image. If so, it seemed to work. “You can’t law-and-order Clinton,” said former Arkansas prosecutor Jay Jacobson. “If you can kill Rector, you can kill anybody.”5
But more than anything, Clinton understood that Reagan’s conservative-populist revolution had rewritten the rules. Americans now viewed government as the problem, not the solution. In 1992, Clinton campaigned accordingly.
On welfare, for example, Clinton admitted that big government schemes had fostered a cycle of dependency. “For so long, government has failed us. And one of its worst failures has been welfare,” Clinton said in a 1992 campaign ad. “I have a plan to end welfare as we know it to break the cycle of welfare dependency.” Instead of asking hardworking middle-class taxpayers to fund cradle-to-grave social programs, Clinton vowed to make able-bodied citizens work and touted his Arkansas welfare record. “We’ll provide education, job training, and childcare. But then, those who are able must go to work, either in the private sector or in public service,” he said. “It’s time to make welfare what it should be—a second chance, not a way of life.”6 It was a message with strong populist appeal.
He took a similar approach on crime. Clinton promised to put 100,000 more police on the street, “be tough on crime,” create a national police corps that hired former members of the military to become cops, and make nationwide military-style boot camps like the one he had in Arkansas for nonviolent, first-time offenders to instill discipline. “We cannot take our country back until we take our neighborhoods back,” Clinton declared. “It is the poor, it is the minorities, it is those who have been forgotten and left out who are most at risk to violent crime in America today.”7 One could almost hear echoes of Richard Nixon’s populist promise to restore “law and order” for “forgotten Americans.”
Positions like these resonated with conservative populists. Working people, by definition, value work. They don’t mind giving people a hand up, but they know endless handouts breed dependency. Big government welfare policies also confiscate workers’ money and hand it to those who are unwilling to work to support themselves. Similarly, populists support law and order policies because they protect the people and keep them safe. Communities wracked by crime force law-abiding citizens to become prisoners in their homes and to live lives of fear rather than freedom. Far from being “selfish” or “bigoted,” conservative populists want a world where working people who play by the rules can get ahead and leave their children’s lives a little better off.
Clinton’s 1992 campaign pounded home these populist themes. “They’re a new generation of Democrats, Bill Clinton and Al Gore—and they don’t think the way the old Democratic Party did,” started one of their political ads. “They’ve called to end welfare as we know it, so welfare can be a second chance, not a way of life. They’ve sent a strong signal to criminals by supporting the death penalty.” The ad’s tagline: “For people, for a change.”
On Election Day, working-class voters and those in the all-important Rust Belt states rewarded Clinton handsomely. He won Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin. (The only Rust Belt state he lost was Indiana.) He also carried every region of the country save the South, where Bush narrowly edged him by two points.8 After 1992, no Republican presidential candidate would ever carry Michigan or Pennsylvania again—until, that is, Donald Trump carpetbombed those states with his conservative-populist message. Trump would also win Wisconsin, something no Republican since Ronald Reagan had done.
But once Clinton got to the White House, things took a sharp left turn. During his first two years in office he drifted further from the populist platform he ran on and defaulted to big government schemes.
Less than a week on the job, President Clinton announced the appointment of Hillary Clinton to head a committee to overhaul America’s health care system—a detail he had strangely forgotten to include in his campaign ads. The reason for choosing Hillary, said the president, was because “she’s better at organizing and leading people from a complex beginning to a certain end than anybody I’ve ever worked with in my life.” Plus, “we have a First Lady of many talents.”9
As it turned out, one of those “many talents” involved creating Hillarycare, a 1,342-page government takeover of the nation’s health care system. Early in the process then–Republican House whip Newt Gingrich warned Hillary not to fashion a comprehensive plan but instead introduce smaller reforms over time. He, like most conservatives, wanted to see the nation’s health care system improved if possible. “It will fall of its own weight,” Newt cautioned. “You won’t be able to pass it.” Hillary listened carefully “and promptly went off and did whatever she wanted.”10 The result: an unpopular bureaucratic behemoth that restricted patient choice and included individual and employer mandates. (Now where else have I heard that lately?) Far from empowering the people, Hillarycare was yet another big government Washington power grab—hardly the kind of people-centered leadership Clinton promised.
A precursor to the Obamacare nightmare, Hillarycare sought to seize control of the health care industry that, at the time, accounted for roughly one-seventh of the U.S. economy. “Not since Franklin Roosevelt’s War Production Board has it been suggested that so large a part of the American economy should suddenly be brought under government control,” wrote The Economist.11 As the Heritage Foundation cautioned at the time, the Clinton health care scheme would raise costs, not lower them—constrict patient choices, not expand them:
In effect, the Clinton Administration is imposing a top-down, command-and-control system of global budgets and premium caps, a superintending National Health Board and a vast system of government sponsored regional alliances, along with a panoply of advisory boards, panels, and councils, interlaced with the expanded operations of the agencies of Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Labor, issuing innumerable rules, regulations, guidelines, and standards. But virtually all the perverse incentives of the current system are to be left in place. . . . This amounts to a stimulation of demand, combined with a constriction of supply. This is akin to turning up the heat on a pressure cooker, while clamping down on the lid. At some point, the lid will blow and the costs of the system will skyrocket in bigger deficits and even higher taxes.12
That Hillary would design a massive centralized health system that seized power and control over the people’s health and well-being was a warning signal about the kind of president she would be. But at the time, all most people could focus on was seeing her health care boondoggle die as fast as possible, and thankfully it did.
Months later, Clinton nominated far-left judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg to replace Justice Byron White on the Supreme Court—a gift to his liberal base and elite Hollywood donors. (Don’t let her long and in many ways touching friendship with the late Justice Scalia fool you.) Ginsburg may be a very nice lady but her record on the Court has been one of unbridled judicial activism. (Once, just once, it would be nice to see the left suffer the same fate as conservatives by picking a Supreme Court justice who turns out to be the opposite of what they thought they were getting.) Indeed, Clinton’s first two years also included a second Court pick, Judge Stephen Breyer. Far from ruling in ways that protected the people’s constitutional rights, Ginsburg and Breyer proved to be reliably activist judges.
And if any middle-class voters in rural America thought Bill Clinton’s Southern roots might keep him from eroding gun rights, they were sorely mistaken as well. Instead of protecting the right to bear arms, Clinton signed gun control laws including the Brady Bill and the so-called assault weapons ban, decisions that rankled gun owners and Second Amendment supporters.
But Clinton’s biggest populist betrayals came on trade and jobs. His campaign famously declared, “It’s the economy, stupid!” Voters thought he understood they were electing him to foster and protect U.S. jobs. But once in the Oval Office, Clinton pursued the globalist trade policies the populist movement had warned about. The results were catastrophic for millions of workers and revitalized calls for an “America First” agenda in the years that followed.
Bill Goes Full Globalist & Unleashes the NAFTA Nightmare
Progressives have spent two decades waging a disinformation campaign to blur the lines of blame surrounding Bill Clinton and NAFTA. We saw it on display during the 2016 presidential campaign when the issue’s toxicity threatened to splash onto Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. Just weeks before the election, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow did her best to chop block for the Clintons. “Bill Clinton did not sign NAFTA,” she said with her usual whiff of intellectual superiority. “George H. W. Bush signed NAFTA.” The lie was so embarrassing that even the progressive publication Salon slammed Maddow. In a piece titled “Own Up to NAFTA, Democrats: Trump Is Right That the Terrible Trade Pact Was Bill Clinton’s Baby,” Salon wrote: “The usually whip-smart Rachel Maddow made a mind-boggling error the day after the Clinton-Trump debate. . . . Clinton absolutely did sign NAFTA.”13
The history here matters, because the NAFTA disaster still haunts us—something Donald Trump wisely hammered home during the campaign and pledged to renegotiate as president. In December of 1992, after President George H. W. Bush lost reelection and was preparing to leave office, he signed the trade treaty between Mexico, Canada, and the United States. But before NAFTA could actually become law, it would first need to pass Congress.
Enter Bill Clinton. Far from a passive observer, the new president spent months working to ram the bill through Congress. He had an uphill climb. By the summer of 1993, Democratic House whip David Bonior, who fiercely opposed NAFTA, had all but killed the bill and claimed to have 218 “no” votes lined up against it—enough to defeat the measure. Undeterred, Bill Clinton kicked into high gear.14
“I was ready to go all out to pass NAFTA in the Congress,” Clinton later said.15 In his presidential memoir, My Life, Bill Clinton recounts that he and his vice president “had called or seen two hundred members of Congress, and the cabinet had made nine hundred calls” pushing NAFTA’s passage. He also enlisted former president Jimmy Carter, who helped by “calling members of Congress all day long for a week.”16 During an intense, “table-pounding” Cabinet Room debate between Clinton and his advisers, Pulitzer Prize–winning Watergate veteran journalist Bob Woodward reported that the president punctuated the meeting with an ominous declaration: “I have to be a president beyond the borders.”17
Clinton barnstormed the country and airwaves promising Americans that NAFTA would yield a jobs bonanza. “I believe that NAFTA will create a million jobs in the first five years of its impact,” he said. “And I believe that that is more jobs than will be lost, as inevitably some will be, as always happens when you open up the mix to a new range of competition.” Not to worry, however; Bubba assured the hard hats and factory workers that he had crunched the numbers and determined that they would be just fine, better even. “NAFTA means jobs, American jobs, and good-paying American jobs.”18
Months out from the vote, the Times/CBS poll found that nearly half (49 percent) of Americans had never even heard of NAFTA. Of the ones who had, most believed it would result in fewer jobs.19 Clinton continued selling the trade pact. Although the president’s marketing megaphone was much louder, a small but influential handful of populists rose up and spoke out.
Pat Buchanan made the populist case in the pages of The Washington Post in a hard-hitting piece titled “America First, NAFTA Never.” “NAFTA epitomizes all that repels us in the modern state” and represents “the architecture of the New World Order,” Pat wrote. Furthermore, the trade agreement was “part of a skeletal structure for world government” and “would supersede state laws and diminish U.S. sovereignty.”
Buchanan then appealed directly to conservatives:
The battle over NAFTA is also a struggle about what it means to be a conservative in 1993. Who defines the term in the post-Reagan era?
To “conservatives of the heart,” even if NAFTA brings an uptick in GNP [Gross National Product] it is no good for America. No matter the cash benefits, we don’t want to merge our economy with Mexico, and we don’t want to merge our country with Mexico. We don’t want to force American workers to compete with dollar-an-hour Mexican labor. That’s not what America is all about.
Of late, some of our brethren on the Right have come to exhibit a near-monomaniacal obsession with economics, an almost religious faith in its ability to solve the crisis of the spirit and the dilemmas of the heart. But there are higher things in life than the bottom line on a balance sheet, or being able to buy Hong Kong suits at the cheapest possible price. Community and country are two of those things.20
Buchanan wasn’t the only former presidential candidate battling NAFTA; Ross Perot also went on offense against the trade deal. He published a book titled Save Your Job, Save Our Country: Why NAFTA Must Be Stopped—Now! Perot then held dozens of anti-NAFTA rallies throughout the country warning that NAFTA was a jobs killer. At the events, which sometimes drew crowds of 3,500 people or more, Perot delivered his usual mix of facts and down-home witticisms. “Money is going to chase cheap labor. That’s as simple as the law of gravity,” Perot told a Lansing, Michigan, crowd. The key, he said, was to “work together like the spokes within a wheel.” “There are so many Americans who don’t think this is a good idea, if we get organized [NAFTA] is dead on arrival before it hits Congress. . . . Do you think it’s right for these companies to move your jobs to Mexico?” he asked the crowd. The Establishment “don’t think you have any sense.”21
Perot’s most high-profile anti-NAFTA moment came during his 90-minute CNN Larry King Live debate with Vice President Al Gore on November 9, 1993. Clinton was short 25 votes in the House; the administration believed Gore debating Perot could tip the balance in the remaining weeks before the vote.
“This is a good deal for our country,” said Gore.
“The problem is, this is not good for the people of either country,” Perot said.
Both men then whipped out graphs and photos as visual aids. Gore was his usual obnoxious self, talking to the nation like he was reading a storybook to children.
“Every Nobel Prize winner” and “every past president” supports NAFTA, Gore said.
Perot turned to the camera and spoke directly to the people.
“A good deal will sell itself, folks—just plain talk. Four former presidents came out for it and couldn’t sell it. All of the secretaries of state came out for it and couldn’t sell it. . . . This dog just didn’t hunt. . . . They all tried to sell it to you and the fact that they couldn’t demonstrates that this deal is not good for our country,” said Perot.
“This is a fork in the road. The whole world is watching,” Gore declared. “This is a major choice for our country of historic proportions. If we give in to the politics of fear and make the wrong choices, the results will be catastrophic.” (If this sounds exactly like the left’s reactions to Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Accords, that’s because globalists always use the same “our way or DOOM!” hyperbolic rhetoric.)
Perot fired back. “If we have to, we the people, the owners of this country, will clean this mess up in 1994,” said Perot. “Working people all across the United States are extremely angry—there’s no way to stop them. They are not going to tolerate having their jobs continue to be shipped all over the world. We have to have a climate in this country where we can create jobs in the good old U.S.A.”
The Perot-Gore debate on Larry King Live became the highest-watched regularly scheduled show in CNN history at the time.22
Importantly, there was another populist back in 1993 who warned NAFTA would be a disaster—and he did it at a conference that featured Presidents Ford, Bush, and Carter. At that conference, Bush declared that “our future lies south of the border.”23 The lone voice disagreed. “The Mexicans want it, and that doesn’t sound good to me.” He explained that NAFTA “would only benefit Mexico,” was “poorly crafted,” and that “we never make a good deal.” He “was the only speaker swimming against the NAFTA current,” reported the Fresno Bee. The speaker’s name: Donald Trump. Records of his prophetic 1993 NAFTA warning were unearthed in February 2016 by none other than that right-wing rag BuzzFeed.24
Despite the populists’ best efforts, the Establishment got its way. In the House, 132 Republicans voted for NAFTA and 43 against. House Democrats voted 102 for NAFTA and 156 against it.25 The Senate passed the trade deal 61–38, with 27 Democrats and 34 Republicans voting in favor of NAFTA.
At the December 8, 1993, signing ceremony, President Clinton made bold promises and heralded the dawn of a new “economic order” that would “remake the world.” “In a few moments, I will sign the North American Free Trade Act into law,” said Clinton. “NAFTA will tear down trade barriers between our three nations. It will create the world’s largest trade zone and create 200,000 jobs in this country by 1995 alone. . . . When I affix my signature to the NAFTA legislation a few moments from now, I do so with this pledge: To the men and women of our country who were afraid of these changes and found in their opposition to NAFTA an expression of that fear . . . the gains from this agreement will be your gains, too.”26
Clinton not only lied, he made a “pledge” to the American working class who opposed NAFTA that they would receive “gains.”
They received pink slips instead.
The populists’ NAFTA predictions proved painfully prescient. Between 1993 and 2013, the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico and Canada went from $17 billion to $177.2 billion.27 Those figures aren’t from some right-wing think tank or Donald Trump shill. Those are the findings of Robert E. Scott, founder of the progressive Economic Policy Institute (EPI), an organization that frequently and strongly condemns Trump.
The effects on American workers have been even more catastrophic. EPI data concluded that in just 10 years, NAFTA was responsible for displacing 851,700 American jobs. To put that in context, that’s more people than live in Columbus, Ohio.28 “All of the net jobs displaced were due to growing trade deficits with Mexico,” stated the EPI. “Growing trade deficits and job displacement, especially between the United States and Mexico, were the result of a surge in outsourcing of production by U.S. and other foreign investors. The rise in outsourcing was fueled, in turn, by a surge in foreign direct investment into Mexico, which increased by more than 150 percent in the post-NAFTA period.”29
The destruction of nearly one million American jobs and the implosion of American manufacturing—that’s Bill Clinton’s NAFTA legacy.
Now that Donald Trump is president and progressives are losing their collective minds, Democrats have suddenly discovered newfound support for NAFTA. President Trump says it’s a disaster, so it must be good! they reason. A Gallup poll taken at the end of February 2017 found that Democrat support for NAFTA far outnumbers Republican support. Sixty-seven percent of Democrats now believe NAFTA has been good for America, a huge leap from 2004 when only 39 percent of Democrats supported it. And all this despite the fact that by 2008, even Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were calling for NAFTA to be renegotiated.
Whether President Trump can make good on his promises to renegotiate NAFTA and stanch the flow of American jobs to Mexico remains to be seen. The highly complex deal was negotiated a quarter-century ago and failed to take into account modern issues like digital trade and intellectual property rights. Renegotiating NAFTA will involve making sure that scores of variables tilt in America’s favor. The good news is that Trump wisely selected Robert Lighthizer as his U.S. trade representative—President Reagan’s deputy U.S. trade representative and one of our nation’s smartest trade experts. And at Lighthizer’s side as USTR general counsel is Stephen Vaughn, my brilliant former Skadden Arps colleague and one of my closest personal friends. These men are as good as it gets on trade and will serve our nation well. The other bright spot: it’s encouraging to know that the only president who wisely foresaw NAFTA’s fatal flaws way back in 1993 now occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
1994–1996: Bubba Gets Shellacked, Populist Results Ensue
When the 1994 midterm congressional races rolled around, Americans were fed up. Despite his promises of governing as a new kind of populist Democrat, Clinton had delivered an unpopular liberal agenda, tried to foist Hillarycare on the country, signed NAFTA into law, and had failed to “end welfare as we know it” like he had promised. The country was ripe for a wave election.
Leading the conservative charge would be the brilliant former college-history-professor-turned-congressional-backbencher Newt Gingrich. Newt’s adherence to conservative principles—combined with his unrivaled intellectual firepower—made him Clinton’s nemesis. He also understood populism’s power. Even before entering Congress, as a history professor at West Georgia College, Gingrich kept a file in his office titled “Populism,” where he would collect news articles about Americans whom Washington elites had failed. One headline read: “Why People Are Mad at Washington.”30 As James Pinkerton put it, “By 1989, [Gingrich] was the de facto leader of the House Republicans, and then, in 1994, he led a nationwide populist rebellion—the signature of which was the famous ‘Contract with America.’ ”31
Six weeks before the 1994 midterm elections, Newt Gingrich introduced the Contract with America—a list of 10 bills Republicans promised to bring up for a floor vote if they took back Congress. Reagan biographer Lou Cannon said over half of the Contract included language from Ronald Reagan speeches.32 The document contained popular proposals designed to shift government power back to the people through greater accountability, openness, and by placing limits on federal authority.
Making laws apply equally to members of Congress, auditing the Congress for waste, fraud, and abuse, placing term limits on committee chairmanships, introducing a three-fifths majority rule for tax hikes—the Contract with America’s populist appeal and over 60 percent plus approval rating made it a winner.33 Indeed, 367 GOP House candidates signed the Contract.34 The House ended up passing all of the plan’s proposals except for the constitutional amendment on term limits (which required a two-thirds vote).35
On the night of the 1994 midterm election, I cohosted a party at then-conservative David Brock’s townhome in Georgetown (while Brock and I had appeared on the 1995 cover of The New York Times Magazine in an issue on young conservatives, Brock would later go on to become a leftist leader and create Media Matters). The party was a raucous affair, with great music and multiple TVs blasting the latest election returns. Everyone was there to celebrate what we knew was going to be a big night for conservatives.
Meanwhile, the scene over at the Clinton camp was dire. Top Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos said he “was in pain” and “more anxious than ever” about the election. When the results came in, voters had repudiated Clinton’s liberal agenda:
Democrats everywhere were defeated, but not a single Republican incumbent running for governor, House, or Senate lost. The Republicans won back the Senate, captured a majority of the governorships for the first time since 1970, and took control of the House for the first time since 1954. Our nemesis Newt Gingrich was now Speaker—two heartbeats away from the White House.36
It was an exciting time to be a young conservative professional in Washington, especially after the GOP takeover shocked the Establishment. I found that the best way to pop the Establishment’s bubble of pomposity was through irreverent humor. One of the Clintons’ favorite events was a gathering of power players and influencers called Renaissance Weekend, an elite confab that still exists today and bills itself as the “grand-daddy of ideas festivals.” The whole thing struck me as a hubristic conclave of snobby know-it-alls and made me want to gag, so I decided to do something about it.
In response, lawyer Jay Lefkowitz and I cofounded our tongue-in-cheek counter-event—Dark Ages Weekend.
We held the first three-day gathering in 1994 over the New Year’s holiday, and a few hundred conservatives attended. One of the highlights was when Judge Robert Bork got up and gave one of my favorite speeches ever with an address he cheekily titled “A Defense of the Dark Ages.” He covered the historical innovations that occurred during the time period as only he could. By the end of his talk everyone was on their feet and clapping.
The following year, we upped the ante and sent out 3,000 invitations with a black dragon logo to conservatives and held the event at the Doral Golf Resort in Miami, complete with a “William the Conqueror Golf Tournament.” Our steering committee included William Bennett, Arianna Huffington (before she became a leftist and the creator of the Huffington Post), Jeb Bush, and Armstrong Williams. Speaker Newt Gingrich was our keynote speaker, and panel discussions included topics like “Life After the Welfare State: What Replaces It?” and “Health Care: Can the Industry Heal Itself?” The whole thing was a blast and a way for conservatives to show we could laugh at ourselves while advancing serious ideas about limited government. Dinging the Establishment’s self-important stuffiness made it extra sweet.
Beyond the fun, the two years between the midterm election and the 1996 presidential election also produced major conservative policy victories. After twice vetoing welfare reform legislation, and with his reelection chances now in jeopardy, the president was forced to support the reforms he’d abandoned. He would never survive a third veto politically, especially not after his populist 1992 campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it.” On August 22, 1996, the president signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. House majority leader Dick Armey said Clinton’s decision to finally support welfare reform was reminiscent of the old saying, “When you’re being run out of town, jump up front and act like it’s a parade.”37 Indeed, Clinton’s greatest successes occurred when conservatives dragged him back to his populist roots.
Progressives spread scare stories that the welfare reform act would spawn mass poverty and force children to live on the streets. “If, in 10 years’ time, we find children sleeping on grates, picked up in the morning frozen, and ask, Why are they here, scavenging, awful to themselves, awful to one another, will anyone remember how it began?” said Democrat senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.38
Instead of creating Generation Les Misérables, the law brought poverty rates for black children and single-parent homes to record lows, sent employment for unskilled single moms soaring, and slashed the welfare rolls by over 50 percent.39 It was a strong populist achievement that empowered people to break free of government dependency and live independent lives.
The Republican Congress also passed and Clinton signed an immigration law toughening border enforcement and strengthening deportation for illegal aliens. The left hated it, which of course meant it was great for the American people. It broadened the list of reasons illegal aliens could be deported and made it harder for progressive judges to find loopholes to keep them in the country. It also placed important restrictions on legal immigration.
The GOP Congress pulling Clinton back toward commonsense conservative-populist positions redounded to his benefit. In 1996, Clinton sailed to reelection, beating Republican Bob Dole 379 electoral votes to 159. After the 1994 Democrat drubbing, Clinton seemed to have learned his lesson and supported some Republican proposals to break the cycle of welfare dependency and crack down on illegal immigration.
But as was his way, Clinton strayed in his second term in more ways than one. There was, of course, the Monica Lewinsky scandal that consumed much of his second term and led to his impeachment. But for American workers, his greatest sin—a globalist trade scheme even worse than NAFTA—was yet to come.
Bubba’s Second Act
During Bill Clinton’s second term I worked as a political analyst for CBS Evening News (don’t laugh). Needless to say, my politics didn’t align with Dan Rather’s. But most weekends the network featured my on-air commentaries, which I introduced and wrapped from the anchor desk. The job took me across the country and out of the dead space of Washington. In October 1997 I traveled to California near the U.S.-Mexican border to report on a Clinton effort to curb illegal immigration.
Operation Gatekeeper was implemented in 1994 with bipartisan support, under the direction of Clinton attorney general Janet Reno. It included the construction of a five-and-a-half-mile-long double border fence from the Pacific Ocean eastward. Congress also added money to double the number of border patrol agents and improve biometric scanning to detect repeat offenders and criminals at weak spots along the border. News flash: The fencing worked; it choked off the entry point for thousands of lawbreakers. Although critics note that it merely pushed the illegal crossings eastward.
Driving on the dusty border road with the chief officer from U.S. Border Patrol Chief Johnny Williams, I heard his story about the old days, pre-Gatekeeper, when illegal immigrants would swarm right past the San Ysidro checkpoint and into the United States. California governor Pete Wilson, who himself had taken a bold and popular stand against the explosion of illegal immigration, told me a federal focus on securing the southern border was long overdue. Wilson had supported proposals the people overwhelmingly supported, like Proposition 187 to ban illegal aliens from using social services, Proposition 209 to prevent racial preferences in state hiring, and Proposition 227 to ensure English education in schools. The people were with him, but the elites labeled the measures “racist.”
Yet whatever populist inclination Bill Clinton had toward immigration enforcement was diluted by the economic punch he delivered to the nation’s gut during his second term. Indeed, he saved the best (worst) for last. If NAFTA had unleashed a flood of dangerous economic currents crashing into the American working class, his decision to pave the path for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) by giving it Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR, now known as Most Favored Nation) status swelled into an outsourcing tidal wave. Millions of American manufacturing jobs were washed out to sea—the South China Sea, that is.
Like any good elitist, Bill Clinton heralded loudest the policies that hurt regular working people the most. In My Life, Clinton says he believes that “clearing the way for [China’s] entry into the WTO” would “prove to be one of the most important foreign policy developments of my eight years.”40 Technically, that is a true statement. It is “one of the most important foreign policy developments” if you want to understand the destruction of American manufacturing. It is also “one of the most important foreign policy developments” for understanding how millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs were vaporized in record speed, even as China grew at a steroidal rate of muscular economic growth.
Let’s start with the basics. The World Trade Organization was officially created during Bill Clinton’s presidency in January 1995, but it had existed in other forms since 1948. On paper, the WTO claims its purpose is to act as a sort of “trade referee” between its 164 member nations. The WTO is supposed to help countries hammer out trade agreements, iron out legal contracts between nations seeking to buy and sell things to and from each other, and resolve disputes. So-called Most Favored Nation status means all WTO members agree to treat each other equally. If you lower tariffs for one country, you agree to extend the same tariff cut to all the other WTO members, as if they are all a “most favored” trading partner.
Clinton sold the China trade deal just as he’d sold NAFTA. He enlisted an all-star cast of globalist elites to help get the China trade bill through the Congress, including: Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, President George H. W. Bush’s globalist alter ego James Baker, and President Nixon’s brain trust Henry Kissinger.
In total, Clinton’s behind-the-scenes jawboning resulted in over 100 face-to-face or group meetings with members of Congress and dozens more over the phone.41
He made sweeping promises more grand than those he had made with NAFTA. “Economically, this agreement is the equivalent of a one-way street,” Clinton promised on March 8, 2000. “It requires China to open its markets—with a fifth of the world’s population, potentially the biggest markets in the world—to both our products and services in unprecedented new ways. All we do is to agree to maintain the present access which China enjoys.” It would be an economic dream come true, Clinton vowed. “We’ll be able to export products without exporting jobs.”42
“We do nothing,” President Clinton said bluntly. We take and the Chinese give, he explained. “They have to lower tariffs. They open up telecommunications for investment. They allow us to sell cars made in America in China at much lower tariffs. They allow us to put our own distributorships over there. They allow us to put our own parts over there.” He then doubled down on how beautiful and glorious America’s New World Order would be. “This is a hundred-to-nothing deal for America when it comes to the economic consequences.”43
All of Washington’s usual poker players anted up and played their strongest hands. Deep-pocketed Establishment forces like the United States Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable dropped their biggest-ever campaign for a bill at the time with a $10 million ad blitz—peanuts in comparison to the cash multinational corporations stood to gain in the form of outsourcing high-wage American jobs and gaining greater access to cheap Chinese labor and over one billion potential customers.44
Big Labor pushed back. “This is a betrayal of workers’ interests,” said the then-president of the United Steelworkers of America George Becker. “This is about moving factories from the U.S. so they can export back here.”45
Meanwhile, libertarians over at the Cato Institute were busy being, well, libertarians—rambling on about theoretical mumbo-jumbo while looking down their noses at the dum-dums who just didn’t get the need to worship trade agreements. “It is primarily U.S. exporters who will benefit,” declared Cato Institute senior fellow Doug Bandow. Furthermore, he said, “the silliest argument against” giving China permanent Most Favored Nation status “is that Chinese imports would overwhelm U.S. industry.” Most Favored Nation status for China “would create far more export opportunities for American than Chinese concerns,” the libertarian scholar explained.46
“If we vote for this, 10 years from now we will wonder why it was a hard fight,” Clinton said. “And if the Congress votes against this, they’ll be kicking themselves in the rear 10 years from now because America will be paying the price.”47
Clinton’s China trade campaign worked. On May 25, 2000, the Congress voted 237–197 to give China permanent Most Favored Nation status. Clinton’s cheerleaders at The New York Times heralded the vote as a “stunning victory” and said the president considered it a “crowning foreign policy triumph.”48 Clinton took his victory lap using words that send a shiver up the spine today. “This is a good day for America. In 10 years from now we will look back on this day and be glad we did this,” said Clinton. “We will see that we have given ourselves a chance to build the kind of future we want.”
Seventeen years hence, it is difficult to overstate the economic destruction wrought by China’s entry into the WTO and Congress and President Clinton’s decision to grant the Chinese permanent Most Favored Nation status. A 2016 analysis published in the Annual Review of Economics concluded that between 1999 and 2011, America lost between 2 and 2.4 million jobs.49 Others, like the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, put the American jobs loss figures even higher at 3.2 million jobs, when calculated between the years 2001 and 2013.50
The brutal economic reality was a cruel reversal of Clinton’s promises: all the gains were on the Chinese side, all the losses and devastation were America’s. American manufacturing jobs were eviscerated. From 2001 to 2011, U.S. manufacturing jobs plunged from 17.1 million to 11.8 million.51 That’s a loss of 5.3 million manufacturing jobs, a figure that’s nearly the population of the entire state of Minnesota.52
The narrowing of the trade deficit between the United States and China never materialized either. To the contrary, it exploded. In 2000, the annual trade in goods deficit with China stood at a towering $84 billion. After Clinton ushered China to the front of the line, the trade deficit more than quadrupled to a jaw-dropping $367 billion by 2015.53 The year before America let China join the WTO (1999), the United States accounted for 25.78 percent of world GDP. By 2014, that figure had dropped to 22.43—the lowest it has been in government records going back to 1969, according to the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In 1999, China’s annual GDP was $1.094 trillion. In 2015, it was more than $11 trillion. In 1999, the U.S. national debt was $5.7 trillion (the good ol’ days!). Today, after the big government globalist policies of the last several presidents, U.S. national debt stands at a mind-bending $20 trillion.54
How the Elites Blew Up the World
Everything Bill Clinton, the global business elites, and both Republican and Democratic members of Congress said in support of giving China permanent Most Favored Nation Status turned out to be wrong and untrue. The numbers that should have gone down went up, and the numbers that should have gone up went down. And all those claims about greater trade with China sparking some sort of human rights “renaissance” of religious freedom and democracy? Tell that to the Christians who have seen their churches pushed underground, the crosses stripped from the rooftops, and their pastors summarily imprisoned. By almost any measure, the United States became weaker while China, our chief geopolitical adversary, grew stronger. This decline was not inevitable—certainly no major U.S. policymakers predicted it. Instead, it is the result of a series of foolish mistakes that have consistently undermined our position while making life easier for our rivals. NAFTA sent our jobs to Mexico, and facilitating China’s rise shuttered American factories and incinerated millions of American jobs.
What the globalists don’t understand—or don’t care about—is that because of the enormous anti-American sentiment around the world, it’s almost impossible to create a multinational organization where U.S. interests don’t become compromised or harmed.
This was true of the United Nations, of NAFTA, of the WTO—and it would have been true of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as well had President Trump not wisely killed its prospects. NATO may have advanced our interests during the Cold War—because so many elites in Western Europe were genuinely afraid of the Soviets. But those days are gone.
The best strategy for the United States is to preserve its own independence as much as possible—thus leaving ourselves free to pursue our own interests. Otherwise we will be stuck in international organizations where we will always be unloved and outvoted.
Again, remember how we got here. By the late 1980s, the United States stood on a pinnacle of success and prosperity unmatched by any country in history. The Reagan voters, thinking that their political problems had been solved, quit paying so much attention to life in DC—so the American political system was left to the Bushes, the Clintons, and their donors. And what they decided to do with all of the power and money bequeathed to them by Reagan was to create a New World Order.
Their plans, of course, depended on an all-powerful United States, which would solve everyone’s problems. When there was a lack of jobs in Latin America, people from Latin America could simply move here and find work. When Asian companies built too much capacity for steel, automobiles—or anything, really—the United States would run massive trade deficits to buy up the surplus and keep Asian factories humming.
When Europeans wanted to take longer vacations, or spend more money on welfare programs, the United States would find the money and troops needed to protect Europe from its enemies. After all, we could afford it. And if the countries of the Middle East were stuck with flawed political systems, we would spend trillions of dollars—and thousands of lives—to give them better ones.
These trends continued for years under the leadership of both parties. As a result, the United States no longer has the money or the resources to do all of the tasks that the Clintons and the Bushes assigned to it. And so the New World Order is falling apart. China is throwing its weight around in Asia, while Russia does the same in Syria, because we are not strong enough to push back.
As we’ve seen, U.S. foreign policymakers on both sides of the aisle made a series of disastrous blunders. They believed that NAFTA would promote better relations in North America and reduce concerns over illegal immigration. They were wrong. Instead, illegal immigration from Mexico to the United States surged, while relations between all three NAFTA countries have generally deteriorated.
Leaders believed that the World Trade Organization would serve as a bastion of support for market economies, and would encourage countries like Japan to give up their mercantilist practices. They were wrong. Instead, the WTO has targeted the United States in an attempt to force us to change our laws to better suit their preferences.
The elites believed that facilitating the rise of China would lead to a freer and safer world. They were wrong. The relentless dictators in China are using their newfound wealth to consolidate their power, both inside China and around the world. If current trends continue, we will soon be driven from Asia, and a communist dictatorship will replace the United States as the world’s largest economy.
The globalists believed that giving away our manufacturing base and welcoming illegal immigrants from around the world would lead to a happier and more prosperous America. They were wrong. The U.S. economy has performed so poorly that experts like Larry Summers now suggest we have entered a period of permanent “secular stagnation.”55 Meanwhile, U.S. politics are riven by the utter mistrust that many voters feel for the elites who govern them—and by the contempt many of those elites feel for voters.
History is not kind to fools, and the United States is paying an enormous price for throwing away the strategic advantages we enjoyed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As President Reagan taught us, we have to be willing to say things the Establishment doesn’t want to hear.
A final note: Immediately after Congress passed the China trade deal and President Bill Clinton began his victory lap, a governor issued a congratulatory statement. “Passage of this legislation will mean a stronger American economy, as well as more opportunity for liberty and freedom in China.” His name: Texas governor George Walker Bush.