Chapter Seven

WAGER

President Clinton bellowed at his aides, who sat with him in the Oval Office like schoolchildren, cringing with a mixture of resentment at his lashings and guilt that his anger was in some measure justified. “We are losing our soul,” Clinton shouted, pounding the arm of his chair.

It was the afternoon of April 7. The crafting of the Clinton economic plan had begun three months earlier in a state of panic as the new team came to grips with the magnitude of the federal budget deficit. Several times the process threatened to hurtle into disarray before magnificently coming together with Clinton’s fine February 17 speech to the Congress. Chaos, near disaster, triumph: a characteristic Clinton performance. So, too, was what came next. The hours of painstaking meetings over the winter had ostensibly settled the major fiscal questions facing the administration: what to do about tax increases and the right balance between new domestic spending and deficit reduction. Now, in the spring, it was becoming clear Clinton’s course was far from settled—not in his own mind, not among his quarreling subordinates.

It had been a cross day to start with in the White House, even before the Oval Office session turned sour. Hillary Clinton’s father was hours away from death in Little Rock, after falling ill from a stroke three weeks earlier. And the president had started the morning with a vivid red scratch across two inches on the right side of his face, which had been the subject of inordinate comment around the White House. He cut himself shaving, Dee Dee Myers explained to reporters. No, actually, it happened while roughhousing with Chelsea, Clinton said later. This tangled explanation had set press room gossips buzzing with another scenario: that the president was scratched in a row with the first lady, who supposedly had returned from a bedside vigil in Little Rock and learned that singer Barbra Streisand had stayed overnight at the White House. Privately, press office aides acknowledged they were not sure what the truth was; they had just repeated what others told them to say. Beset by rumors, and with Hugh Rodham’s death imminent, the president was in a poor frame of mind for bad news.

Labor Secretary Robert Reich and Gene Sperling had sought the meeting precisely to deliver such news. In the six weeks since Clinton spoke to Congress, Clinton’s economic package had been moving along nicely. In March, the House and Senate both endorsed the conceptual outlines of his plan. These were not the essential votes. The actual budget would not come before Congress until the summer. Importantly, however, the House and Senate actions did set the annual spending limits within which Clinton’s entire five-year economic package was supposed to fall. Reich and Sperling were worried that what came dressed as victory was in truth a partial defeat. In particular, they feared the president did not understand that in passing his plan the Congress also had reaffirmed existing provisions in the law that imposed automatic caps on federal domestic spending. These caps likely would limit new initiatives, such as Clinton’s coveted “investments” in education and worker training, to a small fraction of what the president wanted in 1993 and the years to follow. When Clinton found out, he blew up. How could they have spent hours and hours going through nearly every line of the budget, yet he was not aware of something as fundamental as this? It was a flashing moment of recognition for a new president. As much as he was trying to impose his values and directions on government, the wheels of policymaking had a momentum of their own.

“Where are all the Democrats?” he challenged his own team. “I hope you’re all aware we’re all Eisenhower Republicans. We’re Eisenhower Republicans here, and we are fighting the Reagan Republicans. We stand for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market. Isn’t that great?” These vivid words became famous a year later when journalist Bob Woodward recounted the episode in a book reconstructing Clinton’s fateful first year. Sperling remembered recoiling at seeing words delivered in a flush of impatience invested with such significance. Clinton hardly conceived of himself or his program as in the cautious spirit of Dwight Eisenhower. The line echoed even so.

This is because the president, in his sarcasm, had appraised his circumstances rather shrewdly. How had he gotten here? It was one of the abiding mysteries of 1993, which in many ways only deepened in the years to follow. Here was Clinton, liberal by instinct, populist in style, heedless and sometimes irresponsible in his personal life. Yet he was pursuing a fiscal course that was the essence of sober responsibility. His mind had pointed him unavoidably in this direction. His heart was still tugging another way. By instinct, Clinton was a dreamer who viewed American history as a pantheon of heroic presidents he hoped to someday join. During the 1992 campaign he had read Geoffrey C. Ward’s biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt, A First-Class Temperament. The book, he said, had lit a “burning passion” to see the Roosevelt estate at Hyde Park. A month after becoming president, he made the trip, laying a single red rose on the FDR grave. Late that year he gave a speech quoting his hero’s call for “bold, persistent experimentation.” He linked the New Deal’s burst of big-spending innovation with the new programs in his own agenda. Clinton’s frustrations mounted as he saw his grand plans grow ever more stolid, more like Ike than FDR. Clinton was first a romantic. But he was second—and more emphatically—a realist. When faced with almost any difficult policy decision, he would nearly always end up where deficit-obsessed establishment experts told him to be. The path there was often tortuous.

This tension between Clinton’s dueling desires—the romance of bold government initiative versus the realism of deficit reduction—was one great source of Washington drama that first year. So, too, was the fate that met the sober-minded program Clinton had proposed. The capital’s political culture had soured over the previous decade, defined increasingly by partisan anger, the quest for short-term advantage, and fundamental mistrust toward and among politicians. In this environment, the economic plan on which Clinton’s presidency hinged over the next four months was never more than a few steps away from failure.

There was one person whose job it was to anchor Clinton to the political and financial establishment—and to its prescriptions for the American economy. Secretary Lloyd Bentsen’s suite on the second floor of the Treasury Building looked down on the White House. This was apt, for during Clinton’s wobbly opening months in office it was not always apparent who was subordinate in the relationship. Tall and elegantly tailored, his profile creased with wrinkles, Bentsen was a quarter century older than the fresh-faced and fleshy president he served. World War II, not Vietnam, had been his defining experience. In his early twenties, Bentsen was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for the thirty-five bombing runs he piloted over Nazi-occupied Europe. He liked short meetings, not Oval Office bull sessions. Of Clinton’s endless White House meetings, Bentsen noted wearily, “He’s the meetingest fellow I ever saw.” He wanted crisp decisions, yet like everyone else who came into Clinton’s orbit he learned that any matter that seemed to be closed was sure to be reopened. This was Clinton’s way of reassuring himself that all risks had been considered, all options explored; it drove Bentsen to distraction. Yet precisely because Clinton was so attuned to risk, and so in need of reassurance, Bentsen quickly became indispensable to him. For all their differences, their partnership was probably the most consequential policy relationship of Clinton’s first year. The only competition in this category was Clinton’s relationship with the woman in charge of his health care initiative, who happened to be his wife.

Bentsen had first come to Washington as a House member in the early 1950s, then left when he decided he wanted to return to Texas and make a fortune. He did, in the insurance industry. He returned to Washington as a senator in 1970, when he won election over Republican George Bush. In the ensuing twenty-two years, he had established himself as one of the city’s quiet powers, wielding far-reaching influence over tax policy, health care, and much else as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. However formidable his presence in Washington, he was unknown to most Americans outside of Texas until 1988, when Michael Dukakis tapped him to be the Democratic vice presidential nominee. In one of the Democrats’ few happy memories that year, Bentsen in the vice presidential debate disemboweled his callow Republican opponent, Dan Quayle, with one surgical thrust: “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” Bentsen, however, was more content in a world of businessmen, lobbyists, and Washington elders than he was onstage. It was because his Treasury secretary was ambassador to this world that Clinton needed both his approval and the approval of others whom he could bring along. Beyond need, Clinton genuinely wanted Bentsen’s approval. He was extraordinarily deferential to him, eager to impress him with his good intentions and with his understanding of economic matters. Clinton’s courtship succeeded, to a degree. Bentsen was impressed by Clinton, by his energy and his whirring mind and his enthusiasm for governing. A year into the job, the Treasury secretary sat in his office one day reflecting on the eight presidents he had known, and concluded that Clinton was in some respects the smartest. “I think this fellow is a step above in the way of being able to correlate and see how it all works together,” he mused. But Bentsen added that this very talent for seeing multiple dimensions of a problem could be a curse: “He also has difficulty making decisions.” More seriously, he believed Clinton’s incessantly political nature was self-defeating.

Part of Bentsen’s job was to curb the political advisers, whom Clinton let roam freely in policy debates but who did not support deficit reduction on substantive or political grounds. But over time his most important duty was to be confessor to a president whose faith in his own agenda often wavered. Clinton had staked his presidency on a theory that reducing the deficit would impress the Federal Reserve and Alan Greenspan that the government’s fiscal house was being put in order. Once Greenspan and the Wall Street bond markets became convinced that the days of massive government borrowing were over, interest rates would come down. This in turn would spur investment by corporations and lower mortgages for homeowners. If all the gears turned as he theorized, vast suppressed potential for productivity would be unleashed and the economy would boom. But this was a big if. The theory was really just a wager. And even if it turned out to be a wise one, the payoff required the patience of an impatient man. With his calm and dignified manner, Bentsen was there to gently stroke Clinton and assure him that everything would be fine. When Clinton complained that his economic package was a “Wall Street plan” with nothing for “the people who elected me,” Bentsen gave a little sermon. “Wait and see,” he counseled. “It is paying off.”

In many ways, the Treasury secretary lived up to his reputation as the administration’s conservative counterweight. Truth be told, he was opposed to large chunks of Clinton’s agenda. He thought the so-called stimulus package—the $30 billion in public works spending and tax breaks that was designed to pump up the lagging economy—was foolish. How could Clinton convince people he was serious about deficit reduction when he was pushing this liberal grab bag? Similarly, Bentsen believed the president and Hillary Clinton were making a terrible mistake by pursuing a comprehensive overhaul of health care, instead of aiming for more attainable, incremental reforms. Bentsen bristled every time Clinton lapsed into populist rhetoric suggesting he was eager to soak the rich. “Get that damned language out,” he would bark. “You don’t need that in this country.” It was bad politics, Bentsen warned, because “there’s just a lot of people out there that think someday I’d like to be rich.” Certainly Bentsen understood such feelings. He remarked in passing to an aide one day that he always regretted that he never had a private jet. Even so, he was outraged at how the gulf between rich and poor had widened in the Reagan years. Of the administration’s tax increases, he told Clinton, “The rich can damned sure handle it!” There was still a hint of Texas populism inside him. Furthermore, for all his gentlemanly demeanor, Bentsen knew how to settle a score. In the opening days of the administration, there was much chatter around Washington about Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the man who succeeded the Texan as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Moynihan was complaining publicly about not receiving sufficient attention or deference from Clinton. Then one day in Time magazine a quote appeared about the senator from an anonymous administration official that echoed loudly through the capital: “He’s cantankerous, but he could not obstruct us even if he wanted to. . . . We’ll roll right over him if we have to.” The quote was widely assumed to have come from George Stephanopoulos or Rahm Emanuel or one of the other brash young men on Clinton’s unseasoned staff. The words seemed to capture perfectly the impertinence of the new White House crowd, many of whom were still in diapers when Moynihan was already a towering figure in national life. Only years later, in the administration’s closing days, did writer Michael Kramer reveal the name of his “senior official.” It was Bentsen sending a message to Moynihan, one gray hair to another, warning him to leave this young president alone.

Robert Reich was the opposite of Lloyd Bentsen in nearly every particular. Where the Treasury secretary was understated, the labor secretary was voluble and even brash. While Bentsen towered in his physical presence, Reich suffered from a congenital condition called Fairbanks disease that left him just under five feet tall. Bentsen came to his position scarcely knowing the president, yet ended up with outsized influence. Reich had known Clinton for more than two decades, but found himself that year in a lonely battle for his ideas.

He and Clinton met aboard the SS United States, which was carrying both young men to Oxford, England, where they had been accepted in that year’s class of Rhodes scholars. The seas became too high for Reich, who retreated to his cabin with horrible nausea. Clinton knocked on the door with chicken soup and ginger ale, and a friendship was forged. After Oxford, both Clinton and Reich went to Yale Law School. Both men were high achievers, amply ratifying the judgment of the Rhodes scholar judges. While Clinton rose in Little Rock, Reich served in the Carter administration, and after the rout of Democrats in 1980, he took refuge at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he began a successful career as writer and lecturer. By the 1980s, Reich was probably a more celebrated name than Clinton, thanks to a series of popular books diagnosing the ills of the American economy and prescribing a renaissance of progressive government as the remedy. He was not an academically credentialed economist. Instead, he was more like an intellectual publicist, with a gift for promoting ideas and himself that had made him a considerable name in progressive circles. Reich thought, with reason, that he and Clinton believed all the same things about the direction progressive government needed to take in the 1990s. Reich had laid out the case in the 1991 book The Work of Nations, about the problems of the working class in a high-technology and increasingly globalized economy. His answer? Vastly increased public spending on education and mid-career retraining, so that the people left behind in the contracting “old economy” could contrive better futures for themselves in a high-skill new economy. This vision was precisely the one animating Clinton’s 1992 platform, and after he won in November few people doubted there would be a prized spot for Bob Reich.

Reich quickly concluded he did not want to be a Clinton retainer inside the White House. Clinton often made his staff feel as if they were hopelessly inadequate. He treated outside friends and experts, however, as if they were the smartest people in the world. Reich shrewdly realized that from a plaform outside the White House, the Department of Labor, he would be part of Clinton’s economic team and well positioned to implement the ideas for modernizing the American workforce that he had spent the past decade promoting.

It took Reich mere weeks to see that the reality was going to be more complicated. In February, during the long deliberations for crafting the economic plan, he fumed that the newspapers, with their emphasis on deficit reduction, made Clinton seem like Calvin Coolidge. Reich believed in an economic theory quite different from what Bentsen had offered. For him, the deficit was an abstraction, a way of counting numbers. What was real, he believed, were the problems average Americans were facing, and Clinton’s economic and political success would depend on whether those problems were being met with new and better policies. Precisely because he knew Clinton, had stayed up late talking about these ideas with him, Reich felt the pang acutely as he saw Clinton embrace conventional conservative doctrine about the imperative of deficit reduction. He knew Clinton’s heart was with him, but was surprised to learn how little this mattered. The president, so confident in most areas, had become tentative and deferential when it came to his own budget. “Two worlds were foreign to him: Congress and Wall Street,” Reich recalled. “These were two areas where he did not feel competent, but he very much wanted to be respected by these worlds.” Bentsen offered an avenue to that respect, Reich did not. “He felt he had to win a couple battles that the establishment wanted him to win.”

Reich was sympathetic. He worried about the president, who during the spring of 1993 was working to the point of exhaustion. Reich felt his friend did not look at all well. And for all his frustrations, Reich realized Clinton was trying his best to play a bad hand. The description was equally true of Reich, who savored what victories he could. Clinton’s economic plan included a major expansion of the existing Earned Income Tax Credit aimed at people just above the poverty line, which helped ensure that it made more sense for them to work than give up and go on welfare. This would prove to be one of the most important and tangible progressive achievements of the Clinton years. But in general, Reich lost more than he won.

The cause of liberal government spending, already in retreat due to Bentsen’s ascendancy, suffered a major blow on April 21. The stimulus package, which Democrats said would revive the economy with a burst of well-targeted public works spending and which Republicans dismissed as a trough of liberal pork, was dead. The White House and Senate Democrats acknowledged that they could not break a Republican-backed filibuster preventing the bill from a vote. Many Democrats, including conservative David Boren from Oklahoma, had also made clear their opposition. Clinton struck a wounded tone at a news conference. Noting that Republicans had voted for similar measures when Reagan was president, Clinton said, “I just misgauged it. I’ve just been here ninety days.”

The most immediate implication for the defeat was to make plain that Clinton was eminently beatable if minority leader Robert Dole and Republicans kept up a disciplined front. But the demise of the stimulus package had consequences beyond that, which became clear only over time. It marked the end of a particular Democratic faith that had endured for six decades. The economist John Maynard Keynes had been its intellectual father. He believed that modern economies could be managed by controlling the flow of government money. When times were lean, government could pump up the economy through vigorous spending, running deficits if necessary, until the private sector rebounded. Several generations of Democrats, starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt, had embraced the same notion. It was by definition a liberal theory—a splendid revelation that the social and public works spending that most Democrats supported was also the key to the broader health of the economy. The Keynesian faith reflected an era of great ideological struggles—America in wars hot and cold—in which it was natural to suppose that presidents should hold the reins of the economy in their hands and could steer with precision. Even Republican presidents like Richard Nixon accepted the premise. “We’re all Keynesians now,” he famously said. Two decades later, by Clinton’s arrival, a competing premise reigned. It held that a vast economy could not be affected much by the items in a president’s budget or what Congress chose to appropriate. Instead of fiscal policy, the key to the economy was monetary policy—the decisions by which the Federal Reserve decided how much money was in circulation, and at what interest it could be borrowed. If the Fed thought the economy needed a boost, it lowered rates. If it thought inflation was getting too high, it tugged on its money leash and raised rates. Monetarism was in its essence a conservative policy. Historically the great fear of central bankers was inflation, not weak growth. Monetarism was also anti-democratic, since the chairman and governors of the Federal Reserve were appointed and not accountable to voters. Clinton’s policy in early 1993 stood on two legs that were trying to move in opposite directions. One leg was based on the primacy of monetary policy, which dictated that Clinton should cut the deficit and hope that the Federal Reserve lowered rates. Another leg was based on the primacy of fiscal policy, which dictated that Clinton should try to boost the economy with a burst of spending. Now the second leg was kicked away. For the rest of his presidency Clinton’s economic priority was to accommodate Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve.

At the time, Clinton and his policy team spoke of the stimulus package as a relatively modest proposal, just a warm-up act for the larger progressive resurgence to come once the deficit had been tamed. In fact, never in his eight-year presidency would he spend as much on a new domestic program in a single year as the $30 billion he had tried but failed to pass in his opening months with this bill. The defeat showed how Clinton’s basic assumptions about presidential power were being forcibly altered. He was a progressive president acquainting himself with governance in the era of limits.

If Clinton was governing like an Eisenhower Republican, it was reasonable to assume that there might come at least one benefit of that: the support of some Republicans. He got no such thing.

Republicans at least were candid. In Clinton’s first week in office, they sent word that if his economic package contained any tax increases—as of course it would, since he had campaigned expressly on raising taxes on the rich—he could expect zero Republican support. Senator Pete Domenici, a friendly Republican, told budget director Leon Panetta that the word had come down from the GOP leadership that they expected members to hold the line in voting against Clinton on all tax increases. The president was taken aback when Panetta told him. Not long after, Clinton heard it directly when Bob Dole came to the White House for his first meeting with the president. Dole growled that other presidents he had known at least served doughnuts during morning meetings. Was he kidding? Leaving nothing to chance, Clinton aides scurried to bring Dole a chocolate doughnut. It did not sweeten Dole’s message. He told Clinton that Republicans planned to blame Clinton and his taxes if the economy did not improve. It was nothing personal, Dole seemed to be saying, just business.

Just as Clinton was betting on an untested theory, Republicans were placing an opposite bet. The papers that spring were filled with gaudy predictions about the calamity that would follow if Clinton’s plan was enacted. Senator Phil Gramm of Texas called it a “one-way ticket to recession.” In the House, Newt Gingrich warned it “will kill jobs” and “actually increase the deficit.” In due course, these predictions proved ostentatiously wrong. At the time, they underlined the extraordinary risks Clinton was taking.

Clinton’s performance in budget debate in 1993 had been replete with political miscalculation. The mixed messages of the stimulus package and deficit reduction reflected a larger disjunction. Clinton’s public message was being crafted by consultants like Mandy Grunwald, Paul Begala, and pollster Stanley Greenberg, who basically disdained the substance of his program. Occasionally they were joined by James Carville, the leader of the 1992 “war room,” but by then he was already transitioning away from domestic political consulting toward a lucrative career as a celebrity commentator. The facts gave Clinton an impressive story to tell. After a generation of fiscal profligacy, he was dutifully asking Americans to make the necessary sacrifices to clean up the mess. This was not a story his political advisers wanted to tell. Begala in particular thought the sacrifice message was sacrilege. “This is an economic growth package,” he wrote in one memo to the president and cabinet in February. “It is not a deficit-reduction package, a shared sacrifice package, or a pain package.” The angry and burdened middle class who, Begala believed, had secured Clinton his victory already had sacrificed under Republican policies. The winning message, the consultants believed, should be liberation from the old regime, combined with an overtly populist message that the rich were finally going to be forced to pay their share. Begala described the message he wanted Clinton to deliver in a July memo to the president: “HALLELUJAH! Change is coming. . . . Your body language, attitude and confidence will be infectious,” he urged the president. “If you become a merchant of pain, you’ll find that the middle class isn’t buying—they already have enough, thank you. Now go forth and spread the good news.”

The Carville-Begala brand of populist optimism had worked well during the campaign, but it was a dubious theme for 1993. Clinton, after all, was pursuing a policy based on elite assumptions about the importance of deficit reduction. Wrapping his plan in different paper could hardly disguise its essential nature. Moreover, the idea of shared sacrifice did indeed resonate with many of the voters Clinton needed by his side—people who had voted for Perot, or who had voted for Clinton, but with reservations.

Begala and the other consultants were on more solid ground with their other great obsession—avoiding anything that looked like a tax on the middle class. If the political advisers had gotten their way—and, for all their access to Clinton, most of them felt no internal debates were breaking their way—the president would have raised taxes on the top 1 or 2 percent of taxpayers but scrupulously avoided new taxes on everyone else. This was not what happened. In February, Vice President Gore, arguing that “if you’re bold, people will come around,” had successfully lobbied for inclusion of his proposal to apply the BTU tax. Under Clinton’s prodding, House Democrats passed the plan. But when conservative Democrats in the Senate, led by the Clinton skeptic David Boren, made clear the strength of their opposition, Clinton yielded to reality and the tax was dropped. (House Democrats, feeling that they had been pushed into a politically damaging vote only to be abandoned by Clinton, complained about being “BTUed”—soon a synonym for presidential cravenness.) The tax was replaced with a more conventional levy on gasoline. Bentsen said he could eliminate the gas tax if Clinton would scale back a proposed expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit aimed at helping the working poor. He would not—a decision that contradicted the popular stereotype of Clinton as unwilling to pay a price for his principles. For his part, Bentsen had been in Texas politics a long time, and he allowed that he’d never seen a politician get licked over a gas tax.

So here was a new president elected with 43 percent of the vote, pushing a plan replete with political vulnerabilities, with only tepid support from his own party and the vehement opposition from the other side. His policy advisers were at odds over substance; his political advisers thought the policy team was hijacking Clinton’s presidency. Clinton had only one real asset, which was his own prodigious effort. If he had been irresolute earlier, he was now, with his political survival imperiled, a model of discipline and purpose. “Let me see the sheet!” he would say when Howard Paster, the congressional liaison, walked into the Oval Office, carrying the latest vote tallies. Paster recalled that “he’d sit there and he’d have the sheet, and he would get on the phone,” talking himself hoarse. When a phone call did not work, he would summon the wavering member to the White House. If that did not work, he would schedule a trip to the lawmaker’s district. It was a frenzy of activity worthy of Lyndon B. Johnson. But LBJ had known that blandishments work better when combined with a measure of fear. In Clinton’s case, members of Congress learned that there was an incentive to hold back their votes. Some members wanted commitments from Clinton to help with fund-raising. Some, like North Carolina Congressman Martin Lancaster, wanted pledges that he would not single out tobacco taxes for increases as the way to pay for health care reforms. Some like Congresswoman Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, a freshman Democrat from Philadelphia who rightly feared that her yes vote would be political suicide in her tax-loathing district, wanted a commitment that Clinton would visit her district and talk about the need to curb spending on entitlements like Social Security and Medicare. There was one poignant moment, however, when Clinton was visited by a House member who wanted nothing. It was Congressman Bill Natcher, a courtly Democrat from Kentucky, who came to Congress in 1953 and for the next four decades never missed a vote. As they sat side by side in two big yellow chairs in the Oval Office, the president laid it on thick. Clinton asked Natcher about his wife, and cooed over his remarkable voting record: “I suppose you’re like Cal Ripken—once you got started on this thing, now you can’t turn it off.” Natcher soaked up this flattery, but then abruptly brought Clinton’s charm offensive to a halt: “Let me just tell you something,” he said gravely. “You’re my ninth president, and I’m going to make sure you succeed.”

Through the spring and summer of 1993, Clinton did succeed—barely. On May 27, the House backed his plan, with minor variations, by a vote of 219 to 213. Weeks later, in the early morning hours of June 25, Vice President Gore broke a 49–49 vote in the Senate to pass its version. The narrowness of these votes loudly announced the fragility of Clinton’s success. The House and Senate versions needed to be reconciled by conference committee before returning to both chambers for final passage. Clinton’s economic plan would be enacted only if he lost no votes in the Senate and no more than three in the House before the final vote, which would come before the congressional recess in August. This seemed unlikely. But the alternative—a defeat on the most important item in a new administration’s agenda—was unthinkable. For the next month, Clinton and his White House lived on a legislative precipice.