Our Most 'Corporate' President?
Clinton was a far worse crony capitalist than Bush is.
BY HOLMAN W. JENKINS JR.
WSJ.com
His drubbing in Iowa won't change one thing: Howard Dean set the tone of the Democratic campaign on an issue even beyond Iraq, and that's insisting George W. Bush is uniquely "beholden to corporate interests." Here is Mr. Dean blaming the president for the landmark business scandals of our time: "Our business culture is a disaster in this country. And this president's largely responsible for it. . . . He just winks and nods."
Every candidate has now adopted this line. John Edwards paved his way to New Hampshire this week with a TV commercial accusing Mr. Bush of letting Enron felons escape punishment: "I mean really, if somebody goes down to the grocery store and steals a half-gallon of milk, they end up in jail. But here we go with George Bush's friends. Get in trouble, they don't go to jail."
Never mind that Enron, Tyco, WorldCom and the like actually took place on Bill Clinton's watch. Never mind that the clean-up has been unprecedently speedy under the Bush Justice Department, with two dozen Enron culprits already in jail or indicted. Never mind that the previous record accounting fraud, Cendant, blew up halfway through Mr. Clinton's second term and we're still waiting for the principals to face trial later this year.
It turns out the lessons of Enron are as applicable to politics as they are to business: You can fool all the people some of the time.
Mr. Dean set the tone with a game plan worthy of any Wall Street pump and dump artist. "What you do is crank the heck out of your base," he said, "get them really excited and crank up the base turnout and you'll win the middle-of-the-roaders." He also happens to be a fan of George Lakoff, a Berkeley professor of cognitive linguistics who argues that, in appealing to voters' need for a mommy and daddy, the right symbolic language is more important than making sense.
Mr. Dean embraced this philosophy with gusto. He's this year's Pat Buchanan, the candidate who turned the 1996 New Hampshire primary into a referendum on downsizing. The war may divide Democrats, but none dissent from the view that the Bush administration is unusually cozy with corporations and that voters must be told so over and over. Even a few conservative pundits have begun to believe, though evidence for the claim is extraordinarily slight:
Mr. Bush's energy policy (surprise) provides incentives for producers of energy. His most naked instance of business favoritism was one most Democrats approved of: tariff protection for the steel industry. Then there's Halliburton: Dick Cheney once worked there, which for some Democrats is sufficient evidence that the Iraq war was started to line Halliburton's pockets.
Mr. Dean submits this record of coziness as proof that we went wrong, oh, somewhere around 1940. He wants corporate taxes restored to their antediluvian 30% to 40% share of federal revenues, rather than the current 10%. Of course, the shift was more apparent than real thanks to the vast expansion of Medicare and Social Security, both paid for with direct payroll deductions. Never mind: He's making a symbolic statement about fairness.
Voters are stuck picking one candidate among two or three to answer all their hopes and fears about the future of government. Symbolic language is inevitable when politicians try to make their case under such circumstances, but Mr. Dean's folding act in Iowa may have proved that there's a limit to how much symbolism even Democratic voters can stand. The conspicuous chasm between his campaign rhetoric and his conservative, even admirable, record in Vermont always posed a question of whether he was secretly laughing at his fans.
As they resume the spitball fight in New Hampshire, Democrats ought to keep a couple things in mind: No American administration can be successful if it doesn't create a climate in which companies operate and invest with confidence. Also, Bill Clinton was tons worse than George Bush (at least so far) in letting policy cross into cronyism.
To wit: He personally phoned King Fahd to beg for sales on behalf of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, whose executives were contributors. His Commerce Department sponsored sales trips to China for CEOs who made large donations to the Democratic National Committee. One of his last official acts was to issue a mysterious pardon to fugitive commodities trader Marc Rich, after being lobbied by his ex-wife, a big donor
The country is still cleaning up the legal mess, including a recent $14 million fine paid by a company run by Mr. Clinton's single biggest campaign contributor. Its offense: illegally shipping missile technology to China. Another big Clinton bankroller, Indonesian tycoon James Riady, last year paid $8.6 million in penalties for making serial illegal contributions to bankroll Mr. Clinton's career since the Arkansas days.
We offer this just for perspective. The Bush administration may have countless faults, but it's no more corpocratic than any other administration and probably less than some. Corporate America was certainly unthrilled with Mr. Bush's Iraq war: That's not the kind of risk-taking it likes. Democrats, meanwhile, have adopted the college left's habit of using the word "corporate" as a synonym for illegitimacy, but in office they too notice that companies generate all the country's GDP, employ 110 million citizens and are the undergirding of the nation's savings. Mr. Dean himself enjoyed a certain coziness with utilities and tax-avoiding insurance firms in Vermont.
The latter connections were just two of many peccadilloes that allowed Dick Gephardt, in the waning days of Iowa, finally to affix the fatal label "phony" to Mr. Dean. It stuck partly because much of the press happens to agree. Now that the Vermont governor no longer is scaring the pants off his rivals, maybe we can hope to hear less ridiculous rhetoric about the role of business in American life.
Mr. Jenkins is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. His column appears in the Journal on Wednesdays. He is also editor of OpinionJournal's Political Diary, a new premium e-mail service. Click here for subscription information and sample columns.
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