First, the recession was over with well before Clinton took office. Second, Clinton inherited a much better foreign policy situation than he bequeathed. He was the first post- War president to not have to give much thought to the Cold War or military preparedness, and he took advantage of that. However, he dissipated a lot of the prestige that the United States had accumulated through the actions of Reagan and Bush is dealing with the Soviets, helping to bring the Cold War to a close, and showing that we still had not only the power, but the will, to wage war when necessary.
Most of the time that Clinton was in office, we still ran deficits, and it was the Republican Congress that pushed the timetable for deficit reduction. In times of war and national crisis, money is borrowed. That is normal, and all that Bush is doing.
Al- Qaida had the 911 attack in the works for a couple of years. It had nothing to do with Bush. It had a lot to do with the perception of Clinton as unwilling to commit resources to fighting terrorism; being subject to blackmail in the case of North Korea; and only using force when the action was brief and involved bombing, not when a real military commitment was necessary. Even in Bosnia, he mostly waited until the ethnic cleansing was finished, then got the parties to agree to a cease fire.
Anchoring Russia to the West is huge. Any kind of build down in nuclear arsenals is big.
We liberated Afghanistan, and have had a great deal of success in international police and intelligence cooperation. Already, various plots in Europe have been foiled, and we are doing what is necessary to improve domestic intelligence and prepare for internal emergencies. But it is the beginning, and your complaint is like whining that things were pretty dangerous in 1942.
The hi- tech bubble burst. Clinton is not completely to blame, but it was predictable, and Clinton and Gore were unreflective cheerleaders for the techno- boom. If the adjustment had come two years earlier, we might have had an easier time of it. Instead, things had gotten crazy, with venture capitalists throwing money at dot.coms with no business plan, and the value of initial public offerings quadrupling by noon. In any event, it was Clinton's recession if it belonged to anyone. |
