Bill Clinton’s new book, Back to Work, is really several books in one slender volume. It’s a lucid one-man rebuttal of the Tea Party’s anti-government agenda. A series of shrewd talking points for Democrats trying to hold on to the White House and battling for control of Congress in the midst of a sour economy and growing voter discontent. A self-serving reminder of the prosperity the country enjoyed during Mr Clinton’s tenure in the White House, meant to burnish his legacy. And a practical set of proposals – some borrowed and some new, some innovative and some highly sketchy – for restoring economic growth and creating jobs.
The book shows the former president in two familiar modes: freewheeling policy wonk and genial retail politician.
At a time when anti-government ranting dominates the Republican debates and the Democrats often seem on the defensive, Mr Clinton serves up a succinct common-sense argument for why America needs a strong national government, why both spending cuts and increased tax revenues are necessary for addressing the debt problem, and why that debt problem “can’t be solved unless the economy starts growing again”.
Although Mr Clinton questions the Obama administration’s embrace of nuclear-power loan guarantees, the bulk of this book underscores how closely aligned Mr Clinton is with President Obama on many policy issues.
At the same time, the book has a passive-aggressive subtext, which suggests that Mr Clinton has stepped into a gap – has gone “back to work” – to sell Obama policies that have not been persuasively sold to the American people.
What sort of authority does Mr Clinton bring to writing this book? His admirers will argue that he is the ideal author for a book about fixing the economy, and will point to his record as president — reducing the federal deficit, overhauling welfare, blunting his party’s reputation for profligate spending and presiding over the longest economic expansion on record with falling unemployment, rising incomes and improved competitiveness on the world stage.
But critics will say that the deregulatory policies promoted by Mr Clinton’s administration contributed to conditions that led to the Wall Street meltdown of 2008 and the subsequent recession. Of his signing of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act repealing part of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act that prohibited commercial banks from engaging in the investment business, he argues that it is not self-evident that “the mortgage crisis was hastened and enlarged by the end of the division between commercial and investment banks”. On the matter of failing effectively to regulate financial derivatives, Mr Clinton writes, “I can be fairly criticised for not making a bigger public issue out of the need to regulate,” but “couldn’t have done anything about it, because the Republican Congress was hostile to all regulations, going so far as to threaten to leave the SEC with no budget because the commissioner, Arthur Levitt, was vigilant in doing his job.”
As reporters have frequently pointed out, Mr Clinton has always been an omnivorous reader of books, journalism, academic and governmental studies, and adept at drawing useful connections among highly disparate subjects. His prescriptions or creating jobs and addressing the debt problem reflect those habits, while hewing to a basically centrist outlook.
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Mr Clinton lays out various ideas for increasing bank lending and corporate investment, unwinding the mortgage mess and amending tax laws to give corporations incentives to bring more money back to the US.
Some of his proposals simply ratify initiatives advanced by the Obama administration, including payroll tax cuts, infrastructure investment and student loan programs. Some – regarding, say, Social Security – are little more than assessments of recommendations made by the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles debt commission.
As for his more original-sounding ideas, a handful may seem intriguing on paper but are vague and not so easily achieved: for instance, “export more services,” or emulate Germany by concentrating “on high-end manufacturing and getting smaller companies into exports”.
Mr Clinton makes it perfectly clear that some of the ideas he has thrown out in these pages are hastily jotted down thoughts that require further investigation.
In the end this book seems meant less as a detailed blueprint for job creation than a catalyst for getting people to focus on the serious issues facing the US and the necessity of doing so right away. Reviewing the alarming and by now familiar statistics that show America falling behind in high school and college graduation rates, science and math scores and income mobility, Mr Clinton writes that “the troubling thing about all these rankings” is “not what they say about where we are but what they reveal about where we’re going.” He adds, “We simply are not doing what we have to do to stay ahead of the competition for good jobs, new businesses, and breakthrough innovations.”
Not facing up to such inconvenient facts, Mr Clinton notes, is part of the problem. Or, “As my daughter and her friends used to say when they were younger, ‘Denial is not just a river in Egypt.’ ”
BACK TO WORK
Why we need smart
government for a strong economy
Bill Clinton
Alfred A Knopf
196 pages; $23.95
©2011 The New YorkTimes News Service