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- <text id=92TT2840>
- <title>
- Dec. 21, 1992: Bill's Dream Team Of Supersalesmen
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1992
- Dec. 21, 1992 Restoring Hope
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- THE TRANSITION, Page 37
- Bill's Dream Team Of Supersalesmen
- </hdr><body>
- <p>Clinton reassures the markets by naming Establishment figures
- to top economic jobs. But the President-elect still plans
- policies to prime the pump.
- </p>
- <p>By Dan Goodgame/Washington--With reporting by Tom Curry/
- New York
- </p>
- <p> A Few days after the election, Bill Clinton sought advice
- from an unlikely quarter: the Bush White House. The
- President-elect wanted to talk process, not personalities, so
- he phoned Roger Porter, a senior Bush aide who had served on
- President Ford's economic policy council. Clinton quizzed Porter
- on his 1980 book, Presidential Decision Making, which
- recommends, among other things, that policy be deliberated on
- by a group similar to the National Economic Council that Clinton
- created last week.
- </p>
- <p> The council will be chaired by the President and run from
- the White House by Robert Rubin, 54, now co-chairman of the
- Goldman, Sachs investment firm. In creating the group, Clinton
- will fulfill his campaign promise to place himself at the center
- of decisions on spending, taxes and trade, not reserve his full,
- hands-on attention for the foreign policy work of the National
- Security Council, the way Bush and many previous Presidents have
- done. Clinton's action also signaled his intention to restrict
- the power of Cabinet officers and to play them off against one
- another in the manner of Franklin Roosevelt.
- </p>
- <p> Clinton's first Cabinet appointments reinforced the point:
- most are old hands in Washington and on Wall Street, chosen not
- for their new ideas but for their ability to sell, to Congress
- and financial markets, the program of public "investment" and
- deficit reduction on which Clinton campaigned. "Bill didn't want
- a brain trust," a transition official remarked. "He needed a
- sales force--and that's what he's got." Indeed, Clinton, the
- Washington "outsider," might be said to have created the
- capital's most potent lobbying firm: Bentsen, Panetta, Rubin &
- Altman.
- </p>
- <p> His choice for Treasury Secretary, Texas Senator Lloyd
- Bentsen, 71, is a business-friendly millionaire who chairs the
- powerful Finance Committee. California Congressman Leon Panetta,
- 54, named as Clinton's Budget Director, commands high regard
- from his peers for his work as chairman of the House Budget
- Committee. Bentsen's deputy will be Roger Altman, 47, who served
- at Treasury under President Carter. Altman, an investment banker
- like Rubin, knows financiers from New York to Tokyo.
- </p>
- <p> This top shelf of advisers drew applause from some
- surprising corners. The Wall Street Journal editorial board
- praised the team as "all-in-all reassuring." Bay Buchanan, a
- conservative Republican activist, joked that "the only liberal
- in the group is Bill Clinton."
- </p>
- <p> Many Democrats, however, voiced suspicion of Bentsen's
- enthusiasm for granting special tax breaks to oilmen, real
- estate developers and wealthy investors. Jeff Faux, president
- of the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank allied
- with organized labor, complained that "you don't want to run
- your economic policy entirely around the concerns of Wall Street
- investors." Elena Hanggi from Little Rock, who trains community
- organizers and is invited to Clinton's economic conference this
- week, expressed "disappointment" at the pro-business slant of
- his top economic advisers but remains cautiously optimistic. In
- Washington as in Arkansas, she said, "Bill Clinton is trying to
- make changes without making waves."
- </p>
- <p> In his second tier of economic advisers, Clinton reached
- out to women and liberals and added several allies. Laura
- D'Andrea Tyson, 45, a Berkeley economics professor named to
- chair the President's Council of Economic Advisers, counseled
- Clinton during the campaign on trade and industrial policy, and
- recommends a larger role for government in directing the
- economy. Robert Reich, 46, a Harvard lecturer named Labor
- Secretary, has been a close friend of Clinton's since their time
- at Oxford University as Rhodes scholars. Reich argues that
- deficit spending is justified if it is directed at such areas
- as public transportation and job training. But Alice Rivlin, 61,
- the first director of the Congressional Budget Office, named
- Deputy Budget Director, ardently opposes deficit spending and
- advocates transfer of more government functions to the states.
- Secretary of Commerce-designate Ronald Brown, 51, who helped
- Clinton mend fences with black voters as Democratic National
- Chairman, is a sometime lobbyist with close ties to the business
- community. The corporate world is also likely to feel
- comfortable with incoming White House chief of staff Thomas
- ("Mack") McLarty, 46. A kindergarten classmate and former
- campaign treasurer for Clinton, he is chief executive of his
- home state's largest utility, Arkla, Inc.
- </p>
- <p> The appointment of such deficit hawks as Panetta and
- Rivlin was widely--and probably incorrectly--read last week
- as a sign that Clinton is leaning away from additional deficit
- spending early next year to stimulate the economy. To be sure,
- encouraging reports on job creation and economic growth have
- convinced many economists, and some of Clinton's aides, that
- such stimulus is no longer neces sary. But those same re ports
- have galvanized traditional liberals among Clinton's
- supporters, who fear that good economic news will undermine the
- rationale for new deficit spending on social programs and public
- works projects.
- </p>
- <p> Before he can forgo fiscal stimulus, Clinton "needs clear
- and convincing evidence that the jobs are coming back, and the
- reports we've seen so far just aren't enough," Reich explained
- last week. "It's not just the unemployed we're concerned about,
- but also the part-timers who want to work full time and the
- discouraged workers"--those who have been looking for jobs so
- long that they have given up and fallen out of the statistics.
- Clinton voiced the same view, telling reporters, "We are nowhere
- near to knowing that this short-term recession...is over."
- </p>
- <p> Clinton emphasizes that he will watch the economic
- indicators through mid-January before deciding whether new
- deficit spending is needed. In any case, he insists, he will
- seek long-term deficit reduction as well as new public
- investments in education, job training and public works. But new
- spending will be easier to accomplish if it is simply borrowed
- from future generations, Reagan-Bush style, rather than
- painfully extracted from existing programs.
- </p>
- <p> Even some of the deficit hawks among Clinton's advisers
- concede the political logic of early deficit spending. It would
- be politically foolish, says an aide, to "start our
- Administration on a negative note" by not only raising taxes on
- the rich but also cutting spending on popular middle-class
- subsidies and "creating a lot of enemies."
- </p>
- <p> This argument has a familiar and ironic ring to top
- officials of the outgoing Bush Administration, which also
- determined four years ago that it would avoid setting a
- "negative" tone; instead, Bush decided, he would wait to cut
- spending "in the second term." Clinton, however, faces higher
- expectations: he was elected to "do something," in contrast to
- Bush, who insisted that the economy was healing itself.
- </p>
- <p> Bruce Bartlett, a senior Treasury Department economist,
- believes new fiscal stimulus is unnecessary but remains likely
- so that Clinton can "look activist" and for other political
- reasons. "Just as tax cuts are the glue that holds Republican
- coalitions together, increased spending is the glue that holds
- the Democratic coalition together," he says. "The Democrats have
- promised so much, they need an excuse to spread around some
- money to the people who supported them."
- </p>
- <p> But other experts warn that the Clinton team must adapt
- its plans to the stronger recovery. "There's not only less
- pressure for Clinton to do something in the way of net fiscal
- stimulus, there's now a lot of pressure for him to start to
- swing to deficit reduction," says Hugh Johnson, chief economist
- at First Albany Corp. If the economy continues to improve
- through January without a reduction in Clinton's spending plans,
- he adds, "it would worry me and worry the bond markets. Then
- we're looking at something inflexible and ideological. It would
- look like we've got a tax-and-social-spending Democrat on our
- hands."
- </p>
- <p> Aides to Clinton reply that the rationale for short-term
- fiscal stimulus is not merely to reward backers but also to help
- buy support for a long-term plan to reduce federal spending and
- deficits. "If you're going to ask people to take their lumps on
- deficit reduction," an adviser says, "you have to give them some
- sugar along with it." Thus lawmakers who met with Clinton last
- week in Washington reported that he is leaning toward a net
- fiscal stimulus of at least $20 billion in 1993 unless the
- economy unexpectedly rockets into much faster job growth before
- mid-January.
- </p>
- <p> The test for Clinton and his team will come soon
- thereafter, when they try to push spending cuts through
- Congress. At their sessions with Clinton last week, lawmakers
- quickly promised their cooperation. Meanwhile, however,
- Democratic Senators have been lining up votes to oppose
- Clinton's desire for a line-item veto or enhanced rescission
- authority to reduce pork-barrel spending. Congressman John
- Dingell of Michigan differs sharply with Clinton on trade and
- environmental issues that must move through his House Energy and
- Commerce Committee. And Senate minority leader Robert Dole, who
- needs only to hold the votes of 41 of his 43 Republicans in
- order to block any proposed legislation with filibusters, quips
- with a wolfish grin that "gridlock isn't always such a bad
- thing." This is the home team that smugly awaits the arrival of
- Clinton's new team.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
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