Bill Clinton wound up his eight years in the White House with the national budget in balance and the national debt declining.
“When I am asked how I did that, I have a one-word answer: arithmetic,” he said.
Clinton’s 45-minute speech was full of forceful rhetoric. But none of his analysis was more to the point: the numbers must add up. National revenue must be greater than national spending to bring the deficit down.
President Obama’s budget plan calls for higher taxes on the wealthy, less spending on war and fewer loopholes and tax breaks that let revenues leak. Mitt Romney’s budget plan starts with another huge tax cut that will slash federal revenue by trillions and moves from there to higher spending on the military. As Clinton dryly observed, taking in less and spending more is a formula for bigger deficits and an even higher national debt.
Clinton warned his audience the nation couldn’t afford a Republican administration that would “double down on trickle down.”
But his main theme was positive. He called for bipartisanship and cooperation. He praised the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower and noted that President Obama had appointed Republicans to his cabinet and had even appointed Hillary Clinton secretary of state, despite the fact that they had opposed each other in the race for the 2008 Democratic nomination.
Clinton agreed that the economy was still struggling. He observed that Obama inherited a much weaker economy than he did when he took office in 1993. No president could have repaired the damage in just four years, he said. “But conditions are improving and if you’ll renew the president’s contract, you will feel it (renewed prosperity),” he said.
To emphasize that point, Clinton said Democratic presidents have created millions more jobs over the past 52 years than their Republican counterparts. Since 1961, Republicans have held the White House for 28 years and Democrats for 24 years. The U.S. economy produced 66 million private sector jobs over that period. Forty-two million of them came during Democratic administrations, and 24 million came during Republican administrations, he said.
Still on the topic, Clinton said Obama’s decision to bail out the auto industry produced an additional 250,000 well-paid jobs building cars. Those jobs were created not just in Chrysler and General Motors and their dealerships, but also at auto parts manufacturing plants across the country. Romney was a high-profile critic of the auto bailout who said the companies should have been allowed to go bankrupt and shut down.
Clinton also praised the Affordable Health Care Act. Because the law requires health insurance companies to spend 80 percent of premiums they collect on health care rather than profits or promotion or give refunds to policy holders, the companies have been forced to pay out more that $1 billion in refunds this year. The law also provides people between 19 and 26 coverage under their parents policies and expands preventive care coverage to seniors. Under the law, Medicaid will be expanded to cover millions who are now uncovered, and provide a dependable source of income to hospitals and medical clinics.
He also pointed out that Romney’s plan to increase Medicare spending by billions that Obama had trimmed from it would mean it would go broke eight years sooner.
THE FORMER president’s political rhetoric can cut like a razor even while his face is wreathed in smiles. Here may be his best zinger of the night: “The Republican election logic goes like this: We left the country in an awful mess in 2008. Obama hasn’t cleaned it up fast enough. So toss him out and put us back in.”
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
