The Maryland mountains are just an hour northwest of Washington, but they remain remarkably wild. Mason and Dixon explored them centuries ago, leaving stone survey posts that still stand in forests teeming with deer and game birds. It’s not the natural habitat of a gregarious human being like Bill Clinton. Yet there he was on Thanksgiving, hunkered down at Camp David. He was out of the papers. Congress was gone. So was the forgettable first year of his second term. Yet he wasn’t working on any grand plan for the home stretch. Instead, he dipped into the biography of an underappreciated president (John Quincy Adams), communed with his beloved Chelsea (just home from Stanford) and choppered over the hills to Pennsylvania for a round of golf. He was out of sight, out of the American mind.
The real action was worlds away–on Bill Clinton’s watch, yet not quite under his control. He’d just sent carriers to the Persian Gulf, but it was up to U.N. inspectors to locate Saddam’s weapons. Al Gore would go to Kyoto to rescue the global-warming talks–by accepting European and Japanese demands for costlier controls on U.S. emissions. The Asian economies were near meltdown, but the best advice was . . . to sit tight. Don’t unsettle the markets, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin told him in a long phone call that night. Avoid big spending proposals or tax cuts in the next budget. Korea is containable, Rubin said, but the International Monetary Fund–not the United States–should take the lead. Japan could shore up its banks if its leaders had the guts to free up pension funds to do so. ““I wish I could be prime minister of Japan for 30 days–I’d go over there and put a deal together,’’ the president later joked.
He couldn’t, of course. But his daydream said something about the second-term torpor of his presidency. Clinton spent much of the year dodging allegations about how he raised record amounts of campaign cash in 1996–while raising record amounts of campaign cash in 1997. He presided over a cruising economy, passed a modest agenda, lost weight and got a dog. But none of that brought him closer to his ultimate goal: a legacy that will stand the test of time. Clinton’s Tokyo fantasy exposes the condition of our politics a short putt away from the millennium. Washington, for now, is fading from view. At peace with the world and prosperous at home, Americans are too busy consuming to be consumed by the Beltway.
TRUE, AMERICA REMAINS THE ““WORLD’S ONLY superpower.’’ Indeed, our model–entrepreneurial, individualistic, wired-to-the-max–is the planet’s. But the political leadership in Washington doesn’t dominate–and can’t really expect to command–the global forces we helped to create, among them the Internet, the United Nations, the remorseless capital markets and the industrial democracies of Europe and Japan. We made this freewheeling capitalist global village. Now we have to learn to live in it.
Americans are forming up along a new political fault line: on one side, globalists who embrace the world and think we will prosper in it; on the other, nationalists who fear they’ll be screwed and who see our sovereignty eroding. It’s an age-old American conflict, redefined for the digitized 21st century. The ensuing debates might make Beltway talk riveting again.
In the meantime, the seat and symbol of our national life–Washington–has not seemed so inconsequential since the roaring 20s. The major media have cut back on coverage. To most voters, the city is a fountain of small-minded blah-blah-blah. No wonder Clinton daydreams of cutting fat deals in Tokyo.
These days, all politics is planetary. Twenty years ago the opposite was true. Tip O’Neill decreed that ““all politics is local.’’ The capital was the central trading floor of regional concerns, from the tobacco fields of Virginia to the shipyards of Long Beach. But consider the global reach of this year’s defining events and preoccupations: Diana, the gyrations of world markets, the threat of contagion in cities and of viruses in cyberspace, battles over trade, market access and carbon-dioxide levels in the upper atmosphere.
These ““planetary’’ matters are often more compelling and personal than the issues Washington produces. When the World Trade Organization in Geneva (Switzerland) flatly ruled against Kodak recently, workers in Rochester (New York) erupted in rage. Americans joined in the spontaneous global crowd that mourned Diana. Watching stocks fluctuate, small investors at their computer screens were forced to confront–quickly, through their modems–the vastness of the markets.
Meanwhile, Washington suffers from ideological entropy. The parties are like boxers in a clinch, afraid to step back and throw a punch for fear of being decked. The balanced-budget agreement codifies a bland status quo. ““There’s a mandate for exactly nothing,’’ says polltaker John Zogby. ““I have trouble coming up with enough political questions to ask on my surveys.''
People prospering in the new economy care about capital, not the Capitol. Their route to information, credit and power increasingly goes through the Internet. Washington is just another ““mediating institution,’’ just another central source of authority to ignore. When the Dow Jones dropped by 500 points in a single day, dour wise men in Washington and Wall Street advised caution. Instead, the skeptics at their home computers clicked on their ““buy’’ icons–and fueled a grass-roots rally that saved the market.
Not everyone wants to be rid of Washington. Blue-collar voters who don’t have icons to click on still think they can take their grievances to the capital. From the Depression onward, the capital gloried in building things made of concrete, programs or laws. The concrete remains, but the hope is gone. ““Washington vastly oversold its promises to them,’’ said Zogby. ““Now I call these people “acquiescent voters.’ Their only message is: “Please, don’t take anything else from us!’ ’’ Their interest comes down to: save Social Security, and save Medicare.
Mr. Smith doesn’t go to Washington anymore, at least with any expectations. Yes, Hollywood is cranking out Beltway-based films in record numbers, but in them the city has become just another location–like the Old West or Deep Space–inhabited by cardboard bad guys. The old mythic distance that once ennobled leaders is gone, replaced by a claustrophobic awareness of their every weakness, deformity and deceit. This year, depressing revelations arrived by the bargeload: new tapes of Nixon, a best seller about JFK that made Camelot look like a long pool party. Bob Dole erased his sad grandeur with plastic surgery, and the talk shows gleefully discussed whether Paula Jones would be permitted to describe Clinton’s private parts in court.
Paradoxically, the same forces that make Washington less consequential in America make Americans–as individuals and companies–more influential in the world. The Internet undercuts centralized authority but enhances the reach of American culture and commerce. Ninety percent of the traffic on the Net is in English; 80 percent of the Web sites are located in the United States. Washington is made to look ridiculous by Hollywood, but the film and TV ““product’’ manufactured in California spreads America’s visual language, pop heroes and storytelling style throughout the world.
What’s true of culture is true of commerce. Rising capital flows empower George Soros in New York, even if they make managing things more difficult for Bob Rubin. The spread of home computers enriches Bill Gates, even if his rapaciousness tests the Justice Department’s antitrust division.
Planetary politics is reviving an old argument about the role of Washington in the world. Since World War II, the answer has been clear: engage or perish. But the New World Economy is posing the question all over again. Clinton and Gore are committed globalists who accepted the creed early on, as baby-boom leaders in a New South desperate for development–and foreign dollars. Clinton, a Rhodes scholar who was governor of Arkansas for 12 years, traveled the globe in search of investments in his home state. Gore, as a young man in Congress, helped lure Japanese auto plants home to Tennessee.
Critics looking for something Clinton really believes in need look no further. He’s used shrewd, disciplined salesmanship to expand global commerce. To preach successfully for NAFTA, he assembled a choir of former presidents on a dais in the East Room, then delivered one of the best, and most convincing, speeches of his career. He did the same in selling GATT and the WTO. He managed to persuade Congress to underwrite a $20 billion bailout for Mexico (beyond the IMF share), structured the IMF loan to Thailand and still may seek cash for Korea.
This administration rarely meets an international deal it doesn’t like. The tentative global-warming pact, called the Kyoto Protocol, is just one. Earlier, Clinton persuaded Congress to ratify a chemical-weapons treaty that Ronald Reagan and George Bush had opposed. The world is now awash in peacekeeping forces with a familiar prefix–UNFOR (Bosnia, where the president planned a Christmas drop-by), UNSCOM (the weapons inspectors in Iraq)–and U.S. personnel under U.N. command.
For Clinton and Gore, global engagement is exhilarating, profitable–and inevitable. But not everyone sees it that way. Slowly, a nationalist backlash is developing, an odd-couple alliance of the labor left and the populist right that could bring drama–or at least heartfelt clashes over real issues–back to Washington. The most significant congressional vote this year was one that never took place. Lacking votes in his own Democratic Party–and seeing a weakening of support among Republicans–the president shied away from asking Congress to give him wider powers to cut trade deals. ““It was the low moment of the year,’’ said a top White House aide.
Others are coming. Democrats, dependent on Big Labor and holding on in old-line industrial cities, have always been ambivalent about world trade. Ross Perot’s diehards are dubious as well. Now the GOP, for decades the party of free trade, is up for grabs. Grass-roots Republicans, internal party polls show, were more opposed to giving Clinton the ““fast track’’ authority than the Democrats were.
There are plenty of other nationalist hot buttons. They include: paying $1 billion in back U.N. dues (they’re against it), creating a world criminal court (they’re against it), immigration rules (they want them toughened), English as the official language (they want it), further ““bailouts’’ of go-go economies (they’re against them) and environmental treaties (they worry about losing sovereign control over land use). The coalition is inchoate but, depending on the issue, can include unions worried about jobs, greens worried about pollution-control standards of trading partners and cultural traditionalists worried about the loss of American identity.
It’s easy to dismiss the new nationalists as Know Nothing throwbacks. But that would be a mistake. They are asking a profound question. In the next millennium–in a world where credit and communication transcend all borders–what does ““sovereign nation’’ mean? Will we still control our land, our currency, our jobs and our courts? Americans, after all, have always been wary of surrendering power to anyone–to Washington, let alone to a distant array of inter- national acronyms.
These are real fears that deserve real answers. In fact, there’s no going back. The world is too much with us. But if he wants a lasting legacy, Clinton must explain why this is a good thing. He might want to cite the history of the hills around Camp David. Long ago a young man named George Washington passed that way, on his way to an uncharted West. Not everyone was sanguine about what he would find in the New World’s new world. But he returned to assure his countrymen that our prospects were good. The city that bears his name could use his confidence now.
