FEW THINGS in life are as irksome as a backseat driver, an armchair coach or a predecessor who knows he did your job better than you.
As if he didn't have enough on his plate, President Barack Obama must now contend with the former president Bill Clinton dispensing advice and wisdom in Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy, to be published by Knopf today.
The book’s launch is accompanied by a splash of Clinton interviews and public appearances, in which the “ex” elaborates on his criticisms of Obama’s handling of the debt ceiling crisis, the 2010 midterm election campaign and relations with Wall Street.
The 42nd president is reminding the country how good life was in the roaring 90s, when his administration created 22 million jobs and unemployment fell to 3.9 per cent, compared to 9 per cent today. An opinion poll in September showed that although Americans prefer Obama to George W Bush, they rated Clinton a better president than Obama, nearly five to one.
"I'm really trying to help him," Clinton said of Obama at one of his own 65th birthday parties in August, according to the New York Times. "But he seems to have lost his narrative."
Relations between the two men have improved dramatically since the 2008 presidential campaign. Obama needs Clinton’s common touch with the white working classes to win crucial swing states next year. The 44th president puts in an appearance at the Clinton Global Initiative every September, and has repeatedly sought Clinton’s advice. Last December, when Obama struggled to defend a deal extending tax cuts for the rich, Clinton took over their joint appearance in the White House press room.
Yet every Clinton lamentation about what he labels the US economic and political "mess" reads like an indictment of Obama. "The purpose of this book is to say you're always better off doing something," Clinton told USA Today. "When people are in trouble, action is better than inaction." Asked if the message was meant for Obama, Clinton didn't answer.
Last summer’s debt ceiling crisis made the US look “weak and confused”, Clinton writes. He still doesn’t understand why Obama did not heed his advice and invoke constitutional powers to unilaterally raise the debt ceiling, or why Obama did not deal with the matter before he lost the Democratic majority in Congress.
Clinton campaigned hard for Democratic candidates in mid-term elections last year. In one of the most severe judgments in his book, he faults “decision-makers” – for whom read Obama – for failing to send a coherent message.
“Vice-president Biden . . . and I tried to get the Democratic National Committee to send out a centralised set of talking points . . . so Democratic foot-soldiers would at least have some good ammunition for their phone and door-to-door campaigns,” Clinton writes. “We couldn’t persuade the decision-makers to do so.”
In September, Clinton gave an interview to the conservative network Newsmax in which he said Obama’s approach to the deficit was “a little confusing”. It was the same week Obama announced plans to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans.
Clinton said: “I personally don’t believe we ought to be raising taxes or cutting spending until we get this economy off the ground.” The interview was used in Republican advertisements against Obama’s jobs Bill. Clinton also criticised Obama’s feeble efforts to regulate Wall Street. “A lot of businesspeople can be supportive of new regulations and new standards, but particularly in a fragile time they don’t like to have too many things changing at once,” Clinton said.
Clinton implicitly blames Obama – who once referred to "fat cat bankers" – for his poor relations with Wall Street. "Many of them supported me when I raised their taxes in 1993," Clinton writes, "because I didn't attack them for their success." The irony is that, as pointed out in a front page report in yesterday's Washington Post,the largest US banks are larger than when Obama took office, and are reaping profits almost at pre-crisis levels. The securities trading arms of banks have made more in the first 2½ years of the Obama administration than under eight years of Bush.
Although the Clinton years were prosperous, critics point out that the former president helped precipitate the present crisis by deregulating banks and encouraging the mortgage binge. The Clinton administration killed the last vestiges of the Glass- Steagall Act, which separated commercial and investment banking. It also shot down a move by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to more closely supervise derivatives.
But most of all, Clinton reduced the capital gains tax on profits from the sale of shares or property from 28 to 20 per cent, paving the way for Bush to reduce it to 15 per cent. That decision by Clinton was a major factor in growing the income inequality that he now decries.