Democratic presidential hopeful and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
Hillary, the New Nixon—of course: questionable political/policy activity and then the cover-up. That’s actually not the relevant convergence. Hillary in 2016 is reprising not so much the Richard Nixon of 1972, as he fended off Watergate to gain a second term as president, as the Nixon of 1960. Back in that year, Nixon was the incumbent Vice President fated to lose the presidential election to an upstart, Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kennedy.
The problem Nixon faced as he tried to slip out of the shadow of President Dwight D. Eisenhower is that he had to claim the status quo as his own. The country was doing great under Ike—and Nixon was going to produce more of the same. The problem was that a recession came in 1960, the fifth of the eight Eisenhower administration years in which the country spent some time in recession. The downturn hit in April, just as the party nomination processes were getting started. Unemployment, that lagging indicator, stayed low initially, but would scamper up that fall as hundreds of thousands of layoffs came just at election time in November.
Initially, Nixon did the time-honored thing: He denied there was a problem. He waved off Democratic calls for a higher rate of economic expansion as “growthmanship” meant to justify government spending. But then he got a bite from his own party. Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York, indicated that he might make a bid for the Republican nomination on the grounds of his objective, announced in 1957, that the United States could reasonably increase its rate of economic growth to a yearly level of 5%. Democrats put that number in their party platform as they nominated JFK. They noted, gleefully, that this would be double the Eisenhower-era average.
Nixon got the message and hurried himself to a meeting with Rockefeller, at the scion’s huge Manhattan apartment. In a joint statement mocked by the press as the “Compact of Fifth Avenue,” Nixon and Rockefeller agreed that anything less than a per annum growth rate of 5% per year in the 1960s would not befit this country or its potential. Rockefeller withdrew his bid for the party nod. Nixon took the Republican nomination, only to lose by a hair to Kennedy in November as the rolls of the unemployed surged.
In the offing, here is what transpired: Economic growth from JFK’s first full month in office in February 1961, until Nixon himself, as president, signed a tax increase in December 1969—a span of a shade under nine years—was 5.0% per annum. Five percent was precisely double the Eisenhower-era average of 2.5%.
Hillary—the New Nixon. Back in 2008, she ran, unsuccessfully to be sure, on the program of bringing back the 1990s, which was code for peace and prosperity. The President Bill Clinton formula was clear. Fool around for two years (1993-94) with tax increases and HillaryCare, with nothing doing in terms of economic growth and the stock market. Pivot when the Republicans take Congress (November 1994) in favor of decreasing spending, enacting welfare reform and capital gains tax-rate cuts, and affirming the administration’s first two years of tenaciousness on free trade. Take credit—much of it richly due—for six years, late 1994 to 2000, of 4.2% growth. Floor of the stock and bond markets, that secret to unlocking the mystery of 1990s prosperity: election day 1994.
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Hillary—the New Nixon. In 2016, she has been both stung by her 2008 loss to the nobody, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, and saddled with the burdens of incumbency on account of her high-level (Secretary of State) complicity with the Obama administration. The most generous possible rendering of the national growth rate under President Obama, since the deep-deep trough of 2009, is 2.1%. This is half the Bill Clinton-era average, just as Ike’s was half of JFK’s.
The New Nixon therefore has had to make the economic basis of her current campaign the issue of redistribution. Since there is clearly so much production and growth in this economy—we have had a Democratic president for seven years, after all—the only detail is how to swish it around to make sure that everyone has a nice high-middle class livelihood. Upped minimum wages, “strengthening” Obamacare, the “Buffet rule” for tax-hikes on the rich, these are the New Nixon’s economic-policy prescriptions as of spring 2016, as if growth is a non-issue.