by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
PHOTO/White House
Given his attenuated record in Arkansas no one should have expected President Bill Clinton to live up to his campaign promises of attacking “special interests” and defending the “little guy.” Any precious illusions about such a possibility disappeared even before the inauguration, when Clinton stock-piled his administration with an assortment of corporate lawyers (Mickey Kantor and Bernard Nussbaum), financiers (Robert Rubin of Goldman Sachs), lobbyists (Howard Paster and Ron Brown) and corporate executives (Mack McLarty).
Eager to demonstrate to CEOs that business need not fear the Democrats, Clinton was just as accommodating to big corporations as his Republican predecessors. He pushed through the NAFTA agreement, extended an R&D tax break worth billions to big business, halved his proposed corporate tax increase, dropped his carbon tax and won the enthusiastic endorsement of the auto industry by breaking a campaign pledge to force the Big Three car makers to increase fuel efficiency by 40 percent.
By late 1994, the elite press was congratulating Clinton for his wise policies and wondering why CEOs were more appreciative of his efforts on their behalf. “For all the arguments about whether Bill Clinton is a new Democrat or an old one, when it comes to pushing US business interests abroad, no recent president has demonstrated Clinton’s willingness to roll up his sleeves and dive into the sometimes grubby details of international deal-making,” wrote the editors of Time.
Business Week also expressed pleasure at Clinton’s approach. “Guess who’s coming to dinner—lunch and breakfast—since Bill Clinton moved to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?” asked the magazine. “After years of hobnobbing with Republican presidents, blue-chip CEOs are discovering that they can do brisk business with a Democratic chief executive, too.” Business Week observed that Clinton’s “outreach campaign [to the corporate sector] transcends anything the Democrats attempted before.” The DNC’s finance director, Terry McAuliffe, was quoted as gloating that big corporate donors were “screaming to give us checks.”
One man much pleased with the Democrats was Dwayne Andreas, top man at Archer-Daniels-Midland. Once known as the “kingpin of GOP fundraising”—his signature was on the check found Nixon’s Watergate burglars—Andreas changed trains in 1992 when it looked as if Clinton might capture the presidency. In the two years that followed Clinton’s coronation as the Democratic candidate, Andreas gave the party some $270,000 in soft money contributions.
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