The World Hunkers Down for ’96

I don’t know about you, but I can hardly wait for this campaign to be over and done with. It’s already so bad that I’m almost at the point where I don’t really care who wins the presidency, as long as it ends. Soon.

It’s not just the absurdity of what’s soon to come--two hot-air nominating conventions and the inevitable cesspool of negative ads. Worse yet, serious business gets put on hold or badly distorted as officials depart high office for the low road to reelection.

Thus Clinton says he’ll sign a hodgepodge welfare “reform” bill not because he thinks it’s the best bill (though indeed, real reform is needed) but because he knows that by signing it he robs Bob Dole of the delicious opportunity to goad Clinton for being “soft” on welfare.

Problem is, those of us who live here at the water’s edge feel the unintended ripples from both ends. The so-called reform puts in jeopardy federal support for legal (legal, mind you; not illegal) immigrants struggling to stand on their feet. California has more of them than anybody; their problems won’t disappear when the federal funding does. In his campaign rhetoric, Clinton often proclaims how much he has done for California. Is this what he means?

Reports Tovy Hur of the Korean Youth and Community Center in Los Angeles, “I really didn’t expect the reaction from Korean Americans to be this great.” Rallies in Los Angeles protested the cuts, especially those for senior citizens and the disabled. Many Koreans still haven’t forgotten or recovered from the 1992 L.A. riots; now they get this slap in the face. The government of the Republic of Korea is watching intently from Seoul. Clinton, referring specifically to the legal-immigrant aid cutoff, did admit that the legislation was “far from perfect.” But it’s just perfect for election-year politics, right?

Here’s some more quadrennial cutesiness. Consider our Canadian allies, long-suffering in the shadow of the giant down south. Again, another veto not exercised: the recently enacted Helms-Burton bill, which foolishly proposes to penalize foreign firms doing business with Cuba simply because the U.S. doesn’t do business with Cuba (though it does with China, Burma, North Korea, Vietnam, and on and on). The only important thing to know about this piece of legislative cynicism is that Canadians can’t vote but Cuban Americans in south Florida can and do. So when the Republican Congress shoved this macho let’s-get-tough-with-Cuba bill under the president’s nose, he failed to do what a free-trading president should have done: Veto it. Florida has 25 electoral votes in November. No sense letting Dole suggest that Clinton is soft on the Bearded One, right?

The Mexicans (politely) and the Canadians (loudly) fume. Who can blame them? The bill was rushed through Congress after Cuba, stupidly but true to dumb form, gunned down two small planes belonging to Cuban exile groups here. Firing back, Washington then warned a prominent Canadian firm that its directors and executives and their families would be barred from the U.S. unless the firm pulled out of Cuba by the end of this month. Nice. The Canadians practically ate a polar bear over that. Did anyone in Washington, if only to soften the blow, bother to mention to our friends in Ottawa that we’re suffering from the paranoid delusions associated with a U.S. election? “Well, my American counterparts never say that in so many words,” Art Eggleton, Canada’s minister for international trade, told me Friday, “but in so many of our discussions with the Americans lately, the U.S. election somehow does come up.” This is the diplo-speak equivalent of telling it like it is. Thank you, Mr. Minister.

Neither has America looked a whole lot better taking its sweet time getting the president’s personage, aura and seal over to China for some meaningful conversations.. He should have already been there, done that. Says an administration official, defensively: “At least the general importance of Asia is sinking in. If we really believe it’s the economy, stupid, well, then, it’s Asia, stupid. That’s where the world’s economic action is.” The loyal official insists that next year won’t be too late for a presidential visit. But, really, let’s be honest now; shouldn’t Clinton have already been to China, the world’s emerging superpower? Wasn’t it put off because the president doesn’t want to look any softer on Chinese communists than on Cuban communists, not to mention welfare rollsters? Sighs the administration loyalist: “The years divisible by four are always a nightmare for foreign policy. Major momentum will have to wait until after the election.” Thank you for telling it like it really is, Mr. Official.

As I say, I can’t wait until this election is over. For our own democracy at least, I’m not sure elections are our shining moment.