President Clinton, You’re No Teddy Roosevelt

In his Inaugural Address, President Bill Clinton announced that America finds itself today in “a moment that will define our course and our character for decades to come.” Yet, our character and future course are no clearer for his having spoken. The weary tone of bland optimism in his speech showed Clinton has abdicated the bully pulpit created by the activist president he so admires, Theodore Roosevelt.

Clinton has recently quoted Roosevelt and invoked his name so often that observers believe Clinton has adopted TR as his presidential role model. Alas, Clinton earns a D- as a student of the Old Bull Moose’s savvy.

When Clinton opens his second term reciting the GOP mantra that government “is not the solution,” he echoes the failed laissez-faire policies that TR repudiated. Roosevelt understood such policies produced polluted air and food, harsh working conditions and the cruelest treatment of labor in U.S. history.

Roosevelt saw first-hand the hideous results of free enterprise untouched by government regulation. TR’s reformer father had introduced him to factory children who worked 12-hour days for pennies and to uneducated children who slept on the streets and sold newspapers to buy food. Later, in the depression-ridden 1890s, TR walked tenements where he saw malnourished children working on piece work in packed and dirty rooms.

After a long struggle with his conscience and the economic orthodoxy of his day, Roosevelt concluded that the cruel results of unbridled capitalism could be prevented by government action. Today, Clinton has forgotten the lesson that TR’s generation learned: Without government, we reenter the harsh world of Charles Dickens. Clinton has backed away from TR’s passionate belief that the national government should stand as the fierce defender of the public good.

Roosevelt believed leadership requires a strong and energetic moral fervor. Social injustice was worth a battle to the death. While New York police commissioner, TR kept on his desk the quotation: “Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords”--and he believed it. In the physically and emotionally anguished years of his last years, TR still raged against injustice. Around the great fireplace in the North Room of Sagamore Hill, he told his family: “After declaring that all men are equal, we cannot expect that permanently 3% will own the property and have the power.”

The widening gap between rich and poor gave TR sleepless nights. In response, he called for a living wage, inheritance taxes, taxes on excessive profits, old-age pensions and progressive income taxes. Today, the gap between rich and poor continues to widen.

TR fought with the defenders of laissez-faire economics by bringing dramatic stories of human misery to the public. Telling the story of a factory worker whose hopelessness drove her to commit suicide, he used his bully pulpit to awake the conscience of a nation.

It is true that, as president, Roosevelt did compromise often. Much of his commitment to social justice came late in life. Government regulation did not end inequality or banish corporate influence in politics. But Roosevelt knew a villain when he saw one. He had a rare gift for casting presidential power in heroic terms. He stood up to the arrogance of the wealthy. He brandished the moral force of government as his weapon.

And, after his presidency, Americans ate less-contaminated food, enjoyed more public lands and gained more leverage over the robber barons, whose cutthroat practices had known no limits. TR’s ability to dramatize his battles left his public with a renewed faith in the American system.

Today, the parallels to TR’s time are obvious. Clinton’s sleepless nights should be haunted by what is happening to many American workers who are losing faith in the American dream. He should face up to America’s new “global social obligation” and refuse to allow some foreign goods into the country until child labor, inhuman working conditions, and unfair wages are ended in the countries that produce them. TR taught us that the president should be the active moral conscience of the nation.

TR’s greatest gift to Americans was a renewed sense of national moral purpose. He helped build an era in which public service was honorable. Roosevelt insisted that “politics and applied ethics ought to be interchangeable terms.” In contrast, Clinton, faced with an obstructionist GOP Congress, finds politics and equivocation are often interchangeable terms.

A strenuous Rooseveltian life was not worth living without a higher moral purpose. For TR, especially in 1912, it was better to lose than to waffle on the big principles. For Clinton, winning approval and reelection have counted most. To be fair, Clinton has a deeper respect for American’s civil liberties and the nation’s ethnic and racial diversity than TR did. And, in a nuclear age, the world is far safer having Clinton in the Oval Office than it would be if the often hot-headed Roosevelt were president.

Yet, on the domestic scene, Clinton doesn’t measure up to TR because he has forgotten that laissez-faire policies have to be tempered by a strong government defense of the public good. Where is the Bull Moose spirit now that we need it?