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PARTISAN REVIEW
interested in the Republican nomination in 1996 and people interested
in
revitalizing the Republican Party are going to be looking at very closely.
Estelle Leontief: I
would like to ask Professor Schlesinger if it isn't true
that before his election, Roosevelt's speeches were different from the
speeches he gave after he was elected, in which there was much more
form; they were much more revolutionary, much more creative. And is–
n't it likely that such a thing would happen with Clinton, and that the
role he's playing now is a political role which he has to play and which
Roosevelt in his time had to play?
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.:
Roosevelt, it must be remembered, had the
particular advantage, in one sense, to come into office at a time when
twenty-five percent of the labor force was out of work, when the gross
domestic product was cut in half, and there was a felt, perceived, real
condition of national crisis, which gave him a much wider range of op–
tions than we have today. Today people feel we are in a recession; we
are indeed in a recession, but actually our unemployment rate is less than
eight percent. The British unemployment rate is over ten percent. One
reason why there is so much attention paid to our recession - Eric raised
this earlier - is that this is a recession that affects the middle class more
particularly than at other times in history.
If
unemployment were just a
working-class problem, there wouldn't be this concern in the press and
in politics. But because so many junior executives are suddenly faced with
finding jobs, and because so many people even in the media are them–
selves losing jobs, naturally much more attention is being paid.
I do think that a crisis permits a wider range of action. I don't think
that Clinton therefore will have the opportunities that Roosevelt had.
Moreover, Ronald Reagan succeeded in doing what no previous post–
New Deal Republican president had done, and that is to figure out a
way to block further social spending. He did it by contriving a deficit so
large that there wouldn't be money available for social spending, and
that is another thing that is going to restrict what Clinton would like
to do.
Cynthia Colin:
I'd like to go back to the question of the American
character, of our images of ourselves, and how it may be affecting our
political capacity in an era in which finally the American people may re–
alize they are not the leaders of the hegemony of the world; whether
that will force us into a personal isolationism as well as possibly a politi–
cal national isolationism; whether we are seeing those forces at play, for
example, with the GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade]
talks and the reaction to them.
