Another View
From the San Jose Mercury News 
Annelise Anderson
 
        A State of the Union address from a president running for re-election 
is necessarily the opening speech of his campaign.  What, then can we expect 
from a second Clinton term?
 
        If the speech is any guide, President Clinton is genial but stubborn, 
charming but unyielding.  He wants to keep every program, and every dollar for 
every program, passed into law before the Republicans became the Congressional 
majority.  And he wants the status quo on the big entitlement programs.
 
        He boasts about the reduction in the deficit since he took office, but 
all the deficit reduction has come from the higher taxes he imposed and cuts 
in defense spending.  Domestic spending proceeds unabated.
 
        Clinton is adamantly opposed to any budget agreement with the 
Republican Congress except on his own terms.  His own terms postpone all the 
real decisions on how to control spending so far into the future that he will 
not be president when the time comes to make the tough choices--even if he 
wins a second term.  Refusing to accept any legislation that will actually 
control spending on the social programs and middle-class entitlements that 
constitute over 50 percent of federal spending, he prefers a financial crisis 
to accommodation to the fact that the Constitution gives the Congress the sole 
power of the purse.
 
        The era of big government is, he says, over--but where is the 
evidence?  Except for defense, federal spending as a percentage of the Gross 
Domestic Product continues apace, and taxes are up. Clinton has vetoed all 
major legislation to reform domestic spending programs that has reached his 
desk.
 
        Instead he wants a V-chip in TV sets.  School children in uniforms.  
Restraint in advertising cigarettes to children.  More charter schools.  A 
higher minimum wage.  Portable health insurance.  The FBI investigating local 
gangs.  Going after dead-beat dads.  The Environmental Protection Agency 
funded at the bureaucrats' request.  Consolidation of adult education 
programs.  More border enforcement.  Local police funded by the federal 
government.
 
        This is a laundry list without a vision.  Some of the items tinker at 
the edges; some have bipartisan support; the worst expand the role of the 
federal government.  It is not a program for ending the era of big 
government--of turning back programs to the states, getting the federal 
government out of the way, trusting the American people, but of continued 
intervention from the center.  The strengthening of our communities, our 
schools, our local law enforcement will be overseen by beltway bureaucrats.
 
        The grandiose programs of Clinton's early presidency are (mostly) 
gone.  It was after all not the present Congress but the previous one, 
controlled by Democrats, that tabled his federal takeover of health care.  I 
had expected a completion of his metamorphosis from left-liberal Democrat to a 
Reagan sound-alike.  But he didn't sound like Reagan.  He sounded like a 
stubborn man trying  to blame the Congress for a failure to find a common 
ground.  But for President Clinton there is no common ground--there is only 
his ground.