Henry Cisneros

WASHINGTON —  If President Bill Clinton’s second term will be about squeezing Democratic ambitions for government activism into the corset of a Republican balanced budget, Henry G. Cisneros has been there already. The secretary of housing and urban development has presided over three rounds of budget cutting that have shrunk his department by 20%--from $25 billion a year to $20 billion.

If Clinton’s second term will focus on seeking consensus with a Republican Congress, Cisneros has been there, too. He managed to turn back GOP demands to disband his department and reached agreement with Republican leaders on a series of major reforms in public housing programs.

And if Clinton’s last years in office are devoted to elaborating a new kind of Democratic politics, Cisneros has some thoughts on the matter. The former mayor of San Antonio, one of the country’s most successful Latino politicians, Cisneros bridges the gap between old-style, Democratic, ethnic coalition building and New Democratic policy wonking.

When Clinton planned his long march from the congressional defeat of 1994 to Tuesday’s convincing reelection victory, Cisneros was in the room as one of the president’s political advisors.

The 49-year-old Texan called HUD “the hardest one” among the domestic departments when he took the job in 1992. “I think it’s going to be a heartbreaker,” Cisneros said. But he turned the ugly duckling of federal bureaucracies, saddled with 1.4 million units of public housing, into a laboratory of reinvented government.

Cisneros talked of unleashing market forces by giving rent vouchers to public housing tenants. He presided over the dramatic demolition of thousands of decaying apartments in high-rise buildings. He worked on new programs to build better low-income housing, including in the suburbs where the new jobs are.

He spoke out inside the White House against parts of this year’s welfare reform bill. But once Clinton decided to sign the bill, he supported the decision in public.

He campaigned for Clinton among the nation’s growing Latino population, and was a avid promoter of the “Citizenship USA” program, which naturalized 1.2 million legal immigrants as U.S. citizens--in many cases, just in time to vote in the presidential election.

He has also contended with scandal. Cisneros is facing charges that he lied to the FBI about support payments he made to a former lover. He nearly resigned in 1995, when Atty. Gen. Janet Reno asked for an independent counsel to consider criminal charges.

Cisneros says he hasn’t decided whether to stay for the second term. With legal bills mounting and two children in college, he has said he may not be able to afford to live on at a Cabinet officer’s $144,000 salary [check]. “I’d love to stay. There’s a lot we have underway. It would be wonderful to see the momentum we’ve built in the cities continue. But practical family considerations will have to come into this--financial considerations.”

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Question: A lot of voters ask: Which Bill Clinton are we going to have as president in his second term? Is it going to be Bill Clinton the liberal, Bill Clinton the budget cutter, Bill Clinton the centrist?

Answer: The old labels really don’t work in this era . . . . What we’re living through is the end of the New Deal arrangement where the role of government generally took the form of big institutions, huge budgets, alphabet-soup organizations, centralized answers from Washington. For a variety of reasons, we’ve come to the end of both the effectiveness and people’s tolerance for those kinds of solutions. It’s a question of less resources; it’s also a question of the way the country has changed . . . .

Rather than think in terms of Clinton as conservative or liberal or New Dealer or some new configuration, what he really will be doing over the next four years is preparing the country for the next century; preparing the country for a new relationship between the government and the people, the government and the private sector.

This is a new synthesis. It’s not the New Deal bureaucratic structures, but neither is it the Republican dependence on the individual alone and a family alone, left without support. It is, I think, a role that puts people and communities in the lead with the federal government standing behind them as a partner, bringing critical resources but not leading the way.

Q: What does that mean in terms of specific goals that the next Administration should achieve?

A: I think the central themes of the President’s second term will be [a] focus on jobs. I’ve heard him say over and over again that signing the welfare bill was not the end of the discussion; it was the beginning of the task . . . . What you will see in a second Clinton term is an all-out effort to create jobs and opportunity to substitute for welfare. That will occupy a lot of time and it will be the best urban strategy that we can possibly put together for America.

In addition, every time I’ve been around the president and heard him utter his thoughts about how the government can best help prepare the country for the future, it always comes back to education . . . .

I think that he feels very strongly about the government’s responsibilities to families and children, so you will see a continuation of things like family leave; and more recently, extending the Brady Bill to take weapons away from persons convicted of spousal abuse, domestic assault. But other family-oriented things--an emphasis on home ownership for families at lower income levels, improved access to medical care, because so much of people’s dependence on welfare, traditionally, has been reliance on Medicaid. When people lost welfare they lost medical services, and that was really the killer. That’s why they stayed on welfare in the end.

Q: As you look at the results of the welfare reform bill, what do you worry about?

A: What I worry about most is what everyone who has looked at the bill, including the President, is concerned about. That is that there will be enough jobs for the people coming off of welfare.

In this Administration we speak of the immense accomplishment of 10.5 million new jobs created in the last 3.5 years compared to the rate of job creation in the previous four. . . . When you load on top of that 2 million people a year, roughly, coming off of welfare in a four-year span, you would have 8 million people coming off of welfare.

Those 10.5 million new jobs created in a strong economy, are (not, for the most part, going to former welfare recipients). We have new people coming in and requiring jobs. So the mountain before the country is a very steep one, and it’s going to require extraordinary efforts on the parts of Fortune 500 companies, small business, and the government to come up with ways to employ people.

Q: Have you concluded from the experience of the last four years that the public is willing to support individual investments in domestic initiatives, but wary of anything that looks like ambitious, large-scale spending?

A: I don’t think it’s just the lessons of the last four years . . . . The American people like his approach to steady, incremental progress, but it is progress. It is not standing still. It is not defending the status quo. It is constantly moving forward, even if they are bite-sized solutions and small steps . . . .

Essentially, I think what the American people are saying is, let’s see that they work before we jump way out and try things that are going to be hugely expensive and may, by their very scale, fail.

Q: Some liberal Democrats complain that the president’s taken that lesson too much to heart--that he retreats too quickly.

A: What both sides have to understand--liberals, traditional liberals, as well as conservatives--is this is not a political tactic. This is where the mainstream of the American body politic is. And it’s also the way the country has worked best traditionally.

And as I said earlier, what I described as a sea change and the way the country sees itself is more than politics and more than government. It is deep in the psyche. I call it the new sociology. There’s a new set of societal rules unfolding which basically say let us have as much say as we can. We are empowered through the Internet, through computers, to new information, to know more and make stronger decisions.

Q: And Bill Clinton has resurrected the Democratic Party by understanding those things better than the Republicans?

A: I think that’s true. I think Bill Clinton has resurrected the Democratic Party by anticipating and correctly judging what the new expectations of the American people are. They are neither the old Democratic ways, nor are they the new right’s ways. There is a new set of expectations, and he is resonating with those . . . .

The more that traditional Democrats open their minds and allow what the American people are saying to alter their own preconceptions, the better off they will be . . . .

The Republicans have the same problem, by the way . . . . Their hatred of government is so intense that they can’t see the importance of the partnership that’s required or the role of government. They just hate it, they’re blind to it in too many instances . . . .

[House Speaker Newt] Gingrich understands where the American people are on many of these questions more than most. He’s flexible of mind enough to understand it. He just, himself, was tied down by the freshman class and the NRA and all those special interests that give him no flexibility. That’s the problem for them.

Q: Has Clinton changed over the past four years?

A: Those who say that second term presidencies are always less successful than the first may well be wrong in this case. Bill Clinton has the energy and the talent and the will, the iron determination, that I think his greatest accomplishments will come in his second term--because there’s a sort of a seamless process of growth that proceeds from the last two years to the next term.

Q: One turning point in this administration was the decision to embrace the goal of a balanced budget. But before that, some officials argued a balanced budget was not the right goal--that zero was an arbitrary target, and the important thing was reducing the deficit.

A: But zero is what the American people want . . . . You either are there or you’re not there. There’s no close.

Q: Let’s talk about HUD. You’ve won praise for doing something many people thought impossible: making a big, troubled domestic-policy department work, and reforming it in cooperation with a Republican-led Congress. What are you proudest of over the last three to four years?

A: I think what I’m proudest of is the fact that whatever improvements may or may not have occurred, there is increasing objective evidence of improvement out across the country in urban conditions. . . .

Most of this is attributable to the president’s economic policies and the strength of the economy, interest rates, and a good climate for investing generally. But the Administration’s work to pull together school-to-work programs and clean toxic facilities and reduce crime and focus on the transformation of public housing and all of those things we’ve done in urban areas, bring capital to the cities through community development banks, is actually working.

Q: In a period of budget constraints, will the Administration be able to provide the kind of safety net you want in the cities?

A: What we have to do is work very hard in this post-welfare reform era, to think about new ways to create jobs, engage the private sector, Fortune 500 and other corporations, in job creation. Continue to build the infrastructure, including in Los Angeles. I’m very excited about a second round of empowerment zones, and I’m hopeful that Los Angeles would apply for the so-called Alameda Corridor that would link the Long Beach port, through new transportation systems, back into central Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, where new plants and industries are growing, oriented to exports to the Pacific Rim. It could be built throughout that region. That’s the kind of thing we have to do so that we’re ready with jobs, no matter what economic eventuality occurs.*