Previewing the fight over privacy and “big data”

Some Clinton aides favored policies that could have had major implications for privacy — policies that conjured up the kind of Big Brother government that many Americans are now nervous about after revelations of massive National Security Agency data-gathering.

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In 1995, Domestic Policy Adviser Bruce Reed urged that Clinton launch “a high-tech war on illegal immigration, welfare fraud, and other criminal abuse.”

“We now have the technology (fingerprinting, biometrics, DNA testing) to stop all kinds of abuses that drive most Americans crazy: trading food stamps for drug money applying for welfare benefits in more than one state, dodging paternity,” Reed wrote in a memo to then-chief of Staff Erskine Bowles.

Pushing tough-on-crime policies Obama is now reversing

Reed and Rahm Emanuel, a Clinton adviser who went on to be Obama’s first White House chief of staff and now serves as mayor of Chicago, also touted the kind of edgy anti-crime tactics that have generated controversy and protracted litigation in New York City. The pair of advisers encouraged “more aggressive use of constitutionally permissible police authority to stop-and-frisk suspicious characters for weapons.”

And as the Obama administration has been publicly stepping away from some of the toughest sentencing measures adopted during the 1990s, the newly-released papers offer reminders of just how hard the Clinton team pressed to enact such provisions.

“We will need to maintain the offensive on drugs, which Republicans view as our weak spot,” wrote Reed, who also served as Vice President Joe Biden’s chief of staff before leaving the Obama White House late last year. “A sound three-strikes policy should be the law of the land.”

Pre-election mantra: We get no credit

Like many White Houses, Clinton’s was convinced it wasn’t getting proper notice for its achievements.

In a memo that appears to date from 1996, adviser Bill Curry complained that Clinton’s reinventing government efforts weren’t generating the kind of political payoff that they should.

“Though we have done a great deal, our message is still unintelligible to voters so we still haven’t gotten the credit we deserve,” wrote Curry, as he encouraged aides to highlight the issue in commencement speeches that year.

Polling data in the White House files suggested that the public wasn’t responding to the reinventing government effort because it wanted to see government workers laid off or fired. “Promote it by stressing jobs cuts,” an unidentified aide wrote in a polling-driven memo. “We are having difficulty promoting REGO savings. I think it is because we are afraid of leading with job cuts.”

Clinton advisers strategized against the ‘left,’ even after 1996

The newly-released documents underscore the notion that Clinton’s centrism wasn’t just an electoral gambit — at least some of his advisers kept up a concerted push to the political center even after the president won re-election.

In a memo written prior to the 1998 State of the Union address, the Progressive Policy Institute’s Will Marshall urged Clinton’s top aides to push a job-training effort that could shore up public support for trade agreements. “Otherwise, you leave the field clear for the labor-left, which is beginning to make some headway,” Marshall warned.

“It creates a strategic opportunity to ouflank the left — by offering them a deal they can hardly refuse,” he added, while railing against “the left’s economic pessimism and fear-mongering.”

Clinton aides mulled Soros backing for Kosovo film

Clinton’s National Security Council staff considered trying to get billionaire financier and major Democratic donor George Soros to fund a film highlighting Slobodan Milosevic’s war crimes.

In 1999, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) sent a letter to National Security Adviser Sandy Berger suggesting the U.S. government produce a documentary, narrated by a Serbo-Croat speaker, to graphically showcase atrocities in Kosovo.

“[Berger] needs to know if he can be forward leaning — e.g. ‘what a great idea’ — or pessimistic - e.g. ‘we’ll look into it,’” Mona Sutphen, an NSC staffer, told colleagues in an email released to the public Friday by the Clinton Library.

Mara Rudman, a top staffer on the council, warned that the U.S. Information Agency is “severely restricted in their ability to produce films of any sort that are for domestic consumption.”

“Congress has to specifically pass legislation to allow domestic distribution of USIA material, so unless the law has changed dramatically on this, I think Sandy has to be cautious,” Rudman emailed.

Sutphen, who would become a deputy chief of staff during Barack Obama’s first term, responded by suggesting that Soros or another philanthropist fund the film.

“[M]aybe elie weisel [sic] knows someone??” she added, a reference to the Nobel Prize-winning Holocaust survivor. “if levin is really keen, can they earmark funds for this purpose??”

Another top NSC staffer, Jane Stromseth, checked with the war crimes office at the State Department, which also believed that it would be best if a non-governmental organization made the film.

“While it looked attractive at first blush, they ultimately concluded that it was not a good idea for two reasons: (1) the cost is enormous; and (2) a [government]-made documentary would risk being perceived as propaganda, no matter how carefully done,” Stromseth wrote.

Berger sent Levin a non-committal response. It’s not clear if the documentary was ever made.

Dig at donor’s TV franchise gets cut

Clinton or aides apparently crossed out a paragraph in a draft of his 1996 Democratic nomination acceptance speech that credited Vice President Al Gore for his efforts to advocate for the V-chip, TV show ratings and three hours a week of kids’ programming on network TV.

The excised passage also took a dig at a franchise that made Clinton donor Haim Saban rich: “We cannot raise a generation of responsible citizens … on Power Rangers alone.”

State of the Union advice unheeded

Presidents are often looking for ways to break up the usual monotony of State of the Union speeches. Prior to the 1996 address, one outside adviser to Clinton advanced some rather unorthodox ideas.

Guy Smith, who went on to join the White House staff during the impeachment crisis, urged Clinton to “respectfully ask that the members hold their applause until he is through.” In a memo released Friday, the public relations adviser said it would cut down on “TV shots of Republicans sitting on their hands looking sour” and would “eliminate the TV commentators’ ability to count the number of time the President was interrupted by applause.”

Smith also urged that Clinton add drama to the often-dull foreign policy section of the speech. “At this point the President holds up an actual launcher mechanism for a Soviet SS-22,” to dramatize the way the U.S. had rolled back the threat posed by the former Soviet Union, Smith wrote in the memo to White House Communications Director Don Baer.

Neither suggestion was adopted.

James Hohmann, Jennifer Epstein, David Nather and Edward-Isaac Dovere contributed to this report.