President Clinton fancies himself the political and policy mentor of British prime minister Tony Blair. Clinton steered the Democratic party to the right. Blair did the same with Labor. Clinton embraced conservative social values (in theory, that is). So did Blair. Clinton . . . well, you know all that.
You can imagine Clinton's wounded vanity, then, when he discovered last year that Blair had one-upped him. Blair proposed that the national government pay for thousands of new teachers to cut down on class size in England. Once Clinton got wind of this, he did the obvious thing. No, he didn't praise Blair, give him credit, and declare he'd like to try the same thing in this country. Clinton summoned his domestic-policy adviser, Bruce Reed, and instructed him to come up with a Clinton proposal for more teachers and smaller classes, as if the idea had originated with the president.
And that's what happened: a Clinton measure to pay, with federal money, for 100,000 new teachers to reduce the student-teacher ratio. The press, the teachers unions, liberals, Hillary -- they all went ga-ga over the idea. But, as it turned out, the public could not have cared less. Scarcely an astringent word was heard when the Senate voted down the proposal last month.