New York Times op-ed: “Democrats were back.”
Gather round, boys and girls! The New York Times has a fairy tale it wants to tell you—about the magical land of Centrism and how it needs to be saved from the sinister Lefties….
Oh, you’ve heard this story before? Yes, it’s true—the Times has been telling this same story for years, always with the same thrilling leaps of logic (Extra! Update, 6/04; Extra!, 7–8/06; FAIR.org, 1/11/11, 5/27/15, 5/23/16).
This time (New York Times op-ed, 7/6/17), it’s told by Mark Penn—identified as a “pollster and senior adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton,” not as a PR consultant for corporations like Microsoft, Merck, Verizon, BP and McDonald’s—and Andrew Stein, identified as a “former Manhattan borough president and New York City Council president,” rather than as a Trump supporter and convicted tax cheat.
Shh! They’re coming to the good part now:
After years of leftward drift by the Democrats culminated in Republican control of the House under Speaker Newt Gingrich, President Bill Clinton moved the party back to the center in 1995 by supporting a balanced budget, welfare reform, a crime bill that called for providing 100,000 new police officers and a step-by-step approach to broadening healthcare. Mr. Clinton won a resounding re-election victory in 1996 and Democrats were back.
The Democrats were back! It’s true that Bill Clinton won re-election in 1996—with 49 percent of the vote in a three-way race—but Democrats, in the real world, lost the House in 1994 as a result of Clinton’s right-leaning policies, particularly NAFTA, and Republicans held it for the next 12 years. Republicans took back the Senate in 1994 and controlled it for the remainder of Clinton’s administration, with the Democrats never having more than 50 seats until 2009. When Clinton took office, Democratic governors outnumbered their GOP counterparts, 30–18—and when he left office, it was 30–18 the other way.
If that’s coming back, I’d hate to see staying away.
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The parallel to Clinton’s NAFTA was Obama’s ACA which was so far afield from what the candidate ran and won on that it ended up costing the party both houses of Congress. Where Bubba soiled the bed mid-decade, Obama’s version of eleventy level chess pooped out the ACA before mid terms in a census year. The reaction to Obama’s gifting his base to the insurers was losing statehouses and gerrymandering of Congressional districts.
“President Bill Clinton moved the party back to the center in 1995 by supporting a balanced budget, welfare reform, a crime bill..” It sounds like capitulating, and then claiming it’s a win. Which is different than actually being somewhere in the center.
Bill Clinton’s NAFTA cost Hillary Clinton the election in 2016. You think workers of the rust belt states forgot who cost them their jobs, their livelihood? Hardly.
I’ll never make the mistake of voting for a corporate Democrat again.
HRC lost for a long list of reasons. NAFTA was way down on that list.
I think free trade and supporting issues like TPP really harmed her.
It would be interesting to have some comparison: op-eds in NYT supporting the dems move to the left versus op-eds in NYT supporting dems move to the right. I think that kind of data would improve the article.
FDR created the reality of the 4 Freedoms and a nation which actually began working for the PEOPLE! Bill Clinton began his apprenticeship to the oligarchy. and began the destruction of imploding the idea of a more perfect union=———–which continues to implode daily. However, we now have TWO :”Know Nothing Parties., and sadly, The PAX Americana is now that POX Americana……: (