David Shribman, a former New York Times political writer who is now the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette‘s executive editor, had an op-ed about Clintonism in the Times (5/21/16):
In its original form, Clintonism was an effort to pull the Democratic Party — which had lost five of the six presidential elections between 1968 and 1988 — back into political relevance…. Mr. Clinton wanted to help big corporations thrive, favored trade policies that unions loathed and spoke of reining in welfare and fighting crime….
The 42nd president left the White House with high approval ratings after serving during years of economic growth. Many liberals felt bruised, even betrayed — there were some high-profile repudiations of the president, especially when he signed a welfare overhaul in 1996 that set time limits on benefits. But no one doubted that he had given new life to the party when he left office in 2001.
“No one doubted that he had given new life to the party”? Actually, plenty of people have doubted this (e.g., Jeff Cohen, L.A. Times, 8/9/00). But since corporate media keep pushing the fantasy of Bill Clinton as savior of the Democratic Party, it’s worth going over the reality once again.
Bill Clinton came into office with 258 Democratic House members, which was at the time a fairly typical number. The Democrats had controlled the House every Congress but two since 1931; even when the Republican presidential candidate won in landslides in 1972 and 1984, the GOP didn’t manage to win more than 192 House seats.
Then came Clinton’s triangulation, which, as Shribman writes, allowed Clinton to pass “major parts of his agenda, from a trade deal with Mexico and Canada to welfare reform to a crime bill.” The NAFTA trade pact in particular alienated a key part of the Democratic coalition–the labor unions. This led directly to the 1994 midterm massacre, in which the Democrats lost 52 seats and control of the House; since then, the Democrats have only controlled the House twice.
Likewise, Clinton came in with 57 Democratic senators, and lost nine of those seats in the 1994 midterms. Since then, the Senate has mostly been Republican-controlled; it wasn’t until 2009 that there were more than 50 Democrats in the Senate.
The Democrats had big losses on the state level under Clinton as well. From the late 1950s onward, Democrats had a big advantage in state houses that continued almost unbroken through the Nixon and Reagan eras. That ended in 1994; since then, party control of state legislatures has on balance favored Republicans.
Chart: Real Clear Politics (11/11/14)
With governors as well, the Clinton era was likewise when the good times stopped rolling for the Democrats.
The evidence is clear that Clintonism has been a disaster for the Democrats, but the idea that Bill Clinton saved the party is one of those zombie ideas that won’t die. Corporate media are simply too invested in the idea that moving to the right should be good for the Democratic Party to notice that this hasn’t happened in real life.
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Felicia Kornbluh, a professor of history at the University of Vermont and once a FAIR staffer, explained in an interview with CounterSpin (8/28/15) just what it was about Clintonism that made it such a disaster for progressive politics:
We progressives do ourselves an enormous disservice when we don’t really examine what happened in the ’90s and how terrible a kind of Clinton Democratic politics were for us, because it has undercut every type of argument that we have made for every kind of generous or expansive or humane move in terms of domestic politics. Because the opponents have this tool—they can basically use the welfare reform discourse, and bring back those racial and sexual stereotypes, to kill anything. They went after the ACA with this, they went after food stamps, they are now going after disability benefits using the same playbook, and we have to go back to the ’90s and say, “Look, that playbook is no good, and we will not let you vilify people this way.”…
I think we really have to understand the politics of the ’90s, and I think there was a kind of deliberate political choice that drove all of this: From the perspective of the Clinton administration and certain people in the Democratic Party, it was a very explicit idea, that certain people would have to be cut adrift, that it was really going to be OK. They were willing to pay the price with other people’s bodies, with other people’s well-being. African-American women and low-income women and their kids would be cut adrift, because the Democratic Party couldn’t afford to defend them, and wasn’t willing to pay that price.
And the bargain would be then they would save the Democratic Party, they would save Clinton’s political career, and I guess they thought they would also be able to save some type of progressive agenda, maybe around healthcare or something like that. As it turns out, they didn’t do that much for us, and they did unleash this terrible, terrible policy with all of these wide ramifications….
It was all part of what was called “a new Democratic project,” and that was the project that came out of the late ’80s, early ’90s—and Clinton was a national spokesperson for it well before he became president. And that was very appealing to the Washington Post, the New York Times and NPR. It was a kind of rebranding of the Democratic Party and of a certain kind of centrist liberalism that a lot of those institutions, those media institutions, were kind of invested in and believed in. It’s hard to understand; at the time, if you were listening from a race-conscious perspective, it was just all grotesque, but I guess those institutions had none of that orientation; the fact that there were these massive exclusions just didn’t really seem to matter to them, or to hit them, at all.
Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org. He can be followed on Twitter: @JNaureckas.
You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com (Twitter:@NYTimes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
I’d like to direct your attention to the seminal document that set out the framework for the neoliberal counter-revolution of the Plutocrat/Corporate Class to finally kill the New Deal.
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/
http://billmoyers.com/content/the-powell-memo-a-call-to-arms-for-corporations/
This frameworks was accompanied by billions of corporate/right-wing dollars that created a propaganda machine, morphed the media into the property of 5 corporations, bought politicians, built “think tanks” and huge lobbying mechanisms, took over law schools and business schools with their “thinking”, etc. with the installation of Ronald Reagan in the White House signaling its first great success…
The Clinton/DLC takeover of the democrat wing was the party’s capitulation to the growing force that this counter-revolution was becoming by the late 80s…
I’m hoping that the Populist Movement that produced Occupy, BLM, $15, etc and that has also fueled the Trump and Sanders campaigns to the chagrin of the Establishment created by the above counter-revolution is a signal that the billions of dollars that are spent to promote the big lies are losing their effectiveness…
I’m impressed with the way FAIR always can be depended on, when it publishes a raft of Clinton-hating propaganda, to give us the contrary view, from the Clinton’s themselves, or from pro-Clinton representatives.
To be fair, no pun intended, you can’t discount the harmful effect of conservative media that really took a foothold during the Clinton years and has only become bigger and more influential since.
Stop with this! Clinton’s policy, record & what damage it has done it clear, particularly 20+ years later. It has NOTHING to do with or without the “conservative” media. This trope needs to stop. It’s a crock of bull and a manipulation tool by the Dems. Any Progressive knows this.
NO progressive with more than 2 IQ points to rub together “knows this”! Republicans get billions of dollars worth of free false advertising while Democrats get ZERO.
There is no debating the point.
Rush Limbaugh’s daily fact-free FRAUDCAST has an estimated 13 million listeners. That’s just one show!
In my big city, conservative fraudcasts have had a monopoly for over 20 years.
Slicking up Slippery William
Thx for looking backward and judging. .. 20/20 hindsight is so prophetic (not). Reagan & Bush and the continued push from the religious and political right was intense and it was predicted that Democrats could be in the wilderness forever. Because of racial issues particularly, the South turned Republican and Reagan helped successfully link economic conservatism &the Christian Right, as the Tea Party began to rise.
What your analysis leaves out is Clinton helping us climb out of an increasingly crippling budget deficit, intervention in genocide in Bosnia, taking on and winning against the tobacco lobby & industry, and significantly pushing a conversation about all Americans getting health care. … and more.
Not okay to hang someone on policies, when you do not take into account the context in 1992, including one of the highest crime and drug rates we’d had in the country.
NO WEALTH — NO POLITICIANS — NO POWER
Republican Party — Rich ruling class, 25% most wealthy, 75% of wealth
Democrat Party — Middle-class, forth of society that owns 25% of wealth
No Party — Laboring-class, lower half of society, owns no wealth
So, if the laboring-class was not impoverished, they could hire the politicians they need to gain liberty from poverty.
NO WEALTH — NO POLITICIANS — NO POWER
Republican Party — Rich ruling class, 25% most wealthy, 75% of wealth
Democrat Party — Middle-class, forth of society that owns 25% of wealth
No Party — Laboring-class, lower half of society, owns no wealth
So, if the laboring-class was not impoverished, they could hire the politicians they need to gain liberty from poverty.
This is a blatantly deceptive rationale. The author discusses the large majorities Clinton had upon entering the White House, and then this follows:
—-
Bill Clinton came into office with 258 Democratic House members, which was at the time a fairly typical number. The Democrats had controlled the House every Congress but two since 1931; even when the Republican presidential candidate won in landslides in 1972 and 1984, the GOP didn’t manage to win more than 192 House seats.
Then came Clinton’s triangulation, which, as Shribman writes, allowed Clinton to pass “major parts of his agenda, from a trade deal with Mexico and Canada to welfare reform to a crime bill.” The NAFTA trade pact in particular alienated a key part of the Democratic coalition–the labor unions. This led directly to the 1994 midterm massacre, in which the Democrats lost 52 seats and control of the House; since then, the Democrats have only controlled the House twice.
Likewise, Clinton came in with 57 Democratic senators, and lost nine of those seats in the 1994 midterms. Since then, the Senate has mostly been Republican-controlled; it wasn’t until 2009 that there were more than 50 Democrats in the Senate.
—
What the author is not telling you is that the welfare bill, the crime bill, and Clinton’s triangulation were the result of the 1994 “massacre” and didn’t bring it about. The only valid claim in the central paragraph is about Nafta, which was harmful on many levels.
But its validity is undermined by the author’s failure to mention three other factors leading to the change in power: 1. the Assault Weapons ban, with which the NRA used its organizing and funding power to defeat sitting Congressional representatives, 2. the attempt at creating the largest expansion of the social state since LBJ, the major expansion of access to medical insurance led by Hillary Clinton, which failed in Congress, and 3. Clinton’s hiking of taxes for the wealthy in the 1993 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, which mobilized the Republicans. They claimed that it would wreck the economy (this vaudeville act was repeated in 2009-2010).
All three of these significant initiatives were left-leaning. Democrats lost power in 1994 largely as a response to them, not in response to bills that were passed years after the election. Either the author has a bizarre understanding of chronology or he is not being honest with his readers.
https://rightwingnews.com/top-news/bombshell-ghost-clintons-past-comes-back-haunt-bad/ Clinton admits to child rape.
Clinton gave us W and Obama is going to give us Trump or Hillary which could end up giving us something worse.
Lots of stretches there.
Even where you’re right, you can’t help attacking the Clinton’s with arguments designed by the Right. It’s hard to believe that representatives of the Left, find it impossible to believe that people can change. You believe that Sanders nonsense, that Government will change overnight, if only we vote for Bernie, is real, But the idea that Hillary or Bill can have changed into better people, is a “lie.” One thing is obvious here, your predictable, tedious bias.
John! You are right but we can hope that now Democrats will perform better. So we can’t say that who is lying. I am not supporting that Hillary or Bill both are Good but some time we need belive
Bill Clinton pushed neoliberal attacks on poor and working class people throughout his two terms. The most obnoxious were the Big Three “reforms” — welfare reform, school reform, and housing reform. Welfare reform undermined poor families by forcing single mothers off to work, leaving the kids behind (in places like Chicago, where I an writing this) to the gangs. Housing reform eliminated public housing for the poor, resulting in the massive profits for the housing speculators, unkept promises about Section Eight housing to replace it, and hundreds of thousands of families across the USA — children again the victims — homeless. And then there was “education reform.” Bill Clinton praised Chicago’s “mayoral control model” in two State of the Union addresses and pushed the privatization and test based attacks on the nation’s real public schools with a vengeance. Clintonomics, not Reaganomics, undermined the major gains of the New Deal and left behind most of the messes we are beginning to clean up today. Hillary Clinton’s promise to put Bill “in charge of the economy” is all it will take to make millions of Bernie Democrats like myself continue to work against both the Trumpists and Hillary’s hypocrisy. And I’ve voted Democrat virtually all my adult voting life…
Yes, He is the main who is supporting the Democrats. Now Democrats again working perfectly