In Retrospect

Reading Ed Kilgore's post on Hillary Clinton and the question of "change" I was a bit taken aback to see an Official New Democrat seem to characterize the view "that the Republican Congresses Clinton faced made it impossible for him to pursue a truly progressive course" as some kind of slam on Clinton perpetuated by reactionary paleoliberals. I would think that something along those lines would be part of the case for Clinton; it's unfair to criticize him for not delivering results that it wasn't possible to deliver.

Indeed, this is what I find a bit distressing about Hillary Clinton framing her campaign in terms of nineties nostalgia -- the goal of restoring the policy status quo circa summer 2000 seems weirdly timid and not especially true to the actual spirit of the Clinton administration. There is, however, a psychological problem here. I have no doubt that if you took a time machine to January 1993 and showed Bill Clinton what he would have accomplished by January 2001, he would have been a bit disappointed. This is, after all, someone who came into office promising to transform the health care system and make it so that if you work hard and play by the rules, you won't be poor. But by the time Clinton left office, he doubtless wanted to convince himself not just that he'd done a good of coping with a difficult situation, but that he was actually a world-historically brilliant political leader. Which would be fine if it were purely a question of individual ego (one doubts that non-egomaniacs get elected president), but it becomes problematic as a forward-looking political agenda. Imagine what kind of Senator Ted Kennedy would be if his worldview was centered around the idea that congress frustrating JFK's legislative agenda was actually the height of sound government and he had to protect the party from the grips of these LBJ-style radicals who wanted to pass Civil Rights laws.

Comments

"that the Republican Congresses Clinton faced made it impossible for him to pursue a truly progressive course"

Even with a Dem congress it would be very difficult for a Dem president to pass a truly progressive agenda.

Given the way the Senate is set up with the minority party able to filibuster with 40 votes Dems would need a supermajority to overcome congressional obstacles. Add to that right leaning Dem senators and you see the difficult odds.

To pass FDR or even LBJ level reforms you would needs a super majority in both houses of congress.

Posted by DonB | July 6, 2007 12:31 PM

I would think that presiding over the healthiest economy in a long time that saw a major reduction in poverty would be a lot more of an accomplishment than more social programs which would have created more drag on the economy due to higher taxes.

If Clinton had gotten everything he wanted, the 90s wouldn't have been the roaring 90s. We would never have seen a surplus.

And besides, Clinton figured this out before the Republicans took over. His 1993 economic plan featured steeper spending cuts than we saw during Reagan's first economic plan. Clinton was a pro-growth President first, a progressive second.

Posted by Adam Herman | July 6, 2007 12:35 PM

Bill Clinton was positively giddy at the Republican gains in '94: he could get back in permanent campaign mode and use the Gingrich congress as a foil to win in 96. (With the close advice of republicans David Gergen and Dick Morris, no less...)

Also, he wouldn't have to listen to those pesky liberals anymore. In the subsequent elections, he barely raised a finger to strengthen his party in Congress.

We can get all moist eyed about how much better he was than the current resident, but many opportunities (including those he campaigned on) were squandered in favor of 'triangulation'

Posted by DukeJ | July 6, 2007 1:02 PM

Is Dean now supposed to stand in for reactionary paleolibs? (Are the netroots?) I don't think that's clear, and Kilgore isn't usually shifty in his characterizations. It's just possible he's offering an honest description of the arguments he (and everyone else) has heard netroot-ish folks (who often appear to be another wing of neolib Dems) make. It's not clear to me that he considers it a slam, either.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | July 6, 2007 1:21 PM

"Given the way the Senate is set up with the minority party able to filibuster with 40 votes Dems would need a supermajority to overcome congressional obstacles. Add to that right leaning Dem senators and you see the difficult odds."

Add in the fact that Southern Dems, when they do get elected, tend to be different from Northeastern and California and don't always necessarily share the same agenda.

Posted by Reality Man | July 6, 2007 1:26 PM

Matt and company:

Just to clarify the post you discussed, I wasn't describing the "Clinton couldn't be progressive" line as a slam on Clinton. I was instead, perhaps too summarily, referring to it as a way for many, Howard Dean most explicitly, to distinguish Clinton from New Dem types who allegedly kept "trianglulating" after Clinton left the scene.

I also didn't, for what it's worth, call anyone a "reactionary paleoliberal." It's true that Dick Gephardt, who fit that insult as well as anyone back in the day, also happened to be the first prominent Democratic politician to launch a frontal attack on "Clintonism," in a Big Speech in 1997 that did not go over very well. But that's the same Dick Gephardt who just endorsed HRC this week. So much for the old labels.

The basic reality is this: it's not respectable (this side of David Sirota) for Democrats to dislike Bill Clinton. So not surprisingly, Democrats who dislike "Clintonism" as an ongoing enterprise tend to look back on the Big He as an outsized political talent who did as well as he could, but whose legacy should be firmly consigned to the past. Obama has his own obvious reasons for promoting this treatment of Clinton and his era; the whole point of my post was to note that this is a debate with some history and some ideological freight as well.

Ed Kilgore
www.thedemocraticstrategist.org

Posted by Ed Kilgore | July 6, 2007 1:27 PM

What bothers me is that even with years of empirical evidence showing how good Clinton-type policies are for the country, liberals still want to go back to the heyday New Deal and Great Society.

It's called overreach. It happened, things changed, move on. The modern world is not amenable to the kinds of things paleoliberals want to do. It's not 1930 or even 1970 anymore. Progressivism means "moving forward", not "social programs" except to the extent social programs move us forward. Under Clinton, this country took greater leaps than perhaps it had at anytime in the 20th century. That's progress.

Nah, wouldn't want to repeat that again, would we? Some people were having way too much fun!

Posted by Adam Herman | July 6, 2007 3:11 PM

Not that I disagree entirely. But I think you're off the mark here.

The "progressives", defined broadly, that we're speaking about aren't trying to reinvent the wheel, or devise some Utopian scheme. They're trying to get a health care system in this country, just like one almost all other developed countries have.

And even if some are more in the "utopia on earth" model, so what? I think "saving the planet" and dealing with climate change is a pretty big issue that won't be solved by Third Way.

Posted by DRR | July 6, 2007 3:35 PM

The Clinton health plan wasn't a bad plan. Neither are the plans of other Democrats running today.

This isn't an attack on mainstream Democratic politicians so much as liberal bloggers who want single-payer health care, more business regulation, and who think welfare reform was a bad idea and we should go back to unconditional benefits.

Like it or not, the DLCers have produced the only successful Democratic administration in most of our lifetimes. Until the liberal wing can do better, they need to bitch less.

Posted by Adam Herman | July 6, 2007 4:56 PM

Under Clinton, this country took greater leaps than perhaps it had at anytime in the 20th century.

Cripes. How drunk or how ignorant do you have to be to believe that? At least tell us what in gawd's name you think you're measuring that isn't beggared by some other eight years in the 20th century.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | July 6, 2007 6:29 PM

If Hillary and Bill would have accepted the late Sen. John Chafee's compromise for health care reform based on individual rather employer mandates, the need for additional reform would likely be a lot less pressing.

Posted by Rich | July 6, 2007 8:53 PM

Of course Bill Clinton was constrained by Republican control of Congress (though he helped to create that control by botching his first two years in office, when he had a Democratic congress and could have accomplished something).

But many of the accomplishments he bragged about were really about enacting the Republican agenda: NAFTA, the GATT, and welfare reform. He can argue that he held the line against even worse Republican ideas, and that he managed the economy well. But his legacy, for a two-term president, was quite thin, because there really wasn't any core issue that he was passionate about and that he spent political capital to get enacted.

Posted by Joe Buck | July 7, 2007 1:23 AM

On the Hillary issue, my guess is that while many of us reacted to the Bush administration's harebrained right-wing policies by taking it as a repudiation of Republicans and the right, and are eager to see strong, activist Democrats in the White House and Congress, thinking "Bush was a right-winger, and sucked; I want a left-winger," others have reacted by turning sour on the idea of pursuing big changes altogether, seeking a cautious, managerial attitude toward government, thinking "Bush pursued big changes and ambitious policies, and sucked; I want someone who will return things to normalcy and cautiously avoid doing something too stupid and untested."

Posted by Julian Elson | July 8, 2007 5:12 AM