Why I Can’t Hate On Bill Clinton — Even Now

Considering my somewhat maverick bent, maybe it’s not surprising that I didn’t share all the horror and outrage about Bill Clinton’s face-off with some protesters about the 1994 crime bill a week or so ago.

I mean, yeah– that law was packed with many awful provisions that have hurt hundreds of thousands of people, especially folks of color. I get that part, and agree. There are dues to pay for all that — plus welfare “reform” and bank deregulation and more –and plenty of legislative and programmatic rollback that’s overdue.
But as I watched the video and listened to him, those facts didn’t leave me wanting to throw rotten fruit at him or add him to the long, long list of public figures now deemed “hopeless racists.”

Why not?
Well, here I turn to blogger Doug Muder, who writes “The Weekly sift.” He puts out excellent content every Monday, and today’s major post is called, “Do We Still Have to Worry About the McGovern Problem?”
The main point of Muder’s piece is an exploration of the question of whether Bernie Sanders, were he to be nominated for president, would be subjected to the kind of rightwing onslaught that would slice him and his campaign to ribbons and result in a Yuuge GOP blowout.

Of course, neither Muder nor I (or you) know that bit of the future, and I’ll spare you my current opinions thereon. Yet I urge you to read the piece to see where he comes out on the query.

Along the way, tho, Muder reviews the careers of Democratic presidential candidates, winners and losers, since the McGovern disaster 44 years ago. (BTW, for the record, I lived through that campaign, pulling for McGovern all the way, and was devastated by his landslide loss.)
But I digress.
In due course, Muder puts Bill Clinton and his record under his microscope, which brings him to the crime bill, welfare “reform,” bank deregulation, and all that. And here, he puts into words much of what I felt when I watched Bill mixing it up with the protesters.

And here, I’m going to let him take up the story, beginning with Clinton’s hapless predecessor as Democratic standard bearer (I’ve added a few [bracketed] comments):

“Clinton and the New Democrats. If you didn’t live through it, it’s hard to communicate just how depressing the [Michael] Dukakis debacle was. Entering the fall 1988 campaign, Democrats hadn’t thought of Dukakis [who had been a popular & effective governor of Massachusetts] as a McGovern-style left-winger. (Jesse Jackson had been the candidate of the party’s left wing, and Dukakis had resisted pressure to pick him as VP.) On the national scene, Dukakis was a fresh face who should have been able to slough off past stereotypes. He didn’t have a big spending program, wasn’t pushing a tax increase, and his Greek-immigrant-pride thing should have shielded him from the patriotism issue. One post-convention poll had Dukakis ahead of Bush 55%-38%.


[CEF comment: I lived in Massachusetts for some years, and thought very highly of Dukakis, and rooted for him too.]

“But when the Republicans unleashed the formulaic anti-liberal attack, Dukakis proved just as vulnerable as McGovern and Mondale. His poll numbers quickly collapsed, and Bush (who had never seemed like a particularly strong candidate) didn’t just win, he romped his way to 426 electoral votes.
After 1988, Democrats had a sense of “What do we have to do?” The answer came from Bill Clinton. You can’t understand Clintonism without grasping that post-Dukakis despair.

[CEF: Amen; it was the pits.]

“Clinton recognized that the problem was as much image as substance: It wasn’t liberalism itself, it was getting tagged with the liberal stereotypes. You had to compromise somewhat, but you could still have broadly progressive values. You couldn’t stop Republicans from throwing the McGovern/Mondale/Dukakis attacks at you, but (like Jimmy Carter in 1976) you could still win if you maintained an image that the stereotypes wouldn’t stick to. Far-right conservatives might still believe them, but the swing voters wouldn’t.
Clinton wasn’t a “Massachusetts liberal” like Dukakis: He was a Southern Baptist with a drawl who easily projected a good-old-boy sensibility. He declared himself to be “a new kind of Democrat”, and he shifted Democratic rhetoric across the board. He “felt our pain”, but always justified his programs as fairness rather than appealing to compassion, and he rooted his case in respect for traditional American values like hard work….

Clinton made a career out of stealing Republican issues and putting his own spin on them: Balance the budget? Reform welfare? He’d do it, and if Republicans wanted to oppose him they’d have to move even further to the right. In retrospect, some of Clinton’s “accomplishments” — Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the Defense of Marriage Act, and his crime bill — can only be defended by observing that something even worse probably would have happened if he hadn’t gotten out in front of a popular movement that was gaining momentum.

[CEF: Tru dat. If you weren’t there, you just don’t know.]

“He compromised, but he won, and it mattered that he won. That’s why Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer are on the Supreme Court rather than two more Clarence Thomases.

[CEF: Speaking of Clarence T, that confirmation was yet another traumatic horror show of those years; and every time you see pictures of him sitting silently on the bench [and then voting far right] , you should remember just how much worse it would have been if Bill Clinton hadn’t been there to stop the descent of the court ever deeper into the Thomas-Scalia cesspool.]

“While Clinton sometimes rattled his saber and kept defense spending relatively high, America managed to go eight years without launching a major ground war. He left office with low unemployment, low inflation, a budget surplus — and a 66% approval rating.

[CEF: No big wars; many of us seem to mainly forget about our ongoing wars now; but NOT having a big one on Clinton’s watch was a biggie for me.]

“Every Democratic presidential nominee since has in one way or another learned from Clinton’s example, and has maneuvered to project a centrist image. (I believe that’s why Obama drops his g’s.) In that time, the Democratic candidate has lost the popular vote only in 2004, and even that election was close.
One measure of the success of the Clinton strategy is that each recent Democratic nominee has been attacked in some way that was uniquely personal, rather than just being fed to the generic liberal-killing buzzsaw. Bill Clinton was “Slick Willy”, Al Gore was so wooden you wouldn’t want to have a beer with him, John Kerry didn’t deserve his medals, and Barack Obama was a shallow celebrity who palled around with terrorists.

[CEF: Um, and not to forget that Obama was a person of color, which has been an intolerable and delegitimizing hate magnet in the eyes of all too many Americans since the day he was nominated, then since that morning he was sworn in. Donald trump’s ranting about Obama’s “fake” birth certificate was but one,  thoroughly reprehensible but comparatively small indication.]

“The too-liberal case was still there, but it didn’t stick for a majority of voters, so Republicans had to try other attacks.

The downside of Clintonism. As George Lakoff and others have often pointed out, there is no centrist worldview. So while stealing Republican issues and hippie-punching figures to your left may put you in a position to rein in something really bad — to turn, say, a constitutional amendment defining marriage into DOMA, which the Supreme Court (with Breyer and Ginsburg in the majority) could later find unconstitutional — along the way you reinforce the overall conservative frame, and marginalize anyone who promotes a liberal frame. That may win elections in the short term, but makes it hard to build a movement. . . .”

. . . And here Muder gets back to his McGovern-issue-in-2016 musings.

Which are excellent, and you should read them.
But remember I have quoted him thus extensively to illuminate my different point, which is that Bill Clinton is still for me a huge figure in our recent political history, and while there were truly some awful things that were left behind from his term, that need to be cleaned up ASAP— I mean years ago. . .
. . .Yet when I got down to it, and finished watching the video, while I felt I could understand some of the anger out there, I still found myself shaking my head and muttering, I guess to nobody, that it could have been worse. Much worse. (Like how much worse it got in the time of Bill’s immediate successor.)
Much, much worse.
So shoot me.