As we know it. Meaning the democratic system. It's going to take a while to repair.
I disagree. Presidents have a LOT of effect on the economy. Hell, just by electing a republican statistics show that our economy reaps a benefit. At first he had to deal with some of the policies of Bush Sr., but after a few years some of his OWN policies started coming into effect. I read a thing on the SA Forums about his administration and how it wasn't as bad as everyone tends to make it out. The tech burst happened during his years as president and we still saw some of the best times economically and politically under Clinton--to say the man wasn't an extremely awesome diplomat is to make a bold-faced lie. He got us on standing relations with many countries that we were very much not friendly with.
[quote=Peter Beinart from The New Republic]
Part I: The Intellectual and Moral Case
"Clinton's third way failed miserably. It ... delivered nothing." So wrote Markos Moulitsas, the most influential online activist in the Democratic Party, in the May 7 Washington Post. It's not an unusual view. In his wildly successful book, What's the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank says that, in the 1990s, Democrats committed "suicide." Among liberal activists today, the claim that Clintonism represents a failed model--which contemporary Democrats must reject--has virtually become conventional wisdom.
The case against Clintonism comes in two parts: one moral and intellectual, the other political. I'll tackle the first this week; the second next week. What unites them is a deep amnesia about the party--and the country--that Bill Clinton inherited. The attack on Clinton founders on one simple question: compared with what?
The moral and intellectual critique starts with the assertion that Clinton stood for little other than his own political survival. By draining the party of its core convictions, the critics allege, he left Democrats in the intellectual wasteland in which they find themselves today.
The charge ignores two small things: the 1970s and the 1980s. In reality, the Democratic Party didn't lose the confidence of its convictions when Clinton became president; it lost them when he was in graduate school. From Harry Truman through Lyndon Johnson, Democrats stood for three basic things: enlightened anti-communism, an expanding welfare state, and racial integration. Between 1968 and 1972, under pressure from Vietnam and racial conflict, two of those three collapsed. By 1972, George McGovern was urging the virtual abandonment of anticommunism and advocating racial quotas. Then, in 1976, Democrats nominated a relative economic conservative, Jimmy Carter, who showed little interest in extending Johnson's Great Society largesse. And, poof--there went principle number three.
From 1976 to 1992, each Democratic presidential nominee tried to put Humpty Dumpty back together, and each failed, until Clinton. Carter ran on character--as a decent, capable man who embodied the small-town virtues forsaken by Richard Nixon. And it worked--until economic recession and the hostage crisis stripped him of his reputation for competence and left him ideologically naked.
In 1984, the Democrats nominated Carter's vice president, Walter Mondale, who looked like a prisoner of the party's fractious, multicultural factions. While serving numerous parochial interests, his campaign never defined any broader national one. As one Mondale speechwriter admitted, "We had a hell of a time putting down on paper what this campaign was going to be all about."
In 1988, Michael Dukakis barely even tried. "This election is not about ideology," he declared. "It's about competence." And, when Lee A****er shrewdly invoked cultural issues like crime and the Pledge of Allegiance, which required not merely technocratic solutions, but statements of belief, he crumbled.
This, like it or not, is the history that preceded Clinton. He did not create liberalism's crisis of faith; he inherited it. And, in 1992, he became the first candidate in two decades to offer a coherent response. His adviser Bill Galston called it the "politics of reciprocal responsibility." Government would provide opportunity, but it would demand responsibility in return; it would not give something for nothing. This idea--manifested in Clinton's pledge to "end welfare as we know it"--angered some liberals. But it told blue-collar whites that Democrats would distinguish between people who "played by the rules" and those who didn't. (Clinton's tough stance on crime sent the same message.) By the time Clinton signed welfare reform in 1996, the public's image of government was changing. When people thought of the beneficiaries of government help, they were more likely to think of people like themselves.
If Clinton convinced Americans that government action could be moral, he also convinced them that it could be responsible. By reducing the budget deficit, he helped restore the Democratic Party's reputation for economic stewardship, which had been gravely damaged under Carter. And, by using market mechanisms to achieve traditional liberal goals, he found ways to fight poverty in an environment where large new programs were politically impossible.
To be sure, Clinton sometimes bobbed and weaved. But these two principles--the willingness to make moral judgments (think of school uniforms or the V-Chip) and the recognition that social justice does not always require new programs (think of Al Gore's reinventing government)--were the most important intellectual innovations in the Democratic Party in two decades.
And they worked. Clinton's 1993 decision to cut the budget deficit rather than propose substantial new spending helped lay the groundwork for an extraordinary economic boom. And, unlike the boom of the '80s, Clinton's genuinely benefited the poorest Americans. Under Ronald Reagan, 50,000 children escaped poverty; under Clinton, more than 4 million did. During Clinton's tenure, income rose faster for blacks and Latinos than for whites, and faster for single mothers than for two-parent families. By 2000, black and Latino poverty were at their lowest levels ever recorded.
And it wasn't only the economic boom. Clinton raised the minimum wage, he created schip, which offered health insurance to children of the working poor, and he dramatically expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit (eitc). These initiatives rewarded work, and none required large new government bureaucracies. But, on the ground, they changed lives. When Clinton left office, the poverty rate was 11 percent. But, as Ronald Brownstein has noted, when you factor in government policies, especially the larger eitc, it dropped to 9 percent. During Clinton's presidency, the percentage of Americans living in poverty fell by one-quarter. And, without particular policies based on a particular vision of government, that would not have happened. Morally and intellectually, Clintonism wasn't a miserable failure; it was a success.
The same is true politically. But that's for next week.[/quote]
And--
[quote=Peter Beinart from The New Republic] Part II: The Political Case
Last week, I addressed the intellectual and moral case against Clintonism: that it lacked principle and accomplished little. But, among activist liberals today, that intellectual and moral critique is inseparable from a political one: that Bill Clinton destroyed the Democratic Party. Constructing a Democratic majority, critics like blogger Markos Moulitsas and author Thomas Frank allege, does not require building on the Clinton legacy; it requires escaping it.
The argument starts by noting that Clinton never won a majority of the vote. But the statistic is less damning than the critics assume. In three- or four-way presidential elections, the winner rarely cracks 50 percent. Woodrow Wilson failed to do so twice; so did Harry Truman in 1948 and Richard Nixon in 1968. In 1980, with John Anderson running as an Independent, Ronald Reagan squeaked by with 50.75 percent. Measured in electoral votes (which often factor out third-party candidates because they don't win a plurality in any state), Clinton's victories look impressive. He won 370 electoral votes in 1992 and 379 in 1996--more than Wilson in 1916, Truman in 1948, John F. Kennedy in 1960, Nixon in 1968, Jimmy Carter in 1976, or George W. Bush in 2000 or 2004.
Some critics acknowledge that Clinton was personally popular, but attribute it to his freakish political skill. Clintonism, they insist, was not--and thus cannot be the basis for a Democratic revival. But the truth is closer to the reverse. As early as 1992, when revelations about Gennifer Flowers and draft-dodging nearly derailed his primary bid, Americans had huge doubts about Clinton's character. But they divorced those qualms from their assessment of Clinton's policies--which they grew to love. By December 1998, after the Monica Lewinsky scandal hit, a majority of Americans disliked Clinton personally, but over 70 percent liked what he was doing for the country. Today's activists blame Clintonism for leaving grassroots Democrats demoralized. But the demoralization began after Clinton left office. According to the Pew Research Center, 63 percent of Democrats said their party was doing a good job standing up for its core beliefs in 2000--compared with only 33 percent by the end of 2004.
How, then, do you account for the great electoral disaster of Clinton's tenure: the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress? The answer is something that Clinton's critics generally ignore: history. For more than a half-century, Democratic strength in Congress had been anchored by the party's dominance in the South. At the presidential level, Dixie began deserting the party as early as 1964. But, in Congress--where incumbents rarely lose--the transformation lagged far behind. As late as 1988, Democrats still controlled roughly two-thirds of the region's House and Senate seats. But it couldn't last. "Eventually, the massive political realignment at the top of the ticket," warned party strategists Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck in 1989, "will affect races at the bottom of the ticket."
"Eventually" came in 1994, sparked by a wave of retirements and race-based redistricting that created new black districts and left white ones whiter. Did Clinton exacerbate the problem? Sure. The assault-weapons ban, gays in the military, the health care push, and the 1993 tax hike fueled Republican turnout, while nafta kept some labor voters from the polls. But, while Clinton accentuated and hastened the change, it would probably have happened anyway. To keep Congress, Democrats needed the South, and, given the ideological distance--especially on cultural issues--between the white South and the national Democratic Party, the hammer was bound to fall.
And it wasn't just the South. For more than two decades prior to Clinton's election, the national Democratic Party had been in decline. Clinton's liberal detractors blame him for not creating a Democratic majority. But partisan majorities take decades to build, and Clinton took the critical first step: He smashed the existing, Republican majority that had taken shape under Ronald Reagan. (In this way, he was like Richard Nixon, who smashed a preexisting Democratic majority but didn't create a Republican one in its place.) The Reagan majority was based on three things: militant anti-communism, public suspicion of government, and the divide between blacks and the white working class. Mikhail Gorbachev took care of the first, but Clinton overcame the others. The percentage of Americans identifying as Democrats, which dropped like a stone in the '70s and '80s, hit bottom in the early '90s, and the spread versus the GOP inched up. Even more importantly, public perceptions of government, which had also been in freefall since the mid-'80s, began to improve--which is logical, given that government policies were markedly improving the lives of average Americans, particularly the poor.
Clinton's liberal critics savage him for gobbling up big money contributions rather than developing a small donor base (something Democrats began doing in the '80s). And they are right that, in the long term, a small donor base is critical to a Democratic majority. But the emergence of that base since 2004 owes largely to factors that did not exist in the '90s--campaign finance reform, liberal rage over Bush and Iraq, and, above all, the Internet. Organizationally, Clinton could have done more to hasten its rise. But, ideologically, he did something even more important: He convinced blue-collar whites--who had grown cynical about government--that it could improve their lives.
In 1992 and 1996, Clinton did something no national Democrat had done in decades: He won the white working class. And, by restoring the public's faith in government, he laid the ideological (if not the organizational) foundation for a Democratic majority. That emerging majority was derailed by two things. First, the Lewinsky scandal, which made character a dominant issue in the 2000 presidential race and sliced Al Gore's popular-vote victory so thin that the election ended in the Supreme Court. And second, September 11, which gave Bush a Republican Congress and a second term.
But, with those two factors receding, the Democratic Party's prospects once again look bright. The party's new "netroots" base deserves some credit for that. But, even more importantly, Americans are turning to the Democratic Party because, under Bush, they have seen government fail, and they remember a time when it worked--under Bill Clinton. Liberal activists should remember as well.[/quote]
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