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Hillary Clinton today promotes herself as a “reformer with results,” and she’s relied on a widespread impression that she and Bernie Sanders aren’t really that far apart on major issues. After the last round of primaries in the Northeast, she expressed it again:
“Because whether you support Senator Sanders or you support me, there’s much more that unites us than divides us. We all agree that wages are too low and inequality is too high, that Wall Street can never again be allowed to threaten Main Street, and we should expand Social Security, not cut or privatize it. We Democrats agree that college should be affordable to all, and student debt shouldn’t hold anyone back.”
Of course, it’s not just Democrats. The points she touched on have broad popular support, despite elite hostility, or at best neglect, which is a large part of why Sanders went from 3% support in the polls to near parity in some April polls [FOX, NBC/WSJ,IPSOS/REUTERS].
But Clinton is a skilled politician, so she’s artfully re-aligned herself to blur their differences, with overwhelming support from the elite punditocracy. When the dark side of the Clinton record from 1990s is raised—NAFTA, Defense Of Marriage Act, “welfare reform,” mass incarceration, Wall Street deregulation, etc.—two defenses come readily to mind: “Hillary didn’t do it!/Bill was president” and “times change/you’re forgetting what it was like.”
These are both effective narratives in the establishment echo chamber, which is designed and intended for horse-race politics at the expense of political understanding (as well as factual accuracy). But Hillary Clinton wouldn’t be here today if she hadn’t been aligned with those policies—and with helping to create the environment in which they came to pass. Even before entering the White House with her husband, whohad promised voters“two for the price of one” during the 1992 campaign, the pair had cast their lot in with those who moved the party to the right, most notably when Bill Clinton became head of the DLC—the Democratic Leadership Council, or asJesse Jackson called it, “Democrats for the Leisure Class.”
The DLC was crucial to the Clinton’s rise to power, so it’s absolutely essential to understand it, if one wants to understand their politics—and that of the party they’ve so profoundly reshaped—all the way up through Hillary Clinton’s most recent rearticulation of the day.
An excellent starting point for understanding this comes via the much broader focus of Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers’s book,Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics. While the book makes references going back to the Carter era, it opens with a meeting of twenty top Democratic Party fund-raisers three weeks after Walter Mondale’s landslide loss in the 1984 election,where they discussed “1988 and how they could have more policy influence in that campaign, how they might use their fund-raising skills to move the party toward their business oriented, centrist viewpoints,” as the Washington Post reported the next day.
It goes on to describe how, two days later, a closely-related group, the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, sponsored a similarly-themed public forum that drew national press attention, dominated by speeches given by Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt and Virginia governor Charles Robb, who, in turn, were also prominent founding members of the Democratic Leadership Council in the following spring, along with Missouri Representative Richard Gephardt and Georgia Senator Sam Nunn:
“The moderate and conservative Democrats didn’t make it past the first round in its primaries in 1984 and we want to change that,” said Nunn, a major Democratic proponent of increased military spending who had backed John Glenn in the 1984 race.
Right Turn makes it abundantly clear that the DLC was just one facet of a much broader mosaic of elite political reorientation—a reorientation profoundly out of step with the American people, as the book also takes pains to point out. Salon contributor Corey Robin recently illuminated this broader elite shift in a blog post, “When Neoliberalism Was Young: A Lookback on Clintonism before Clinton,” citing in particular “A Neoliberal’s Manifesto” by Charles Peters, founder and editor of The Washington Monthly, in which “The basic orientation is announced in the opening paragraph,” Robin notes:
We still believe in liberty and justice for all, in mercy for the afflicted and help for the down and out. But we no longer automatically favor unions and big government or oppose the military and big business. Indeed, in our search for solutions that work, we have to distrust all automatic responses, liberal or conservative.
This captures neoliberalism in a nutshell: a disavowal of New Deal liberalism in the posture of open-mindness, which (“Ooops, I did it again!”) repeatedly lends itself to conservative cooptation. It quickly became a popular stance in the Democratic donor class, spread further by the publications they financed and other political infrastructure.
Still, the DLC emerged to play a much more central role than most of the other forces involved, specifically because of Bill Clinton. Al From tells the story like this:
A little after four o’clock on the afternoon of April 6, 1989, I walked into the office of Governor Bill Clinton on the second floor of the Arkansas State Capitol in Little Rock.
“I’ve got a deal for you,” I told Clinton after a few minutes of political chitchat. “If you agree to become chairman of the DLC, we’ll pay for your travel around the country, we’ll work together on an agenda, and I think you’ll be president one day and we’ll both be important.” With that proposition, Clinton agreed to become chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, and our partnership was born.
Clinton was a natural fit for DLC, From said. Both Clintons, in fact:
He was not afraid to challenge old orthodoxies. In the early 1980s, long before I knew him, he and Hillary Clinton pushed cutting-edge education reforms, like pay for performance and public-school choice, against the opposition of the powerful Arkansas Education Association.
Fighting teachers unions! Just like Bernie Sanders, I’m sure!
Clinton…. took the DLC’s shelves of policy-wonk manifestoes and dark warnings about special-interest politics, and turned it into an agenda for winning elections and governing, with his own charm and his own brand of compromise and conciliation, not DLC founder Al From’s. The DLC thinks it made Bill Clinton, but in fact Clinton made the DLC. Without his charisma and political smarts, its earnest, castor-oil approach to politics and policy would never have won a national election.
The same, of course, is true of Hillary Clinton as well: however smart, educated, and otherwise well-qualified she may be—as much as anyone in her generation, arguably—she would never have been where she is today without her husband’s charisma and political smarts, which in turn undermines her retroactive efforts to disavow the path they blazed together. And that path was “progressive” because From decided to label it so—as push-back against journalists’ more accurate recognition that it represented a conservative force within the Democratic Party. As Paul Star wrote in 2014:
In 1991, Clinton told a DLC conference in Cleveland: “Our New Choice plainly rejects the old ideologies and the false choices they impose. Our agenda isn’t liberal or conservative. It is both, and it is different.” This denial of labels was a way of getting people to listen. Eventually, though, needing a label, From settled on “progressive,” an ironic choice. During the Cold War, “progressive” had meant left of liberal (as in Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party), but it now came to refer vaguely to any viewpoint left of center. From says he called the DLC’s policy arm the Progressive Policy Institute because he was tired of his organization being described by journalists as conservative.
Even the claim of being ‘vaguely left of center’ is a questionable one, considering the vast differences between elite and mass opinion which have so shaken and confused elites this cycle. It’s arguably more instructive to recall that in 1896, running against the Populist/Democratic Party alliance headed by William Jennings Bryant, William McKinley’s big business Republicans successfully portrayed themselves as representing the forces of progress. It’s an extremely ambiguous term, to say the least. Clinton’s description of their agenda as neither liberal nor conservative, but “both” and “different” perfectly exemplifies this ambiguity.
While it’s true the DLC’s formation was born out of a widespread Democratic donor class revolt, and was intended to combat forces pushing the party to the left, that’s not the full story of its genesis, and it’s misleading to ignore that there were some genuinely progressive motivations involved. We need to understand that side of the story, too, if we’re to understand the limitations that live on today in Hillary Clinton’s continuing claims to be a progressive. And for that, we can turn to Mark Schmitt’s look back in 2011, “When the Democratic Leadership Council Mattered,” just after the DLC closed its doors. “The real DLC was far more complicated — though not necessarily more benign — than its caricature in the 2000s, when it became best known for blind support of the Iraq War and for founder Al From’s simmering anger at anti-Iraq War liberals like Howard Dean and Ned Lamont.” Schmitt wrote.
“To understand the real DLC, it’s useful to know the name Gillis Long,” the Louisiana congressman (cousin of the legendary Huey Long) who chaired the House Democratic Caucus after Reagan’s election. “Both DLC co-founder Will Marshall — who now runs the thriving and independent think tank the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) — and From had worked for Long and remained devoted to him after his death, on the day of Reagan’s second inauguration.”
The DLC was, in significant ways, an effort to keep Long’s style of politics alive:
But chasing the chimera of a South that was going to elect more than the occasional Long or [Florida Governor Lawton] Chiles led the DLC into a cul-de-sac, in which the pursuit of white Southern votes became an end in itself, and so the fight to eliminate affirmative action and reform welfare (neither of which would much affect the economic well-being of the working middle class that was already losing ground) became the organization’s touchstone issues in the mid-1990s. Racial politics, not “corporatism,” was the more controversial aspect of the DLC at the time Jesse Jackson called it “Democrats for the Leisure Class.”
Which is why it’s so ironic to see Hillary Clinton depending so heavily minority support (especially Southern blacks) to not only keep her candidacy alive, but also her reputation as a progressive. Schmitt goes on to say, “But at least the organization was thinking about how to construct a working majority with progressive ideas at the heart of it,” but there three distinct problems here: First, how progressive were those ideas? Second, were they really at the heart of what the DLC was doing? And third, what working majority? The third problem is far less subject to obfuscation than the other two: The fact that Democrats lost the House in a landslide two years after Clinton’s election for the first time in 40 years, and held on to it for 12 years after that does not square at all with notion that Clinton “saved the Democratic Party,” or that DLC politics constructed “a working majority with progressive ideas at the heart of it.”
In fact, they did the exact opposite: they destroyed the Democratic House majority which had long been a bastion for progressive ideas and political leaders. That fact alone casts doubts about the whole thrust of the DLC’s progressive claims. After all, if their argument was—like Clinton’s today—that they are pragmatic progressives, then their failure to build an enduring political majority undermines the very core of their argument.
The fact that the same pattern of record-breaking Congressional losses (and state legislative ones as well) repeated itself with Barack Obama should tell us something. Obama had nothing to do with the DLC, directly. But he grew up politically in the world that the DLC did so much to create, and he espoused a similar desire to be neither liberal nor conservative, neither “blue state” nor “red state,” but “both” and “something different.” Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were both successful politicians individually, but neither was successful in constructing “a working majority with progressive ideas at the heart of it,” even if you don’t question how progressive their ideas really were. Perhaps the best way to understand their success, as well as the limits of this brand of “progressive ideas” is through analytic lens of Augustus Cochrane III’s 2001 book, Democracy Heading South: National Politics in the Shadow of Dixie.
Cochrane argued that the same sorts of maladies which afflicted the South circa 1950, diagnosed in V.O. Key’s classic, Southern Politics in State and Nation, had come to afflict the nation as a whole. The specific structures might differ—lungs vs gills—but the functions, or dysfunctions were strikingly similar, he argued, with political power held tight by wealthy elites while the majority of voters were confused, disengaged, or entirely absent, with politics serving them primarily as entertainment. In the 1950s-era South, its one party system was functionally a no-party system, operating somewhat differently from state to state. In the country at large, the same result later came from a dealignment of politics—the White House controlled by one party, congress by another—a frequent, but not dominant pattern in American politics until 1968, after which it’s become the normal state of affairs. The intensified role of money and media served to accelerate the breakdown of party bonds and further entrepreneurial politics, in which individual politicians thrive by branding themselves, regardless of how party allies may fare.
This is the environment in which Bill Clinton and Barack Obama proved so successful, even as their parties crumbled. Their branding worked first and foremost with the donor class, and then the broader political elite which provides guidance to the mass public public in ordinary times. But this system fails to really engage the public directly, or respond to their needs, which is why participation falls off so sharply during mid-term elections, leaving the possibility of a working majority—with a well-thought out, reality-based policy agenda—increasingly out of reach.
The DLC brand of progressivism was perfectly crafted within this corrupt system of politics to enable certain individual politicians to succeed with their targeted messages and well-honed promises combining “responsibility” on the one hand an “compassion” on the other. The Clinton’s early 80s fight against the Arkansas teachers union was a textbook example of how this worked, which is why From cited that example as showing that the Clintons were made for the DLC. The problem Cochrane described is not about corrupt individuals, necessarily, but it is about systems in which mass organizations like teachers unions are automatically labeled corrupt. In an upside-down world like that, things are bound to be confusing.
Which is why that world favors clear, crisp messaging more than almost anything else. “Reformer with results” is a powerful branding message, regardless of how meager those results may be, or even how toxic they are now seen to be two decades on down the road. In the end, the real problem with Bill and Hillary Clinton-style progressivism is not only what a mixed bag its results have proven to be. There’s also the further problem of how it muddles our vision of what a truly successful progressive politics might look like. Now, more than ever, we need to go back and ask ourselves, what were the roads not taken? Where could they have lead us instead of here? And how can we create similar alternatives going forward? That’s a conversation we’ve barely even begun to have.
Paul Rosenberg is a California-based writer/activist, senior editor for Random Lengths News, and a columnist for Al Jazeera English. Follow him on Twitter at @PaulHRosenberg.
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton has been making the rounds to defend his policies while in office to support his wife’s run for President. The close working relationship that he and Hillary Clinton have infers a symbiosis that other ‘First Couples’ wouldn’t be jointly held accountable for. And in contrast to the oft offered argument that Mrs. Clinton isn’t responsible for her husband’s policies, she has taken responsibility (links below) for her role in developing, promoting and implementing the omnibus crime bill of 1994 that led to the massive buildout of the carceral state (mass incarceration) and for her use of the term ‘super-predator’ as racist slander against Black children.
When Bill Clinton was recently confronted by Black Lives Matter protestors he reiterated the talking points that he (and Hillary) used in 1994, that drug ‘gang’ violence was real, that his (and Hillary’s) interest was humanitarian, that many Blacks supported the crime bill and that the growth in incarceration rates for people of color was an unintended consequence. Left unsaid was that the crime bill was but one part of the Clinton’s opportunistic ‘dog-whistle’ strategy, that the policies tied to more than three centuries of racial repression in the U.S. and that regardless of whether the Clintons fully thought through the implications, they were willing to gamble with the lives of millions of Black and Brown youth for political gain.
Contemporary political rhetoric ‘works,’ to the extent that it does, by erecting walls between ideas, acts and policies that might otherwise be plausibly related. Basic physical security, as in freedom from violence for one’s person, family, neighbors and community, is a human right in a most basic sense. It is also the human right that has been most tightly circumscribed throughout American history. The American ‘story,’ as in the history written by the dominant culture, has been of White America ‘under attack’ from hostile indigenous peoples and inner-city ‘criminals’ whereas the overwhelming preponderance of actual violence has been committed against the indigenous population, kidnapped Africans held in slavery and their descendants.
This same disjoint ‘history’ is true of American military adventures overseas, always undertaken in official explanations to benefit those being bombed, sanctioned, starved, imprisoned and forced to migrate. Bill Clinton spent most of his two terms in office bombing and sanctioning Iraq to ‘contain’ former CIA ‘asset’ Saddam Hussein as Mr. Hussein continued to eat well and sleep comfortably at night. It was the Iraqis who were least able to defend themselves who were bombed, starved, and from whom life-saving medicines and medical care were withheld. Somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 innocent Iraqis— mostly women and children, were killed by Mr. Clinton’s bombs and sanctions.
This context is necessary because when Bill Clinton chose to defendhis and Hillary Clinton’s omnibus crime bill and its social consequences he framed it, once again, as a domestic ‘humanitarian intervention.’ The localized ‘truth’ that Mr. Clinton used to do so— that freedom from violence is a basic right that ‘even’ the communities subsequently targeted with repressive policing, racially biased drug laws and mass incarceration deserved, removes the broader context of American racial history. Alternatively, without an antique-progressive racial or genetic theory of ‘crime,’ why would liberal Democrats choose police repression and creation of a carceral state before first resolving the political and economic exclusion that correlate 100% with the communities suffering from ‘internal’ violence?
In history, the first ‘professional’ police department in the U.S. was created in Charleston, S.C. from mercenary ‘slave patrols.’ Following the Civil War ‘Black laws’ (codes) were used to maintain civil control over nominally freed slaves for purposes of creating neo-chattel conditions of expropriated labor and social control. Jim Crow used racially targeted laws, policing and carceral policies as tools of civil enforcement of racial repression. Ronald Reagan began his 1979 campaign for President in Philadelphia, MS, where in 1964 three civil rights activists were brutally murdered by local police working with the Ku Klux Klan. It was in this historical context that in 1994 Hillary Clinton used the term ‘super-predator’ as racist code for poor black youth to sell the omnibus crime bill.
In fact, the Clinton’s spent most of Bill Clinton’s two terms using coded racist themes—‘dog-whistle’ politics, to benefit politically through raising racial animosity and repression. Mr. Clinton’s welfare ‘reform,’ framed as ‘ending welfare as we know it,’ followed directly from Ronald Reagan’s racist caricature of the ‘welfare queen’ living high on the public dime. Mrs. Clinton’s ‘super-predators’ likewise had implied race and class that tied to racist themes of Black ‘supermen’ all ‘hopped up’ and impervious to pain, bullets and ‘normal’ human emotions. That the overwhelming preponderance of American racial violence has been perpetrated against Blacks and the indigenous population seems a murderous flaw in the dominant culture id— complete reversal of factual history into misdirected fear.
Put forward as support for the Clinton’s policies is that many Blacks buy-into dominant culture stereotypes much the same as White people do. In areas where drug violence persists, Blacks are often featured on the local news thanking the police for arresting the kids who have been shooting up neighborhoods and killing one another. To state the obvious: these circumstances are tragic and require social resolution. However, the argument that repressive policing, racist drug laws and mass incarceration are socially constructive solutions in no way follows from the tragedy of the circumstances. The Clinton’s ‘market-based’ solutions to poverty ultimately destroyed the near totality of Black wealth and many inner city neighborhoods in the housing bust.
Most adult Americans live no more than a ten minute walk or drive from a place where, for less than twenty dollars, they can buy a lethal dose of a debilitating and violence inducing drug. Eighty-eight thousand people drink themselves to death every year in the U.S. Two hundred and ten thousand people die each year from preventable medical errors. The worst case scenario under the racist hysterics of ‘super-predator’ theories was that 6,000 people per year would die. In other words, Americans are 35X more likely to die from an accident at the doctor’s office than they were in 1994 to die from ‘gang’ violence. The Clintons knew exactly what they were doing when they used coded racist appeals to ‘peel away’ White suburban voters from national Republicans. The strategy worked politically for them at the time, never mind the body-count of destroyed lives they left behind.
Drug (alcohol) Prohibition in the 1920s produced a violent culture of (White) alcohol distributors that used gun violence against one another, the police and occasionally innocent bystanders. No racialized pseudo-science was created in response around a White predisposition toward wanton murder. The social ‘choice’ of which drugs are legal or illegal has always been a proxy for racial and cultural politics. As Dan Baum wrote recently in Harper’s, Richard Nixon’s rationale for launching the ‘war on drugs’ was to provide the Federal government with plausible cover to spy on, disrupt, arrest and otherwise impede Black communities and the anti-war Left for political gain. From its inception the war on drugs has been a racialized tactic of political repression waged by the authoritarian Right, often with the help of progressive ‘science.’
Many commentators have pointed the sudden compassion that White Americans found for the drug-addicted as heroin has once again become a major cause of death among Whites. Portugal decriminalized all drugs(heroin, methamphetamine, etc.) fifteen years ago, at about the same time that the Clintons were leaving office. Since then drug usage in that country has declined substantially (link above). Canadian physician Gabor Mate has been (plausibly) arguing for several decades now that drug addiction is a symptom, not a cause, of social dysfunction. Were the Clinton’s intention other than political gain through racial division and racist repression their lack of political imagination might have only been depressing, rather than socially catastrophic.
The broader frame of the American carceral response to social problems is inextricably tied to three centuries of racial repression. Bill Clinton slaughtered 300,000+ innocent (Brown) women and children in Iraq and social circumscription places those deaths in the category of ‘acceptable’ behavior. But when Black children tossed onto the social garbage heap express a tiny fraction of the social pathos hurled at them they are suddenly too dangerous to be left un-imprisoned. To reiterate, in the context of broader threats to life and livelihood, the threats to the children the Clinton’s imprisoned far outweighed any plausible threats from them. Had Bill and Hillary Clinton given the slightest crap about these children they would have been increasing funding to their communities, not cutting it as they were.
In an interview that followed Bill Clinton’s derision of Black Lives Matter protestors in Philadelphia, Hillary Clinton demonstrated that she understands that their use of dog-whistle politics in the 1990s is a political problem forher in 2016. And therein lies part of the problem. The lives that the Clinton’s destroyed in Iraq, Kosovo and in the American carceral system are just so much detritus, a political problem to be overcome, rather than human catastrophes to weep over and try to make right. Hillary Clinton wants to ‘tweak’ the carceral state (link above) without revisiting the base premise that if punishing socially destructive acts is the legitimate function of incarceration she, her husband and some fair portion of their moneyed supporters belong in prison for ‘the remainder of their natural lives.’
This isn’t a gratuitous slam— what the Clinton’s use of racialized politics demonstrates is that it is the entire American system of governance that needs to be reworked. The distinctions between the ‘innocent’ and the ‘guilty’ used to legitimate the carceral state have nothing to do with justice and everything to do with the maintenance of social privilege and power for the Clinton’s and the cohort of plutocrats and power brokers that they represent. The ‘thirteen year old boy’ that Bill Clinton uses to convey moral outrage at Black-on-Black violence deserves more than to be used as a prop in his racist ploy to win votes. Mr. Clinton need not even be insincere in his outrage— some of the most effective demagogues are those that sincerely believe their destructive rhetoric.
The starting point to address social violence is creation of a state of social justice for all people. This includes a right to work for decent wages, adequate housing, quality public education, public health care from cradle to grave, adequate pensions and the right of political participation. Hillary Clinton and her liberal apparatchiks have argued convincingly that Hillary Clinton has no concept of how to affect such an outcome. In fact, in their view no such outcome is possible. In defending his own programs, what Bill Clinton confirms is that Hillary Clinton was an active participant in their development and implementation. The public record substantiates Mrs. Clinton’s active role in the Clinton’s dog whistle politics. And in fact, her ‘experience in public life’ is the central selling point that Mrs. Clinton claims for herself.
As Bernie Sanders readies his capitulation and asks that followers of his ‘revolution’ get in line behind Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment the question needs to be asked: if the Clintons are the best that the Democrats have to offer, why would anyone in their right mind vote for Democrats? How what the Clintons did in the 1990s comes across in 2016 is absolutely the point— their policies and politics were cynical bullshit then and that is exactly how they appear now. The only guarantee in the present is that whichever establishment candidate becomes President, it is the overwhelming preponderance of the world’s citizens who will suffer the consequences. Revolution is the only solution.
Announcement that Hillary Clinton would ask her husband Bill for economic advice reveals stark contrast between their supporters and the Americans who agree with Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders’ darker vision of the decade
Former president Bill Clinton campaigns with the Democratic frontrunner for president, Hillary Clinton. Photograph: Mike Nelson/EPA
Like the upcoming sequel to Hollywood’s 1996 blockbuster Independence Day, this summer Bill Clinton is hoping to revive the spirit of the 90s after two decades away from the White House.
Frailer, thinner and with a now whispery stage voice, the 42nd president of the United States has captured attention by revealing a deal with his wife Hillary toserve as an economic adviser should she defeat Donald Trump in November’s general election.
But just as the film’s writers updated their script to put a woman in the new Oval Office – they memorably blew up the original – much has moved on since the last time a Clinton was behind the Resolute desk. What worked in the 1990s is no guarantee of box office success this time.
Though his exact role in any future administration remains unclear and a cabinet post has been ruled out, the emergence of William Jefferson Clinton as a central cast member in his wife’s 2016 campaign is already prompting a major reinterpretation of past performances.
From trade liberalisation and welfare reform, to gay rights and the war on drugs, the once-vaunted legislative successes of the first Clinton decade are being re-litigated in a very different America.
Trump has also begun to re-examine old scandals. He has tried to use Bill’s womanising as an antidote to his own alleged misogyny, and has threatened to dredge up everything from his affair with Monica Lewinsky to the Whitewater property deals in an effort to smear his opponent in attack adverts.
“Nobody in this country was was worse than Bill Clinton with women. He was a disaster,” Trump recently claimed at a rally in Oregon, after his own record was challenged by his opponent’s campaign.
At least the Clintons have had time to develop a thick skin. “You think the stuff they said about [Hillary] is bad? They accused me of murder,” Bill Clintonresponded on Friday, referring to the conspiracy theories that followed the suicide of White House aide Vince Foster.
For many Democrats, the “first dude” – as Hillary once joked he might have to be called if she wins – nonetheless remains an unparalleled electoral asset.
Unlike Tony Blair’s war-tarnished reputation, the centrist tenets of Third Way politics in the US emerged relatively unscathed from Clinton’s eight years in office between 1993 and 2001.
The reputation of this political “big dog” for both growing the economy and bringing Republicans and Democrats together, though more fondly remembered on the left than the right, is a particular attraction at a time of partisan rancour and economic insecurity.
“There’s been one time in 50 years when we all grew together, and that’s when I had the honour to serve. And I would like to see it happen again,” boasted Bill Clinton during a speech to supporters in Kentucky where he first revealed his offer to help his wife revitalise impoverished regions like Appalachia and the Rust Belt.
But while this attention to what the former Clinton adviser James Carville once dubbed “the economy, stupid” makes just as much electoral sense now as then, there is far less consensus today that Clintonomics holds the necessary answers.
At least two phenomena can trace some roots in that insecurity: Trump’s capture of the Republican party and the remarkably persistent challenge ofBernie Sanders to Clinton’s Democratic nomination. Both rest on their shared critique of Clinton-era free trade deals, and both opponents target the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) and the permanent normalisation of trade relations with China in October 2000, which they say began a hollowing of US manufacturing that accelerated under George W Bush and Barack Obama.
Sanders in particular has singled out Clinton’s reform of welfare entitlements for exacerbating US poverty rates and removing a vital safety net once the economy turned sour.
The collapse in middle class incomes since the banking crash of 2008 can also arguably be traced back to Clinton’s decision to remove many of the restraints on Wall Street.
Recently revealed documents show two separate attempts by bank-friendly advisers, in 1995 and 1997, to hurry Clinton into a repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which prevented investment banks, insurers and retail banks from merging.
A Financial Services Modernization Act was passed by Congress in 1999, giving retroactive clearance to the 1998 merger of Citigroup and Travelers Group. The law also unleashed a wave of Wall Street consolidation that was later blamed for forcing taxpayers to spend billions bailing out the enlarged banks after the subprime mortgage crisis.
Even Bill Clinton’s own labour secretary, Robert Reich, has become a major critic of the administration’s legacy – and emerged as a powerful cheerleader for Sanders instead.
As Sanders supporters come under pressure to rally around Clinton, Reich acknowledged this week that she would be preferable to Trump, but with words of faint praise.
“Don’t demonize or denigrate Hillary Clinton,” he wrote. “She’ll be an excellent president for the system we now have, even though Bernie would be the best president for the system we need.”
On the campaign trail, Bill Clinton has also become a magnet for critics of the criminal justice system, who claim his 1994 crime bill, passed during the so-called “war on drugs”, was responsible for incarcerating a lost generation of African American men.
“I don’t know how you would characterise the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack, sent them out onto the street to murder other African American children,” he angrily told Black Lives Matter protesters last month. “You are defending the people who kill the lives you say matter.”
Though the language sounded as dated as the policy, Clinton supporters argue some can be excused by the changing times and attitudes. Both Clintons, for example, have also been criticised by gay rights campaigners for supporting the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, when public support for same sex marriage was far less common or vocal.
Ultimately, however, such issues reveal the limits of relying on 90s nostalgia to help propel the Clintons back into the White House. As it has with grunge music, electronic pagers and Tamagotchis, the world has moved on a long way.
