Bai isn’t the first to make this observation, but he states it succinctly and well:
By this thinking, Clinton and his friends at the Democratic Leadership Council…were so desperate to woo back moderate Southern voters that they accepted conservative assertions about government (that it was too big and unwieldy, that what was good for business was good for workers) and thus opened the door wide for Bush to come along and enact his extremist agenda with only token opposition.
Despite esteeming the former president, Democrats remain dubious about “the centrist forces he helped unleash on the party.” Bai sees a reckoning with Clintonism as an important theme of the 2008 campaign.
Whatever else these Democratic primaries may be about – health care plans, global warming, timetables for withdrawal from Iraq – they are, on some more philosophical and even emotional level, a judgment on the 90’s and all those tumultuous years represent.
Bai identifies three strains of anti-Clintonism in the 2008 campaign: Obama’s and Edward’s critiques of triangulation and watered-down poll-driven positions, instead of clear principles; concern about corruption and the capture of government by corporate interests; and what Bai calls “boomer fatigue” – the sense that the stalemated and corrosive political culture that arose between the parties in the ’90’s must change.
Bai’s article is ultimately, I think, kind to Bill, recalling that he was a rebel within his party when he started, not so unlike today’s bloggers in being willing to take on sacred cows and the party establishment. Bai allows that Clintonism was more than an electoral strategy. It was about successful tactics, and winning elections, yes, but it was also Clinton’s sincerely held philosophy of governing to seek progressive ends through different means than traditional liberalism. Bai also points out that Obama and Edwards, even as they critique elements of Clintonism, have embraced rhetoric and policies that owe much to Bill and his approach of governing from the center.
Bai is more cautious on Hillary:
it’s also possible that history will record Bill Clinton as the first president of the 21st century, the man who synthesized the economic and international challenges of the next American moment, even if he didn’t make a world of progress in solving them. This may be the defining difference between the candidacies of Bill Clinton and his wife…Like most successful outsiders, Bill Clinton directly challenged the status quo of both his party and the country, arguing that such a tumultuous moment demanded more than two stark ideologies better suited to the past. By contrast, Hillary Clinton’s campaign to this point has been mostly about restoring an old status quo; she holds herself up as the best chance the Democrats has to end eight years of Bush’s “radical experiment” and to return to the point where her husband left off. It has been a strong but safe campaign…but winnning a general election could well require a more inspiring rationale.
Good piece, worth looking up. We’ll see soon how the votes fall.
It took eight years for Clinton to build and eight months for Bush to squander and destroy the peace and prosperity he inherited.
Democrats have not stood for much of anything since the Kennedy administration. The days of robust liberalism died with the Vietnam War, the party then got divided between various interest groups and fights between the New Left, the old Left, and the DLC crowd.
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p>And thats basically where we are now. Duke and Mondale were old liberals, McGovern a New Lefty, and Clinton and Carter cut from the DLC mode of Southern moderates. Clinton arguably ceded too much ground to the right on a core of issues and created the corporate friendly Democrat party which has netted a lot of good (consensus on free trade for one) and a lot of bad (the Iraq war for one). What is needed is a new kind of politics that bring us out of these old battles and unite us behind common principles.
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p>Both parties are doing a lot of soul searching this year and will have to ask themselves what they stand for.