Full statement below:
UPDATE: Full Statement of Secretary Reich
Bill Clinton’s Old Politics
I write this more out of sadness than anger. Bill Clinton’s ill-tempered and ill-founded attacks on Barack Obama are doing no credit to the former President, his legacy, or his wife’s campaign. Nor are they helping the Democratic party. While it may be that all is fair in love, war, and politics, it’s not fair – indeed, it’s demeaning – for a former President to say things that are patently untrue (such as Obama’s anti-war position is a “fairy tale”) or to insinuate that Obama is injecting race into the race when the former President is himself doing it. Meanwhile, the attack ads being run in South Carolina by the Clinton camp which quote Obama as saying Republicans had all the ideas under Reagan, is disingenuous. For years, Bill Clinton and many other leading Democrats have made precisely the same point – that starting in the Reagan administration, Republicans put forth a range of new ideas while the Democrats sat on their hands. Many of these ideas were wrong-headed and dangerous, such as supply-side economics. But for too long Democrats failed counter with new ideas of their own; they wrongly assumed that the old Democratic positions and visions would be enough. Clinton’s 1992 campaign – indeed, the entire “New Democratic” message of the 1990s – was premised on the importance of taking back the initiative from the Republicans and offering Americans a new set of ideas and principles. Now, sadly, we’re witnessing a smear campaign against Obama that employs some of the worst aspects of the old politics.
Bill could blow it for Hill.
Indeed, he has already. Ba dum bum.
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p>I think that what I am beginning to see is that the exceedingly shrill denunciations of the Clintons are coming from the far left wing of the party: the special interests to which Democrats are traditionally bound, the so-called “progressives”, Robert Reich for crissakes.
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p>Doubtless this is because Clinton is a centrist, rather than a self-styled “progressive.” Indeed, the best moments of Bill’s administration, welfare reform, say, happened when he ignored the bleatings of the left wing. I guess it is payback time.
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p>It is interesting that the right wing attacks HRC as a commie, and the left attacks her as conservative. That suggests to me that she resides in pragmatic moderate land, which is a good thing.
Reich has always been disappointed with the Clintons since he served in the administration and basically lost out on some of the big economic decisions – when Bill put fiscal prudence ahead and deficit reduction ahead of progressive spending policies. Reich lost out to former Treasury Secretaries Bentsen and Rubin and never had the same view of the Clintons since.