Yesterday, the news was buzzing about Tim Kaine “wailing” on the harmonica on the campaign trail.
While I appreciate the effort (he’s not bad, though C&W is not my genre), I couldn’t help but remember Bill Clinton playing the blues in 1992. Even more poignantly, joining an all-star blues ensemble at the 40th Anniversary of the Newport Jazz Festival.
Say what you will, after Ronald Reagan and George H. Bush, this man DEFINED cool.
Please share widely!
Arsenio Hall commented after Clinton’s performance, “It’s nice to see a Democrat blowing something other than the election!”:)
Defined cool?
Shaking my head so damn hard.
I agree with Tom’s assessment, but would add that the current POTUS is a pretty cool cat himself.
It was a personal judgment, which I think is much worse.
After a dozen years of Ronald Reagan’s sentimental Father-Knows-Best horseshit and George H. Bush’s lame attempt to continue “the Reagan years”, I found Bill Clinton a refreshing breath of fresh air.
I’m unashamed about my enthusiasm for Bill Clinton, then and now, personally and professionally.
You have enthusiasm for Hillary because she is not Trump and you had enthusiasm for Bill because he was not Reagan. Looks like the neoliberals have found how to outwit you. That don’t have to stand for what you believe in, much less deliver anything of merit. They just have not be that other guy and you’ll then the keys to the castle.
He’s just playing the sax and otherwise showing his humanity in this context. I’m completely missing what could be objectionable in this context.
It’s not just playing sax that Tom was referring to. It’s his entire persona. I take issue with a well-established sexual creep “defining cool.” It’s similar to people thinking that Frank Sinatra “defined class.”
If we want to look at single instances, one could call George W. the coolest President ever for his first pitch at Yankee stadium after 9/11.
…with Clinton’s sex live, the details of which range from unproven to none of your business.
…W DID seem to win the want to have a beer with sweepstakes vs. both Gore and Kerry.
After eight years of Reagan, four of Bush, Democrats just wanted to WIN. Hey, this guy looks cool. He’s young, good looking, and a dynamite speaker. Let’s hitch our wagon to him. That much I agree with. That much I understand. I do not understand the blinders being put on when he passes the Commodity Futures Modernization Act and his repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act – giving free reign to the rich to rape and pillage the nation and then implements cuts to the welfare state through passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, tearing a gaping hole in the safety net.
Do I need to add NAFTA and the mass incarceration of minorities brought about by his crime bill?
Or do we just listen to the music, move on, nothing to see here, because THIS guy is COOL!
stuff then. Why should we believe you now?
I supported it then, when I was a Rush Limbaugh idiot. Why did you support it then and still support it now?
half of the question.
I am able to enjoy the things that ARE and WERE cool about Bill Clinton, admire the things he did that I support, and tolerate the things he did that I do not (and there are, frankly, few of them). I am willing to differentiate between hindsight and foresight.
Unlike some, I remember what the GOP was attempting to do to the safety net. I remember their crudely disguised racism as they attacked Mike Dukakis with Willie Horton and the venerable “welfare queen” lies — and I remember the complete inability of every other Democrat (or anybody else) to handle those attacks.
I remember black community leaders pleading with federal officials to do something — anything — about the violence plaguing the inner cities and the unwillingness of the Reagan administration to do ANYTHING about it. I remember GOP politicians using “law and order” as a cudgel against Democrats and “liberals” (a canard born during the Nixon era), making it a dog whistle for legalized harassment of minorities.
I remember Bill Clinton turning those canards on their ear. I remember him, with full-throated and enthusiastic support from inner-city black community leaders, putting “one hundred thousand new police officers” on the streets. I remember President Bill Clinton completely humiliating Newt Gingrich and the “conservative” GOP, giving them a political whupping that they STILL smart from. There’s a REASON deep-pocketed right-wing donors spent SO MUCH money trying to destroy Bill Clinton.
The enthusiastic support for Bill and then Hillary Clinton from minority communities across America didn’t just happen. Those communities know, in a way that angry white men do NOT know, just how much Bill and Hillary Clinton have done for black and minority communities for DECADES.
I don’t know about anybody else. I’m completely able to enjoy what was great about Bill Clinton and accept his imperfections along the way.
I look forward to doing the same for Hillary Clinton.
the Commodity Futures Modernization Act and his repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act – giving free reign to the rich to rape and pillage the nation and then implements cuts to the welfare state through passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, tearing a gaping hole in the safety net NAFTA and the mass incarceration of minorities brought about by his crime bill that you liked? And why do you look forward to more if it from Mrs. Clinton?
What is it about “Those communities know, in a way that angry white men do NOT know, just how much Bill and Hillary Clinton have done for black and minority communities for DECADES” that you find hard to understand?
You unabashedly self-identify as an “angry white man” here. You utterly ignore how ACTUAL black communities ACTUALLY feel about Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton before her. The plain truth is that the dogma you relentlessly repeat here was COMPLETELY REJECTED in this primary season. Mr. Sanders ran it up the flagpole, and it failed miserably. The plain truth is that those black communities that you claim were so damaged by Mr. Clinton OVERWHELMINGLY supported Hillary Clinton in this primary season.
Whatever community you think you defend, it is NOT the black and minority community. In fact, you ignore them in a way that is strikingly similar to the way that Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the GOP have ignored them for generations.
…if the organized union endorsement track record is any guide.
…but I don’t recall Tom specifically defending those things. What I do recall is running real liberals in 1984 and 1988 and getting our rear ends handed to us. Can you blame Dems for tacking to the center, especially after the GOP retook the House in 1994 for the first time in 40 years? What if Clinton had done nothing on welfare and risk losing to Dole in 1996? Then the GOP would have complete control and the safety net wouldn’t survive at all.
Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank. I’m currently in progress trying to get through it, but my reading time has been rare lately.
He makes the argument that only a Dem could have pushed through what Clinton did (as the Dems would fight the same things if proposed by a Repub). According to him, Social Security privatization was next up but was pre-empted by the whole Monica thing.
I’m not going to debate Frank’s points – read the book if you want to get more into it.
Attacking labor, agreeing with Republicans that “welfare queens” really exist and are at the heart of the issue, deregulating Wall Street in such a way that we almost repeated the Great Recession and now see wealth disparity equal to that of the 1920’s….is “taking to the center”?
…it was people of your rightwing ilk we had to contend with in the 1990s and gave us a GOP Congress and now you are complaining the Clintons played the hand y’all dealt him! Maybe if you and numerous others learned THEN not to be a Dittohead we could have done things differently.
As now, I am fighting to support labor, bring equality, and tear down the powerful interests that now run this country while you and your Somerville friend are embracing the status quo and defending a political movement that is funded by Wall Street….but like the man said, the money has to come from somewhere.
Looks like we’ve switched roles.
You might think you’re “fighting to support labor, bring equality, and tear down the powerful interests that now run this country”. I think your commentary, if it has any effect at all, accomplishes just the opposite.
in the window. What do you feed him?
At no time did Bill Clinton EVER “agree with Republicans that ‘welfare queens’ really exist”.
You are simply lying.
Tell me why he had Welfare Reform enacted? And while you are at it, tell me why Hillary called the act a way to get rid of deadbeats?
The point is that Ms. Clinton, and her husband before her, removed the racist dog-whistle from the discussion about welfare reform. The system DID need reform. The abuse (and “deadbeats”) was, in fact, overwhelmingly by poor whites in Appalachia. The dog-whistle “Welfare queen” was specifically targeted at a stereotype of inner-city black women. In fact, when examined through the lens of the percentage of people who qualified for benefits compared to the people who collected benefits, inner-city blacks were UNDER, not over, served by that system.
You are, I hope, able to realize that abuse of the welfare system (and therefore welfare reform) was not a “black” phenomenon, right? The system WAS being abused by 1992. Or is that another fact that you refuse to admit into your anti-Clinton narrative?
Clinton could dog whistle like the best of them, he just used a tune that was inaudible to affluent white liberals. You don’t think this New Republic cover backed by the DLC wasn’t directed against the welfare queen? You don’t think executing Ricky Ray Rector or excoriating Sistah Souljah and conflating her with David Duke was part of that strategy? TNC has documented this as have others. Or Hillary saying Super Predators. The DLC was all about winning over white suburbanite Rockefeller Republicans and winning back white ethnic Reagan Democrats.
The whole 1992 campaign was premised on the idea that government should help people who “work hard and play by the rules” which implicitly agrees with the Republican idea that welfare recipients were immoral insolvents who cheated the system.
The dual shocks of welfare reform and rent control repeal in 1994 made my sister homeless for several months and she and my nephew had to live with us. My mother when she was a single mother out of her abusive first marriage got free community college off of CEDA and a chance to get off the welfare rolls, my sister never had that chance thanks to TANAF. She’s been stuck in the same minimum wage trap that Michael Moore and Robert Reich have extensively catalogued. There is a reason Reich resigned. Even Moynihan voted against reforming AFDC the way Clinton did, and he literally wrote the book on why Great Society welfare didn’t work. We can say Hillary is a progressive and vote for Trump without rewriting history. The Clintons did a lot more for blacks than Reagan-Bush, and a lot less than Johnson, Carter or Obama.
AFDC, rent control, and other similar Great Society liberal programs were, by the 1970s, comprehensively discredited (whether fairly or unfairly), profoundly unpopular politically, and by 1992 were political zombies. Liberal democrats had about 25 years prior to 1992 to make the case for a more left-wing reform, and they just didn’t.
If Clinton didn’t work with the Congress he had, and sign a welfare reform bill in 1996, there would have been an entirely Republican plan enacted without Democratic input in 1997, and signed by President Dole.
You guys often act as if 2008 was, in addition to being a rejection of the GOP, an embrace by the voters of an old-style liberal Democratic agenda. It wasn’t. Dems just happened to be the other option on the ballot.
After 1994, the entirety of the Clinton domestic agenda was to limit the damage in order to fight another day, and in his corner he had his own self and a deeply unpopular minority in Congress. Posts like this are like the “Bernie will enact single payer and free tuition, yay!” posts, in that they totally ignore the reality of the political context.
I have consistently said the Clintons and their policy prescriptions were appropriate for their political era. I don’t disagree with you there. Where you and Tom are wrong is thinking that vision is adequate to meet today’s challenges, or that anything bolder than this vision would repel the electorate. Bernie Sanders and his radical vision nearly captured this nomination. I might add the candidate you both supported in the primary as more electable and fit to govern also repudiated her husbands agenda on trade, crime, war, and even the welfare state. She is running on the most progressive platform since 1972 and will likely win in a landslide.
You are also wrong about 2008 since Obama won in 2012, and it wasn’t because the GOP nominated someone less electable, it’s because Americans ended up liking Obamacare and gay marriage and getting the fuck out of Iraq. Americans are by and large, overwhelmingly more liberal than they were a decade ago and especially two decades ago. The GOP is moving into McGovern-Mondale terrain and in desperate need of it’s own Bill Clinton. There is no reason for us triangulate anymore.
Downrated for the first sentence. The Clinton policies were wrong back then and many of us who were active then fought them. We are living with his mess today.
I confess I don’t understand the meaning of the rest of your post.
I don’t think anyone has said that they want a re-run of Democratic policies from the 90s. I do think that tom and I have rejected the villification of Bill by means of pretending the 70s, 80s, and 90s didn’t happen.
Where I think you depart from reality is that you seem to assume that there is some vast shift of the electorate and Democratic voters to the left, and I just don’t see it.
What I do see is that a presidential candidate who has been a political smear target for 25+ years– first for being a radical liberal in the White House (she wasn’t); then for being a crypto-conservative (she wasn’t); and then for being insufficiently ideological– unsurprisingly has poor favorability ratings, which allowed a competing candidate to do surprisingly well for a month or so.
What I also see is that that other candidate was pretty soundly beaten in the end; that the noisiness of his campaign pushed the Dem platform left, but not any actual elected Democrats. It is now primary season. Where are the left-wing challengers to the evil neo-liberal Democrats. There aren’t any.
What I also see is that this not-moving left party is nevertheless the minority party in Congress and in state legislatures, and seems likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future.
You write: “Where you and Tom are wrong is thinking that vision is adequate to meet today’s challenges”
I don’t think I’ve ever said that. I certainly didn’t say it here.
I do hope you have proof of that, or are you still working on the difference between a heart attack in Finland versus the USA…or are you taking Blue for a walk?
Mondale ran on deficit reduction, hence his infamous pledge to “raise your taxes”. Other than Hollings or Hart, Mondale was to the right of the rest of that primary field which included George McGovern who strongly opposed Mondale on economics. The only issues he was legitimately left of center on were abortion and the nuclear freeze.
Dukakis similarly ran as a flinty Yankee fiscal conservative and third way job creator, he was the DLC’s choice along with Al Gore going into 1988 after Hart fizzled. He was not from the progressive or labor wing of the party, that would’ve been Paul Simon or Dick Gephardt respectively. They only retrospectively became liberals in the eyes of the media which bought the right wing spin machine and the DLC which was eager for an even more conservative nominee, which it got in 1992 with Bill Clinton. Nobody with his record or platform could even approach the nomination today, just ask Jim Webb.
…at least in the eyes of the public such a strong pledge to raise your taxes is the very definition of liberal with all it’s negative connotations. Dukakis himself too late said he was a liberal and I think it’s fair to say was on the social issues of the day. He attracted a primary challenge from his right in 1978.
It is indeed ironic that I offer, on a Democratic blog, a light-hearted look back at arguably the best politician we Democrats have elected since FDR — and most of the resulting commentary is hostile.
Bill Clinton was popular while in office — more so than Barack Obama (compare the “4th July after re-election” figure of 60% for Bill Clinton to Barack Obama’s 53%) — so much so that only Dwight Eisenhower did better.
Bill Clinton took office with a nation in recession, an accelerating national debt, and a White House reeling from yet another GOP abuse-of-power scandal. He left his successor a booming economy and a balanced federal budget. More importantly, he absolutely DEMOLISHED the arsenal of attack weapons the GOP had used to defeat Democrats since the Nixon era (“Welfare queens”, “Soft on crime”, “Soft on defense”, “Bad for the economy”, yada-yada-yada). Years of right-wing personal attacks served only to enhance his popularity with the public.
I get that there are some here who are attached to the hostility and contempt produced by decades of groundless right-wing attacks. I get that there are some here (perhaps because of age) who cannot distinguish hindsight from policy. I get that there are some here who know Bill Clinton only through retrospective videos and history classes.
Bill Clinton was far and away the greatest politician, greatest President, and greatest Democrat of my lifetime. What I don’t get is why so many self-identified Democrats treat this giant with such hostility.
That you place Clinton and FDR together……as Clinton worked so feverishly to tear down all that FDR had achieved.
Obama is a better president.
Much of his “greatest” accomplishments were not at all progressive and we’re still feeling the long-term negative impacts and he had more personal failings than any President of the twentieth century except for Nixon.
What I don’t get is why so many self-identified progressives treat this man with such admiration.
Whatever
…on politics brought Dems back to the White House after 12 years and the first Dem twice elected since FDR.
…on policy presided over the longest sustained economic expansion up to that point and relative peace.
Frankly, I turn your last sentence right back to you and say I don’t understand why so many Democrats treat him with such contempt.
He did this by embracing toned down versions of their attacks against liberalism and toned down conservative solutions. Welfare reform and his approach to criminal justice were humanitarian disasters in the black community, as was the deindustrialization accelerated by NAFTA in white and black communities alike.
His foreign policy was a mix of half hearted humanitarian interventions and laid the groundwork for a lot of the rhetoric and policies the ultimately led to the Iraq War which he, his wife, and their allies in the Democratic Party fully embraced.
I’ll never forget the horrible way the Clinton wing treated Howard Dean in 2004, and it’s taken me 12 years to forgive them. So much of the early reason for blogs such as this one was to have a forum outside of the Democratic establishment for liberal ideas to be discussed, encouraged and embraced. We were shut out of Clinton’s party, the Dean campaign, Kos and BMG were ways to break back in.
I wonder if perhaps this is another foresight/hindsight situation. You describe yourself elsewhere as a child when the 1992 Arsenio Hall clip happened. I was a divorced and remarried 40 year old father of three (then), with a mortgage, child support, a devastated economy (thanks to 12 years of Reagan/Bush), and no job. I stood in an unemployment line in Lowell in the early winter of that year (1992), saw block after block of plywood-covered storefronts, and Salvation Army campfires in doorways. I remember a distinct impression that I was watching a newsreel from the 1930s, in living color.
For me, Bill Clinton changed that world overwhelmingly for the better. I never felt shut out of the Democratic Party. The web didn’t even exist then (the first internet browser wasn’t distributed until 1995). When you speak of “half-hearted humanitarian interventions” as Mr. Clinton’s foreign policy, I remind you that when he took office US “foreign policy”, for twelve long years, had been illegal wars throughout South America, continued support for the utterly corrupt and drug-dealing rule of Manuel Noriega in Panama, secret arms deals with the Iranians, failed and completely ineffective responses to attacks like the PanAm 103 bombing, and so on. Where does the Grenada invasion fit into your hostile Clinton foreign policy narrative?
It seems to me that you look back on the Clinton administration and chastise it for the many things it did that turned out differently than we all hoped. I remember thanking my lucky stars that we finally had competent leadership in the White House that was at long last cleaning up the ENORMOUS amounts of broken china that twelve years of Ronald Reagan and George H. Bush littered America with.
By 2004, Bill Clinton had been out of office for four years and Hillary Clinton was the junior senator from New York. George W. Bush had already botched 9/11 and then committed the largest single blunder of modern American history. Howard Dean, as much as I loved his flamboyancy, was NEVER a viable candidate. I’m not trying to minimize your pain about all that. I am, however, suggesting that perhaps some of that pain was a result of youthful naivete. The 1972 loss of George McGovern — not to mention the devastating primary season that led up to it — was similarly painful for me.
Today, as one of my favorite fifth-anniversary coffee mugs (from 1992) says, “we are much older now”. Perhaps we might leave it that.
The sax thing was an early memory of my childhood. My first horribles parade in Salem was going as Clinton’s barber while my dad put on sunglasses and played the sax. I’ll see if I can find the pictures.
I think we can argue that Clinton was not a progressive president by today’s metric while simultaneously agreeing he was the most progressive president we could’ve elected in the 1990s. These are not mutually exclusive concepts. There is a reason he was the only Democrat re-elected since FDR before Obama.
Now the fact that the far more liberal Obama got nominated, elected, re-elected and will likely have a Democratic successor is proof that the country has shifted left. Howard Dean ran in the DLCs party in 2004 and was attacked in that primary for being too liberal to win, he would be too conservative to have won this years primary where the mantle of authentic progressive champion was hotly fought over. The DLC is a distant and long dead memory.
Clinton was the best we could do then, his policies are not the best we can do now, which is why I am glad his wife has rejected most of them.
This is what they SAID
I didn’t believe it then, and I don’t believe it now.
Most electable we had at the time? Sure.
Best we could do? No effin’ way. And by do I most explicitly mean win. We just lacked the right candidate.
It’s fair to remember that other than Tom Harkin, none of the primary opponents were more liberal than Clinton. Kerrey was all about hawkish defense policies, Tsongas was all about deficit reduction, and Brown backed the flat tax and was a bizarre mix of libertarian and New Left in his outlook. If Cuomo couldn’t commit to a run, it’s doubtful he would’ve been a good candidate though I do believe he would’ve been a great liberal President.
Wellstone should’ve run in 2000, he would’ve been a better progressive alternative to Gore or Bradley. It would’ve been interesting to see if he had gone through with the primary campaign against Clinton in 96′, though you also had Pat Casey contemplating one from the right. It was a totally different party then with stronger southern and northern pockets of social conservatism.
I listened to Hillary yesterday, when she listed the five things she would do for the economy and justice. They were:
1. Create jobs with a big government investment in infrastructure
2. Make college debt-free for all
3. Encourage companies to share profits with their employees
4. Make the rich (and Wall Street) pay more in taxes
5. Put “families first” in the economy by raising the minimum wage, enacting paid family leave and expanding preschool for all.
I like #1, don’t know how you get to #2 and think it needs to be tweaked so as not to imply that everyone needs a college education. I adore #3 and #4 and I really, really like #5.
Senator Warren, at the most recent Massachusetts Democratic State Convention urged us to only fully support candidates who promised:
1. Get the money out of politics
2. Put more cops on Wall Street.
3. Raise taxes on the top percentage.
4. Increase the safety net for labor.
So how does this stack up? I’ve heard Hillary promise to go after Citizens United, so I’ll give her #1. She’s a “go” on #3. She’s really, really close but not yet there on #4 and I have not heard anything on #2 (not to say it does not exist, but I’ve yet to know about it)
If blowing a sax on TV while wearing shades makes him cool, then what does getting a BJ from a young intern make him? Disgusting is the answer to that question. If you ever attended a fundraiser or private event with him you saw him pawing at women in ways that were disgraceful.
You want cool from that generation? Morgan Freeman. Muhammad Ali. Nina Simone. Faye Dunaway. Patti Smith. Clinton was a bad Elvis imitator. And his sax playing was barely adequate.
He was also a shitty self-serving pol. The greatest Democrat since FDR? What a load of crap. How about Ted Kennedy or Wellstone or Mario Cuomo, who embodied the spirit of FDR, cuz Clinton sure did not. Clinton gave us the deregulation of the financial services sector which came close to destroying the US economy until rescued by Obama, who is a far cooler and more authentic Democrat. Clinton gave us his “Sister Souljah” BS with nasty welfare reform, a doubling down on the war on drugs that has put hundreds of thousands of people in jail, tried to cut Social Security benefits before he tried to privatize it, gave us NAFTA and the GATT, and was willing to sacrifice the entire Democratic agenda via triangulation in order to save his career. He did not rebuild the economy but was the beneficiary of the GHWB tax increase (remember “read my lips”?) that brought the budget back into balance, while he kept spending on social benefits that even the GOP liked.
Clinton was not the worst President of the past half century but he is not half the President that Obama is, whose legacy will include saving the auto industry, the economic stimulus package that helped save our economy from the inevitable disaster than Clinton set in motion with financial de-regulation, the Affordable Care Act, a full-on attack of climate change both domestically and with the UNFCCC Paris accords of last year, the restructuring of the student loan program, and some pretty fine SCOTUS appointees with a mostly hostile Congress. I have more than a few quarrels with Obama but they are nothing compared to Clinton’s records
I nearly threw up in my mouth when HRC said Bill would be her chief economic advisor, which would of course create a disastrous conflict of interest with the Foundation and worse yet, bring him back into policy making.
And if you need any more proof of what a shallow self-serving man he is, just compare his post-Presidency with that of Jimmy Carter. Clinton exists to get rich and show off in public. I have had to deal with the CGI in other countries and it is a bloated and bureaucratic organization. Carter actually brings peace and democracy to far flung places on a comparative shoestring.
You suffer from Clinton Derangement Syndrome, an inability to see the trash in Clinton’s past. Just don’t bring it here to those of us who are actually engaged in the political world.
President Obama was the best president in my lifetime, and this will likely be true after a second Clinton administration. I critiqued him extensively here, and still will on a few areas, but by and large he showed tremendous political acumen, courage, and policy successes in a wide variety of domestic and foreign policies. 20 years from now when we are driving hybrid Buicks, have universal affordable health care, when Iran and Cuba are major trading partners, and when there are no US forces in the middle east we will be ranking him in the top ten presidencies. He also operated the most ethical and scandal free administration in the history of the modern presidency. Hillary would be wise to build on his successes rather than copy her husband’s far more mixed record.
I suggest that Hillary Clinton will be wise to build on Barack Obama’s successes AND embrace the strengths of the Bill Clinton administration. I think she’s already said that she intends to do just this.
I further suggest that Bill Clinton would make different decisions today for many of the contentious issues cited here given what we’ve learned since he was in office (including the consequences of his own policies).
There is absolutely no need or justification for the relentless savaging of Bill Clinton that goes on and on here.
I don’t understand “savaging”, but I also don’t understand demanding a kid glove treatment either. I think it is fair game to look at what was done in his administration both in the context of the times and how its effects last today. Heck, my childhood was as removed from FDR’s administrations as the kids today are from Clinton’s, but I’d argue that he had more of an influence on what my life was like growing up than any of the presidencies that I lived through.
Like any other presidency, Clinton’s was a mixed bag. It’s OK for people to point out what they liked as well as what they didn’t, especially on a “reality based” blog.
Dang “no edit” policy…
“…but I’d argue that he (FDR) had more of an influence…”
Here’s what I mean by savaging:
– “He was also a shitty self-serving pol. ”
– “I take issue with a well-established sexual creep ‘defining cool.’ ”
– “Clinton could dog whistle like the best of them, he just used a tune that was inaudible to affluent white liberals.”
– “he had more personal failings than any President of the twentieth century except for Nixon.”
I don’t think anybody, including Bill Clinton himself, demands a “kid glove treatment” of his administration. People can certainly throw whatever shit they want and see what sticks to the wall — I just find it ironic and disappointing from fellow Democrats, especially when the target is implicitly or explicitly our current nominee.
And, by the way, NONE of the four quoted attacks are true.
Your defense of Bill Clinton without responding to any of the criticism of his tenure is the only thing relentless about the commentary here. You can make all of the “eyeroll” comments you want but today is my first time in taking a shot at him. You are the one who offers broad generalizations and flat out false comments idolizing the Clintons multiple times per day.
As I stipulated, Clinton was not the worst President in recent history. He did stop doing some of the truly evil stuff of the previous decade but that does not make him the best Dem since FDR. Worse still, you don’t even get the facts right in your defense of him.
For example Noriega was indicted in 1988 and his government was overthrown by the US invasion and extradited to the US in 1989, before Clinton took office. Since your recollection of the truth is so faulty I feel the need to remind you that Noriega was a paid US informer since the 1950s, a tool of and user of administrations of both parties. But be clear of the real point, Clinton had nothing to do with bringing Noriega to justice.
Clinton did not end the Reagan/North illegal arms sales. The Congress did a decade before Clinton.
“Illegal wars” in Central America? Clinton engineered an immigration law that fast tracked admission of refugees from the leftist regimes in Cuba and Nicaragua but denied it to refugees from right wing authoritarian governments in Guatemala and El Salvador. This one really pisses me off because I was arrested in Guatemala as a suspected CIA spy by their army when I was there as an observer (it was pretty easy to convince them I was not smart enough to be a CIA spook LOL).
You want a clear example of his tepid humanitarianism? Biden and Daschle, along with many Republicans and real progressive activists who are usually peace-nics, criticized Clinton for allowing ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, including the slaughter of tens of thousands in what is now officially a war crime, before finally allowing after three years NATO to intervene to stop the genocide.
You wrote
which is more garbage. Conservatives still use all of those claims against Dems and progressives. Maybe you missed the GOP primary this year and the Trump rhetoric.
If you want to go through the rest of your fabrication of history I will do that but by now it should be clear that your case of Clinton Derangement Syndrome is incurable.
I have re-registered to vote in one of my other homes in a battleground state so I can cast a meaningful vote for HRC but I am not fooled. Her announcement this week of Ken Salazar as transition chief, he a notorious supporter of the TPP, fracking and Big Oil, is good reason to not let down our guard even though we should vote for her.
I think he looks very good by comparison to what came before. Maybe as a consequence, though, of following such disastrously wrong decisiveness, he was terribly indecisive, to great cost, an AWFUL lot.
On foreign policy, he was always neither here nor there. Will we stay in Afghanistan, or not? Lets think for a year or two. Libya? Maybe HRC was wrong to be hawkish, but it is hard to tell because we wound up being half-hawkish, intervening but not really, but maybe we will, but probably not. Same, to far greater cost, in Syria. We took a FIRM stand against Assad, but maybe not, unless he uses chemical weapons, but maybe not. It is likely that there were zero good options in Syria, but if so, why on earth did we choose one of the bad ones?
The same pattern on domestic matters: lots of what all the people here hate about ACA was pre-emptively surrendered to no one in particular, in an effort to compromise with a GOP that was already clearly not interested. And then we tried that same tactic again, frustratingly often, with the debt ceiling, budget sequestration, etc. For the most part, especially on the budget and debt, this amounted to handing the GOP policy victories in return for nothing.
The best thing about HRC, and I hope that I am right, is that I do not think that she will pre-emptively surrender to the GOP, handing them policy victories in return for nothing.
I see in Obama much the same as I saw in Clinton: a great political talent , squandered. Clinton’s by bad personal decisions, and Obama’s by sheer timidity.
I agree on much of your evaluation. Obama was outrageously successful in achieving his own personal agenda, while Clinton achieved a substantial string of victories that were the product of moving towards the DLC/GOP way past where the Democratic Congress and the public were.
Obama won when he went bold and lost when he was timid. Clinton capitulated too often when bold would have been better (he was also saddled with his own personal foibles that encouraged him to cut his personal losses).
For me, Obama’s biggest foreign policy failures were: 1) his own ill-informed 2008 campaign promise to double down in Afghanistan; 2) listening to HRC’s hawkishness on Libya without having learned the lesson of de-Bathification in Iraq and shredding the political infrastructure of a country without having an alternative; 3) drawing a “red line” in Syria without knowing what that means in conflict zones. The latter was the worst part of his hubris and should never have happened in a second term Presidency. A President cannot issue ultimatums unless s/he is prepared to match them two to one against the opponent and he was not willing to do anything to stop chemical attacks by the Assad regime.
Presidential candidates who do not have substantial Senate or other foreign policy experience (e.g. the GOP’s Jon Huntsman) usually screw up during their first campaign. Making rookie mistakes in your second term is unacceptable.
The big place where I disagree with you is in the source, in that I think Bill Clinton’s failures were across the board, ideological and personal failures. Obama’s failures were a bizarre mix of hubris and timidity.
As much as I like Obama in many ways I still miss Bill. I remember him at very least as a stronger fighter against Republicans, which contrary to the common myth here, he DID do more often than cave.
That the Reagan-style GOP was sweeping all before it for quite some time before 1992. A lot of the policies for which Reagan loudly claimed credit, and for which he is most vilified by the left, were actually continuations of Carter administration policies. That, after all, is why Ted Kennedy shivved Carter in 1980. That’s a process that started in 1968, and accelerated in the 80s. Clinton slowed down the advance, but did not stop it, though he did actually convince Democrats that they have a fighting chance, if they fight. I don’t think Obama fought, or at least brought too little, too late to the fight. I don’t think Sanders could have fought, because he would have been a pure ideologue. I do expect HRC to fight as Bill did, and will forgive the maneuvering necessary to do that, though I think I will need to be reminded to forgive it from time to time.