The Legacy of Clintonian Politics
How the Fall of Real Democratic Party Values Paved the Way for The Rise of Donald Trump and The MAGA Movement. And How Biden Can Help (And Already Has Helped) Undo it.
Talk about timing with the recent New Hampshire primary projections:
As no one paying attention to the 2012 election would ever forget Mitt Romney’s infamous 47% comments, few who paid attention to the 2016 election will forget Hillary Clinton and “the basket of deplorables.”
For many Trump supporters, it perfectly represented how “the Democratic coastal elites” looked down on ordinary people disillusioned with the status quo. It is not to say that all Trump supporters are choir boys. Just ask David Duke, who instigated the events that would lead to the death of a woman in Charlottesville in 2017. Or ask Alex Jones. Or, better yet, ask Roger Stone and Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller and the many other Trump aiders and abettors at hand.
But Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in 2016 was no accident, nor was it even a shock to us. The Hillary Clinton campaign as a whole was particularly dreadful, from the Wasserman-Schultz’s DNC scandal, to the complete collapse in a national ground game, and to its inept messaging on WikiLeaks and the State Department emails. Yet the problem was more than messaging. It was the culmination of a startling fall of the Democratic Party from grace as the Republican Party pretended to take the mantle of “the working class party.” And it all began with, well, another Clinton. Which makes me wonder why the Clintons are still around in the public eye at all.
But let us repeat: the GOP is NOT the working-class party, nor will it be in the near future. The Biden Administration has been very consequential for the betterment of working families. To name a few of the most recent, the aggressive JetBlue-Spirit antitrust efforts, the elimination of overdraft fees, and the historic decision of the president to actually stand in solidarity with striking auto workers, instead of denigrating and attacking air traffic controllers like Reagan did.
To understand what is possible for the Democratic Party now, we must understand how we got here. After a decade of struggles for the Oval Office in the 80s, some Democrats advocated for a new turn, even though they remained very dominant on both the congressional and state levels. Cue Bill Clinton, who embraced this view of a new turn and offered that aura of electability.
Why? Because, one, Bill Clinton initially offered a compelling story. He knew what struggling was like in Hope, Arkansas. He was not an elite, but he became one and began to think like one as he rose to power. Once he rose to the presidency, both he and his pro-corporate advisors (with, thankfully, the exception of people like Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, who should have had much more influence in the Clinton Administration than he had) followed a policy course that eroded the meaning of what it was to be a Democrat.
In discussing the failure of the Clintons, many talk about healthcare—or more so, the lack of execution and delivery on that promise. But there was much more that began to blur the lines between Democrats and Republicans. Often with the help of Republicans and conservative Democrats, he negotiated multiple international trade deals despite the warning signs that working people might be left behind. NAFTA, PNTR, and successors based on those models (like CAFTA and TPP) upended the lives of small communities across the globe, and exacerbated the discontent already present in the Midwestern Rust Belt, in many parts of the South, and all across Rural America. Trump, as we know, exploited the discontent very effectively.
The Clinton record on other issues was little better. Bill Clinton took the party in the direction of Reagan by loosening “burdensome regulations.” The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and other New Deal/Great Society era consumer safety laws set the stage for the 2008 Great Recession, an economic crisis that has shaken up working people ever since.
Clinton, again like Reagan, did not have the backs of organized labor at all—in fact, Clinton encouraged union-busting as Governor of Arkansas. Nor did he have the backs of the poor and disadvantaged. Among Democrats, he led the way for welfare reform, even though doing so was nowhere near necessary to keeping the support of Democrats and independents. He embraced for-profit charter schools, and often welcomed fossil fuel conglomerates in his new vision of the Democratic Party (by the way, decades before Citizens United changed the role of money in politics forever). Since then, contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, large corporations, and private insurance have become commonplace.
Bill Clinton was no kinder to the African American and Hispanic & Latino communities (nor was his wife, who infamously used the term “super predators” to justify her personal support of the crime bill). Tough-on-crime policies devastated the inner cities, and contributed to a steady rise in incarcerations. Tough immigration laws replaced substantive attempts at bipartisan immigration reform, with Clinton’s decision to kick the can down the road eventually leading to the immigration crisis we face today. Time and time again, the Democratic Party of Clinton turned its back on its own coalition.
What Clinton did was different from staking a position for the interests of your own constituents—like those in Southern West Virginia or Eastern Kentucky. Clinton did not have to worry about choose between giving into then-radical Republican figures like Newt Gingrich and winning the next election. It was ultimately a Clintonian approach that used conservative positions and priorities to gain the favor of the rich and powerful—which are the rules Manchin, Sinema, and others play by today.
That thinking guided campaign outreach to Wall Street and Corporate America, with paid speeches and lavish fundraisers. It created the mood that the Democratic Party needs to appeal to more people like venture capitalists, corporate executives with problematic business records, and failed politicians such as Gina Raimondo, Andrew Cuomo, Michael Bloomberg, Rahm Emanuel, and Helena Foulkes. Naturally, the lack of interest to even be with the party base left many ordinary Democrats feeling they were taking for granted.
It was how Democrats really lost the South for good in the 1994 midterms (and again in 2010). It was how rural support eroded from Clinton’s presidency to Obama’s. It was how from there rural support rapidly eroded with Hillary Clinton’s disastrous 2016 run. And it is how the Rio Grande and South Florida went from solid blue to battleground turf in a matter of only 6 years.
The Solid South earned a new meaning as a result. States like Missouri, Indiana, and Iowa drifted fast to Republicans as the progressive farmer-labor coalitions collapsed. Bellwethers like Ohio and Florida began to fall out of range too. The Midwestern Blue Wall is no longer a blue wall. It is now a blue hill, if anything.
Yet President Biden, unlike Bill and Hillary Clinton, can reconfigure the Democratic Party once more to become a true working class party that fulfills its ideals rooted in New Deal and Great Society progressivism. Which is why Marjorie Taylor-Greene has complained about exactly that during the Biden presidency. If that is not a sign of Biden’s progressive potential, then what is?
We need a Democratic Party that finally looks to the common good of regular people instead of following the lead of special interests. His successes in the presidency so far and the change of approach on Capitol Hill have paid off for the White House and congressional Democrats. And it has been the better to all people, despite those who criticize the ways that Biden has moved “to the left” (looking at you, Commerce Secretary Raimondo). If moving to the left means recovering the New Deal/Great Society agenda, then you can count us in.
Yes, fellow progressives, Biden is not perfect, but he has done a lot more than many Americans give him credit for.
For everyone today, the time for grassroots campaigning and local community engagement has never been greater. Do not wait your turn this year. Get involved. Jump in now. The time has never been more urgent to have you at the table. If you want a few ideas, check out some of the past Substack and Medium blog posts for just a few ideas.
In 2016, Donald Trump found the perfect opponent, the perfect representative of the “out-of-touch elite Democrats” and the pro-corporate world they created. But Trump’s presidency was no different from the worst of the Reagan, Clinton, and Bush eras. His presidency was a dismal failure for working people. If you ever run into a Trump supporter, ask them if they can cite one accomplishment beyond “tax cuts” (i.e., for the rich) and judicial appointments. Ask them if they can point to a specific policy that made their lives better, whether they lived in big cities or small towns.
Trump’s economic “accomplishments” are a mirage. He was the wrong person at the right time. He had the great luck of inheriting the economic growth started in the late Obama years.
President Biden, on the other hand, has set the foundation for a new era of economic prosperity, much like what we saw in 1948. Build Back Better, for the first time in decades, tried something that was actually different from the status quo (despite the predictable opposition from Trump and his lackeys). A second term for Biden can not only rebuild our country further, but restore a vision of the Democratic Party we can be proud of.
What a contrast with the Republican Party that really is.
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