Clintonism Lost in 2000

we already tried Clintonism without Clinton and it failed

“lockbox”

I’m afraid that this piece recapitulates some thoughts I have already shared recently. I hate to be repetitive, but the post-election recriminations within the Democratic party are in full swing and thus (of course) we are seeing a full-court press from the right wing of the Democratic party. When the Democrats lose, there’s always pressure within the party to move to the right; this is also true when the Democrats win. It’s true when the economy is bad, and when the economy is good, in times of war and in times of peace, when the party is in power or out of power, when the day of the week ends in y…. It’s the Groundhog Day reality of the modern Democratic party, an infinite regress. Of course, I’m a person of zero influence in such matters - they don’t give influence to people who might reject this trend, you see - but, well, I gotta say something.

There is one and only one political dynamic that matters in modern American politics, and it is the same dynamic that was in place when I was born in 1981: the Republican party is a right-wing party that works relentlessly to advance right-wing ends; the Democratic party is a centrist party that only sometimes tries to mildly slow the country’s drift to the right; the result is a country that moves right regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats win. People like to dismiss this with references to meaningless cultural politics, elite liberal language games and Pride flags flying outside of Raytheon and the like, but such symbols are just that, meaningless. In terms of policy we have two right-wing parties of varying extremity and so even modest center-left policy wins become impossible. And neither Matt Yglesias nor Jon Chait nor Kevin Drum nor Ezra Klein nor Josh Marshall nor Joan Walsh nor any of the rest of them have ever been able to articulate a remotely convincing explanation of how this scenario can result in anything but a right-wing drift.

Klein has, yielding that dreamy influence of his, pushed Rahm Emanuel back into the national spotlight with a softball interview. As you’d expect from a right-wing apparatchik of his type, Emanuel extols Clintonism as the future for the Democrats, which sounds compelling if no one challenges you with any hard questions at all. In other words, yes, it has gone back round in circles once again: the elite opinion is that the Democrats should become even more of a right-wing party, and it’s the New York Times leading that charge. Some things never change. If we could step back for just a moment and look not at the immediate question of which candidate and policy in which point of time, but at the general political strategy of the Democrats for the past 50 years - that is, moderating, triangulating, and other euphemisms for moving rightward - we would have to conclude that it has failed. And yet there is precious little appetite for actually coming up with a radically different approach, because ultimately politics is about taxes and the funding base of the party are rich people who won’t tolerate significantly higher taxes. Good news, though! Good-faith supporter of the Democrats and its constituents Bret Stephens loved the interview.

It’s worth saying that the Republicans are a more effective political party because this whole dynamic would simply never happen within the GOP. Ezra Klein would not have a big national interview with (say) Lincoln Chafee, treating him as a person of influence within the Republican party, because moderate guys like Chafee can’t become people of influence in the Republican party. If he did, that interview would not be treated as a big deal among conservatives in politics and media, and whoever the lefty analog of Bret Stephens might be would not then write a column extolling Chafee’s push to move the Republican party to the left. That column would not then spark tons of discussion within the Republican party about whether it’s time to head hard left. That wouldn’t happen, couldn’t happen; the conservative movement have inoculated themselves against that. And the inevitable result of a Republican party that rigidly adheres to a right-wing ideology and a Democratic party that constantly shuns left-wing ideology is a profoundly right-wing country. This is, again, not complicated.

Emanuel says to Stephens, referring to the Clinton years, “As I always say to the left, what part of the peace and prosperity were you most upset with?” he asks. “Which part did you hate?”

Well I’m glad you asked! Bill Clinton

• is a serial sexual predator who should spend the rest of his life in jail

• pushed through draconian cuts to “welfare,” forcing millions of people into even more dire poverty, including hundreds of thousands of Black children

• helped usher in the “law and order” era of Democratic politics, which resulted in a massive expansion of mass incarceration that had profoundly inhumane and racist consequences

• expanded the War on Drugs, one of the most ruinous and destructive policy efforts in the history of this country

• cut almost 400,000 federal employees

• instituted Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which codified into policy that openly gay people could not serve in the military

• pushed through the cruel 1996 immigration “reform” law, which reads like a conservative dream of deportation and higher barriers for gaining legal status

• signed DOMA, which officially defined marriage as between a man and a woman and prohibited the federal government from recognizing same sex marriages

• used sanctions and bombs to kill countless innocent civilians in Iraq, most of them children, while doing nothing to undermine the regime’s control

• rammed through NAFTA, lying the whole way about his administration’s own internal projections about how it would affect the economy

• pushed to expand NATO right up towards the borders of Russia, helping to exacerbate tensions that have a direct role in the current war in Ukraine

• bombed a pharmaceutical factory in a blatant attempt to distract the country from the fact that he had committed a crime while attempting to cover up yet another scandal related to his sexually predatory behavior.

That’s what I didn’t like, personally, Rahm! And that’s all during his presidency, not bringing in little tidbits like when he had a deeply cognitively compromised man executed so that he could look tough for an election in Arkansas.

What I really want to point out, though, is that the idea that Clintonism is some surefire political winner has already been disproven. After all, we had a non-Clinton Clintonite presidential candidate and he lost an eminently winnable campaign. Al Gore was the sitting vice president in an administration that had been battered by scandal but which still benefited from a decade without a major war and a generally strong economy. His opponent had been successful in politics in Texas but was profoundly vulnerable to criticisms that he was an inexperienced and dim party boy who had risen up only because he was part of a political dynasty and was guilty of appropriating his aww-shucks Texan identity - criticisms, by the way, that originated in the Republican party. Bush had also misrepresented his Air National Guard service and had gotten a DUI in the 1970s. (Do you know how drunk you had to be to get a DUI in the 1970s?) Gore enjoyed many advantages of incumbency, and did not suffer from a fundraising deficit compared to his opponent. He was a terribly awkward and stilted politician, but he was largely free from personal scandal, which could have been an advantage after eight years of Bill Clinton being unable to keep his dick in his pants. He and his campaign had a lot going for them - but Clintonism, in fact, proved to be an albatross.

The problem was, by 2000 there was really very little space left to move to the right without asking Newt Gingrich to come on as running mate, but also an intense institutional bias against moving left - which left Gore with nowhere to move at all. Clinton had taken the Democrats so far right that his 1996 opponent Bob Dole complained, accurately, that Clinton had stolen his agenda. Clinton jokily acknowledged on the campaign trail, several times, that he was right. With Democrats having moved against the social safety net, fighting for gay rights, criminal justice reform, nascent efforts to end the War on Drugs, humane immigration reform, and a drawdown of hostilities in several foreign conflicts, there wasn’t much for Gore to run on as a positive agenda. And Gore, in his infinite wisdom, had decided to run primarily as a fiscal conservative, meaning he was hemmed in when it came to advocating for new spending or programs - and, as I will not stop saying, no voters who are motivated by fiscal responsibility are ever going to vote for a Democrat in the first place.

The above compilation from Saturday Night Live mocks Gore’s repeated advocacy for a federal “lockbox,” which would have taken funds from the surplus the federal budget then enjoyed and set them aside in case of fiscal emergencies that might jeopardize Medicare or Social Security. Whatever the merits of this plan, it was terrible politics that, as SNL demonstrated, became a parody of itself. Why did Gore bring it up so often? Because there was no positive Democratic agenda to talk about. The Democrats were the party of sober fiscal conservatism and backlash against social change. Unfortunately for Gore, the Republicans are better at being the party of sober fiscal conservatism and backlash against social change than the Democrats ever could be, and he lost a sad and dispiriting election where he even failed to carry his home state of Tennessee, where Clinton had won twice. Like Kamala Harris, Gore had attempted to triangulate his way into a position that conservatives own and will always own; Harris, with her absurd efforts to campaign as a tough border cop, Gore, with his relentless insistence that he was the one who would balance America’s checkbook. Voters who care about that stuff are Republicans.

The fact that Gore won the popular vote, and the credibility-ruining scandal over Florida - credibility-ruining for the United States and our electoral system, that is - have long obscured what an immense failure Gore’s campaign was. He should never, ever have been in a position to lose because he lost Florida’s electoral votes. I’m not going to prosecute the Ralph Nader fight again, but the fact that almost 350,000 registered Florida Democrats voted for George W. Bush speaks to how deluded the party remains about the 2000 election. And the failure of Gore’s campaign to come up with any effective messaging, his lack of an assertive policy agenda, is an indictment of the Clintonism that guys like Emanuel and Stephens are extolling. Bill Clinton, monster that he is, was nonetheless a famously charismatic politician, and he enjoyed the advantage of first winning office against a GOP president who had earned his seat almost entirely on the coattails of Ronald Reagan’s immense popularity. Bob Dole was an old man who was given the nod out of party loyalty and as a sacrificial lamb. Once Bill Clinton was term limited out, though, Clintonism fell flat on its face, giving an awkward and clumsy politician no clear policy advantage in a race that he had no business losing. You think Clintonism can beat the GOP in 2028? We already saw this movie, and you didn’t like the way it ended the first time.