Yesterday, Digby wrote about Matthew Dowd as an example of someone who had disappeared his own Bushian past, and was now sternly warning against Obama getting too carried away, and governing too far left, like Clinton did when he took office. She quotes Dowd:
I think everybody, including Bill Clinton himself, said that the mistake he made when he first took office was that he governed way too far to the left when he started and that after the Republicans took the house in 1994 he moved more to a centrist policy. that's when his numbers went way up, that's when he preserved his reelection. And if Barack Obama starts the same way Bill Clinton does that is a huge problem, I think.
It's good for the Republican party if he does that. But I think Barack Obama is going to have to govern to the center which is where the majority of the country is.
This almost identical to the line taken by Mark Penn cited by David earlier:
The history of 1992 contains a clear warning that a centre-left coalition can fall apart quickly if the policies are seen as too far left. In 1993, Mr Clinton raised taxes on the wealthy, adopted the "don't ask, don't tell" policy in the military, proposed and lost universal healthcare and adopted gun safety measures, banning assault rifles. (emphasis added)
This narrative is utterly and totally false. And that's completely apart from the fact that 2008 is nothing like 1992. But the biggest lie involves how the false narrative about 1992-94 obscures the connection between then and now. |
| The short version is that Clinton was a centrist, and his worst mistakes came from leaning too far to the right--most notably, pushing NAFTA. The assault weapons ban, in contrast, was hugely popular, (for example, 80-18 in a 6/94 ABC News Poll, and 79-19 five years later in 5/99), while the problem with his health care plan was his attempt to be too accomodating to insider interests, and failed to mobilize the considerable grassroots distress with the system at the time. Far from being an extreme measure, "Don't Ask/Don't Tell" was a political comprise after Clinton got ambushed over his initial executive order. Finally, Clinton's turning point in his political comeback came from Gingrich's extremist attempt to shut down the government. Rather than crumpling, Clinton stood up to Gingrich, and his political fortunes improved from there on in. Clinton was a master at mixing progressive and moderately conservative narratives, but his actions that turned the tide were clearly progressive--and popular.
Let's move on to the issue of connecting that time with our own. When Clinton was elected in 1992, the dominant narrative at the time was that Clinton had shifted the party to the center--and this was going to be its salvation, nmaking the party "relevant" again. This narrative was already suspect, given that Clinton had run an economic populist campaign ("Putting People First", "It's the economy, stupid", etc.) that was far more openly ideological than either Walter (I'm going to raise your taxes) Mondale or Michael ("It's about competence, not ideology") Dukakis--but when it came to governing, rather than campaigning, that narrative was on firmer ground.
Indeed, the biggest issue in terms of the larger political dynamic at the time was NAFTA--which Clinton passed in sharp opposition to his party's base and Congressional majority. In Three's a Crowd: The Dynamic of Third Parties, Ross Perot, and Republican Resurgence, Ronald B. Rapoport and Walter J. Stone argue persuasively Clinton's embrace of NAFTA, and the humiliating treatment of Ross Perot that accompanied it, opened the way for Republicans to court the Perot vote and ride it to victory in the Congressional elections of 1994. The NAFTA vote was most instructive on this point:
In the House, Dems opposed NAFTA, 156-102, while Republicans supported it, 132-43. In the Senate, Democrats opposed NAFTA narrowly, 28-27, while Republicans embraced it, 34-10. These votes were in late November, 1993. They signalled the exact opposite of what the current Orwellian narrative claims about Clinton's first term.
Gingrich responded by crafting the "Contract with America" specifically with Perot voters in mind. It had none of the religious right agenda in it. Although most Americans never heard of the "Contract"--and most who had heard of it knew little about it--it served a useful function in terms of message discipline, and impacting Versailles narratives. Yet, little of it got passed into law, and congressional Republicans moved decisively toward the social conservative direction--something most Perot voters weren't particularly keen on.
What happened, in essence, was that Clinton's ill-advised move to the corporate center created a huge populist opening for the GOP to accomplish a political realignment, by adopting Perot's reformist agenda--only they didn't really believe in it. The reformist swing vote is still out there--as Chris noted back in his post-2004 election analysis, and Obama has tapped into as part of the story of how he won the nomination--as I diaried in May--and is positioned to win it all tomorrow. This reformist vote is not particularly ideological in left/right terms, but it does have an inherent potential progressive affinity, as Chris argued back in 2004.
Just as Clinton made a fatal mistake, losing potential reformist support by championing NAFTA and betraying his economic populist roots, Obama could similarly create an opening for the Republicans--not by moving too far left, but by paying too much attention to the Versailles conventional wisdom, and trusting it, rather than his own distinctive progressive instincts--instincts that are different from Clinton's, but similar in their potential for connecting with folks that the Versailles punditalkcazy will never understand. |
