Last Thursday, Brad DeLong excerpted my diary, "Obama's time-warp" as one of a trilogy he dubbed "Coalition Maintenance". There were a number of predictable Versailles talking points in the comments, but the one that struck me was the following, both because it's couched in terms of general agreement with me, and because it is so fundamental to the delusional Versaille version of the world [emphasis added]:
Ebenezer Scrooge said...
I pretty much agree with Rosenberg's thesis, with one reservation.
Clinton's presidency was not about policy, either liberal or Third Way. It was about reviving the Democratic Party as a credible party of governance. He succeeded in doing so, at the cost of letting public discourse creep to the right. But he did purge the Democrats of their silly wing. (And I'm not using "silly" as a euphemism for "left." Today's left Democrats aren't silly anymore.)
Obama does not have Clinton's excuse. The Democratic Party is a credible party of governance now. As a matter of fact, it is the only credible party of governance, the 2010 election notwithstanding. (2010 was all about the Great Recession.) So nu, Barack? Stop triangulating, and govern already!
I have no idea what the poster means by the Democrats "silly wing", especially if it's explicitly not a jab at the left. But this is the sort of Brooksian nonsensical way that Versailles narratives are made. And why in the world should Clinton's presidency not be "about policy, either liberal or Third Way", just because it's claimed that "It was about reviving the Democratic Party as a credible party of governance"? In earlier versions it was explicitly stated the other way around--Clinton's presidency re-established the Democratic Party because of the policy shift to the Third Way. More recently, this form has become more popular--nothing to do with each other. But why? It's both arbitrary and nonsensical.
But the real Big Lie here is that Clinton somehow revived the Democratic Party--in terms of seriousness, legitimacy or whatever spin you want to put on it. But, then how to account for a "revival" in which Democratic Party power was decimated across the institutional spectrum, from Congress, through statehouses and state legislatures across the land?
From the Statistical Abstract--Elections Section
A raw numbers view first:
And a percentage view:
The Democrats had had their ups and downs before, especially in the Senate in 1980, when the combination of then-unprecedented stealth outside money and Jimmy Carter's early concession helped produce an unprecedented loss of Democratic seats. But the Democrats re-took the Senate in 1986.
It was not until Clinton gained the presidency in 1992, and then abandoned the traditional Democratic stance of economic populism (which, of course, Clinton had run on) that Democrats suffered sweeping losses at all levels--losses they did not start to recover from until 2006, when conservatives' disastrous mismanagement finally started catching up with them.
Now, of course, Obama is starting the Clinton cycle all over again--with sharp drops that are even worse at the state legislature level. Which is why the Big Lie of Clinton's political awesomeness is so important for Versailles. By denying the actual history of the 1990s, they lay the groundwork for the denying the reality of today, which is, simply put, that "Third Way" neo-liberalism is as anti-pragmatic in political terms as it is realworld results terms.
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