I like E.J. Dionne. But I think his perspective on the Clinton campaign points out the difference between the new progressives and the older more mainline Democrats.
For all Democrats, the worst thing that has happened since January is the tarnishing of the Clinton brand.
Dionne goes on to detail the well known offenses of the Clinton campaign that have so offended many Democrats that ‘when the word “Clinton” crosses their lips, many Democrats sound like Ken Starr, Bob Barr and the late Henry Hyde.’ And he concludes:
“Chill out” is good advice. Hillary Clinton has every right to keep fighting. But her campaign has suffered from a ricochet effect. Attacks aimed at her opponent and efforts to exaggerate her experience have weakened rather than strengthened her claim to the nomination.
This is obviously a problem for Hillary Clinton herself, but it is also very bad for a Democratic Party that cannot afford to see the entire Clinton legacy discredited.
To my way of thinking, the health and future of the Democratic Party (and, therefore, the nation) actually depends on the Clinton legacy being discredited and their brand tarnished. It’s nice, and valuable, for a party to have a president in the somewhat recent past that they can point to as a positive example. For the Republicans, the cult of Ronald Reagan is more than an example; it is a recruitment strength and an ideological rallying cry. But Ronald Reagan didn’t get impeached. Ronald Reagan didn’t preside over huge congressional losses for his party. Ronald Reagan’s presidency was validated by the election of his vice-president as a successor, not rejected in favor of a chimpanzee.
But more to the point, Obama keeps saying that he wants ‘to change the mindset that got us into the war’ in Iraq. A prerequisite for that, is that Democrats revise their opinion of Clinton’s foreign policy. The Clintons spent the 1990’s feeding us trumped up intelligence about the dangers of Saddam Hussein as a way to maintain domestic and international support for the sanctions, for an aborted coup attempt in 1996, for the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, and for the bombing of Iraq at various points throughout the decade. The Bushies then took that falsified intelligence and used it to justify the invasion and five-year occupation of Iraq. “Even the Clinton administration thought he had WMD.”
Domestic affairs are a more mixed bag. Clinton did cut through some ossified liberal dogma, but the overall effect of his New Democrat policies was to complete the destruction of the party in the South, badly weaken the party in the Plains states and Interior West, and freeze the Democratic momentum in the suburbs. The Clinton presidency was partly successful because of a booming economy and relative peace, but we should never forget that he squandered the peace dividend and kept the country on a permanent war-budget footing.
Much has also been written about how the Clintons ran the party as an organization. State parties atrophied, the grassroots were marginalized, and funding became dependent on corporate money. We’ve seen these same failings contribute mightily to the downfall of Hillary’s campaign.
The Democrats should never look back to the Clinton presidency as a positive example. Mostly, the Clinton presidency is a cautionary tale about what not to do.
That’s not to suggest that Bill Clinton did nothing right. He did many things right, including hiring competent and ethical people to run the federal bureaucracy. The Clintons should not be demonized, but their brand deserves some tarnish, and we can definitely afford to discredit their legacy…going forward.
