Clintonism Failed

A new look at some old conventional wisdom

Throughout all of its struggles and disappointments over the course of the Trump era, one thing about the modern Democratic Party has remained constant: its electoral model. That model has been President Barack Obama: the most recent president to win two back-to-back terms, the most recent president to leave office with a positive approval ratings, and one of only a small handful of national political figures to enjoy positive personal favorability ratings today. It’s not all that bad of a state of affairs for the reactionary center of the Democratic Party, which can very plausibly claim Obama to be on their side. But they have still gone looking for more, towards a clearer, even more validating example of how the party can only win by following their playbook. They’ve been working at crafting a new story, and they’ve decided that they’ve found their man.

His name is William Jefferson Clinton: 42nd President of the United States and the first Democrat after FDR to successfully win two terms. As they see it, he presents the only responsible path forward for the Democratic Party.

Their story isn’t quite as unwieldy as you might expect. When they lay out their electoral history of the 21st century, the neo-Clintonian will freely admit that, yes, Democrats have indeed won the presidency three times with strategies vastly different from the old best practices of the DLC. But they will also just as quickly cite such elections as exceptions that prove the rule: narrow victories against weak candidates during times of world-historical crisis. Bill Clinton, by contrast, is said to have turned water into wine, serving two full terms as a Democrat in a strongly conservative era. By establishing himself as and winning as a moderate, he showed himself to be the only modern Democrat with a real path for winning.

There is, of course, a standard set of rebuttals to this claim. If you’re on the left, you’re probably thinking of them right now. They are the time-honored and true points that the bulk of Clinton’s actual policies ranged from bad to downright awful, to such an extent that much of the blame for Donald Trump’s eventual rise lies at his feet. These arguments have their place, but they don’t really address the main question: Bill Clinton’s alleged success at defeating Republicans. As such, they have become increasingly insufficient in the current moment, when anxieties about the Trumpist threat to democracy have become so high that liberals have become willing to accept any kind of victory, however hollow, as long as it staves off that all-consuming threat for at least some time.

In this light, I will critique the Clintonite legacy along a set of lines that it should have been criticized on long, long ago. I will address its record at achieving the one and only thing it ever truly promised the American left: that it would keep the ever-odious GOP away from power and do so more effectively than any alternative could hope for. While the widely-accepted mythology says that Clinton was resoundingly successful at doing so, the true history of Clinton-era presidential elections shows that the exact opposite was the case. Far from a generationally talented force who singularly kept the Democratic Party in power during tough times, Bill Clinton was an outright electoral anchor: an awful man whose dedication to poll-chasing turned what should have been a landslide 1996 into a mixed verdict and was set to make 2000 into a generational triumph for the Republican Party before one brave man’s decision to break from him averted disaster.

The story I will tell you is not one that you will hear from any centrist, rightist, or even leftist history of the politics of the late 1990s. It includes a cast of characters that you have likely never seen before: a locked-in Al Gore, a terrifyingly popular George W. Bush, and even a genuinely savvy Bob Dole. It is one that revolves around a President Clinton whose political failures were just as vast as his policy failures: a mad king whose delusional White House was only saved from complete humiliation by the tireless, thankless efforts of an underling who he resented and undermined. It is the story of the creation of one of the most gargantuan Big Lies in modern American political history: one that nearly did lead Democrats to disaster in 2008, actually did lead them to oblivion in 2016, and stands to send them hurtling off a cliff once again in the 2020s.

It is a truly revisionist piece of history, and it starts with what might be the most audacious claim I have ever made while writing this newsletter: that the 1996 presidential election was not only an interesting race, but a truly disastrous result for Democrats that very nearly led to the demise of American liberalism, all thanks to Bill Clinton.