2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumThomas Frank: It's Bill Clinton Who Wrecked the Democratic Party
Hillary will continue the political process of removing what vestiges remain of the New Deal.
For those who appreciate reading: Thomas Frank has several articles archived on Salon: http://www.salon.com/writer/thomas_frank/
For those whose learning style is more television:
And for those who appreciate public television and good writing:
Listen, Liberal.
EXCERPT...
(Bill MOYERS) Where do you see evidence of (bipartisan contempt for Labor)?
(Thomas FRANK) You mean politically? Well if you just look back at the history of Democratic governance — I look from the ’70s to the present. But if you look just back to the Bill Clinton administration: In policy after policy after policy, he was choosing between groups of Americans, and he was always choosing the interests of professionals over the interests of average people. You take something like NAFTA, which was a straight class issue, right down the middle, where working people are on one side of the divide and professionals are on another. And they’re not just on either side of the divide: Working people are saying, “This is a betrayal. You’re going to ruin us.” And professional people are saying, “What are you talking about? This is a no-brainer. This is what you learn on the first day of economics class.” And hilariously, the working people turned out to be right about that. The people flaunting their college degrees turned out to be wrong. I love that.
You go right down the line: Every policy decision he made was like this. The crime bill of 1994, which was this sort of extraordinary crackdown on all sorts of different kinds of people. And at the same time he’s deregulating Wall Street. So some people are getting crushed in the iron fist of the state, and other people are literally having the rules rolled back. No more rules for banking. We’re doing away with rules for interstate banking. We’re doing away with Glass Steagall. We’re ensuring that nobody can ever regulate derivative securities. These are all things they did when Bill Clinton was president. Or deregulating telecoms. Or capital gains tax cuts. It’s always choosing one group over another.
Obama, it’s slightly different, but it’s the same kind of story. By the way we should talk about them — Clinton and Obama — the similarities in their biographies. And not just them. If you go down the list of leading Democrats, leading Democratic politicians, what you find is that they’re all plucked from obscurity by fancy universities. This is their life story. Bill Clinton was from a town in Arkansas, goes to Georgetown, becomes a Rhodes Scholar, goes to Yale Law School — the doors of the world open up for him because of college.
CONTINUED...
http://billmoyers.com/story/author-thomas-frank-talks-hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-and-his-new-book-listen-liberal/
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matt819
(10,749 posts)If memory serves (and that's questionable at times), in the early 2000s, DU was a love fest for Bill Clinton. He was regarded as royalty, great guy, great president, the big dawg. People couldn't get enough of him or speak highly enough for him. Of course, the contrast was the George Bush, and people here would say favorable things about a tree stump when comparing it to Bush. How times have changed. He is being shredded here now, with good reason, as we have had some time to evaluate his policies and legacy: NAFTA, mass incarceration, erosion of social programs, the Clinton Foundation/Slush Fund, and more.
pmorlan1
(2,096 posts)Yes, some of us have learned from our mistakes. Sadly, some of us have not.
840high
(17,196 posts)I just watched NBC news a little while ago. They don't have the video up yet but Chuck Todd said things that will make Hillary supporters heads explode. Evidently in their latest poll Clinton is beating Trump by 3 pts and Sanders is beating him by 15 pts. Todd was saying that the swing voters in this election are Sanders supporters. You know the very supporters the Clinton supporters have been dissing non-stop. He said some other really interesting things but I'll wait until they get the video up just in case they edit it.
farleftlib
(2,125 posts)No more Clintons. I think the CDC needs to work on a cure for Clinton fatigue if the FBI investigation goes kaput.
I wonder if she'll find a way to buy her way out of that too.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)I covered a speech of his in Detroit. The reporters couldn't wait to get a chance to see him and ask him anything. Instead, we got roped off and stuck at the back of the room, behind a velvet rope. Still, the pack swooned.
Regarding my problem with the guy: Thomas Frank summed it up...
http://billmoyers.com/story/author-thomas-frank-talks-hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-and-his-new-book-listen-liberal/
Now here's something you probably know, matt819, but it likely is news to 99-percent of America:
The author was a Chicago Boy helping implement the privatization scam for Pinochet and the globalist crowd:
President Clinton and the Chilean Model.
By José Piñera
Midnight at the House of Good and Evil
"It is 12:30 at night, and Bill Clinton asks me and Dottie: 'What do you know about the Chilean social-security system?'” recounted Richard Lamm, the three-term former governor of Colorado. It was March 1995, and Lamm and his wife were staying that weekend in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House.
I read about this surprising midnight conversation in an article by Jonathan Alter (Newsweek, May 13, 1996), as I was waiting at Dulles International Airport for a flight to Europe. The article also said that early the next morning, before he left to go jogging, President Bill Clinton arranged for a special report about the Chilean reform produced by his staff to be slipped under Lamm's door.
That news piqued my interest, so as soon as I came back to the United States, I went to visit Richard Lamm. I wanted to know the exact circumstances in which the president of the world’s superpower engages a fellow former governor in a Saturday night exchange about the system I had implemented 15 years earlier.
Lamn and I shared a coffee on the terrace of his house in Denver. He not only was the most genial host to this curious Chilean, but he also proved to be deeply motivated by the issues surrounding aging and the future of America. So we had an engaging conversation. At the conclusion, I ventured to ask him for a copy of the report that Clinton had given him. He agreed to give it to me on the condition that I do not make it public while Clinton was president. He also gave me a copy of the handwritten note on White House stationery, dated 3-21-95, which accompanied the report slipped under his door. It read:
[font color="green"]Dick,
Sorry I missed you this morning.
It was great to have you and Dottie here.
Here's the stuff on Chile I mentioned.
Best,
Bill.[/font color]
Three months before that Clinton-Lamm conversation about the Chilean system, I had a long lunch in Santiago with journalist Joe Klein of Newsweek magazine. A few weeks afterwards, he wrote a compelling article entitled,[font color="green"] "If Chile can do it...couldn´t North America privatize its social-security system?" [/font color]He concluded by stating that "the Chilean system is perhaps the first significant social-policy idea to emanate from the Southern Hemisphere." (Newsweek, December 12, 1994).
I have reasons to think that probably this piece got Clinton’s attention and, given his passion for policy issues, he became a quasi expert on Chile’s Social Security reform. Clinton was familiar with Klein, as the journalist covered the 1992 presidential race and went on anonymously to write the bestseller Primary Colors, a thinly-veiled account of Clinton’s campaign.
“The mother of all reforms”
While studying for a Masters and a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University, I became enamored with America’s unique experiment in liberty and limited government. In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville wrote the first volume of Democracy in America hoping that many of the salutary aspects of American society might be exported to his native France. I dreamed with exporting them to my native Chile.
So, upon finishing my Ph.D. in 1974 and while fully enjoying my position as a Teaching Fellow at Harvard University and a professor at Boston University, I took on the most difficult decision in my life: to go back to help my country rebuild its destroyed economy and democracy along the lines of the principles and institutions created in America by the Founding Fathers. Soon after I became Secretary of Labor and Social Security, and in 1980 I was able to create a fully funded system of personal retirement accounts. Historian Niall Ferguson has stated that this reform was “the most profound challenge to the welfare state in a generation. Thatcher and Reagan came later. The backlash against welfare started in Chile.”
But while de Tocqueville’s 1835 treatment contained largely effusive praise of American government, the second volume of Democracy in America, published five years later, strikes a more cautionary tone. He warned that “the American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.” In fact at some point during the 20th century, the culture of self reliance and individual responsibility that had made America a great and free nation was diluted by the creation of [font color="green"] “an Entitlement State,”[/font color] reminiscent of the increasingly failed European welfare state. What America needed was a return to basics, to the founding tenets of limited government and personal responsibility.
[font color="green"]In a way, the principles America helped export so successfully to Chile through a group of free market economists needed to be reaffirmed through an emblematic reform. I felt that the Chilean solution to the impending Social Security crisis could be applied in the USA.[/font color]
CONTINUED...
http://www.josepinera.org/articles/articles_clinton_chilean_model.htm
No offense, Mr. President, but I prefer Democrats who side with LABOR, not management.
brewens
(13,566 posts)trusted him! You make moves like that and promise it will be good for working class people, you had better be right. They way it worked out, there is no reason to believe that wasn't the intent all along.
CrowCityDem
(2,348 posts)and the only one they pulled out was Carter beating the only President to never run on a ticket, who had just gone through a brutal primary fight that fractured their party (kind of like the Dems this year).
Rather than wrecking the party, Clinton gave it new life, and sparked the strategy that has led to winning five of the last six popular votes. If turning the tide to a generation of Democratic Presidents is 'wrecking the party', I'll drive the bulldozer.
pmorlan1
(2,096 posts)Oh, he wrecked it all right and so have his many enablers that refuse to open their eyes. By the way you are helping to drive that bulldozer.
CrowCityDem
(2,348 posts)If you think things are bad now, imagine how bad they would be if we had spent the last two decades with people even worse than W in the White House. You can see from crazy stupid Republicans like in Oklahoma and North Carolina recently that we would be back in the Jim Crow era if Democrats weren't in charge of the White House. But go ahead, say that things are just as bad electing Clinton-style Dems.
I'll be over here laughing while we actually move the country forward.
pmorlan1
(2,096 posts)I haven't.
SCantiGOP
(13,868 posts)That 8 years of peace and prosperity fooled us into thinking that 8 years of peace and prosperity was a good thing.
Fawke Em
(11,366 posts)My father lost so many jobs because they went overseas or to Mexico, he had to change professions and ended up making far, far less.
That Guy 888
(1,214 posts)Deny medicine to Iraqi's.
Don't look to closely at Clinton's "Peace and Prosperity" keep it vague.
Full time union manufacturing jobs replaced with temp jobs and fast food jobs that used to be filled by high school kids. Such Riches!
craigmatic
(4,510 posts)The two times Bill won were because of Perot. Winning is only really half the struggle anyway it's about governing and helping the little guy. If you can't make good policies for the people who vote for you in your party then there is no need for you to have power. Why would I as a labor person vote for somebody who is anti-labor? It makes no sense.
ericson00
(2,707 posts)1. Exit polls from election night 1992, a better method than just saying what one wants to believe, show that Clinton would have won over 50% of the vote absent Perot, and thus in more than 9 in 10 trials, the election.
2. George H.W. Bush's approval ratings in 1992 rivaled Jimmy Carter's in 1980. Both in their election years were not only lower than Reagan 84 and Clinton 96, but lower than Bush 04 and Obama 12. You don't win with under 40% and below approvals.
3. The GOP (and the anti-Clinton fringe left) also leave out that when Perot was not in the race, which was from July to the start of October 1992, Bush Sr. still polled near the 37% that approved of his performance and that he won in the end. Nate Silver, a data and stats expert, also disagrees with the idea that Perot cost Bush tho he does believe he hurt Clinton.
4. Ross Perot was not a conservative like Nader was a liberal or Trump is running as a conservative. Perot was pro-choice, pro-gay rights, and against trickle down economics.
The smear against Bill that "he only won because of a 3rd party spoiler" was not only factually incorrect wholly, but very damaging to his presidency and legacy. Without a press-validated mandate, of course health care reform was going to be a problem. It also gave the GOP cover to slime him in the press as well as the media to slime Clinton too with the lies of "Whitewater," and other Bullshit-"gates" because he didn't "win a majority." They've also pushed hard-right policies because the Perot-lie is the impetus to believe this country is to the "right." The Perot lie was also used against Hillary in 2008 by people to her left, and can even be found on places on our side of the fence somehow, probably due to the self-flaggelating tendencies of progressives at times. The Perot myth helped the GOP bring about Monica, which brought about W. Bush.
1992 was absolutely a realigning election to which every Democrat who has won since owes a debt, whoever wins the 2016 nod,, and every Democrat who didn't win still ought to thank for keeping their losses from being landslide losses in the molds of George McGovern, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis. Kerry and Gore were not very media savvy at all as Obama and Clinton were, but were very gaffe prone. From 1968-1988, IL, CA, NJ, VT, and NH went Republican 6 out of 6 times, MI, DE, ME 5 out of 6 times, PA, CT, ME, MD 4 out of 6 times. Those states alone add up to 156 EVS. All of them except NH have voted Dem 6 for 6 times since 1992 and comprise this "blue wall" that exists now. Before from 1968-1988, the GOP averaged over 400 electoral votes. Since Bill Clinton came along, they average 210, meaning on average they lose. No wonder why the GOP really hates the Clintons. This is why Clinton reformed welfare and was tough on crime. Even for some of the downsides to that, it beat and still beats more GOP presidents any day.
craigmatic
(4,510 posts)matters. He turned his back on blacks, blue collar workers, and other traditional democratic constituencies. Every one of his proposed liberal reforms were a failure to the point that he turned right. I would say 1972 or 1980 or 2008 were real realigning elections. In 1972 we saw the beginning of the southern strategy, war on drugs, and law and order. That election broke the new deal coalition. In 1980 we saw the conservative movement come to power and created the playing field that Clinton was forced to play on. In 2008 Obama won by being anti-war, for healthcare reform, and for an active role for government then largely did what he said he was going to do. In these elections the results matched the policies that came after. 1992 for all intent and purposes was false advertising. Clinton was a 43% president elect in 1992. Perot helped him.
ericson00
(2,707 posts)which is linked from reputable sources in my prior post?
You sound like a partisan Republican with your Perot-myth.
Before Clinton, California was a 6 for 6 GOP state, as were many "blue wall" states. Obama played off what Bill Clinton created. I could go on.
======================================
1. Exit polls from election night 1992, a better method than just saying what one wants to believe, show that Clinton would have won over 50% of the vote absent Perot, and thus in more than 9 in 10 trials, the election.
2. George H.W. Bush's approval ratings in 1992 rivaled Jimmy Carter's in 1980. Both in their election years were not only lower than Reagan 84 and Clinton 96, but lower than Bush 04 and Obama 12. You don't win with under 40% and below approvals.
3. The GOP (and the anti-Clinton fringe left) also leave out that when Perot was not in the race, which was from July to the start of October 1992, Bush Sr. still polled near the 37% that approved of his performance and that he won in the end. Nate Silver, a data and stats expert, also disagrees with the idea that Perot cost Bush tho he does believe he hurt Clinton.
4. Ross Perot was not a conservative like Nader was a liberal or Trump is running as a conservative. Perot was pro-choice, pro-gay rights, and against trickle down economics.
George II
(67,782 posts)....a majority of both popular votes and electoral votes. Perot was a non-factor in 1996.
1992 is arguable, but I think Clinton still would have won.
George II
(67,782 posts)
ljm2002
(10,751 posts)...yeah, in the sense that Frankenstein gave his monster new life -- IOW, the thing that lives now, is not the same as what it was before it was given "new life".
Doctor_J
(36,392 posts)We also wielded great power and had large and important constituencies. Who is going to vote for a democrat whose politics are just like the Bush family?
Armstead
(47,803 posts)ericson00
(2,707 posts)and had Bush been re-elected, he would've appointed justices in the spots of Ginsburg and Breyer and Roe would've ultimately been overturned.
arcane1
(38,613 posts)
bjo59
(1,166 posts)of a political party so that it can "win." None of us are winning as a result of trade deals like NAFTA. The professional classes will realize this from a personal perspective when the TPP gets ratified.
ericson00
(2,707 posts)for such "destruction."
Octafish
(55,745 posts)The thing is, at what price Victory? He seems to have sold the soul of the Party.
Take Social Security, he was willing to entertain its privatization, like in post-CIA overthrow Chile:
President Clinton and the Chilean Model.
By José Piñera
Midnight at the House of Good and Evil
"It is 12:30 at night, and Bill Clinton asks me and Dottie: 'What do you know about the Chilean social-security system?'” recounted Richard Lamm, the three-term former governor of Colorado. It was March 1995, and Lamm and his wife were staying that weekend in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House.
I read about this surprising midnight conversation in an article by Jonathan Alter (Newsweek, May 13, 1996), as I was waiting at Dulles International Airport for a flight to Europe. The article also said that early the next morning, before he left to go jogging, President Bill Clinton arranged for a special report about the Chilean reform produced by his staff to be slipped under Lamm's door.
That news piqued my interest, so as soon as I came back to the United States, I went to visit Richard Lamm. I wanted to know the exact circumstances in which the president of the world’s superpower engages a fellow former governor in a Saturday night exchange about the system I had implemented 15 years earlier.
Lamn and I shared a coffee on the terrace of his house in Denver. He not only was the most genial host to this curious Chilean, but he also proved to be deeply motivated by the issues surrounding aging and the future of America. So we had an engaging conversation. At the conclusion, I ventured to ask him for a copy of the report that Clinton had given him. He agreed to give it to me on the condition that I do not make it public while Clinton was president. He also gave me a copy of the handwritten note on White House stationery, dated 3-21-95, which accompanied the report slipped under his door. It read:
[font color="green"]Dick,
Sorry I missed you this morning.
It was great to have you and Dottie here.
Here's the stuff on Chile I mentioned.
Best,
Bill.[/font color]
Three months before that Clinton-Lamm conversation about the Chilean system, I had a long lunch in Santiago with journalist Joe Klein of Newsweek magazine. A few weeks afterwards, he wrote a compelling article entitled,[font color="green"] "If Chile can do it...couldn´t North America privatize its social-security system?" [/font color]He concluded by stating that "the Chilean system is perhaps the first significant social-policy idea to emanate from the Southern Hemisphere." (Newsweek, December 12, 1994).
I have reasons to think that probably this piece got Clinton’s attention and, given his passion for policy issues, he became a quasi expert on Chile’s Social Security reform. Clinton was familiar with Klein, as the journalist covered the 1992 presidential race and went on anonymously to write the bestseller Primary Colors, a thinly-veiled account of Clinton’s campaign.
“The mother of all reforms”
While studying for a Masters and a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University, I became enamored with America’s unique experiment in liberty and limited government. In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville wrote the first volume of Democracy in America hoping that many of the salutary aspects of American society might be exported to his native France. I dreamed with exporting them to my native Chile.
So, upon finishing my Ph.D. in 1974 and while fully enjoying my position as a Teaching Fellow at Harvard University and a professor at Boston University, I took on the most difficult decision in my life: to go back to help my country rebuild its destroyed economy and democracy along the lines of the principles and institutions created in America by the Founding Fathers. Soon after I became Secretary of Labor and Social Security, and in 1980 I was able to create a fully funded system of personal retirement accounts. Historian Niall Ferguson has stated that this reform was “the most profound challenge to the welfare state in a generation. Thatcher and Reagan came later. The backlash against welfare started in Chile.”
But while de Tocqueville’s 1835 treatment contained largely effusive praise of American government, the second volume of Democracy in America, published five years later, strikes a more cautionary tone. He warned that “the American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.” In fact at some point during the 20th century, the culture of self reliance and individual responsibility that had made America a great and free nation was diluted by the creation of [font color="green"] “an Entitlement State,”[/font color] reminiscent of the increasingly failed European welfare state. What America needed was a return to basics, to the founding tenets of limited government and personal responsibility.
[font color="green"]In a way, the principles America helped export so successfully to Chile through a group of free market economists needed to be reaffirmed through an emblematic reform. I felt that the Chilean solution to the impending Social Security crisis could be applied in the USA.[/font color]
CONTINUED...
http://www.josepinera.org/articles/articles_clinton_chilean_model.htm
Now, thanks in a very large part to the constant triangulating rightward by New Democrats, Austerity is the New Normal.
Larkspur
(12,804 posts)It was under Bill Clinton that Dems lost Congress.
Dems got it back in 2006 and Obama lost it 2 years into his first term.
Neoliberal philosophy is not core Democratic philosophy.
2banon
(7,321 posts)Thank you once again Octafish! 
Octafish
(55,745 posts)No offense to Speaker Sam, but what's the point of having Democrats then?
PS: You are most welcome, 2banon! Your friendship means the world.
Ferd Berfel
(3,687 posts)THere are more, but these tell most of the story
Octafish
(55,745 posts)per Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism, April 28, 2016:
But even allowing for the fact that some and probably most of the gains were real, you’ll see Clinton try to sell a Big Lie: that productivity gains were tied to increased worker prosperity. As numerous commentators pointed out, that story had stopped being true as of roughly 1976. Businesses once did share the benefits of productivity gains with workers, but as labor bargaining power weakened, kept it for themselves. Clinton continues with his canards, praising “open borders” as keeping inflation low. The mechanism by which inflation is contained is by restricting wage growth. A prosperous, full employment economy will feature strong growth in pay levels, and will at some point lead to pricing pressure (mind you, profit levels in the US are now so far outside historical norms that businesses could go a long way in increasing wages if they weren’t so greedy). So his low inflation story is again at odds with his effort to depict everything as rosy for average workers.
Wars Without End. Millions tossed from homes. Gig Economy and McJobs Only.
Bottom Line: Third Way = Third World.
Ferd Berfel
(3,687 posts)
tabasco
(22,974 posts)Both Clintons are unprincipled quislings.
dflprincess
(28,075 posts)They'll collaborate with anyone and give up any principle they may have had as long as it helps them.
Hiraeth
(4,805 posts)Rex
(65,616 posts)Armstead
(47,803 posts)Someday (soon) I hope the voters will prove the assumption that it will never change to be wrong.
But that's up to us collectively, I suppose. But we're about to install a leader who represents the "real owners," so I guess the Barnum theory will hold true for at least four years.
Rex
(65,616 posts)There is always time to change.
bjo59
(1,166 posts)impossible is closer than many think. That's why Bernie Sanders candidacy is so important at this particular historical moment. The object of the trade deals on the table now is to eviscerate the sovereignty of nations so that elections will make no difference at all with regard to the power of the stateless manipulators of the world economy.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)The pendelum is stuck on the Right. The invisible claw of the National Security State holds it there.
Dr. Alfred McCoy studied the history of the crimes of the secret national security state and found that when they previously occurred, there usually was a reaction from the party not in executive power. LBJ and COINTELPRO/CHAOS were countered by the Repuke investigators in the House and Senate; Nixon and Watergate were countered by the Church Committee and new Congressional oversight. Today there has been no response from either party when the other's treasons were exposed, thanks to the USA PATRIOT Act and the NSA warrantless full-spectrum spying op preventing the Constitutional pendulum from swinging.
Alfred W. McCoy
The Making of the US Surveillance State
(One 29min. program)
30 second Preview/Promo
In July 2013 an article appeared on line in TomDispatch that gave an up to date and chilling analysis of the unprecedented powers of the US Surveillance state. It’s author, University of Wisconsin, Madison, professor of history Alfred McCoy, credits Edward Snowden for having revealed today’s reality. And McCoy adds his perspective of the intriguing history that led up to this point - and he makes a few predictions as to what to expect in the near future. That article in TomDispatch caught the attention of radio host, writer and Middle East expert Jeff Blankfort who allows me to broadcast the highlights of his interview with Professor McCoy.
McCoy studied Southeast Asian history at Yale University before coming to Madison. In 1971 he was commissioned to write a book on the opium trade in Laos and discovered that the French equivalent to the CIA had financed its covert operations from the control of the Indochina drug trade. He also found evidence that after the US replaced the French the CIA took over the drug trade. Not surprisingly the CIA tried to block publication of the book The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. But after three English editions and translation into nine foreign languages, this study is now regarded as the “classic” work on the global drug traffic.
Professor Alfred W. McCoy is the author of: The Politics Of Heroin (in 1972) and A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror (published in 2006) A film based in part on that book, "Taxi to the Darkside," won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 2008. McCoy’s latest study of this topic, Torture and Impunity (Madison, 2012), explores the political and cultural dynamics of America’s post 9/11 debate over interrogation.This program was first aired on July 24, 2013 at KZYX Radio in Philo, CA.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175724/
http://history.wisc.edu/people/faculty/mccoy.htm
The 35 minute version is here: http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/69998
SOURCE w/links to a durn good podcast: http://www.tucradio.org/new.html
While we cannot see it, we can feel the grip of the Invisible Claw. And going by what's happened since Nov. 22, 1963, it isn't letting go.
Scuba
(53,475 posts)The Democratic Party knows this, the Republican Party knows this, the Ruling Class knows this- and they've been astonishingly successful at making sure the Working Class never learns this."
vintx
(1,748 posts)It seems like a large enough percentage of both republican and democratic voters have now finally realized how they're BOTH being played (after years of each group thinking only the other side was falling victim to liars, cheaters and thieves).
MisterP
(23,730 posts)want to hear, so he moves more to autarky than Reaganomics
http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/la-na-trump-big-government-20160301-story.html
Clinton OTOH is basically "sell the country to China and Saudi Arabia, they give me some of the money they earned from that, and then I can use it campaign to do some good!"
rhett o rick
(55,981 posts)
SusanCalvin
(6,592 posts)
amborin
(16,631 posts)
felix_numinous
(5,198 posts)and know now next to Jeb, Trump or Cruz or a Frankenstein monster they would also 'look good'.
I too was taken in by the 'RW Clinton conspiracy theory' in the 90s. Amazing how *some* conspiracy theories are sanctioned without question, without presenting evidence, and tolerated alongside compilations of evidence to the contrary.
Clintons had their chance to do the right thing because that is what the millions of voters wanted them to do. We didn't vote Clinton in so he could advance the WOD or NAFTA. Obama was voted in based on his left progressive rhetoric, that was what we were cheering in 2008, we did not want drones or TTIP. Now the Clintons have to spend millions to orchestrate and manufacture this 'win' because their assumed real support vanished with every news leak about their crimes. So now the NAKED government stands for all to see--there isn't enough money in the world to cover them..
The disconnect between the people and government has destroyed the public trust. Destroyed it, betrayed it. Our generation and all after have been betrayed.
nationalize the fed
(2,169 posts)
A Republican in Democratic Garb
And if a Republican had done what this louse did there would have been protests. But it's the D.
senz
(11,945 posts)and gave birth to a monster called, variously, the Third Way, the DLC, and Blue Dog Dems.
Oh, and they also call themselves "New" Democrats as if the old FDR, JFK, LBJ, Carter Democrats weren't good enough.
Kick them out. Let them go to the Republican Party where they belong. And take the Clintons with them. (Actually, the Clintons, with their Bush/Kissenger/Blankfein buddies, are already there.)
Hydra
(14,459 posts)They really believe in their "meritocracy" BS. That the people around them really are the best of the best of the best.
Therefore, the rest of us are just human garbage, regardless of what we know or what we can do- we don't have a pass into their little club not because we have no way to access it(we don't), but because supposedly we're not good enough to qualify.
Damn...
pdsimdars
(6,007 posts)Demsrule86
(68,539 posts)Without Bill Clinton, we would have had 12 years most likely of GOP types...and no Ginsberg...you people want to re-write a history you simply don't even understand.
tirebiter
(2,535 posts)The UPS strike was a team effort between Clinton and the TDU.
Doctor_J
(36,392 posts)Heritage Care, TPP, TTIP, offshore drilling, Libya, Honduras, "turning the page"
highprincipleswork
(3,111 posts)In retrospect, it has become abundantly clear to many of us that Bill Clinton's triangulating policies led to things like the 1994 Crime Bill, Welfare Reform, NAFTA, deregulation of Wall Street, and the Telecommunications Act - devastating to PoC, working people, middle class people, and our political/economic system in general.
But would it be too feminist to say that Hillary does not have to run like Bill? I mean, c'mon, this is a very different age, with a very different perspective. Lots has happened,, and there are clear, clear signs that the People are ready for a Progressive Solution. She is a powerful, ambitious, independent, intelligent, capable woman - there really is no doubt about that. The question of the hour is will she run like Bill or run like Hilary, will she feint to the policies of the past or will she take proper stock of today and what the people really need, and run a more solidly Progressive campaign and administration, if she is elected.
It would be absolutely foolishness to trot out these 90's chestnuts now, and potentially devastating in a campaign against someone like Trump. He is unpredictable, and willing to go just about anywhere to win. He can easily outflank these policies on the Left.
Furthermore, I've seem potential ads for downballot Democrats that try to win against Republicans by criticizing them for things like:
Washington Doublespeak
Insider Status
Connections to Wall Street and Banks
Being for the rich and powerful and not for the people
Lack of trust
How are downballot Democrats even going to run these campaigns if all these ads make our own falsely resurrected policies from the 90's look awful?
It's a losing strategy, and I would hope that Hillary and all the party leaders would realize this is not the 90's now. I would hope that Hillary would realize she can run and govern totally differently from Bill. We can learn from the past, and we can act differently in the future. We must realize fully that we are not running against Reagan or the coalitions or conditions of the past. Even Trump's nomination proves we are out of Ronald Reagan territory.
You run against Trump by being an unabashed Progressive. Hillary can do this. I know many of us here doubt it, and I'm not holding my breath too long either, because she slips to the Right so easily. It became one of their patented moves. But it does not have to be.
A concerted FDR style, Progressive Democratic Party can beat Trump in a landslide.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Civil, Social, and Economic Justice is what 99-percent of Democrats agree upon. Which is why we vote Democratic since the time of FDR. So why the big change after the inauguration?
highprincipleswork
(3,111 posts)If we could just do that, even the warring factions here could settle down.
blue neen
(12,319 posts)It's heartfelt and it makes a lot of sense.
We may not agree on everything, but it shows that we probably all have far more commonalities than differences. 
highprincipleswork
(3,111 posts)It's good to feel our feelings or commonality.
To be honest, I believe that those at the top could work this out a little better, and hope they will, to reflect the generally Progressive or Liberal or just common sense, decent beliefs and goals of the majority of the Democratic Party.
All best.
blue neen
(12,319 posts)
blue neen
(12,319 posts)If he did, I missed it.
The video was good and informative, but you should change the title of your OP. It's attributing Thomas Frank as quoting something that he didn't. (Unless I missed it).
Thanks.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)I guess you missed that part.
blue neen
(12,319 posts)Did Thomas Frank make that actual quote?
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Why does it bother you so? It accurately describes the post. Oh, now I get it.
blue neen
(12,319 posts)You know why it's a shame....because I didn't do that to you. I actually gave credit to the video for being interesting and informational.
The video was strong and credible enough to stand on it's own without you attributing words that were not spoken by Mr. Franks to him. And that's the shame of it, because that took the credibility away.
So, you didn't answer a simple question and then attacked me for asking it. So really, Octafish, in your own words, "now I get it".
Bye. Good luck.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)No matter what the reason, I am sorry to have hurt your feelings.
Oh, in the interest of clarity, I did change the OP title from the video's title. Originally it read "It's Clinton who wrecked the Democratic Party."
ETA: Typo in Title.
Yavin4
(35,432 posts)Fact is that the White, American working class abandoned the party because of the social progress movements of the 1960s. The Dems came up with a strategy to counteract this move and have won the popular vote in 5 out of the last 6 presidential elections.
nolabels
(13,133 posts)Anyway they can divide some from a group to win favor of the larger with the lie that the smaller social or economic class is taking more than their share (of whatever it they think they are missing) they will do it. The topper of it is they will call it a political party and then say vote us out if you don't like us and if you can.
They stole my vote, money, religion, dignity and freedom, i'm as mad hell and i am not going to take it anymore 
I have more in common with my brethren of the 99% than the 1%, our new, up and coming divider.
It's dumb way to do it, but more than ever i would say the 1% are bringing it on themselves from simple problem of just being human
Demsrule86
(68,539 posts)reason Bernie can't win.
nashville_brook
(20,958 posts)and have been scapegoating white working class folks ever since.
it was white working class people who voted for LGBT marriage rights when AA folks voted down Prop 8.
If you want white working class voters back, ENGAGE them. don't demonize the.
rhett o rick
(55,981 posts)This is what Black Lives Matters thinks about the Clintons:
The 1994 Crime Bill that she so vigorously defended not only expanded incarceration, but stripped funding for college education from prisoners. The Clinton legacy allowed for policies that prevented anyone convicted of a felony drug offense from receiving food stamps or income assistance. Clinton-led welfare reform fundamentally ripped apart the social safety net.”
“Make no mistake, Hillary Clinton's efforts to push these policies resulted in the continued destruction of Black communities and the swift growth of our mass incarceration crisis.”
And here's what Michelle Alexander had to say about the Clintons:
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow
The Clintons are tools of the Wealthy 1% and will destroy the lower 99% for money.
Alex4Martinez
(2,193 posts)He had a lot of help, and our culture's general fall into consumeristic oblivion didn't help.
Remember that "me generation" shit? Yeah, all about me, now, us, give me more, fuck the future.
That's the train that Bill rode in on and which has become more and more the norm.
hedgehog
(36,286 posts)840high
(17,196 posts)in her cabinet.
hedgehog
(36,286 posts)
840high
(17,196 posts)Tierra_y_Libertad
(50,414 posts)But....he was likeable while doing it. If you like con-men.
m-lekktor
(3,675 posts)
seafan
(9,387 posts)Thank you, Octafish, for posting this piece. Thomas Frank explains so much about the 1990s, in a way that only the passage of time could bring into focus for us in 2016 as sharply as he has now done.
An excerpt from Thomas Frank's book, Listen Liberal, as presented by Salon::
Some believe it is unfair to criticize President Clinton for these deeds. At the time of his actions, they recall, each of the initiatives I just mentioned were matters of almost universal assent. In the tight little group of credentialed professionals who dominated his administration as well as the city they worked in, almost everyone agreed on these things. Over each one of them there hovered a feeling of inevitability and even of obviousness, as though they were the uncontroversial policy demands of history itself. Globalization wanted these things to happen. Technology wanted them to happen. The Future wanted them to happen. Naturally the professional class wanted them to happen, too.
The term Clinton liked to use to summarize this sense of inevitability was “change.” This word is, obviously, a longstanding favorite of politicians of the left; what it means is that We the People have the power to shape the world around us. It is a hopeful word. But when Clinton said in a speech about free trade in 1993 that
“Change is upon us. We can do nothing about that.”
he was enshrining the opposite idea as the progressive creed. Change was an external force we could neither escape nor control; it was a reality that limited what we could do politically and that had in fact made most of our political choices for us already. The role of We the People was not to make change but to submit to its dominion. Naturally, Clinton thought to describe this majestic thing, this “change,” by referencing a force of nature: “a new global economy of constant innovation and instant communication is cutting through our world like a new river, providing both power and disruption to the people and nations who live along its course.”
Clinton spoke of change the way other politicians would talk about God or Providence; we could succeed economically, he once announced, “if we make change our friend.” Change was fickle and inscrutable, an unmoved mover doing this or that as only it saw fit. Our task—or, more accurately, your task, middle-class citizen—was to conform to its wishes, to “adjust to change,” as the president put it when talking about NAFTA.
The first time I myself tuned in and noticed some version of this inevitability-speak was in 1993, during that fight over NAFTA. The deal had been negotiated by the departed president, George H. W. Bush, but the Democratic majority in Congress had balked at the original version of the treaty, forcing the parties back to the table. As with so many of the achievements of the Clinton era, it eventually took a Democratic president, working with Republican members of Congress, to pass this landmark of neoliberalism.
According to the president himself, what the agreement was about was simple: “NAFTA will tear down trade barriers,” he said when signing it. “It will create the world’s largest trade zone and create 200,000 jobs in this country by 1995 alone.” The stationery of an outfit that lobbied for the treaty was emblazoned with the argument: “North American Free Trade Agreement—Exports. Better Jobs. Better Wages.”
But it wasn’t reason that sold NAFTA; it was a simulacrum of reason, by which I mean the great god inevitability, invoked in the language of professional-class self-assurance. “We cannot stop global change,” Clinton said in his signing speech.
The phrase that best expressed the feeling was this: “It’s a no brainer.” Lee Iacocca uttered it in a pro-NAFTA TV commercial, and before long everyone was saying it. The phrase struck exactly the right notes of simplicity combined with utter obviousness. Globalization was irresistible, the argument went, and free trade was always and in all situations a good thing. So good, it didn’t even really need to be explained. Everyone knew this. Everyone agreed.
Yet there were people who opposed NAFTA, like labor unions, for example, and Ross Perot, and the majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives. The agreement was not a simple or straightforward thing: it was some 2,000 pages long, and according to reporters who actually read it, the aim was less to remove tariffs than to make it safe for American firms to invest in Mexico—meaning, to move factories and jobs there without fear of expropriation and then to import those factories’ products back into the U.S.
One reason the treaty required no brains at all from its supporters is because NAFTA was as close to a straight-up class issue as we will ever see in this country. It “boils down to the oldest division of all,” Dirk Johnson wrote in The New York Times in 1993: “the haves versus the have-nots, or more precisely, those who have only a little.” The lefty economist Jeff Faux has even told how a NAFTA lobbyist tried to bring him around by reminding him that Carlos Salinas, then the president of Mexico, had “been to Harvard. He’s one of us.”
That appeal to class unity gives a hint of what Clintonism was all about. To owners and shareholders, who would see labor costs go down as they took advantage of unorganized Mexican labor and lax Mexican environmental enforcement, NAFTA held fantastic promise. To American workers, it threatened to send their power, and hence their wages, straight down the chute. To the mass of the professional-managerial class, people who weren’t directly threatened by the treaty, holding an opinion on NAFTA was a matter of deferring to the correct experts—economists in this case, 283 of whom had signed a statement declaring the treaty “will be a net positive for the United States, both in terms of employment creation and overall economic growth.”
The predictions of people who opposed the agreement turned out to be far closer to what eventually came to pass than did the rosy scenarios of those 283 economists and the victorious President Clinton. NAFTA was supposed to encourage U.S. exports to Mexico; the opposite is what happened, and in a huge way. NAFTA was supposed to increase employment in the U.S.; a study from 2010 counts almost 700,000 jobs lost in America thanks to the treaty. And, as feared, the agreement gave one class in America enormous leverage over the other: employers now routinely threaten to move their operations to Mexico if their workers organize. A surprisingly large number of them—far more than in the pre-NAFTA days—have actually made good on the threat.
Mexico has not fared much better. In the decades before NAFTA, its economy often grew rapidly; since NAFTA was enacted, Mexico has experienced some of the feeblest growth of any country in Latin America, despite all the stuff it now makes and exports to the U.S. The country’s poverty rate has not changed much at all while every other country in the region has made considerable progress. One reason for all this is the predictably destructive effect that free trade with American agribusiness has had on the fortunes of millions of Mexican family farmers.
.....
One of the strangest dramas of the Clinton literature, in retrospect, was the supposed mystery of Bill’s developing political identity. Like a searching teenager in a coming-of-age movie, boy president Bill roams hither and yon, trying out this policy and that, until he finally learns to be true to himself and to worship at the shrine of consensus orthodoxy. He campaigned as a populist, he tried to lift the ban on gays in the military, then all of a sudden he’s pushing free trade and deregulating telecom. Who was this guy, really?
How the question used to vex the president’s friends and advisers! There was “a struggle for the soul of Bill Clinton,” said his aide David Gergen just after the Republicans took Congress in 1994. A month later, Clinton’s press people (to quote the hilarious deadpan of the Washington Post) were actually forced to deny “that Clinton lacks a sense of who he is as president and where he wants to go.”
Clinton’s wandering political identity absorbed both his admirers and biographers, many of whom chose to explain it as a quest: Bill Clinton had to prove, to himself and the nation, that he was a genuine New Democrat. He had to grow into presidential maturity. And the way he had to do it was by damaging or somehow insulting traditional Democratic groups that represented the party’s tradition of egalitarianism. Then we would know that the New Deal was truly dead. Then we could be sure.
This was such a cherished idea among New Democrats that they had a catchphrase for it: Clinton’s campaign team called it “counter-scheduling.” During the 1992 race, as though to compensate for his friend-of-the-little-guy economic theme, Clinton would confront and deliberately antagonize certain elements of the Democratic Party’s traditional base in order to assure voters that “interest groups” would have no say in a New Democrat White House. As for those interest groups themselves, he knew he could insult them with impunity. They had nowhere else to go, in the cherished logic of Democratic centrism.
The most famous target of Clinton’s counter-scheduling strategy was the civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, the nemesis of the party’s centrists and the living embodiment of the politics the Democratic Leadership Council had set out to extinguish. At a 1992 meeting of Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, with Jackson sitting to his left, Clinton went out of his way to criticize a controversial rapper called Sister Souljah who had addressed the conference on the previous day. The exact circumstances of Clinton’s insult have long been forgotten, but the fact of it has gone down in the annals of politicking as a stroke of genius, an example of the sort of thing that New Democrats should always be doing in order to discipline their party’s base.
Once Clinton was in the White House, counter-scheduling mutated from a campaign tactic to a philosophy of governance. At a retreat in the administration’s early days, Bill’s chief political adviser, Hillary Clinton, instructed White House officials how it was going to be done. As Carl Bernstein describes the scene, Hillary announced that the public must be made to understand that Bill was taking them on a “journey” and that he had a “vision” for what the administration was doing, a “story” that distinguished good from evil. The way to dramatize this story, the first lady continued (in Bernstein’s telling), was to pick a fight with supporters.
You show people what you’re willing to fight for, Hillary said, when you fight your friends—by which, in this context, she clearly meant, When you make them your enemy.
The 'co-president' still carries her playbook today.
More:
But there was also an important difference. NAFTA was not symbolism. With this act, Clinton was not merely insulting an important constituency, as he had done with Jesse Jackson and Sister Souljah. With NAFTA he connived in that constituency’s ruin. He assisted in the destruction of its economic power. He did his part to undermine his party’s greatest ally, to ensure that labor would be too weak to organize workers from that point forward. Clinton made the problems of working people materially worse.
It is possible to regard this deed as fine or brave, as so many New Democrats did, if you understand the struggles of workers as a Depression-era cliché you’ve grown sick of hearing. However, if you understand those workers as humans—humans who contributed to Bill Clinton’s election—NAFTA starts to appear like a betrayal on a grand scale. To this day, for working people, the lesson of NAFTA glares like the headlight of an oncoming locomotive: These affluent Democrats do not give a damn about inequality except as an election-year slogan.
Workers were the first casualties of Bill Clinton’s quest for his New Democratic self. But the journey went on. The next great milestones were his big, first-term legislative accomplishments: the great crime crackdown of 1994 and the welfare reform measure of 1996. Both were intended to swipe traditional Republican issues and to demonstrate Clinton’s independence from the so-called special interests.
Back in 1992 Clinton had briefly departed the campaign trail to return to Arkansas and be visibly present while his state went about executing one Ricky Ray Rector, a convicted killer who was so mentally damaged he had no idea what was happening to him or why. Clinton’s design was to signal his toughness and thus avoid the fate of Michael Dukakis, whose presidential run had been done in by TV commercials suggesting he was too much of a wuss to keep dangerous black men behind bars. In the precise words of Christopher Hitchens, Rector was a “human sacrifice” for Clinton’s presidential ambition.
.....
Someday we will understand that the punitive hysteria of the mid-1990s was not an accident; it was essential to Clintonism. Taken as a whole with NAFTA, with welfare reform, with his plan for privatizing Social Security and, of course, with Clinton’s celebrated lifting of the rules governing banks and telecoms, it all fits perfectly within the new, class-based framework of liberalism. Clinton simply treated different groups of Americans in radically different ways—crushing some in the iron fist of the state, exposing others to ruinous corporate power, while showering the favored stratum with bailouts, deregulation, and a frolicking celebration of Think Different business innovation.
Some got bailouts, others got “zero tolerance.” There was really no contradiction between these things. Lenience and forgiveness and joyous creativity for Wall Street bankers while another group gets a biblical-style beatdown—these things actually fit together quite nicely. Indeed, the ascendance of the first group requires that the second be lowered gradually into hell. When you take Clintonism all together, it makes sense, and the sense it makes has to do with social class. What the poor get is discipline; what the professionals get is endless indulgence.
(bolding added)
Thank you, Thomas Frank. The truth about the Clintons is finally coming into focus.
We have been sold down the river and the proceeds were never meant to benefit the people. Only the powerful.
We've seen the slick rhetoric of the salesman. Now, his wife is the closer.
Unless we say no.
antigop
(12,778 posts)
eridani
(51,907 posts)dchill
(38,465 posts)Katashi_itto
(10,175 posts)Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)
polly7
(20,582 posts)
Beacool
(30,247 posts)for 8 years as president? Democrats kept losing the WH after Carter's presidency damaged the brand. Clinton figured out how to revive the party and win the WH. All the whining and complaining from the Left did not win elections since 1980 to the present time.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)October Surprise was just the tip of the iceberg in 1980. The main body was totally off the radar: most people have never heard of the Safari Club.
Instead of going after Reagan, Casey and Bush's TREASON that sank President Carter's presidency, let alone all the criminality from Iran-Contra to the crooked S&L fiasco to the Safari Club to BCCI, President Clinton didn't help matters leading up to today's world where the super-rich get even richer off of wars without end while the middle class evaporates to nothingness through WTO crapola from the likes of Larry Summers and Goldman Sachs.
So, yeah, if that is "whining," sorry. They're the facts.
