Coons: Democrats Need To Abandon 'Wild-Eyed' Race to Left

[GaryCnf]

32. Another post equating Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama

Another attempt to tie the utter failure of what is now known as "New Democracy" to the utter success of the TRUE Democratic message that we can be better than we were the day before. Another attempt to let Bill Clinton ride the coattails of one of the greatest presidents and human beings of our time instead preside over the carnage left behind by the politics of creating a third way from centrist in both parties and the remnants of our party who would be so negatively personally affected by Republican rule that we just shut up and get in line.

Bill Clinton ran as a centrist campaign, a campaign of changing our party from the "wild eyed leftism" of Dukakis and McGovern. I stood in horror at a rally in Tifton, Georgia filled with what we now call Deplorables as he talked about teaching poor people the dignity of work and the plague of violent crime. All the revisionist history in the world won't change the fact that he RAN ON the policies embodied in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, the Violent Crime Act, and welfare "reform." They weren't forced on him. When he won in a triangulated election with less than a simple majority of the popular vote, he used that same coalition to pass what he promised.

Obama ran a decidedly progressive campaign, a campaign of changing America. He governed in the face of the reality that the establishment of our party was controlled by those who clung to this third way. He governed in the face of the reality that he was abandoned, not championed, in 2014. Finally, after maintaining HIS coalition in 2016, he used the power of the executive to do what should have been our policy all along and undo the damage of the centrist coalition.

To even speak their names in the same breath is to deny reality.