If elected President, which of these Democrats...

[Ken Burch]

61. He COULD have flipped the House back to us in '96, but he didn't even try.

I haven't watched the "American Experience" episode you mentioned yet, but I lived through the Nineties. I remember how little the guy did to help Dems down the ticket after he got elected.

And he could have let the welfare bill become law without his signature. He didn't actually have to have a damn signing ceremony and act like it was something to celebrate. There was no excuse for a Democratic president to ever collude(not just accept, but actually collude)in gutting programs for the poor. Everyone who wanted people on welfare to be punished just for being on welfare was going to vote straight-ticket GOP no matter what. His signing that bill didn't gain him ANY votes in the fall.

Yes, the welfare system needs changes(as the New Left had been arguing as early as 19 freaking 65-read Tom Hayden on the subject) but we never needed to have a Democratic president, especially the first president to be born in poverty and to benefit significantly from Democratic social programs himself as a child and young man(those programs were the only way he could ever have had a chance to become a Rhodes Scholar) to join forces with poorbashers like Newt Gingrich and deliberately make life worse for people who already had nothing. He had a moral obligation to stand with the poor, and he betrayed them. And HRC never said anything, publicly OR privately, against the signing of that bill, and still essentially defends it today(which still makes me furious that, in her 2008 campaign, she actually used Bobby Kennedy quotes and images after devoting her whole political life to ideologically pissing on Bobby's grave and on all that he stood for).

The message on welfare from the Clinton Administration should have been"switch from the dole to federal jobs programs and put the poor to work rebuilding their neighborhoods", not "just go work at McDonald's because that's your station in life,k peasant scum". There are some things that are just never ever supposed to happen when a Democrat is president. Kicking the poor off of the ladder is one of those things.

And there is no reason to think that nominating HRC won't mean going back to those exact same policies and all the old betrayals. And a return to D.C. for Rahm in the bargain, most likely.