"Making the perfect the enemy of the good."

[JHan]

105. The politics of the 90's was very different...

B. Clinton triangulated out of necessity, selectively amplifying tough decisions he made that he wasn't happy with and ignoring impactful ways he defended democratic principles don't provide a full picture. Context is lost in easy comparisons between eras.

It’s impossible to understand Bill Clinton’s political strategy without appreciating the desperation of the circumstances he and his party faced when he ran for office. The vaunted New Deal majority built by Franklin Roosevelt had collapsed in the 1960s, and the cause of its death was race — specifically, the perception that the Democratic Party had come to represent black interests at the expense of white ones. Republicans won every presidential election from 1968 through 1988, the sole exception being Jimmy Carter’s razor-thin 1976 victory, propelled by the overhang of the Watergate scandal, and bereft of progressive domestic accomplishment. “These white Democratic defectors express a profound distaste for blacks, a sentiment that pervades almost everything they think about government and politics,” concluded pollster Stanley Greenberg, who met with voters in the Detroit suburb of Macomb County to understand why they had flocked to the Republican Party.

It did not seem at the time that liberalism was merely in the midst of a historical pause between spurts of activism. It seemed that liberalism was completely dead, and Reaganism, which spoke for the growing Sun Belt, owned the future, and the main question in American politics was the speed at which the welfare state would be dismantled.

Greenberg worked for Clinton, who set out to build a party that could continue to represent African-Americans while also winning enough white voters to assemble a majority. That was the message sent by Clinton’s embrace of welfare reform and a crime law, his repudiation of Sister Souljah and his execution of mentally disabled murderer Ricky Ray Rector. Clinton did not fully or even mostly capitulate to racism. He vetoed two previous, more draconian welfare bills before ultimately signing the third, which he deemed “a decent welfare bill wrapped in a sack of shit.” He likewise appointed the most diverse administration in history to that point, and defended affirmative action against Republican attempts to abolish it.

One could make the case that Clinton compromised more than necessary, or that he accomplished too little (those accomplishments include the Family and Medical Leave Act, a more generous Earned-Income Tax Credit and a higher top tax rate, and an economic boom that yielded across-the-board wage gains). The point is that Clinton made those compromises in the face of real pressure. That African-Americans remained his most loyal constituency throughout his presidency attests to Clinton’s success in maintaining his party’s trans-racial appeal even as he reassured dubious whites.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/06/clinton-and-the-politics-of-90s-racial-backlash.html