Two of our diarists presented long diaries over the weekend reiterating thirties nostalgist Thomas Frank’s DP scolding. Frank contends that the DP squandered its heritage for 30 piece of corporate silver (more or less) and lays considerable blame Clinton, W. J., President, 1992-2000. Frank catalogs a long list of Clinton’s policy errors. What he forgets, as a recent column reminds us, is the political context:
“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 (it has even been argued that Carter was the first neo-liberal).”
“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 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.”
Again, white working class voters were deserting the DP for Reagan. Not for the DPs failure on bread and butter issues, but over race. Poppy Bush, Reagans VP continued the trend in ‘88 with some pretty blatant dog whistling.
In that context, Clinton set out to build a party that could continue to represent African-Americans while also winning enough white voters to assemble a majority.” His election was made possible in part by a restive GOP base, which primaried Bush (the odious, white identity candidate Pat Buchanan) and a 3rd party bid by Ross Perot.
This brings us to Clinton’s embrace of welfare reform and the 1994 crime law. Continues our columnist, “Clinton did not fully or even mostly capitulate to racism. He vetoed two previous, more draconian welfare bills before ultimately signing the third, which Clitnon deemed “a decent welfare bill wrapped in a sack of shit.” He also ushered in 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.” He likewise appointed the most diverse administration in history to that point, and defended affirmative action against Republican attempts to abolish it. And do not forget that he tried to get a universal health bill over the line that was savagely demagogued by the GOP/AMA and was not universally supported even within his own party. But of course the media blamed both sides for its failure.
To conclude, “The point is that Clinton made those compromises in the face of real pressure.” And how African-Americans respond? “They remained his most loyal constituency throughout his presidency”.