To this day, bloggers on web sites like Daily Kos argue that Bill Clinton was in no way a progressive president, and that his victories were reactive (such as stopping the worst budget cuts of the Gingrich Congress) and never proactive. In particular, Clinton is disparaged by comparisons with Howard Dean, who is said to have a sterling liberal record. This article is intended to refute these arguments; I firmly believe that Clinton, while far from perfect, did more for progressivism than most politicians of our time, including Dean.
For this list, I selected achievements that constituted major improvements in the lives of Americans. I did not include things that were admirable but largely symbolic, such as the dialogue on race and the support of Washington, DC’s voting rights campaign. Furthermore, I kept the list to things that large numbers of people would consider progressive; welfare reform, for example, was a significant legislative achievement, but not many people would call it progressive. Lastly, I kept the list domestic, which meant that the successful military interventions in Kosovo and East Timor, while important, could not be included.
1. The Family and Medical Leave Act. Granted, the leave it gives is unpaid, but it remains an important building block on which to construct efforts to widen leave, such as the mandatory paid sick leave act recently passed in Connecticut.
2. Raising taxes on the rich. Clinton’s 1993 tax increases helped the Republicans win Congress in 1994 (largely because of the misinformation conservatives spread about them), but they also helped produce the federal government’s only recent surplus, and were the only recent successful attempt to make taxation more progressive. (This link, from the Center for American Progress, is a great source of information on this history.)
3. The Brady Bill. Clinton got this law passed after years of the gun lobby fighting it tooth and nail; it has since stopped more than half a million people from getting guns they shouldn’t have. The best source is this F.B.I. report.
4. The California Desert Protection Act. This popular law protects a chunk of ecologically valuable land in the southeastern corner of the Golden State that is the same size as the state of Maryland (!). This had been a priority of local and national environmentalists for many years.
5. A minimum wage increase. In 1996, the Clinton Administration was able to get the first increase in the wage in decades through a Congress that largely opposed the very existence of the minimum wage law.
6. SCHIP (the State Children’s Health Insurance Program). A lot of pixels were spent on blogs decrying George W. Bush’s shameful veto of an expansion to the SCHIP program, but it’s worth remembering that Clinton, with help from Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch, was the president that actually began the program in the late 1990's.
7. Health Insurance Portability (the so-called HIPAA or “hippa” law) created the COBRA program to provide for coverage transfer and expanded patients’ rights, including their rights to privacy (ironic, considering that conservatives claimed that the original Clinton health care plan would have meant the end of all patient privacy).
8. Violence Against Women Act. The National Domestic Violence Hotline says that this law “changed the landscape for victims who once suffered in silence.”
(This is a more general list of Clinton accomplishments, and it was a source for this article.)
Please note that I am not arguing that everything the Clinton Administration did was good, nor am I arguing that these successes were solely accomplishments of Clinton or his administration (congressional Democrats, who worked better with Clinton than the "triangulation" stories claimed, and grassroots activists were also important). I am arguing that Clinton deserves more credit for genuine liberal progress than some pundits are ready to give him.