An obituary for Clintonism (but zombie political ideas die hard)

Charles Blow has a column revisiting Bill Clinton's Presidency from a perspective I wish more Democrats - including then-Senator Joe Biden - had taken in real time, Democrats Repent for Bill Clinton New York Times 03/14/2021. Blow writes of Bill Clinton:

He was a gifted politician, a once-in-a-generation kind of prodigy, and many liberals adored him for it.

But Clinton’s record, particularly with respect to Black and brown Americans and the poor, was marked by catastrophic miscalculation. It was characterized by tacking toward a presumed middle — “triangulation,” the administration called it — which on some levels, abandoned and betrayed the minority base that so heavily supported him.

Two major pieces of Clinton-signed legislation stand out: The crime bill of 1994 and the welfare reform bill of 1996. [my emphasis]

Both were part of the larger project of neoliberalism, the crime bill being part of the cultural/social part and the welfare reform part of the larger economic and social program.

It's worth remembering that Jerry Brown was Clinton's strongest competition in the 1992 Democratic primaries. And he advocated a distinctly more New Dealish orientation. His campaign centered the problem of de facto corruption view private campaign financing. The problem has grown to enormously greater proportions since. And still isn't solved.

As Kalena Thmhave reported in Reforming Welfare and Controlling the Poor on how Trump was happy to continue the "welfare reform" trend, The American Prospect 02/15/2018. It was only the Republican Party that enabled what became Trumpism.

And the "moderate" political strategy behind it didn't even work well. "In the 1990s, an influential group of political actors argued that, by reforming welfare and making aid recipients 'play by the rules,' the Democratic Party could shed an electoral liability, free poverty politics from the crippling effects of racial resentment, and create a public opinion environment more favorable to antipoverty efforts," wrote Joe Soss and Sanford Schram (Welfare reform as a failed political strategy Focus 24:3, Fall-Winter 2006). In poli-sci jargon, that explain that actually reforming the supposed welfare problem didn't remove "welfare" a a political issue, because to conservatives, "welfare" symbolized something that was largely independent of the real existing welfare programs:

The primary problem, we argue, is that progressive revisionists focused on the visibility of welfare for Americans without attending to the fact that this policy had little proximity to the lives of most Americans. Regardless of this visibility in public discourse, policies may be distant from citizens’ everyday lives as a result of geography (as with some foreign policies), the patterning of social relations (as with an income-targeted policy in a class-segregated city), or time (as with policy effects that will be felt personally but only at some remote date). When highly visible policies have proximate, tangible effects on peoples’ lives, mass publics will experience them more directly and, hence, will gain greater ability to evaluate them through “individual observation rather than mass response to others’ cues.” By contrast, when highly visible policies exist primarily as distant objects of perception for mass publics, they may elicit rapt attention and powerful emotion, but they will lack concrete presence in most people’s lives. In such instances, claims and beliefs about policies cannot easily be tested against experience. As a result, public perceptions will depend more heavily on elite rhetoric, media frames, and widely held cultural beliefs.

Welfare reform, in our view, offers a paradigmatic example of the politics that surround distant-visible policies of this sort. As Jacob Hacker points out, AFDC was “a fiscally tiny program with … a clientele that never exceeded 6 percent of the population,” yet it became “liberalism’s symbolic beachhead and conservatives’ poster child for everything wrong with American social policy.” Details of the AFDC policy design mattered greatly for recipients but very little in most Americans’ lives. “Welfare,” on the other hand, symbolized to large numbers of Americans a deeply felt sense that government was giving special favors to a group of undeserving others. It evoked an image of easy living on government largesse, in contrast to the experiences of “normal, hardworking Americans.” [my emphasis]

The infamous crime bill also didn't bring the political benefits conservative Democrats projected for themselves in supporting it. As former North Carolina Congressman Brad Miller writes (Confessions of a Tough-on-Crime Progressive The American Prospect 07/13/2020):

There was little political reward for the tough-on-crime legislation that Democrats enacted. Republicans just said we should have been much tougher. “Three strikes and you’re out,” which gave a life sentence to defendants convicted a third time of a violent crime, should have been two strikes. We should have double- and triple-bunked prisoners, they said, without mentioning the existing federal court orders against overcrowding and disrepair of North Carolina’s prisons.

Because of the overcrowding, prisoners were often paroled after they served a small fraction of their stated sentence. We enacted “truth in sentencing” legislation, as did many states, which required prisoners to serve almost their full stated sentence. (Prison officials said some reduction for good behavior was necessary for discipline.) The stated sentence for many nonviolent crimes was reduced to match the actual sentence, and to make more room in prisons for violent criminals. Republicans ran saturation ads that we reduced sentences for those crimes. The explanation that we reduced the stated sentence but not the actual sentence was too complicated.

In the 1994 midterms, Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives for the first time since Eisenhower was president. In North Carolina, we lost 25 seats in the 120-member House, and control. My seat was one of the 25. Democrats in the state Senate clung to 26 seats out of 50. There were other factors, of course. Democratic voters were dispirited that the Clinton administration had been unable to enact health care reform. But it seemed just not possible to be tough enough on crime.

Bad policy and bad politics: the sweet spot for establishment Democrats for three decades.

Maybe they are finally learning something. Hope spring eternal. Or is it, hope dies last? I'll go with the former because I have a foolishly optimistic streak.