Owen Jones’ criticism of Bill Clinton giving a poison-pill speech in Michigan, allegedly to help Kamala Harris get elected, is understandable and accurate. (1)
Still, on this one, my reaction is more of a sad feeling. One, because Clinton comes off as frail in this one and doesn’t seem to clearly understand what he’s talking about and why. His sentences aren’t garbled. But he unfortunately looks like he came out to deliver a speech from the teleprompter and doesn’t quite understand how he’s bound to come across. And his babbling about King David and “Judea and Samaria” is pretty pitiful.
The one time I saw Bill Clinton give a speech live and in person was at the 2009 Netroots Nation convention in Pittsburgh. When he started his speech, I was struck by how flat he sounded, because he was obviously known for inspiring speeches. Aaron Banks reported at the time what happened next:
The drama kicked off when progressive and GLBT activist Lane Hudson shouted out “Mr. President, will you call for a repeal of DOMA [the Defense of Marriage Act] and Don't Ask, Don't Tell? Right now?”
President Clinton’s calm demeanor quickly turned stormy and the crowd witnessed a flash of the legendary Clinton temper as he shot back at Hudson in defense of his record:
[“]You want to talk about Don't Ask Don't Tell, I'll tell you exactly what happened. You couldn't deliver me any support in the Congress, and they voted by a veto-proof majority in both houses against my attempt to let gays serve in the military, and the media supported them. They raised all kinds of devilment. And all most of you did was to attack me instead of getting me some support in the Congress. Now that's the truth. [“]
It was Clinton at his best, showing passion and just enough restraint, and it won the crowd to his side. The speech ended in a standing ovation and seemed only to be missing the traditional playing of “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” as he waved to the crowd and excited the stage. Participants later gave a spirited rendition around 2:00am at a local karaoke bar. [my emphasis] (2)
I assumed from that speech that he started off not quite sure what kind of crowd he was addressing. Was it standard liberals, aspiring Democratic Party functionaries, or grouchy leftie activist? When Banks interrupted him, Clinton started emotionally engaging with the crowd. That gave him a sense of the audience and then started talking like he was addressing left-leaning Democratic activists who actually wanted to accomplish things. And the crowd responded positively. This was 2009 before the realization had set in that Obama really was leaning toward a conservative approach rather than the hope-and-change attitude he projected in his 2008 campaign.
Ryan Grim in his book We’ve Got People (2019) gives a good account of how the activist base pushed back on Obama’s conservative tilt. Including how Nancy Pelosi as the Speaker of the House pushed Obama’s team to actually get the “Obamacare” health insurance plan passed, which wound up being one of Obama’s most popular, effective, and enduring programs.
Anyone slightly to the left of center has found plenty of reasons to be frustrated with her on various issues since. But she came through on that one, and seriously tried to get the “public option” feature enacted, which failed to pass the Senate thanks to the vote against it by ConservaDem Joe Lieberman in one of his most consequential “f*** you” gestures to the Democratic Party and especially its base voters.
Here, Clinton just repeats the inaccurate trope that it was all the Palestinians’ fault that the Oslo Peace Process broke down and shamelessly regurgitates the Israeli propaganda justification for deliberately targeting civilians because all them were being used as “human shields” by Hamas fighters. It’s disgusting and immoral. Jones’ phrase is “disgusting and insane.”
Jones’ criticism is right. And I don’t want to detract from it.
But it’s also sad to see Clinton coming off like this as a hull of his former self. If the words he’s saying weren’t so horrible and indefensible, it would just be kind of sad and nostalgic to see this.
And it’s hard to believe it’s giving any boost to turnout for the Harris-Walz ticket in Michigan, where Arab-Americans are a key constituency the ticket needs to win. This is as tone-deaf as it gets.
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 ClintonNew 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 strategyFocus 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 ProgressiveThe 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.
Bacevich implicitly uses 1991 as the end of the Cold War, a more clearly defined dividing point than the Owl of Minerva can usually identify. He takes the war that year to push Iraq out of Kuwait as the historical demarcation line, a conflict called at the time the Gulf War. (The beginning of the Cold War is conventionally dated somewhere between 1945 to 1948.)
The Emerald City Presidencies
The press and public perception of that war would prove to be a crucial element of the often miserable US experiences with wars the next three decades:
The conclusion of the Cold War showed that the U.S. military could win without fighting. The Persian Gulf War showed not only that America's armed forces could still fight, but that they were seemingly invincible.
So the nation's military narrative added a chapter: After Vietnam there now came Desert Storm. The latter did not expunge the former. Yet the military failure in Southeast Asia now lost much of its relevance. By putting a ragtag Iraqi army to flight, the United States had emphatically "kicked the Vietnam syndrome," as President George H. W. Bush put it at the time. With that, reticence about using force evaporated, especially in elite circles. In a post-Cold War world that awaited shaping, America's manifest superiority in all things military positioned it to do whatever needed to be done.
This is key to understanding Bacevich’s understanding of what the book’s subtitle describes as the US squandering its Cold War victory and the destructive hubris that was integral to it. Freed from the balance-of-power considerations of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact and the policy limits imposed by the negative public view of the Vietnam War, the US could now indulge in war after war without the prospect of a major domestic political backlash.
Bacevich quotes a prime example of the American Exceptionalist rhetoric characteristic of the Emerald City era, this one from Colin Powell in 1992:
No other nation on earth has the power we possess. More important, no other nation on earth has the trusted power that we possess. We are obligated to lead. If the free world is to harvest the hope and fulfill the promise that our great victory in the Cold War has offered us, America must shoulder the responsibility of its power. The last best hope of earth has no other choice. We must lead.
In reality, the enormous popularity that President G.W. Bush enjoyed in 1991 after the successful conclusion of the war with Iraq did not prove sufficient to get him re-elected against Bill Clinton in 1992.
It led further – by the conscious decision of the Cheney-Bush Administration with the explicit support of leading Democratic Senators including Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry – to the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq, whose very deadly consequences are still playing out in 2020. The Iraq War also dramatically increased the regional power of Iran by removing the balancing power of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-led Iraq. And, of course, at the time Bacevich’s book appeared in January 2020, the US was on the verge of war with Iran.
Bacevich traces the broad path of US wars and assertions of military dominance through the Clinton Administration and its interventions in the Balkan Wars:
In the ceaselessly updated chronicle of the American military experience, the Bosnia and Kosovo campaigns - Operation Deliberate Force, lasting just three weeks in the late summer of 1995, and Operation Allied Force, spread across seventy-eight days in the spring of 1999-have long since been crowded out. Both featured what military theorists were then calling "precision bombing." In both cases, American air forces operated at high altitudes and faced negligible resistance, with U.S. losses all but nonexistent.
... during Clinton's eight-year tenure as commander in chief, these were the only victories the U.S. military was able to claim. As such, at least for a time, they shaped American expectations regarding the use of force. Here, it seemed, was evidence that the United States had solved the riddle of making armed might politically purposeful. [The military idea of] Full-Spectrum Dominance was no longer a theory. Bosnia and Kosovo made it fact.
While stressing this feature of the Clinton Administration that continued the hubristic direction of Emerald City, he makes it clear that the Bush-Cheney Administration took a qualitative (and bad) next step:
The central theme of Bill Clinton's tenure in office had been globalization. The central theme of George W. Bush's tenure became war, which some in his administration conceived as a sort of complement to globalization - another approach to bringing the world into conformity with American preferences. While Clinton had dabbled in war, the events of September 11 prompted Bush to embrace it wholeheartedly. Wars that still today follow their meandering course ultimately consumed his presidency.
The name devised to justify those conflicts-the Global War on Terrorism - amounted to an exercise in misdirection. … As an explanation for U.S. policy after 9/11, terrorism comes nowhere near to being adequate. Indeed, much like the shelling of Fort Sumter in 1861 or the sinking of the USS Maine in 1898, the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon served less as a proximate cause for war than as a catalyst. [my emphasis]
And he describes the various arrogant assumptions that flourished in the Bush-Cheney foreign policy that “went altogether off the rails”, a task which Bacevich was diligently performing in real time during that Presidency in his published work and public appearances:
The Bush Eschatology struck me even then as vainglorious, if not altogether blasphemous. Yet by no means did it signify a fundamental change in the trajectory of post-Cold War American statecraft. On the contrary, it reaffirmed in the strongest possible terms the premises underlying those policies. [my emphasis]
Noting that he himself voted twice for Obama as President, he carefully points out what he sees as Obama’s positive accomplishment. But Obama did not break from the four elements that Bacevich identifies as characterizing the Emerald City era, despite the symbolically transformative nature of the election of the first African-American President.
Obama “saved globalized neoliberalism”, he writes, but did not substantively transform it. “Sadly, the mendacity and malfeasance that had paved the way for the Great Recession went essentially unpunished.” Through policies like his escalation in the Afghanistan War, the failure to fully extricate American troops from Iraq, his extensive use of drone attacks, and the 2011 intervention in Libya, Obama modified but did not fundamentally alter the kind of militarized global dominance approach of the post-1989 era.
He has a particular criticism of this moment in the Libya intervention when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was asked about the torture-murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi by rebels:
On March 19, Western air attacks on the Gaddafi regime commenced. By October, the regime had collapsed and Gaddafi himself was dead. On national TV, a laughing Clinton bragged, "We came, we saw, he died."
Yet liquidating Gaddafi no more settled the matter than the fall of Baghdad ended the Iraq War. His ouster merely paved the way for a years-long civil war. As Libya descended into anarchy, the United States largely washed its hands of further responsibility. Years later, Clinton was still insisting that the intervention she had done so much to promote exemplified "smart power at its best," the apparent measure of merit being not the results achieved but the dearth of U.S. combat casualties.
... I also found her premature and unseemly victory dance regarding Libya indicative of someone possessed of a dangerously deficient understanding of war. [my emphasis]
I've never been much impressed with the NeverTrumper schtick. It basically is a way for some Republicans to distance themselves from Trump's vulgarity and sleaze while still advocating for Republican positions and constantly criticizing the Democrats for not being Republican enough.
I've always distinguished John Dean from the NeverTrumpers, because he has been make substantive criticisms of the Republican Party's authoritarianism for a long time. Like in this article co-authored with Bob Altemeyer, who has done extensive research and writing on authoritarianism, Why Do So Many Americans Continue to Support Donald Trump? In a Word: Authoritarianism Justia 03/20/2019:
There are a lot of Americans who do not care for democracy (Altemeyer, 2006 at www.theauthoritarians.org). They do not mind that he fails to follow the Constitution, or that he poses a danger to democracy. In fact, surveys of these people show they would prefer a demagogic autocrat who will “stomp out the rot,” which they believe infects society. Because most Americans see the world differently, this finding may be difficult to accept. It is, however, based on solid science.
The research to which we refer began during World War II and has, over the decades, produced a clear understanding about Americans who are highly submissive to authority, how they became that way, plus a great deal about how they think and maintain their beliefs. This body of science is well known in academic circles, and it is essential to understanding the Trump presidency and his supporters. Yet it is being largely ignored.
I would note that a major body of systematic study on this problem precedes the Second World War, Studies on Authority and Family (1936), carried out and published in 1936 as one in a series of special publication by the Institute for Social Research, aka, the Frankfurt School.
But Dean is aligning himself with NeverTrumper Max Boot on what strikes me as a really bad tactical idea:
This is playing out so far like I dreamed it could, and it can get better if the House Democrats continue to sit on the articles. This is Trump’s nightmare because more can and will come out on his guilt. Mitch’s nightmare too, notwithstanding his pretending otherwise. https://t.co/LEH5KDXGHU
Not sending the impeachment to the Senate would be taken by virtually everyone as a lack of seriousness on the part of the House Democrats. And it would be.
Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian discuss some other tactical considerations on the timing of formally sending the impeachment to the Senate. (Ana has been particularly sour about establishment Democrats the last week or so.) Nancy Pelosi's Impeachment FakeoutTYT 12/19/2019:
There was an interesting conservative endorsement this week of the need to remove Trump from office, from Christianity Today, a conservative evangelical journal (Trump Should Be Removed from Office 12/19/2019).
(Update 12/23/2019: The editorial was signed by CT's editor-in-chief Mark Galli but speaks in a collective voice of "we" and "our". In a follow-up piece supporting Galli's position, CT's president Timothy Dalrymple writes, "CT does not have an editorial board. Editors publish under their own names. Yet Galli has stood in the trenches for men and women of faith for over three decades. He has been an outstanding editor in chief. While he does not speak for everyone in the ministry — our board and our staff hold a range of opinions — he carries the editorial voice of the magazine. We support CT’s editorial independence and believe it’s vital to our mission for the editor in chief to speak out on the issues of the day." For whatever reason, CT does not formally call "the editorial voice of the magazine" an editorial board, but I've left the original references in this post. The Flag in the Whirlwind: An Update from CT’s President 12/22/2019)
I don't think their editorial board is made up of NeverTrumper types. But in a similar way, it's very tempting for Democrats to praise conservative pitches like this and distribute them on social media as a kind of "evidence against interest" argument.
But the facts in this instance are unambiguous: The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.
The reason many are not shocked about this is that this president has dumbed down the idea of morality in his administration. He has hired and fired a number of people who are now convicted criminals. He himself has admitted to immoral actions in business and his relationship with women, about which he remains proud. His Twitter feed alone — with its habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies, and slanders—is a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused. [my emphasis]
But my guess is that this kind of argument will mainly function to give evangelical pastors and members of their congregations who are so inclined something to say that sounds thoughtful and critical while they explain why they support Trump against being removed from office, by Senate conviction or by the 2020 election.
The CT editors also include their arguments from two decades ago for impeaching Bill Clinton on far more frivolous excuses than the very substantial high crimes and misdemeanors that are well documented for President Trump. Because Republicans who are trying to sound thoughtful or prayerful about Trump's conviction still need a whataboutism argument against the Democrats. And readers can make their own judgments about whether their criticism of Trump is as passionate as their criticism of Clinton they quote. It's notable that the very substantial evidence of multiple instances of felony obstruction of justice on Trump's part documented in the Mueller report don't merit an explicit mention in the editorial.
The full editorial on Clinton in 1998 The Prodigal Who Didn’t Come Home 10/05/1998) is notably longer than the current one about Trump. And it doesn't offer any sympathetic alibi language for evangelicals who might want to sound like they disapproved of his affair with Monica Lewinsky but didn't support impeaching him and removing him from office. On the contrary, the 1998 editorial sneers at Clinton's admission that his affair was "inappropriate".
The following excerpts present an notable contrast. From the 2019 editorial:
Let’s grant this to the president [Trump]: The Democrats have had it out for him from day one, and therefore nearly everything they do is under a cloud of partisan suspicion. This has led many to suspect not only motives but facts in these recent impeachment hearings. And, no, Mr. Trump did not have a serious opportunity to offer his side of the story in the House hearings on impeachment.
Did the 1998 editorial show similar understanding for Democrats' concerns about crass partisanship by Republicans? Um, not exactly:
On August 17, Bill Clinton acted like he was cornered. There was no mea in his mea culpa. He no sooner acknowledged an "inappropriate" sexual relationship with a female intern less than half his age, than he started blaming those who were doing their duty in pursuing the truth and upholding the law. Even his subsequent attempts at apology — to his cabinet, to party loyalists, to Democratic members of Congress — looked more like sandbagging operations to shore up crumbling support than like the fruit of personal reflection. For Bill Clinton, there was no openness to being found.
So, for Christianity Today, 1998: Clinton admits wrongdoing then criticizes rabid partisanship in the impeachment process - deserving of total contempt.
Trump and his supporters in Congress staunchly deny that Trump did anything wrong and dismiss the Democratic investigation, which were closer to reluctant and apologetic than rigidly partisan - Trump and his supporters obviously deserve generous Christian sympathy for their objections to Democratic partisanship.
I'm underwhelmed by this conservative kinda-sorta endorsement of a Senate conviction against President Trump.
Paul Starr provides kind of flashback to the Democratic politics of 1991 and the years of the Clinton Presidency in Reparations, Really?American Prospect 04/24/2019. It's a column basically saying the Democrats should never ever have publicly considered the idea of reparations for slavery.
He does talk about issues related to reparations in the context of insisting that the Democrats should discuss only "race-neutral" proposals.
Reparations for slavery is a complicated issue. And, aside from the political marketing worries, I've yet to be convinced that legally and admistratively that the US would be able to design a program that obviously reasonable and fair. Or maybe I should say, "obviously reasonable and fair in the view of Republicans." Because they don't even want black people to be able to vote. They might not want to roll back the 13th Amendment. But they're not so thrilled with the 14th and the 15th.
In fact, the 14th Amendment includes this provision, "neither the United States nor any state shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void."
If reparations continue to be a live issue, I wouldn't be at all surprised if some Republicans demand that this portion of the 15th Amendment be changed so that the US Treasury can pay the debts of the Confederate States of America. As long as it benefits mainly the already wealthy, of course.
Because the Republicans have finally morphed into a white nationalist party headed by Donald Trump, the President who regards neo-Nazis as "very fine people". They accuse the whole Democratic Party from Bernie Sanders to Joe Manchin of being socialists who want to give white people's money to undeserving blacks and Latinos. And they're not likely to stop any time in the future.
But that doesn't mean the Democrats should hide under the bed rather than discuss serious ideas and proposals, including reparations for slavery. What Paul Starr argues that duck-and-cover is the best approach on this issue. And he partly expressses it in vintage 1991 terms:
Donald Trump and Steve Bannon must be smiling from ear to ear and celebrating their good fortune whenever they hear one of the Democratic presidential candidates endorsing a bill to establish a commission to study reparations for descendants of slaves — a proposal that everyone will take as preliminary to support for financial reparations. It's the sort of idea Trump and Bannon can work with, to expand and lock down Republican support among white voters next year.
Not every idea with a moral justification has a political justification in an imperfect world. If Democrats fail to win the 2020 election, Trump will have an opportunity to bring about deeper and more durable change in his second term than in his first. For one thing, he’ll likely be able to add two more conservatives to the Supreme Court, replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, and a 7-2 right-wing Court could radically alter legal doctrine in every sphere, including civil rights.
This is pretty much the state in which the Democratic Party and Democratic leaders have been for decades. It's symptomatic of the kind of historical trauma Rick Perlstein discusses in his interview with Isaac Chotiner, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Takes the Democrats Back to the FutureNew Yorker 01/10/2019. The "Clintonian" mode of the Democratic Party was to accept the broad Republican framing of issues but presentiong a more compassionate version of them. Or a least a less mean version. Not normally stated publicly but implicit in that approach was that black voters would have no place else to go politically.
But a signficant element of that was to try to show voters that the Democrats were not catering to black voters and were at least somewhat sympathetic to the concerns of whites racist. Bill Clinton presented a prototype version of this kind of performance with his "Sistah Soljah moment." (Rosie Swash, Bill Clinton's Sister Souljah moment tops year of political controversyGuardian 06/13/2011)
I haven't heard the recording in a long time. And I'm struck at how crass and petty it comes across with Clinton attacking a young hip-hip artist that most white people in the US had never heard of at the time. It was a cheap shot. And not one against racist Republican politicians. There was no meaningful group of swing voters in 1992 who actually thought that Bill Clinton and the Democrats advocated randomly murdering white people, which the snippets from the singer's over-the-top words that Clinton criticized suggested. In fact, since most voters would never have associated Clinton with the hip-hop singer they didn't know existed ifl Clinton hadn't attacked her, I wouldn't be surprised if the effect wasn't to associate Clinton and the Democrats with her words in the minds of whites who wouldn't consider voting for Democrats anyway.
Here was Hillary Clinton in 1996, the next Presidential election year, continuing the approach (1996: Hillary Clinton on "superpredators"C-Span; uploaded to YouTube 02/25/2016):
Hillary there was speaking in support of the controversial Clinton Crime Bill, aka, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (Jessica Lussenhop, Clinton crime bill: Why is it so controversial?BBC News Magazine 04/18/2016) In a contemporary account, Tony Poveda described how, compared to previous decades, the bipartisan support for the Crime Bill was largely a result of Democrats adopting Republican positions which the Democrats had criticized for decades (Clinton, Crime, and the Justice DepartmentSocial Justice 21:3; Fall 1994):
... what is even more striking [than the bipartisanship] about the crime policy debate of the 1990s is that it has considerably narrowed in terms of the range of policy options on the table for discussion. Liberals of the 1960s often called for an examination of the root causes of crime, the rehabilitation of offenders, and for procedural safeguards in the administration of justice. Conservatives of that period, like today, emphasized punishment and crime control in their crime agenda. These poles (crime prevention versus punishment and due process versus crime control) of the traditional liberal-conservative dialogue have largely disappeared, as measures emphasizing punishment far overshadow any consideration of crime prevention.
Instead, the major policy debate in the 1990s, at least in the congressional arena and in the media, centers on the punishment/crime control end of the continuum. Both conservatives and liberals attempt to outdo each other in their posturing and proposals to be increasingly punitive toward criminals.
While the Democrats may have been more supportive of civil rights generally, there was a huge racial component behind this crime policy. As Jessica Lussenhop writes, the 1994 Crime Bill wasn't the only cause of the mass incarceration of black men that has produced the current situation. However, "At minimum, says Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, the bill reinforced the popular thinking that the solution to crime was harsher punishments." (Jerry Brown, who didn't hold public office at the time, was highly critical of the Crime Bill.)
The Sacramento Bee editorial board recalled those days in 2016. The "three strikes" refernce is to a type of mandatory sentencing laws that were becoming an unfortunate fad at the time:
Those “three strikes” Clinton talked about were well on their way to becoming law in California in 1994, when the Legislature and voters were galvanized by the murder of Polly Klaas. Proposition 184 passed overwhelmingly.
“The majority of both houses of the Legislature and the overwhelming majority of the public are in a mind to put people away forever for jaywalking, period,” said then-[California lAsembly] Speaker Willie Brown, one of only nine Assembly members to vote against the measure. “That is the mentality that is going to prevail.”
A lighter version of “three strikes” also became the centerpiece of Clinton’s federal crime bill. It was that 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act that pushed the nation over the edge, one of a string of tough-on-crime measures that bloated the prison system and disproportionately decimated poor communities of color.
It’s what people, particularly young people who grew up in the lock-’em-up era, remember most. This is definitely true in New York, where voters head to the polls Tuesday to pick a nominee for president, and in California, where voters will have their say in June. [my emphasis]
The argument to sell Clinton-style "triangulation" to Democratic constituencies was the one Paul Starr uses in the quote above: Democratic Presidents are at least a little better than Republicans. So vote for (so-called) electable centrists even in the primaries because judges. Between 1994 and today, the Republicans have chosen a big majority of the current federal judges. They control the Senate and were crass about just blocking Barack Obama's last Supreme Court nominee on partisan grounds. Given that reality, it's hard to argue that the Democrats' longtime duck-and-cover centrist posture has protected the federal judiciary from become a Federalist Society colony.
Starr cites an article from The American Prospect itself from 1990 by William Julius Wilson (Race-Neutral Policies and the Democratic Coalition Spring 1990) that argued for the distance-yourselves-from-black-people approach of the Democrats. Starr notes that Wilson had by 2011 decided that affirmative action programs were okay, putting him at least as far left as the Nixon Administration in 1972. Starr quotes part of this passage from Wilson's 1990 piece:
Many white Americans have turned, not against blacks, but against a strategy that emphasizes programs perceived to benefit only racial minorities. In the 1990s the party needs to promote new policies to fight inequality that differ from court-ordered busing, affirmative action programs, and antidiscrimination lawsuits of the recent past. By stressing coalition politics and race-neutral programs such as full employment strategies, job skills training, comprehensive health care, reforms in the public schools, child care legislation, and prevention of crime and drug abuse, the Democrats can significantly strengthen their position. As [Party] Chairman [Ron] Brown himself has emphasized, reinforcing Democratic loyalty among minorities and reaching out to reclaim white support are not mutually exclusive.
Such a change of emphasis is overdue. In the 1960s efforts to raise the public's awareness and conscience about the plight of black Americans helped to enact civil rights legislation and affirmative action programs. However, by the 1980s the civil rights strategy of dramatizing black disadvantage was backfiring. The "myth of black progress" theme, frequently invoked to reinforce arguments for stronger race-specific programs, played easily into the hands of conservative critics of antibias policies. The strategy reinforced the erroneous impression that federal antidiscrimination efforts had largely failed, and it overlooked the significance of complex racial changes since the mid-1960s. It also aroused concern that Democratic politicians' sensitivity to black complaints had come at the expense of the white majority. [my emphasis]
Yet Wilson also argued in that article, "while income inequality widened generally in America during the 1980s, it widened even more dramatically among black Americans." He recognizes that the "myth of black progress" was in significant part a myth. So how is it a good thing for Democratic politicians and activists to try to ignore the underlying reality? Especially for such an important part of their own political base?
There will always be conservatives warning Democrats to beware of the "white backlash," a term to which the history of slavery and segregation gives a grim double meaning. The problem is, there has been a significant number of whites "backlashing" since the moment Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses Grant at Appomattox. The reality in 1990 and today is that Democrats can't successfully counter white backlash by adopting the "backlash" positions themselves. Or by pretending that the problems caused by white racism don't exist.
It would be more meaningful in 2019 to argue that the Democrats should be aggressive in addressing the problems affecting the base because judges. And because a lot more, too. But Starr argues instead that even suggesting that there's anything remotely substantive in the issue of reparations for slavery has practically doomed the Democrats' chances for 2020: "African Americans may or may not ever receive reparations, but the 2020 Democratic candidates who are moving in that direction have already given Trump and Bannon a priceless gift."
In other words, keep on with this version of the Democratic approach to fighting the Republicans. Or, too often, not fighting.
