Matt Bai on Clintonism

I got my NY Times this morning and I saw this on the front cover of the magazine section

Clintonism
a. It's a poltical philosophy that steered the Democratic Party back to the center, brought about pragmatic policies and on votes.
b. It's a corruption of liberalism and a cynical approach to politics that led to George W. Bush;
c. It's the real issue for Democrats deciding who will be their nominee.
by Matt Bai

http://www.nytimes.com/...

I promised myself I would read the article before going to DKos to see what everyone had to say about it. When I got to DKos I looked for a diary but I haven't found one. So I guess its my turn here.

Matt Bai has spent some around the netroots, he has written a book about the blogosphere, but doesn't really seem to understand it.

I was justifiably skeptical when I saw the article.

I think he starts out OK talking about Bill stumping for Hillary in New Hampshire.

Listening to him talk, I found it hard not to wonder why so many of the challenges facing the next president were almost identical to those he vowed to address in 1992. Why, after Clinton’s two terms in office, were we still thinking about tomorrow? In some areas, most notably health care, Clinton tried gamely to leave behind lasting change, and he failed. In many more areas, though, the progress that was made under Clinton — almost 23 million new jobs, reductions in poverty, lower crime and higher wages — had been reversed or wiped away entirely in a remarkably short time. Clinton’s presidency seems now to have been oddly ephemeral, his record etched in chalk and left out in the rain.

Then he lays out the two sides of the story.

Supporters of the Clintons see an obvious reason for this, of course — that George W. Bush and his Republican Party have, for the past seven years, undertaken a ferocious and unbending assault on Clinton’s progressive legacy. As Clinton points out in his speeches, Bush and the Republicans abandoned balanced budgets to fight the war in Iraq, widened income inequality by cutting taxes on the wealthy and scaled back social programs. "We’ve had now seven years of a radical experiment in extremism in domestic policy," Clinton said in New Hampshire.

Some Democrats, though, and especially those who are apt to call themselves "progressives," offer a more complicated and less charitable explanation. In their view, Clinton failed to seize his moment and create a more enduring, more progressive legacy — not just because of the personal travails and Republican attacks that hobbled his presidency, but because his centrist, "third way" political strategy, his strategy of "triangulating" to find some middle point in every argument, sapped the party of its core principles. By this thinking, Clinton and his friends at the Democratic Leadership Council, the centrist think tank that served as a platform for his bid for national office, were so desperate to woo back moderate Southern voters that they accepted conservative assertions about government (that it was too big and unwieldy, that what was good for business was good for workers) and thus opened the door wide for Bush to come along and enact his extremist agenda with only token opposition. In other words, they say, he was less a victim of Bush’s radicalism than he was its enabler.

... and I thought he was pretty fair here.

snip

He goes on to talk about differing views on the Bill Clinton era. The traditional view...

There are, among Democrats, dueling interpretations of what Clintonism means and how it came into being. The most popular version now, by far, is that Clintonism was chiefly an electoral strategy, a way of making Democrats sound more acceptable to conservative voters by softening the party’s stances on "values" issues like guns, welfare and abortion and introducing pallid, focus-grouped phrases like "work hard and play by the rules" and making abortion "safe, legal and rare." In other words, Clinton was basically as liberal at heart as any other Democrat who marched for civil rights and protested the Vietnam War, but he was a brilliant political strategist who instinctively understood the need to rebrand the party.

He quotes the DLC's Al From

"I don’t want to see what I think is his greatest achievement diminished," From told me. "Just as Franklin Roosevelt saved capitalism by dealing with its excesses, Clinton saved progressive governance, and he saved progressive governance all over the world."

Then Matt starts to go off the Cliff....

Clinton’s critics on the left may scoff at this idea, but it’s fair to say that the discussion of Clintonism among party activists and especially online often displays a stunning lack of historical perspective. For a lot of younger Democrats, in particular, whose political consciousness dates back only as far as 1994 or even to the more recent days of Clinton’s impeachment, the origins of Clintonism have become not only murky but also irrelevant. "Clintonism" is, in much of the Democratic activist universe, a synonym for spinelessly appeasing Republicans in order to win, an establishment philosophy assumed to comprise no inherent principles of its own.

And it took no small amount of courage, at the end of the Reagan era, to argue inside the Democratic Party that the liberal orthodoxies of the New Deal and the Great Society, as well as the culture of the antiwar and civil rights movements, had become excessive and inflexible. Not only were Democratic attitudes toward government electorally problematic, Clinton argued; they were just plain wrong for the time.

Bai fails to see that times have changed. Clinton stuck his hand out to try to meet people half way. It worked for a while, but as soon as the GOP figured out what he was doing, they took that hand that was held out half way and dragged it to the right. For example sure we should accept people of faith, but that doesn't mean you have to acccept the Bush administration tearing down the separation of church and state.

He goes on...

He (Clinton) laid out a forceful case for improving and decentralizing decades-old institutions, from public schools to welfare, and modeling government after corporate America.

Yes when Clinton took those steps it was appropriate. That doesn't mean that the DLCers of today should be supporting the
Bankrupcy Bill

He goes on to talk about how todays progressives feel about some of Clinton's actions.

For a lot of liberals (those who now call themselves progressives), the ’90s were a conflicted time. They never really bought the ideological premise of Clintonism, and they quietly seethed as the president moved his party to the center — enacting free-trade agreements over the objections of union leaders; embracing balanced budgets and telling Americans that "the era of big government is over"; striking a deal to give Republicans a long-sought overhaul of the welfare system.

I know there is some of that sentiment around here regarding free trade. Bai doesn't realize that there are a spectrum of views on that issue here. I also think most folks agree that democrats do more to ensure that free trade helps everyone. The problem we have now is that the DLC or elements in the party are just rolling over to the GOP.

There is alot more to the article, but I think have the gist of it. Bottom line, some good parts, but Matt always seems to find a way to miss the point.