It seems that Clinton\u2019s standing reflects less on current judgments of Obama and more on rosy retrospective ratings of the presidency of Bill Clinton. Voters may not be eager for a third Obama term, but might like a third Clinton term.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Now, many of you weren’t adults – or at least not paying attention to politics – between 1992 and 2000 (especially in Minnesota, considering who we elected goverrnor in 1998). \u00a0You may have been fed a lot of gauzy beatifics about “the Clinton Years”; they were prosperous and peaceful.<\/p>\n
Let’s be clear on why that was.<\/p>\n
Twang<\/strong>: \u00a0Bill Clinton was a Democrat – but he was no Barack Obama. \u00a0He was part of the “Democrat Leadership Conference”, a moderate, business-friendly caucus of Democrat pols and advocates. \u00a0The DLC has, by the way, been completely extinguished; there’s no \u00a0room in the modern Democrat party for such moderation.<\/p>\nShriek<\/strong>: \u00a0But Hillary was not. \u00a0Nobody mistook her for a moderate; she was the fire-breathing liberal of the couple. \u00a0And for the first two years of Clinton’s first term, many of her pet initiatives – including “Hillarycare”, which in those innocent days before Obamacare seemed like a grotesque power grab, nationalizing 1\/7 of the national economy. \u00a0The first two years of Clinton’s reign were not much further to the right than Obama’s.<\/p>\nPow<\/strong>: \u00a0The 1994 elections put a stop to that; the GOP took control of Congress for the first time since the ’30s, in a reaction to the Clintons’ “progressive” overreach. \u00a0In response, Clinton swung to the right, triangulating to the GOP’s right on issue after issue – essentially neutering all of Hillary’s “progressive” ambitions – to save his presidency in 1996.<\/p>\nDuring his last six years in office, Clinton was more fiscally conservative than George W Bush.<\/p>\n
Poof<\/strong>: \u00a0As a result, between the 1994 landslide and his self-inflicted sex scandals, the best thing about the “Clinton Years” was that government was deadlocked between a Congress that was\u00a0<\/em>conservative, and a President that was frantically trying to act\u00a0<\/em>conservative.<\/p>\nJing!<\/strong>: \u00a0Of course, deadlocked government works best against a background of overwhelming prosperity. \u00a0And the US was prosperous during the mid-late nineties – mostly because by 1994, the economy had shifted from Cold War priorities to full-scale civilian production, the so-called “Peace Dividend”. \u00a0All those Cold War-period innovations in technology \u00a0started filtering into the civilian market, driving frenetic booms in technology, equities, and consumer spending. \u00a0We enjoyed the first genuine peacetime boom since the Roaring Twenties – nation’s economic blender switched to “puree”.<\/p>\nThe end of the Cold War was, of course, predicated on the end of the USSR – and that was largely the work of Ronald Reagan.<\/p>\n
Bill Clinton didn’t govern anything like Ronald Reagan. \u00a0Hillary would be much less so.<\/p>\n
The Good Old Days Are Gone For Good<\/strong>: \u00a0It’s not the nineties. \u00a0The GOP doesn’t control Congress – and any circumstances that lead to a Hillary! win would likely also lead to a blunting of any GOP effort to retake the Senate or extend control of the House – as Barone points out in the piece I link above, people are much more likely to vote straight tickets than they were 22 years ago.<\/p>\nSo while the Democrats and media (ptr) will flog the idea that Hillary would be a return of Bill which would lead to a return of their gauzy, soft-focus version of “The Nineties” – it’s just not true. \u00a0Hillary is not Bill; without a conservative Congress, it’ll be like having Maxine Waters running things. \u00a0And Obama has seen to it there will be no surge of productivity when he leaves office.<\/p>\n
We will get an expansion of government power; Obamacare will become un-repealable (even as its most onerous provisions finally kick in – and you really ain’t seen nothing yet). \u00a0And government debt will zoom under paleo-“progressive” Hillary!, pushing the nation further and faster down the road to the inevitable financial cataclysm.<\/p>\n
That is all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
To: \u00a0The American Electorate From: Mitch Berg, Guy Who Was Of Cognitive Age In 1992 Re: \u00a0The “Clinton Years” All, Michael Barone, writing about the putative Hillary Clinton juggernaut: It seems that Clinton\u2019s standing reflects less on current judgments of Obama and more on rosy retrospective ratings of the presidency of Bill Clinton. Voters may […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[187,68],"tags":[249],"class_list":["post-44394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-16","category-capitalism-v-socialism","tag-open-letters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44394"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44440,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44394\/revisions\/44440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}