My point back then was, and remains today.
That if the Democratic Party doesn't purge the Eisenhower Republicans New Democrats from their roles along with their policies and continues to insist that their only problem is messaging then they will not get their working class base back any time soon. "Everything is ducky" with how the Democratic Party has been run since Bill Clinton took the wild swing Right is, incredibly, still the position of party elites.
Thomas Frank sums up nicely the real problem with the Democratic Party and it's most definitely not messaging.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/36035-thomas-frank-bill-clinton-s-five-major-achievements-were-longstanding-gop-objectives
Leave us hope Frank's wrong about that last quoted sentence.
Thomas Frank sums up nicely the real problem with the Democratic Party and it's most definitely not messaging.
You argue the abandonment of labor by the Democrats came to full fruition in the two administrations of Bill Clinton? How did Clinton who came from a working-class upbringing eventually betray the workers of the United States?
First of all, I'm not so sure about his background. It is true that he came from a very poor state, and that his family struggled, but Clinton's biographers always emphasize that he wasn't really of the working class: He always drove a new Buick, etc.
Clinton never had a really great relationship with workers' organizations, but the worst thing Clinton he did to them was NAFTA. There were many trade agreements, of course, but NAFTA was the one that mattered, both because it was the first one and because labor put everything into stopping it. Indeed labor had stopped it when George H. W. Bush tried to get it through Congress. Clinton got it done, however, with a little muscle and a vast fog of preposterous claims about how NAFTA would increase exports and manufacturing employment.
His admirers saw NAFTA as his "finest hour," because he had stood up to a traditional Democratic constituency. What an achievement. NAFTA handed employers all over America the ultimate weapon against workers: They could now credibly threaten to pick up and leave at the slightest show of worker backbone -- and they make such threats all the time now.
How did the Clinton administration become a surrogate of Wall Street, resulting in the far-reaching repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act?
In 1992, Clinton ran as a populist, deploring income inequality, but that was just an act. As president he seems immediately to have decided to cast his fortunes -- and those of his party -- with Wall Street. Bank deregulation was a persistent policy of his from the very beginning -- he signed the Riegle-Neal Act in 1994, for example, and the Mexican bailout (a big favor to Wall Street) came shortly thereafter. Along the way, he helped bail out a too-big-to-fail hedge fund, he twice appointed Alan Greenspan to run the Federal Reserve and he ensured that certain derivative securities would not have any kind of federal supervision at all.
At the time, Clinton's admirers thought this record was something to boast about. He had brought his party out of the Rooseveltian dark ages and had embraced modernity, etc.
Why did he do it? My explanation is simple class identification. Clinton's real class story has to do with his career in college and graduate school, where he became a star of the rising professional cohort. People with this kind of background saw (and still see) Wall Street as a part of the enlightened world, a part of the world inhabited by people just like them. They're so smart! Plucking wealth from thin air!
This is a little off message regarding the book, but can you speculate why the Republicans were so obsessed with removing Clinton from office when he was fulfilling so much of the GOP agenda, including negotiating with Newt Gingrich about cutting Medicare and Social Security?
(Emphasis Mine)
"Fulfilling so much of the GOP agenda": That is a point worth reiterating. Clinton had five major achievements as president: NAFTA, the Crime Bill of 1994, welfare reform, the deregulation of banks and telecoms, and the balanced budget. All of them -- every single one -- were longstanding Republican objectives. His smaller achievements were more traditionally Democratic (he raised the earned-income tax credit and the minimum wage), but his big accomplishments all enacted conservative wishes, and then all of them ended in disaster.
So why did the right try so hard to get rid of him? For one thing, because they always do that. They never suspend the war or stop pushing rightward. There is no point at which they say, "OK, we've won enough." For another, because Gingrich couldn't control the rank and file, a problem that persists to this day.
The final conservative consequence of the impeachment, although this one was surely not intended: impeaching Clinton made him a martyr and hence a hero to Democrats. It secured his family's and his faction's grip on the Democratic Party apparently forever.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/36035-thomas-frank-bill-clinton-s-five-major-achievements-were-longstanding-gop-objectives
Leave us hope Frank's wrong about that last quoted sentence.
