Bill Clinton: Classic or Dud?

I hear he's also hit with the ladies...

Clinton is looking better and better every day, no? Best President we had since Truman if you ask me.

or is this wishful thinking?

Personally, for all his qualities, it comes down to this - he deliberately had people killed for electoral advantage. Ricky Ray Rector was crying out for clemency, but Bill didn't want to have a Willie Horton situation on his hands, so Ricky fried.

I'm sure you could argue that Clinton saw that he was better able to help people and put his values and those of the Democratic Party into practice as President, so Ricky was an expedient measure for a greater good. But that's how Clinton kept getting away with ever more outrageous stunts, as they all justified on the basis of something greater. Eventually, that boiled down to simple fear of the alternative.

The Labour Party use the same trick; no matter how bad we are, we're not the Tories. Sorry. Doesn't work anymore. I know you're better than the Tories and I take it as a given. It's the baseline, not the high point of ideological difference. I want to believe something positive, rather than using the same old fear of the right-wing bogeyman to, er, do much of the same things the right-wing bogeymen would have themselves done.

Even then, Clinton wasn't backwards at coming forwards when it came to indiscriminate use of US Military power on the developing world. Admittedly, I think he'd baulk at starting WW3, but again, he's only be less bad here, not 'better' than Dubya. Though if better means no WW3, then that's an important difference I'll admit.

A different question might be: what did Clinton achieve that was progressive? (*Apart from* just keeping Republicans out of the WH for 8 years: not a small achievement, and one reason, I think, why Tad and I like him so).

Judged against Dubya, he's a half-step behind FDR.

How on earth would you know that?

For wasting so many years of his presidency on scandal management, because he couldn't keep his penis in his pants, DUD.

For marring a strong 8 year span of Democratic presidency by not keeping his penis in his pants, DUD.

For fueling the 'culture wars', DUD.

What a waste of talent (his and anyone who worked for him).

I think we did not have them in the UK.

Cockburn:

The Clintons have always excited passions disproportionate to their very modest talents as creative politicians. Looking back across the Nineties at the frenzied Republican onslaughts on the couple, one can only wag one's head in bemusement at the Right's hysteria. Why did they consume so much energy in savaging a pair who had learned conclusively from their earlier upsets in Arkansas that you don't get ahead by offending the powerful, starting with the timber and chicken barons who controlled that backward and impoverished state?

To be fair on Bill and Hillary, beyond some ritual freshets of campaign rhetoric in primary season they have never advertised themselves as anything other than reliable guardians of the basic Business Round Table agenda that defines the programmatic vision of 99.9 per cent of all American politicians....

No one has yet written particularly well about the Clintons, probably because the appropriate tone--Mencken's comic savagery--was devalued by Bill's assailants on the right. Obsessed by Bush, the liberals cannot see Clinton for the light-weight scoundrel he was and have reinvented his terms in the White House as a golden age, whose possible sequel under the aegis of President Hillary Clinton they eagerly await.

http://counterpunch.org/cockburn09292007.html

had to check the date on that

Alex Cockburn doesn't like the clintons, part 235

Cockpunch

the Clintons WERE tailor-made for Mencken though.

New series of Slow Burn seems even-handed and is intriguing for those of us perhaps too young to dig what was happening at the time. And like the Nixon series, lots of resonances with what's happening today.

whoah I take that back I thought Lieberman had been the lone Dem "guilty" vote in the Senate but apparently I was wrong. huh.

I'm also thinking of the complete failure to take Broadrick seriously. I don't remember who specifically went on the record about it in terms of politicians, but certainly in liberal/democratic circles in general my memory is that she was dismissed.

I don't entirely disagree with your analysis but I think it's expressed in maybe overly dramatic terms. He did have *some* reckoning with it - I mean he was impeached and it's haunted his career ever since, including his wife's career, and he got called out on it by a sitting Senator fairly recently for ex. It's true he's not as much of a pariah in the Democratic party as he probably should be. I don't know who in the party genuinely likes him at this point, he's clearly become an albatross as the years have passed, and yet they can't seem to fully reject his "star-power" or whatever.

I mean, he's not just "not a pariah," he was a major power broker in the party at least until fairly recently -- hard to say whether it was the Obama victory or the Trump victory that finally diminished his status, but it continued well after he was president. People of my parents' generation still seem to carry the idea that he was wrongfully accused.

Hillary's loss severely damaged her and Bill's standing in the party. And trends in the party are moving very far away from their policies and legacies so I don't think there's going to be any comeback either. Probably some handwringing when they die about their squandered potential.

People of my parents' generation still seem to carry the idea that he was wrongfully accused.

I don't think this is the case w my parents but yeah ugh boomers

oh look

https://www.yahoo.com/news/juanita-broaddrick-glad-believe-her-024811948.html

So are you saying that means it didn't happen or that it doesn't matter because she's a bad person.

not saying either of those things? it just popped up in my newsfeed, so you're not the only one seeing the parallels/differences

Broaddrick's story strikes me as extremely credible fwiw

at the same time, her position about Dr. Ford is a mixture of predictable and gross

yeah I think it's gross too but I found her story very credible when I finally gave it a chance a few years ago. And his pattern of behavior is supported by other women.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/us/politics/white-house-government-shutdown.html

Lengthy shutdowns can be disastrous for the White House for other reasons.

The last time a shutdown went on for this long, President Bill Clinton put himself on the long road to impeachment when he courted a young intern named Monica Lewinsky in an empty corner of the West Wing. Nonessential employees had been sent home, unpaid interns were brought in to work, and the rest is bitter history.

The Obama administration barred interns from coming to work during a shutdown, and the Trump White House’s new class of interns has not yet started, according to a senior official.

omg

Here’s a provocative alternate reality that, with the benefit of time, is just starting to come into focus: All those joyful Democrats who tearfully celebrated the generation-shifting results of the 1992 election would likely be better off today if Bill Clinton had lost and George H. W. Bush had been reelected.

...BEFORE WE GET TO WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN, let’s review what actually was. We’ll start with a pop quiz for Democrats: Name the three most important domestic achievements of the Clinton administration.

Chances are you’ll say a booming economy — the byproduct of responsible financial stewardship that converted record budget deficits into healthy surpluses. If you lean centrist or buy into pollster sabermetrics, you might mention welfare reform, which finally neutered the devastating if cynical tactic Republicans had used to paint their Democratic opponents as defenders of lazy “welfare queens.” Or maybe you’ll cite the assault weapons ban of 1994, a high-water mark for gun control that no pol of that persuasion has managed to come close to since, despite the numbing frequency of mass shootings.

Follow-up question: Which achievements from the Clinton years still hold up today?

Do you need more time?

I tried this exercise with several presidential historians and public policy pros, and the most common answer turned out to be “very little.”

https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2018/07/10/bill-clinton-had-never-been-president-democrats-would-better-off-today/qsYmCo7ZEYpQr8fOZSkRLM/story.html

even better than no Clinton: no Clintonism.

I don't know if a Poppy Bush reelection or Dole beating Clinton would have, respectively, stymied the Rush-infused growth of alternative conservative media and moderated the party's excesses. Some kind of Democratic overcorrection to Reaganism was preordained.

That was a good read, but even assuming a Dem-controlled Senate I don't doubt Poppy would've gotten some Thomas-esque cranks onto federal courts, if only to appease the right wing; eight years of Clinton appointing judges was a good thing.

All those joyful Democrats who tearfully celebrated the generation-shifting results of the 1992 election

The euphoria of displacing Reagan's successor definitely went to people's heads. I remember listening to a call-in the local community-owned volunteer-run lefty radio station (KBOO) on the night of the election and hearing all the callers speculating about what marvels would soon be delivered by our new "progressive" president. For the first and last time in my life I called in to a talk show -- to say on-air that while Clinton would certainly be an improvement over Reagan, the USA had never elected a truly progressive president, hadn't now, and if they expected him to push hard for a left-progressive agenda that Clinton would soon disappoint them.

The party still exists in the shadow of Reagan and the Clintons. Any real rebuilding work is only just starting, if it is to succeed at all.

A Bush win in 92 election is a weird thing to fantasize about. The incumbent President only got 37% of the vote.

there's a lot of debate over how much perot affected the outcome of that election but i think it's fair to assume bush wouldn't have done as badly (at least) without him in the race.

was there a more progressive democrat who could plausibly have been elected in 1992? (or 1996, assuming a second term for bush.)

(aimless -- surely FDR qualifies as a progressive president?)

i remember Clinton's election pretty clearly and I remember the elation as well, to feel like we'd thrown off the mantle of Reaganism finally. Obv. in retrospect that seems suspect but at the time it felt like something. Much in the same way that it felt like something when Obama was elected, and now in retrospect we have to accept that there was still a rapid expansion of executive power, broad misuse of FISA and the patriot act, and drone bombings. Presidential elections seem to only ever get incremental progressive gains, I don't know why, when you can clearly go very far down the fucking toilet with ease as the Trump administration has demonstrated.

FDR qualifies as a progressive president?

FDR was a non-ideological pragmatist faced with a nation in an existential crisis. He was wiling to try radical new ideas, only because the old ideas had failed catastrophically. As one of his top advisors (I forget who) complained, FDR's Brain Trust was desperately trying to save capitalism, but the capitalists hated them intensely.

and FDR wanted to balance the budget AND do Keynesian spending stuff

and nuke people and lock up the japanese.

truly a renaissance man

"and nuke people" was the guy who came after him, to be fair

the development vs the use

i tend to think Roosevelt would've used it as well

the actual Progressive movement gave us eugenics and prohibition. nukes seem very progressive in that sense

there's a lot of debate over how much perot affected the outcome of that election but i think it's fair to assume bush wouldn't have done as badly (at least) without him in the race.

I think there's consensus, though, that Clinton would have won with or without Perot. If you throw Perot's 19,743,821 votes back into the mix, Clinton would have only needed a little over 35% of them to win the popular vote.

Which doesn't, admittedly, take into account: 1) the electoral college, 2) how Perot affected the debates (quite a lot, at least one of them), and 3) the fact that Perot hated Bush and zeroed in on him the whole way.

But I assume Clinton would have won a plurality of Perot's votes--who were mostly, as I remember it, people angry at Bush for breaking his tax pledge and various other things--making at least the first point moot.

Perot's spoiler effect was essentially nil - he ended up drawing support evenly from each candidate.

Everyone would have used nukes

Not long after Clinton unpacked his things in Chappaqua, his successor was presiding over a sputtering economy, increased poverty, and yawning deficits.

I feel like there was an important historical event that's being elided there... can't quite put my finger on it....

For whatever it's worth, in 1996 when Perot's votes dropped from 19% to 8% - the Republican vote went from 37% to 40%, Clinton's vote went from 43% to 49%.

^^^ exactly

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-ross-perot-myth/

maybe he'll end up in prison. that'd be p cool.

A friend and I were talking about the convention yesterday: going to take a wild guess that WJC is kept well hidden from view this year.

and what of Lucretia?

there might be a video tribute to Epstein and Weinstein if Biden's the nominee, ya never know

The woman from the bombastic Blood, Sweat & Tears song? I don't know.

Bombastic Rodham

Don't forget the time his spouse met personally with Putin at his private compound before taking $500,000 for a speech to Renaissance Capital in Moscow. Oh, wait, that was the Clintons. https://t.co/NMwY76eJF5

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 23, 2020

https://i.imgur.com/YsfBoQf.png

I see how this is generated -
https://www.kapwing.com/explore/bill-clinton-album-challenge-meme-template

- but where does it originate? Did he pose with actual LPs originally - when, and what were they?

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/bill-clinton-swag

According to this the original is a photoshop to begin with (from an onion piece from 1999!) so no, he never posed with any records

In the onion article they are all Joan Jett lps

The image definitely has that janky onion photoshop feel

Yes. In fact I originally thought it was fake - thanks for confirmation.