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Democrats Face Identity Crisis

CajunCrimson said:
Obama was laying groundwork for the party to shift more left. He needed the Midwest union vote and the retiree vote to win, so he could not venture too far left. He was a very effective snake oil salesman. He wanted to go further left....but had to control the speed. All of which points out a leftward shift. Nothing points to a right shift.

And remember you said "our" politics was drifting right....not compared to European. We are more right than Europe (for now)....but that's not really relevant when comparing our politics to ourselves in previous decades
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Maybe, but he still wasn't a FDR democrat is more of the point like many tend to believe. He still bought into corporations, military advancement, and and many of the same things that presidents since Reagan have done. Yeah gay rights, gun control, and his involvement in the police shootings point to a leftist but never fully crossed that line that Bernie or Warren did in separating himself from the mainstream democrats.
 
81usaf92 said:
Maybe, but he still wasn't a FDR democrat is more of the point like many tend to believe. He still bought into corporations, military advancement, and and many of the same things that presidents since Reagan have done. Yeah gay rights, gun control, and his involvement in the police shootings point to a leftist but never fully crossed that line that Bernie or Warren did in separating himself from the mainstream democrats.
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You forget the confiscation of 1/5 of our economy.
 
rgw said:
The New Democrats (Clinton era and forward) are centrist by any practical, modern measure unless you sit upon the right pole from which everything appears left-wing. Mixed economies with social welfare programs is the accepted middle ground approach of the 20th century into today. People who want Jeffersonian egalitarianism today are on the political equivelent of a crack pipe.
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Bill Clinton wasn't a centrist.

He BECAME a centrist when he had no choice after the 1994 mid-term wipeout of the Democrats.

Now, I'll be fair: Dick Morris (who resurrected Clinton both in 1982 in AR and nationally in 1996) insists that the REAL Bill Clinton was a down-the-center guy but was basically kidnapped politically by the Hard Left Congress of early 1993. Maybe that's true, I don't know. Morris claimed he told Clinton during the transition that he needed to be in contact with Republican leaders and get some bipartisan support and that Clinton basically whined about how "they" didn't accept his election and he had the votes in both houses to pass whatever he wanted anyway (Dems had 57 Senators at the time). Morris further claimed that he warned Clinton that if he set off down that path, he would not recognize who he was six months later.

And allegedly, Clinton didn't as his approval rating was at 36% following the Lani Guinier debacle.


So you MIGHT be right. The REAL Bill Clinton might well be a centrist. But he sure as hell didn't sound like one in 1993 and 1994, when he appointed RB Ginsburg the radical to the court, passed the partly unconstitutional Brady Bill, only seemed to want to keep his promises about gays in the military and abortion (but literally nothing else), raised everyone's taxes while wanting more spending, tried to pass a pork package for his core constituents (called the stimulus), botched Somalia, and tried to seize 1/7 of the US economy and impose Hillarycare.

(People who weren't old enough don't seem to realize that there was not a very substantial difference in the mind-boggling disaster of Clinton's first nine months as President and Trump thus far in terms of utter disorganization; since Clinton grew up at least having to meet some standards of modicum and actually wanted to be President while Trump doesn't care).

I remember him running as a principled centrist (and getting the liberals to bite their tongues long enough to win), darting hard left before he ever took office, and only coming back to the center when it became clear the country WANTED a balanced budget (and to his credit, Clinton provided an alternative).

But maybe he really was a centrist all along who got caught up in a game he didn't understand.
 
selmaborntidefan said:
Bill Clinton wasn't a centrist.

He BECAME a centrist when he had no choice after the 1994 mid-term wipeout of the Democrats.

Now, I'll be fair: Dick Morris (who resurrected Clinton both in 1982 in AR and nationally in 1996) insists that the REAL Bill Clinton was a down-the-center guy but was basically kidnapped politically by the Hard Left Congress of early 1993. Maybe that's true, I don't know. Morris claimed he told Clinton during the transition that he needed to be in contact with Republican leaders and get some bipartisan support and that Clinton basically whined about how "they" didn't accept his election and he had the votes in both houses to pass whatever he wanted anyway (Dems had 57 Senators at the time). Morris further claimed that he warned Clinton that if he set off down that path, he would not recognize who he was six months later.

And allegedly, Clinton didn't as his approval rating was at 36% following the Lani Guinier debacle.


So you MIGHT be right. The REAL Bill Clinton might well be a centrist. But he sure as hell didn't sound like one in 1993 and 1994, when he appointed RB Ginsburg the radical to the court, passed the partly unconstitutional Brady Bill, only seemed to want to keep his promises about gays in the military and abortion (but literally nothing else), raised everyone's taxes while wanting more spending, tried to pass a pork package for his core constituents (called the stimulus), botched Somalia, and tried to seize 1/7 of the US economy and impose Hillarycare.

(People who weren't old enough don't seem to realize that there was not a very substantial difference in the mind-boggling disaster of Clinton's first nine months as President and Trump thus far in terms of utter disorganization; since Clinton grew up at least having to meet some standards of modicum and actually wanted to be President while Trump doesn't care).

I remember him running as a principled centrist (and getting the liberals to bite their tongues long enough to win), darting hard left before he ever took office, and only coming back to the center when it became clear the country WANTED a balanced budget (and to his credit, Clinton provided an alternative).

But maybe he really was a centrist all along who got caught up in a game he didn't understand.
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I think this is exactly what happened
 
GrayTide said:
I think this is exactly what happened
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I think it was Bob Kerrey of Nebraska - don't hold me to this, but I think he was the one - who was quoted as saying that early on in Clinton's first few weeks both as President-elect and as CINC, it became crystal clear that "he could be had." As a consequence of "this guy is soft," the article went on to say, "Everybody got to be President for one day" (with all their announcements).


I'll tell you what else I think hurt Clinton in 1993 - yeah, he had been governor, but he had been governor of a ONE-PARTY old-line Southern state. He lived when there was still a couple of generations of people in the state where all he had to do was blame it on the Republicans when anything went wrong. (I think what helped Reagan in his governorship was that for a period of time while he was governor, the other party controlled the state government houses, so he had no choice but to compromise).

Hell, I recall Clinton actually trying this in DC. He runs on a tax cut for the middle class, submits a TAX HIKE for everyone including the middle class, passes it by a real close vote in each house (Mezvinsky from PA was the swing vote in the House, Al Gore in the Senate), raised every single person in this country's taxes......and then had the audacity to come out and blame the Republicans who didn't vote for it for the tax increase!!!!


Let me summarize: "I raised your taxes, but it's THEIR fault!!!"


I've told more than one person that while I disagreed with Bill Clinton on more than a few issues - including some important ones - if I could have actually BELIEVED him when he ran in 1992, I'd have voted for him. He kept coloring himself as if he was a Reagan conservative "light" (he was for the death penalty, he was kicking blacks off welfare - let's be honest, that's what he was implying when he said they needed to show "responsibility," he was for lowering taxes on the middle class, he was NOT a fundamentalist environmentalist, he wanted a balanced budget, he wanted us strong overseas and none of this American Imperialism apology crap.........and then he became President and twisted his tricycle hard left into a telephone pole built by child labor in Nicaragua).


We recall Clinton as a centrist President, but he only became one after he lost the tails that were wagging the dog his first two years.
 
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