I rather liked this Peter Beinart piece. As someone who has often made exactly the critiques of Clinton that this article pushes back upon--that the Clintons caved in too often to the right, basically--I think this article does a good job of defending its thesis. It doesn't really convince me to change my mind too much, because while Clinton's centrist moves on welfare reform and crime helped to take those issues off the table, they weren't the only issues upon which Clinton triangulated. I actually tend to let him off the hook for the big things. It was the little things--signing DOMA, Telecom Deregulation, the DMCA, all terrible legislation that Clinton decided wasn't worth spending political capital to oppose. And then there were the slights against his own allies. Sister Souljah is just as much a part of the Clinton legacy as welfare reform. Maybe it was politically necessary to do this at the time, but it's much less defensible than welfare reform in my book. And then there's stuff like the anti-gay ads that Clinton ran in 1996 in red states. Andrew Sullivan mentioned it here. This was when they were running against Bob Dole, who was crippled right out of the gate. Why run such ads? There was no real political necessity to do so, unless one believes that Bill Clinton felt the need to constantly stick his finger in the eye of his ostensible friends. As I do.
And this was perhaps the greatest negative legacy of Clinton's Democratic party--an abiding belief that you had to join the Republicans on things like Telecom Deregulation, on DOMA, and eventually on the Iraq War because the public just wasn't going to accept forthright progressivism. Bill Clinton internalized this, even though six years of appeasing Republicans earned him a jerry-rigged impeachment proceeding and little else to show for it. I think that his wife internalized it as well, and maybe it was true at the time, but Barack Obama came of age politically during the 1990s instead of the 1960s and thus he doesn't reflexively feel the need to sell out his friends when it's politically convenient. I think that that's the single biggest difference between the two candidates, and I think part of the hangup about Obama in elite circles is that he doesn't triangulate, and these folks probably wonder if it's no longer necessary. But in a funny way that proves Beinart's thesis--it was Clintonian triangulation that was emulated by many members of the Democratic party in the leadup to Iraq, including Clinton's own wife, and the eventual grassroots revolt against said elites that has been going on ever since. Clintonism, in essence, prompted Democrats not to want to break ranks with Republicans on Iraq, which ultimately paved the way for Barack Obama. Ironic, but in hindsight it seems obvious.
