Many people are hoping the Democrats can take over the U.S. House of Representatives and maybe the U.S. Senate in the elections this fall. Without that legislative check on Donald Trump and the Republicans the outlook for the United States—and indeed, the world–will continue to be bleak.
To accomplish this legislative takeover, the Democrats must overcome policies and practices initiated by Bill Clinton when he was president. Some of Clinton’s policies hurt a lot of Americans. As a result, many abandoned the Democratic Party.
This fact is not discussed with any regularity. So Bill Clinton is not usually blamed for some of his actions. Thus the moniker–“Teflon Bill.”
Clinton’s vehicle was the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), founded in 1985 by Democratic operatives Al From And Will Marshall, and such Democratic leaders as Governors Chuck Robb (Virginia), Bruce Babbit (Arizona), and Lawton Chiles (Florida), and Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia.
Bill Clinton became chair of the DLC in 1989. Among its founding arguments was that the Democratic Party should shift away from its liberal orientation that had formed in the 1960’s and 1970’s. To do that the DLC wrested control of the Democratic Party and pushed aside liberal leaders such as Mario Cuomo and Jesse Jackson.
In the Spring of 1991, the DLC held a national convention in Cleveland OH and did not invite either Cuomo or Jackson. Jackson showed up but they denied him a speaking role.
Elected president in 1992, Clinton proceeded to govern from a more conservative position than the Democrats had followed in many years. His approach was called “triangulation.” This is the political strategy defined as when the politician does not take a position on the left or the right, liberal or conservative. Instead, they stand between or above these two positions and take from either depending upon the circumstances. In practice, many of the positions are conservative.
Bill Clinton had run for the presidency on an anti-welfare platform and had praised Charles Murray’s radically conservative ideas. In the book, The Bell Curve, Murray and Richard Herrnstein argued that social welfare programs do not work and that the reason is minorities have low IQ’s and cannot be helped to improve.
In 1996, Charles Murray’s decade-plus campaign to end welfare for single mothers paid off when President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, essentially killing traditional welfare programs with a specific emphasis on cutting welfare for poor families with children. As a result, today single mothers in America have the least social welfare support in the developed world. Also, extreme poverty doubled in the next 15 years.
Bill Clinton caused the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history. Although he did not declare the War on Crime or the War on Drugs, he escalated it beyond what many conservatives had imagined possible.
In 1994 Clinton signed his now infamous $30 billion crime bill that created dozens of new federal capital crimes, mandated life sentences for some three-time offenders, and authorized more than $16 billion for state prison grants and the expansion of police forces. When Clinton left office in 2001, the United States had the highest rate of incarceration in the world.
Two weeks after Clinton signed his crime bill in September 1994, he enacted the Riegle-Neal interstate banking bill, the first in a series of moves deregulating the financial industry—to Wall Street’s great delight.
The Democratic party once represented the working class, but Bill Clinton led the march away from that position. In the so-called Clintonian Triangulation, Clinton moved against trade unions. He started the Democratic push for free trade agreements without providing millions of blue-collar workers who would lose their jobs means of getting new ones that paid at least as well. Partly as a result, union membership sank from 22% of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to less than 12% today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains.
Thus, I agree with Michael Moore who called Bill Clinton a good “Republican” president.
Teflon Bill Clinton is not generally known to have caused the damage I have listed—and more; however, persons affected are aware of their plights, and some know who was in charge when it happened. To get disaffected democratic voters back into the fold, Democrats, when in power, must push policies that help the working class as well as others. When they are not in power—like now—they must promote such policies all the time, not just during election time.