"How the Democrats would be better off today if Bill Clinton had never been president."
https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2018/07/10/bill-clinton-had-never-been-president-democrats-would-better-off-today/qsYmCo7ZEYpQr8fOZSkRLM/story.htmlThis is a longish read but fascinating, from today's Boston globe Magazine.
It opens with Fleetwood Mac, reunited for Clinton's inaugural ball, taking the stage in January 1993 and singing "Don't Stop." For those of us who remember that event, this article is really incredible.
Like me, you are probably thinking "What?? How is that possible?"
The author, Neil Swidey, lays out a scenario that shows this path to Trump.
leftofcool
(19,460 posts)CTyankee
(63,889 posts)primaries. It has to do with our party's policy stands. I don't think the author is in any way unsympathetic to the Dem party. He is a presidential historian talking about unforseen outcomes.
SamKnause
(13,088 posts)Using the incognito window doesn't work either.
Sounds interesting, but can not get access.
CTyankee
(63,889 posts)Try it and I think you'll get it. We don't have a subscription to it either. Hubby goes out on Sunday mornings and buys it from a vendor.
Wwcd
(6,288 posts)dredging of America.
Clinton brought with him minorities that the RW had sought to suppress.
The Southern white dominance was set back with the surprising rise of Clinton & the 2nd term defeat of Bush sr.
Republicans gathered to unseat him (Roger Stone) & at that point the Vast RW Conspiracy was in full out assault mode.
It was as much about racisim then as it is today, for one thing.
JI7
(89,240 posts)those who want to excuse white bigots.
you would think seeing the mess from w and now trump would teach them something. but, some have a hard time acknowledging white bigotry.
ghostsinthemachine
(3,569 posts)Is still up. Verboten to say anything bad about Dems and especially Bill Clinton here on DU.
CTyankee
(63,889 posts)The Boston Globe isn't a RW rag. It is pretty liberal.
murielm99
(30,717 posts)Well yes. It is in the TOS. This is a Democratic website.
CTyankee
(63,889 posts)I think you'd have a different opinion. It's analysis, not cheerleading for repukes.
appalachiablue
(41,103 posts)Clinton is an enormously important figure in the history of the modern Democratic Party. By pushing his Third Way moderate-reform agenda on issues like welfare and crime, he proved the Democrats could once again be viable competitors in postindustrial presidential politics. He stopped the bleeding and may have helped spare them from a Whig-like demise into nothing-but-a-congressional party, and then nothing at all.
The damage, Edelman says, was masked by the rising tide of the late-90s boom, which lifted all boats and led to record-low poverty rates. But when the economy turned bad, it became clear that the welfare law Clinton had signed effectively dismantled the safety net for millions of vulnerable people. That helped pave the way for todays near-record-high income inequality.
The assault weapons ban produced a different kind of failure. Clinton deserves lots of credit for getting this sensible legislation passed. Still, it was packaged with an overall crime bill that, we now know, did far more damage than good. It significantly accelerated the growth of the prison-industrial complex, and its truth in sentencing components greatly increased both the amount of time criminals spent in prison and the racial disparities within our justice system. Across Clintons eight years in office, the number of people imprisoned in this country grew by nearly 60 percent.
LastLiberal in PalmSprings
(12,564 posts)I think it's not so much who or what specific events happened, but the inherent difficulty of maintaining a democratic (small "d" ) state. There are so many forces working against it from inside and out that citizens have to really want it. As President Andrew Shepard said in "The American President":
"America's not easy. America is advanced citizenship. You've got to want it bad, because it's going to put up a fight."
Trump is just one of a long line of people who say they love America, but hate Americans. He wants to deport naturalized citizens, for chrissake! He wins by wearing people down. He's a damned glacier crushing everything in its path because it just doesn't stop.
Trump is not the enemy of democracy. It's what he represents that is the enemy. It's every Republican in Congress who doesn't stand up to him who is the enemy of democracy. It's every citizen who just doesn't care enough to vote who is the enemy of democracy. It's every corporation that puts profits above all else that is the enemy of democracy. (The fact that I started to write "who" instead of "that" to describe corporations shows how deep the problem is. Corporations are NOT people, my friend!)
Ultimately, lethargy and the general feeling of "What's the use?" is the ultimate enemy of democracy. As President Shepard said, "You've got to want it bad."
CTyankee
(63,889 posts)snowybirdie
(5,219 posts)hadn't been President, we would have lost WWII, and all be speaking German!
CTyankee
(63,889 posts)as well.
We often watch documentaries on a TV channel we get here that is pretty much devoted to WWII. Lots of information I didn't know about.
shraby
(21,946 posts)to impeach him/her. That's their modus operandi.
They've added a new modus to their operandi too. Don't let a Democratic president pass any of his/her agenda.
CTyankee
(63,889 posts)Gothmog
(144,919 posts)Nader is the reason why we have trump http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-zuesse/ralph-nader-was-indispens_b_4235065.html
Nader-voters who spurned Democrat Al Gore to vote for Nader ended up swinging both Florida and New Hampshire to Bush in 2000. Charlie Cook, the editor of the Cook Political Report and political analyst for National Journal, called "Florida and New Hampshire" simply "the two states that Mr. Nader handed to the Bush-Cheney ticket," when Cook was writing about "The Next Nader Effect," in The New York Times on 9 March 2004. Cook said, "Mr. Nader, running as the Green Party nominee, cost Al Gore two states, Florida and New Hampshire, either of which would have given the vice president [Gore] a victory in 2000. In Florida, which George W. Bush carried by 537 votes, Mr. Nader received nearly 100,000 votes [nearly 200 times the size of Bush's Florida 'win']. In New Hampshire, which Mr. Bush won by 7,211 votes, Mr. Nader pulled in more than 22,000 [three times the size of Bush's 'win' in that state]." If either of those two states had gone instead to Gore, then Bush would have lost the 2000 election; we would never have had a U.S. President George W. Bush, and so Nader managed to turn not just one but two key toss-up states for candidate Bush, and to become the indispensable person making G.W. Bush the President of the United States -- even more indispensable, and more important to Bush's "electoral success," than were such huge Bush financial contributors as Enron Corporation's chief Ken Lay.
All polling studies that were done, for both the 2000 and the 2004 U.S. Presidential elections, indicated that Nader drained at least 2 to 5 times as many voters from the Democratic candidate as he did from the Republican Bush. (This isn't even considering throw-away Nader voters who would have stayed home and not voted if Nader had not been in the race; they didn't count in these calculations at all.) Nader's 97,488 Florida votes contained vastly more than enough to have overcome the official Jeb Bush / Katherine Harris / count, of a 537-vote Florida "victory" for G.W. Bush. In their 24 April 2006 detailed statistical analysis of the 2000 Florida vote, "Did Ralph Nader Spoil a Gore Presidency?" (available on the internet), Michael C. Herron of Dartmouth and Jeffrey B. Lewis of UCLA stated flatly, "We find that ... Nader was a spoiler for Gore." David Paul Kuhn, CBSNews.com Chief Political Writer, headlined on 27 July 2004, "Nader to Crash Dems Party?" and he wrote: "In 2000, Voter News Service exit polling showed that 47 percent of Nader's Florida supporters would have voted for Gore, and 21 percent for Mr. Bush, easily covering the margin of Gore's loss." Nationwide, Harvard's Barry C. Burden, in his 2001 paper at the American Political Science Association, "Did Ralph Nader Elect George W. Bush?" (also on the internet) presented "Table 3: Self-Reported Effects of Removing Minor Party Candidates," showing that in the VNS exit polls, 47.7% of Nader's voters said they would have voted instead for Gore, 21.9% said they would have voted instead for Bush, and 30.5% said they wouldn't have voted in the Presidential race, if Nader were had not been on the ballot. (This same table also showed that the far tinier nationwide vote for Patrick Buchanan would have split almost evenly between Bush and Gore if Buchanan hadn't been in the race: Buchanan was not a decisive factor in the outcome.) The Florida sub-sample of Nader voters was actually too small to draw such precise figures, but Herron and Lewis concluded that approximately 60% of Florida's Nader voters would have been Gore voters if the 2000 race hadn't included Nader. Clearly, Ralph Nader drew far more votes from Gore than he did from Bush, and on this account alone was an enormous Republican asset in 2000.
CTyankee
(63,889 posts)Let's hash it out in the primary debates, air all our views there but come together as Dems in the general election.
Gothmog
(144,919 posts)I will never forgive nader Rove funded Nader in 2000 and 2004 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-zuesse/ralph-nader-was-indispens_b_4235065.html
Furthermore, Karl Rove and the Republican Party knew this, and so they nurtured and crucially assisted Naders campaigns, both in 2000 and in 2004. On 27 October 2000, the APs Laura Meckler headlined GOP Group To Air Pro-Nader TV Ads. She opened: Hoping to boost Ralph Nader in states where he is threatening to hurt Al Gore, a Republican group is launching TV ads featuring Nader attacking the vice president [Mr. Gore]. ... Al Gore is suffering from election year delusion if he thinks his record on the environment is anything to be proud of, Nader says [in the commercial]. An announcer interjects: Whats Al Gores real record? Nader says: Eight years of principles betrayed and promises broken. Mecklers report continued: A spokeswoman for the Green Party nominee said that his campaign had no control over what other organizations do with Naders speeches. Bushs people - the group sponsoring this particular ad happened to be the Republican Leadership Council - knew exactly what they were doing, even though the liberal suckers who voted so carelessly for Ralph Nader obviously did not. Anyone who drives a car the way those liberal fools voted, faces charges of criminal negligence, at the very least. But this time, the entire nation crashed as a result; not merely a single car.....
On July 9th, the San Francisco Chronicle headlined GOP Doners Funding Nader: Bush Supporters Give Independents Bid a Financial Lift, and reported that the Nader campaign has received a recent windfall of contributions from deep-pocketed Republicans with a history of big contributions to the party, according to an analysis of federal records. Perhaps these contributors were Ambassador Egans other friends. Mr. Egans wife was now listed among the Nader contributors. Another listed was Nijad Fares, a Houston businessman, who donated $200,000 to the Bush inaugural committee and who donated $2,000 each to the Nader effort and the Bush campaign this year. Furthermore, Ari Berman reported 7 October 2004 at the Nation, under Swift Boat Veterans for Nader, that some major right-wing funders of a Republican smear campaign against Senator John Kerrys Vietnam service contributed also $13,500 to the Nader campaign, and that the Republican Party of Michigan gathered ninety percent of Naders signatures in their state (90%!) to place Nader on the ballot so Bush could win that swing states 17 electoral votes. Clearly, the word had gone out to Bushs big contributors: Help Ralphie boy! In fact, on 15 September 2005, John DiStaso of the Manchester Union-Leader, reported that, A year ago, as the Presidential general election campaign raged in battleground state New Hampshire, consumer advocate Ralph Nader found his way onto the ballot, with the help of veteran Republican strategist David Carney and the Carney-owned Norway Hill Associates consulting firm.
It was obvious, based upon the 2000 election results, that a dollar contributed to Nader in the 2004 contest would probably be a more effective way to achieve a Bush win against Kerry in the U.S. Presidential election than were perhaps even ten dollars contributed to Bush. This was a way of peeling crucial votes off from Bushs real opponent - votes that otherwise would have gone to the Democrat. Thats why the smartest Republican money in the 2004 Presidential election was actually going to Nader, even more so than to Bush himself: these indirect Bush contributions provided by far the biggest bang for the right-wing buck.
JI7
(89,240 posts)and other gains made by minorities so maybe blame the civil rights act.
Scruffy1
(3,252 posts)After the drubbing the Democratic took in 1994 he could do little to change anything, but I think he got what he could. He was elected in a three way race with a minority and was able to keep the government functioning in spite of the loonies on the right. We had the same problem in 2010 and Obamas hands were tied for the last six years. If we are to learn anything from history it would be to never underestimate the power of the media. Gingrich understood this and the asshole is still hanging around. All you have to do is come up with a catchy phrase like "Contract on America', get the complicit media to amplify it and you have it made. Of course racism is just another tool in their boxas is lying, but as long as you get the microphone you are ok.. The Republican party created it's own "news network" 2 years later and was able to have another six year run of power, despite it's horrendous results. When you have something that works, you don't change it. I still remember Reagan as the first to use the line "I'm not a scientist,but...., and of course the media replayed it endlessly and nobody in the media knew jack shit except make-up, enunciation and dress so they let it ride.They are still borrowing it today and getting away with it.
It boils down to never overestimate the intelligence of voters and take control of the media instead of it being a tool that you react to so it controls you.