The Clintons and "counter-scheduling"
In Thomas Franks' book "Listen, Liberal or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?", he talks about how Bill Clinton was floundering in 1994 after the Republican takeover of Congress. He was thought of as weak and ineffectual and there was a "struggle for the soul of Bill Clinton", according to his aide David Gergen.
Franks writes:
"Clinton had to prove, to himself and the nation, that he was a genuine New Democrat. And the way to do it was by somehow damaging or insulting traditional Democratic groups that represented the party's tradition of egalitarianism. Then we would know that the New Deal was genuinely dead."
"This became such a cherished idea among Clinton's campaign team that they had a catchphrase for it: "counter-scheduling." During the 1992 race, as though to compensate for his friend-of-the-little-guy economic theme, Clinton would confront and deliberately antagonize certain elements of the Democratic Party's traditional base in order to assure voters that "interest groups" would have no say in a New Democrat White House. As for those interest groups themselves, Clinton knew he could insult them with impunity. They had nowhere else to go, in the cherished logic of Democratic centrism."
(Note how we still see that nowhere else to go theme, particularly in the loyalty oath threads aimed at Bernie's supporters at DU.)
Frank gives some examples of Clinton counter-scheduling, including the infamous Sister Souljah moment in front of Jesse Jackson during the 1992 campaign, and notes that NAFTA was the first great test of it in the White House when Bill Clinton took on organized labor and much of his own party.
Hillary understood and promoted this counter-scheduling strategy. Frank writes:
"Once Clinton was in the White House, counter-scheduling mutated from a campaign tactic to a philosophy of governance. At a retreat in the administration's early days, Bill's chief political adviser, Hillary Clinton, instructed White House officials how it was going to be done. As Carl Bernstein describes the scene, Hillary announced that the public must be made to understand that Bill was taking them on a "journey" and that he had a "vision" for what the administration was doing, a "story" that distinguished good from evil. The way to dramatize this story, the first lady continued (in Bernstein's telling), was to pick a fight with supporters.
You show people what you're willing to fight for, Hillary said, when you fight your friends - by which in this context, she clearly meant when you make them your enemy."
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That should surely help Sanders win since we know God is a Sanders supporter cuz he sent a bird to land on his podium.
