Let's move on from the Clinton presidency and not look back

ProSense

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Fri Jan-18-08 09:30 PM
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Let's move on from the Clinton presidency and not look back

Defense of Marriage Act

North American Free Trade Agreement

Death penalty

Lewinsky scandal

CEO Pay Loophole

The Clintons and the Bushes

The Clintons' Real Trouble with Truth

Emboldening the Republican Party:

Special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh was still battling the cover-up that had surrounded the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s; Democratic congressmen were digging into the “Iraqgate” scandal, the covert supplying of dangerous weapons to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in the 1980s; and a House task force was suddenly inundated with evidence pointing to Republican guilt in the “October Surprise” case, alleged interference by the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980 to undermine President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to free 52 American hostages then held in Iran.

Combined, those three investigations could have rewritten the history of the 1980s, exposing serious wrongdoing by Republicans who had held the White House for a dozen years. The full story also would likely have terminated the presidential ambitions of the powerful Bush family, since George H.W. Bush was implicated in all three scandals.

Clinton agreed to let George H.W. Bush retreat gracefully into retirement despite Bush’s brazen attempt to destroy Walsh’s criminal investigation by issuing six pardons to Iran-Contra defendants on Christmas Eve 1992.

In his 2004 memoirs, My Life, Clinton wrote that he “disagreed with the pardons and could have made more of them but didn’t.” Clinton cited several reasons for giving his predecessor a pass.

“I wanted the country to be more united, not more divided, even if that split would be to my political advantage,” Clinton wrote. “Finally, President Bush had given decades of service to our country, and I thought we should allow him to retire in peace, leaving the matter between him and his conscience.”

But Bill Clinton never ordered a major declassification project, nor did he establish any U.S. truth commissions to put the Cold War history in a meaningful context. To Clinton, truth never seemed to be a high priority, either in his private life or in his public duties.

Ironically, Bill Clinton’s protection of the Reagan-Bush administrations didn’t protect him. Clinton saw his prized domestic agenda, including Hillary Clinton’s health care reform, defeated; his party lose control of Congress in 1994; the House vote to impeach him; and his Vice President, Al Gore, have the 2000 election stolen from him.

Then, once the Bush family again controlled the White House, one of the first acts of the new President, George W. Bush, was to sign an executive order ensuring that Reagan-Bush-era historical records, scheduled for release in 2001, stayed locked up, possibly forever.

President Bill Clinton is his wife's not-so-secret weapon -- the single most popular Democrat on the planet, a campaigner who ranks with the all-time greats, and one of the best political minds in the country.

But, as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., is learning every week, his legacy can be a mixed blessing -- a reminder of peace, prosperity and Democratic victories, but also of scandal, gridlock and "triangulation" that frustrated many liberals.

On the campaign trail Thursday, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards delivered a speech filled with coded language aimed at reminding Democratic voters of the less-than-pleasant aspects of the Clinton administration. "The American people deserve to know that their presidency is not for sale, the Lincoln bedroom is not for rent, and lobbyist money can no longer influence policy in the House or the Senate," Edwards said in Hanover, N.H., in a not-so-subtle reference to a famous fundraising scandal.

"The trouble with nostalgia is that you tend to remember what you liked and forget what you didn't," Edwards continued. "It's not just that the answers of the past aren't up to the job today -- it's that the system that produced them was corrupt."

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