Clinton and Dean

[ShimokitaJer]

A recent post made the inflammatory claim that Dean supporters think Clinton was a BAD president. Of course, the word "bad" is so broad as to be meaningless, and the thread was correctly locked. Clinton was an effective president, and his type of leadership may have been necessary to compete with the GOP at the time, but it can't be denied that he did pull the party closer to the right. None of those nuances can be captured with the simple statement that Clinton was a GOOD/BAD president.

However, though the poster made the common mistake of suggesting Dean-supporters equate Clinton with the DLC and all their centrist policies, the divide he highlights between Dean and the centrists is a very real one, and one which I think it is important to explore.

I found a lot of insight on Clinton/Dean in this article by Michael Tomasky in The American Prospect. It highlighted both the ways in which Clinton transformed the party and the ways in which Dean continues to do so.

http://www.prospect.org/print-friendly/print/V15/1/tomasky-m.html

-snip-

Clinton rebuilt the party ideologically. He shed it of some of its more hidebound ways. Whether one agrees with, say, his support for welfare reform or NAFTA, it must be said that those moves took some political courage insofar as there wasn't much of a natural constituency within the Democratic Party for his positions. Moving something as large as a political party off a marker on which it has stood for a generation or two is no easy thing.

He also rebuilt the party as a fund-raising machine. This, as we know, has had both its good and its ill effects. But whatever the downsides, this rebuilding, too, was necessary. From the stock-market boom to the exorbitant price of gourmet mustards, the 1990s culture was about money. Politics was not immune. The Democrats, always cash-poor compared with the Republicans—and especially so after losing three presidential elections in a row—needed to join the financial big leagues to be able to compete.

But there is one way in which Clinton did not rebuild the Democratic Party: from the ground up. Beyond rhetoric, and the occasional action, he didn't really make it a party of the people. He and Al Gore did energize a youth vote in 1992, and he made millions of voters who'd been disaffected feel comfortable voting Democratic again, bringing important states like New Jersey back into the Democratic camp.

But he never situated the party as an entity that represented the aspirations of its people—its most committed members.

-abridgement-

This is where Howard Dean comes in. If one thinks of the Democratic Party as rebuilding itself after its disastrous 1980s, then Dean—or more appropriately, "Deanism"—is a new and potentially more powerful stage of the rebuilding process. Clinton rebuilt (forgive the Marxist terminology, but it happens to fit) the superstructure. Dean is rebuilding the base. "If Clinton modernized the message," says Simon Rosenberg, the most prominent centrist Democrat who's enthusiastic about Dean, "then Dean is rebuilding the party. In the '90s party, it was, 'Write us a big check.' Regular people were left out of that equation. Now, through new technology, we're getting them back in."

-snip-

[slinkerwink]

1. we need the base to be in the superstructure

and that's what Dean is doing by rallying the Democratic base of the Democratic party.

[liberalnurse]

2. Dean supporters admire Clinton, our last elected

President. Not all alleged Dean supports are what they claim to be....

[Cheswick2.0]

3. very interesting analysis

thanks

[mzmolly]

4. Dean admires Clinton and so do I. I voted for him twice.

:hi:

[Walt Starr]

5. The worst thing Clinton di while president

is he forgot the visciousness of the member of the GOP. He forgot it is run by truly evil men who would do anything to tear a successful Democratic President down.

He let his guard down just enough for them to land a knock down punch that the Democratic Party has been unable to overcome to this day.

In other words, the worst thing there was to the Clinton presidency is he is human and only a demi-god can hope to survive the evil of the GOP.

[ClarkGraham2004]

6. Of course he pulled the party to the middle, it's why he WON

Remember how our Party was like before Clinton? No White House since LBJ, excluding Carter's disasterous run. Clinton made the Party VIABLE again. It's why we pull in 48% no problem. Instead of Mondale-type numbers.

Thank you Bill Clinton.

[ShimokitaJer]

7. Where were you in 2000 and 2002?

Yeah, that's the ticket. Let's keep winning like that, eh?

Clinton was an enormous personality. Americans trusted him on a personal level, despite rather than because of the shift to the right. As soon as Clinton was out of the picture, no one else could hold onto the same centrist position and still inspire voters. That's why we lost all the Congressional seats.