General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsLest we forget what the era of Bill Clinton's Presidency was like.
Some mistakes like trusting that the Crime bill would be enforced justly and fairly and trusting that the Welfare reform bill would get necessary changes in the second term and help pull families out of poverty...but impeachment took over.
But take a look at the really progressive policies that Clinton/Gore introduced.
The Brady Bill
Violence Against Women
Assault weapons ban
Tax relief on the working poor.
and much more
It ought to be an eye opener to those who don't have a jaundiced eye.
http://clinton5.nara.gov/WH/Accomplishments/eightyears-02.html
Bad Dog
(2,025 posts)The only American president who could be bothered.
merrily
(45,251 posts)6000eliot
(5,643 posts)merrily
(45,251 posts)No one has time for unsupported, false smear attempts.
Inasmuch as you've made a bit over 5000 posts since your registered in 2004, keeping each one at least in the neighborhood of honesty and plausibility should not be as difficult as you've made it seem.
riderinthestorm
(23,272 posts)Bad Dog
(2,025 posts)He was just tinkering about the edges. If anything he was an apologist for Noraid.
BlueMTexpat
(15,350 posts)that too many in the US have never comprehended. Thanks for mentioning it!
Bad Dog
(2,025 posts)And will be remembered for a long time.
liberal N proud
(60,302 posts)For example, Clinton managed to remake the image and operations of the Democratic Party in ways that effectively undermined the so-called Reagan Revolution.
Although there has been some partisan debate about the extent to which the 1990's boom can be attributed to Clinton, the mainstream interpretation now tends to give great credit to Clinton and his economic team, especially Robert Rubin of the National Economic Council and later the secretary of the Treasury, for uncommon fiscal discipline in 1993. These efforts fueled a period of confidence in the financial markets.
This link provides a fair list of President Bill Clinton's legacy.
http://millercenter.org/president/biography/clinton-impact-and-legacy
Don't forget the Budget Surplus
https://www.quora.com/What-is-Bill-Clintons-presidential-legacy
But trying to equate Bill's White House to Hillary's would be a poor judgment call.
merrily
(45,251 posts)produced a tiny budget surplus. Whooptie frickin doo.
Now, heartbreaking websites where people humbly beg for money for food and shelter are a cottage industry.
liberal N proud
(60,302 posts)merrily
(45,251 posts)My post was on topic with the OP and about issues and only issues. What in hell was your post to me about again?
As long as we're going personal though, I can't believe you (or anyone) recc'd the OP.
Viva_La_Revolution
(28,791 posts)Why Gore wanted to put it in a lockbox.
merrily
(45,251 posts)"modest budget surplus," which robbery also helped weaken OASDI. A stench twofer.
WhiteTara
(29,676 posts)karynnj
(59,475 posts)by GHWB - written by Chris Dodd.
THIS IS WHY WE WANT A DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENT -- Any Democrat would have signed it, any Republican vetoed it.
BlueMTexpat
(15,350 posts)most especially to the last. Hillary's would be significantly better, IMO, even though this era is far more contentious and polarized than Bill's. It will also be more difficult because the global scene is much more precarious than at any time since WWII. This last is one major reason why I prefer the candidate who not only knows world leaders personally but is much respected and admired by them.
merrily
(45,251 posts)on even that. In the 2016 primary, she's sought to distance herself from his administration, as well as from her own acts, omissions, words, votes, etc.
One can only pray enough people see her "evolutions" for what they are.
kaleckim
(651 posts)Based on what? She is probably more hawkish than her husband. She is still meeting, constantly, with corporate and bank lobbyists (challenge me on that, got links), her largest donors over the course of her career. Has a horrible record on trade, and issues of institutional power. How is she significantly better? She is a horrible candidate overall (especially given her bad polling. She's lucky, if she wins, that she will have to face Trump, the only person with worst polling numbers that is running), and is as conservative and pro-establishment a candidate that the Democrats could put on the top of the ticket. Hard to put into words how tone deaf picking her is, given how radically the country has changed in the last few decades, and given how angry people are at the system she wants to protect at all costs. Her BFF is DWS. How is that not telling?
SHRED
(28,136 posts)* welfare "reform"
* Graham-Leach-Bliley
* NAFTA
In my opinion.
merrily
(45,251 posts)Telecommunications Act
DADT
DOMA
NAFTA
And others--not to mention lobbying for and signing the two bills, that together, crashed the economies of the US and several other nations
Repeal of Glass Steagall
Commodities Futures Modernization Act
And DLC/Third way
BTW, acting as though this is purely a memory lane post that belongs in GD and not in GD: P is typically....
kaleckim
(651 posts)that he WAS open to privatizing Social Security and was working with Gingrich to divert SS into private accounts. The Lewinsky affair then broke and that fell apart. Somehow, in Clinton la la land, he and his wife are "progressive", and we're all ideological purists or whatever. It isn't that we object ideologically AND because of the impact of their policies. Nope, we're all hippies with Che posters on our walls, and that's the end of it.
merrily
(45,251 posts)Catfood Commission named by President Obama.
As far as the term "progressive".....http://www.democraticunderground.com/127710158
kaleckim
(651 posts)him gutting social programs that decimated the poor, NAFTA, the WTO, the Telecommunications Act, him working with Gingrich to privatize Social Security (then Lewinsky broke), him gutting the New Deal financial regulations, him pushing strongly for the Commodities Futures Modernization Act, his support of mass privatizations, among other things. He did some okay things, but those things I mentioned had gigantic long term consequences. Even him basically being a deficit hawk, him creating surpluses (for some odd reason, lauded by some on the barely center-left) was pretty damaging in the long run. To claim he did anything other than further Reagan's revolution is pure revisionism. My god, he and his wife are the two people most responsible for pulling your party to the right! One of the most significant things that Sanders has done in recent years is hiring Stephanie Kelton to be a chief economic adviser. The (actual) left should read up on her and modern monetary theory (MMT). On those deficits (these articles are from actual progressives):
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-bill-clintons-balanced-budget-destroyed-the-economy-2012-9
"I think it is safe to say that we are still suffering the harmful effects of the Clinton budget surpluses," says Stephanie Kelton, an economics professor at the University of Missouri Kansas City.
To understand why, you first need to understand that the components of GDP looks like this:
{GDP} = C + I + G + (X - M)
In the above equation, C is private consumption (spending). I is investment spending. G is government spending. And 'X-M' is exports-minus imports (essentially the trade surpus).
Here's a chart of the government budget around the years during and right after Clinton, in case you need a reminder that the government was in surplus near the end of his tenure.
..."If the government is in surplus, it means that the government is taking in more cash than it's spending, which is the opposite of stimulus. It's also well known that the US trade deficit exploded during the late 90s, which means that 'X-M' was also a huge drag on GDP during his years."
http://www.vox.com/2015/1/10/7521819/sanders-mmt-kelton
But new budget committee ranking member Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is poised to break dramatically from traditional Democratic views on budgeting, from Obama to Clinton to Walter Mondale and beyond. His big move: naming University of Missouri - Kansas City professor Stephanie Kelton as his chief economist. Kelton is not exactly a household name, but to those who follow economic policy debates closely, tapping her is a dramatic sign.
For years, the main disagreement between Democratic and Republican budget negotiators was about how to balance the budget what to cut, what to tax, how fast to implement it but not whether to balance it. Even most liberal economists agree that, in the medium-run, it's better to have less government debt rather than more. Kelton denies that premise. She thinks that, in many cases, government surpluses are actively destructive and balancing the budget is very dangerous. For example, Kelton thinks the Clinton surpluses are nothing to brag about and they actually inflicted economic damage lasting over a decade.
...Usually, when Democrats hire economists, they hire nice, respectable Keynesians, who use mainstream economic models and often agree with conservative economists on a lot of theoretical matters while drawing different policy conclusions from them. For example, Greg Mankiw, who served as George W. Bush's top economic advisor, and Christina Romer, who served as Obama's, were both influential in developing New Keynesianism, a macroeconomic theory that emerged in the 1980s and arguably dominates the field today. What really set Romer and Mankiw apart was policy, not economic theory.
...MMT emphasizes the fact that countries that print their own money can never really "run out of money." They can just print more. The reason we have taxes, then, is not to pay for stuff, but to keep people using the government's preferred currency rather than, say, Bitcoin. In some rare cases, consumer demand gets too high, so sellers raise prices and inflation ensues. Then, you need to raise taxes to cool the economy down. But the theory holds that this eventuality is pretty rare. James Galbraith, another MMT-influenced economist, once told me that the last time it happened was in World War I.
The main takeaway from this is that you really don't need to balance the budget over any time horizon, and attempts to do so will hurt the economy. That's what Kelton argues happened after the Clinton surpluses of the late 1990s / early 2000s. Any dollar of government surplus must show up as private debt, she reasons. And the private sectors just can't run up debt like that indefinitely. "Eventually, something will give," Kelton once wrote to Business Insider. "And when it does, the private sector will retrench, the economy will contract, and the government's budget will move back into deficit."
...Before recently, mainstream economists and policymakers could comfortably ignore MMT. Galbraith told me that when, on a panel for an April 2000 event at the White House, he argued that the US's new budget surplus would harm the economy, the hundreds of economists in attendance laughed in his face. That's all changed. The financial crisis created a huge appetite for new economic thinking, and MMT helped meet it. Now, people like Krugman are expected to at least grapple with its claims. Kelton's elevation to the budget committee is another important step in mainstreaming the theory, and making it safe for left-wing Democrats to embrace.
Viva_La_Revolution
(28,791 posts)Jitter65
(3,089 posts)many times in many places. Lot's single moms were able to get off welfare and get good paying jobs. Blame the state and local politicians for uneven and unfair enforcement of many of the provisions and not taking the Federal help that was available. Social Security was never privatized so stop inferring that it was. Glass-Steal contributed zilch to any economic recession we had and economists on both sides agree that its repeal was minimal if any affect on it.
I know about the GDP formula and X-M is just not a simple as it looks on paper. Lots of factors enter into it, including currency manipulation and countries cheating on enforcement of trade agreements. What counts is what consumers actually feel and realize in their daily lives an during those Clinton years lots of people, including low and middle income families raised their standards of living, built wealth for themselves and their children. Many escaped the harmful affects of the 'bubble' and invested wisely or saved wisely. Others went crazy and made bad decisions and greed overtook a lot of people. Nothing lasts forever because people aren't always wise. But you cannot deny the reality of many people doing quite well under the Clinton administration...and that's what many of us remember.
kaleckim
(651 posts)Last edited Wed Mar 30, 2016, 04:24 PM - Edit history (1)
"the claims about NAFTA's job losses have been refuted"
I know the damn data inside and out. You are either lying or speaking out of ignorance. Why don't you research the US's trade balance with Mexico and Canada before and after NAFTA, then research the impact on jobs. You also can't argue against the long term consequences of his policies.
Take a look:
"But you cannot deny the reality of many people doing quite well under the Clinton administration"
Most definitely, and those people have paid him kindly for his service. Like, when the East Asian financial crisis broke, or the Mexican peso crisis broke, he most definitely helped them to do well, he used public money to guarantee that. He also did that when he deregulated Wall Street and destroyed working people and unions with NAFTA and destroyed our democracy with the WTO.
"Social Security was never privatized so stop inferring that it was."
Never said it was, he was (not arguable) working to do so, then Lewinsky happened, just as I said. After that broke, he realized the last thing he needed was to piss people off even more and he backed off his plans. This is not a secret:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2004/10/30/how-monica-lewinsky-saved-social-security/
Late in 1998 or in the State of the Union message of 1999 a solemn Clinton would have told Congress and the nation that, just like welfare, Social Security was near-broke, had to be reformed and its immense pool of capital tendered in part to the mutual funds industry. The itinerary mapped out for Clinton by the Democratic Leadership Committee would have been complete.
It was a desperately close run thing. On the account of members of Clintons secret White House team, mandated to map out the privatization path for Social Security, they had got as far down the road as fine-tuning the account numbers for Social Security accounts now released to the captious mercies of Wall Street. But in 1998 the Lewinsky scandal burst upon the President, and as the months sped by and impeachment swelled from a remote specter to a looming reality, Clintons polls told him that his only hope was to nourish the widespread popular dislike for the hoity-toity elites intoning Clintons death warrant.
...We have this on the authority of high-ranking members of the Clinton Treasury who gathered in Harvard in the summer of 2001 to mull over the lessons of the 1990s. At that conclave it was revealed that on Clintons orders a top secret White House working party had been established to study in detail the basis for a bipartisan policy on Social Security that would splice individual accounts into the program. Such was the delicacy of this exercise that meetings of the group were flagged under the innocent rubric Special Issues on the White House agenda.
What was in fact being prepared for the President was precisely that second dose of welfare reform, this time targeted on the very citadel of the New Deal, the Social Security program Roosevelt himself established.
...The Special Issues secret team was set up by then-Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers (later elevated to Treasury Secretary and now President of Harvard) and Gene Sperling, the head of the Council of Economic Advisers. The Deputy Treasury Secretarys fondness for schemes to privatize Social Security comes as no surprise. As Chief Economist of the World Bank in the early 1990s Summers had commissioned a notorious report, Averting the Old Age Crisis, that argued that Merrill Lynch and Fidelity would be better at pension provision than any government. In fact governments should offer only a safety net and farm out their power to tax payrolls to private financial concerns, which would run mandatory funded pensions on the Chilean model. The task of the Special Issues group was to find an installment of privatization that could reconcile realistic Republicans and Democrats, and be sold as still honoring most existing entitlements.
Participants at the Harvard conference conceded that severe technical problems beset efforts to introduce commercial practices. The existing program has low administration costs whereas running tens of millions of small investment accounts would be expensive. The secret White House team sought to finesse the problem by pooling individual funds and stripping down the element of choice or customer service. But Summers was unhappy: as one Team member now recalls it, Deputy Secretary Summers was fond of saying that we had to guard against the risk of setting up the Post Office when people were used to dealing with Federal Express. And pooled funds were also to be avoided because they would risk government control of business.
Some members of the team also worried that allowing employees the option of setting up their own accounts would soon turn into a slippery slope, since the defection of the richest five or ten per cent of employees would soon undermine the programs ability to honor its commitments to existing retirees.
Nevertheless, under Summers guidance, the secret team pushed forward. There were high hopes that the President would embrace what had by now had become a detailed blueprint: The working groups estimates were at the level of detail that it was determined how many digits an ID number would have to be for each fund and how many key strokes would therefore be required to enter all of the ID numbers each year.
Clinton was kept up to date with briefings every few weeks and in July 1998 attended one of the Special Issues meetings himself. But in that same month he was served with a grand jury subpoena. A month later he finally acknowledged a sexual relationship with Monica.
Chasstev365
(5,191 posts)Wilms
(26,795 posts)merrily
(45,251 posts)Address to the Nation on the Invasion of Iraq (January 16, 1991)
George H. W. Bush
Just 2 hours ago, allied air forces began an attack on military targets in Iraq and Kuwait. These attacks continue as I speak. Ground forces are not engaged.
This conflict started August 2d when the dictator of Iraq invaded a small and helpless neighbor. Kuwaita member of the Arab League and a member of the United Nationswas crushed; its people, brutalized. Five months ago, Saddam Hussein started this cruel war against Kuwait. Tonight, the battle has been joined.
much more at: http://www.millercenter.org/president/speeches/speech-3428
transcript: President Clinton explains Iraq strike
CLINTON: Good evening.
Earlier today, I ordered America's armed forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq. They are joined by British forces. Their mission is to attack Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors.
much more at: http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1998/12/16/transcripts/clinton.html
more at: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026211673
Senate vote on 2002 AUMF Iraq at: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/107-2002/s237
House vote on 2002 AUMF Iraq at: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/107/hjres114
10:16 P.M. EST
THE PRESIDENT: My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.
On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein's ability to wage war. These are opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign. More than 35 countries are giving crucial support -- from the use of naval and air bases, to help with intelligence and logistics, to the deployment of combat units. Every nation in this coalition has chosen to bear the duty and share the honor of serving in our common defense.
more at http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030319-17.html
Wilms
(26,795 posts)We ought to buy a museum and stick the Clinton/Bush Crime Syndicate in it.
merrily
(45,251 posts)Wilms
(26,795 posts)The Clinton Lie Brary.
merrily
(45,251 posts)Poppy and his self-proclaimed brudder from anudder mudder.
marmar
(76,991 posts)..... creation of the housing and credit bubbles, repeal of Glass-Steagall....
BlueMTexpat
(15,350 posts)rather than on the eight years of Bush-Cheney where no tweaks were made that could have improved ALL situations. Wrong focus, IMO.
look at the data, the LONG-TERM impacts of both Clinton and Bush's policies (after all, the long term consequences of gutting New Deal financial regulations, NAFTA, the WTO and gutting social programs wasn't largely felt during his presidency) and realize that it is entirely possible that they were both net negatives for most working people. Why should I, or anyone else, pretend that Democrats like Clinton aren't what they are? Can me deluding myself about that help me pay for graduate school or health care?
marmar
(76,991 posts)Yes, the Bush-Cheney period was the absolute worst, but to deny Clinton's role in so many of these things is a kind of cognitive dissonance I'm incapable of. So you can focus on whatever you like.
BlueMTexpat
(15,350 posts)yourself when you want to blame ALL that is evil on the Clintons.
I did not deny their role in anything. I merely stated that your focus seemed to be more on those who initiated rather than those who actually caused the damage. With the proper tweaks and attention, none of the acts you cited would have been nearly so disastrous. Some might have been as beneficial as intended, or at worst benign.
One simply cannot exist in a global society without international trade agreements, for example. It is how those trade agreements are implemented, monitored and improved that is important. That is where the system failed.
kaleckim
(651 posts)The record on NAFTA is clear and no working person, especially on the left, would ever delude themselves like you have. I take it you are well off. The same is true of the WTO (I doubt you Clinton defenders know what it is or does), him deregulating financial capital, ripping apart social programs that benefited the poor, etc. Your type of response is why people are fed up with Clinton and the establishment in this country. You just can't be honest with anyone, including yourself, about the actual impact of policies they supported. Whatever, think what you want, but I'll be damned if you claim they're on the left, or anything other than conservative establishment figures. They've all but announced that the system will not change, and the system is inequitable, corrupt, and leading us to ecological collapse. Nothing progressive about that.
marmar
(76,991 posts)..... but that's an intellectually dishonest argument and you know it.
BlueMTexpat
(15,350 posts)merrily
(45,251 posts)Be specific and don't be shy. Link the post and call out the specific error. That approach would be much more effective and a lot less silly than posting an image of a dead or distressed seal. Unless, of course, baseless denial is all you've got. Then circus imagery is totes appropriate.
adigal
(7,581 posts)Or at least that's my opinion. Who knows what Hillary really thinks because she goes with the wind. I do think, however, that she can be pressured to do the right thing most of the time.
Democat
(11,617 posts)It's obvious by their posts.
kaleckim
(651 posts)There is such thing as a left wing critique of them. The WTO uprising in Seattle, for example, happened under Clinton. What were the people involved in Seattle saying about his WTO? Were they wrong? What was the left, the LEFT, saying about NAFTA, him gutting social programs that benefited the poor, etc?
Here's Chomsky on NAFTA and Clinton from around the time it was passed. Was he, and the left, wrong?:
It seems that most Democrats that defend the Clintons, and Obama (a person that just announced he is backing the vile and corrupt DWS), seem to think that only the right should critique people like the Clintons and Obama. Makes no damn sense. Doubly given that if the left doesn't critique them, you essentially give a monopoly to the right in that regard. They will only be pushed from the right. How in the hell does that make any sense and how does that benefit working people, or your party?
The Bush administration was horrible. Saying that doesn't mean I can't also point to the impact of the policies neoliberal Democrats have supported, and critique them. The world is complicated, ya know?
dembotoz
(16,740 posts)BainsBane
(53,003 posts)and that sort of thing. Looking at it from a 21st century vantage point entirely ignores the political context of the time.
The alternative to Bill Clinton was not more leftist administration but another term by George HW Bush and a continuation of Reaganism. In fact, Clinton likely would not have won without Ross Perot's entering the race as a third-party candidate.
I certainly shared the frustration many felt toward Bill Clinton's administration, but the fact is the GOP alternative was far worse. There was no leftist option at the time. Americans political sensibilities have changed considerably since those days and the platforms of BOTH Democratic candidates reflect that.
Hillary Clinton was always more liberal than her husband. Those inside the administration, like David Gergen, say that she argued against NAFTA, which had begun as a Bush initiative. She did promote it for her husband's administration, however, so she bears responsibility for that. It is, however, mistaken to assume she is a carbon copy or mere appendage of her husband.