Reply #31: NAFTA undermined everything good Bill did.

[Xithras]

3.6 million unionized manufacturing jobs sacrificed on the Clinton altar of Free Trade.

Plus, we can thank Clinton for not ratifying Kyoto, for approving "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", the Brady Bill (which cost us Congress in 1994), the Digital Milennium Copyright Act, an expansion of the federal death penalty, approval of the welfare reform bill that increased national poverty, the Defense of Marriage act, and a civilian death toll in Iraq that was only recently eclipsed by George Bush.

Clinton was certainly a better president than Bush, but in the grand scheme of Democratic presidents he was actually a very poor leader, and not a friend to progressive causes. If you factor out the dot-com boom (which really had little to do with Clinton), it would have been a very blah period of time. As one of my friends once put it: "The best thing to come out of the Clinton years was the X-Files."

As an anti-trade protester from the late 90's, I do not look back fondly on the Clinton era.