Somewhere in Between

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 10:22 AM
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Somewhere in Between
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>


[Note:  This item comes from friend Robert Berger.  DLH]

Somewhere in Between
The rise and fall of Clintonism.
By Ryan Cooper
Feb 14 2018
<https://www.thenation.com/article/the-rise-and-fall-of-clintonism/>

In 1993, Vice President Al Gore took part in an unusual debate about trade:
He went on Larry King’s CNN show to spar with Ross Perot—the third-party
candidate President Bill Clinton had beaten in the previous year’s
election—over the impending North American Free Trade Agreement. During the
campaign, Perot had warned that NAFTA would create a “giant sucking sound”
as high-paying manufacturing jobs drained out of the country. About a year
later, Clinton was trying to push it through, and so Gore was dispatched to
debate NAFTA’s most high-profile opponent.

Most observers concluded that Gore won handily. But he didn’t convincingly
put away Perot’s arguments; instead, he took his opponent down with a lot
of cheap rhetorical tricks—most especially, baiting Perot’s notorious
temper by constantly interrupting him. Perot’s peevish “Could I finish?”
was turned into a punch line by comedian Dana Carvey, and that was that. It
was a tactical success for Clinton, who wanted to build a new base for his
party among the executive and financier class and high-income voters. NAFTA
was eventually approved by the Senate and signed into law by Clinton on
December 8, 1993.

In the end, however, Perot turned out to be more right than wrong about
NAFTA—and not only on economic but on political terms. While NAFTA’s
overall effects weren’t that large, there were far bigger losses after
Clinton signed another trade deal, this time with China, in 2000, and the
wreckage left by the outsourcing and deindustrialization that followed
would come back to haunt his wife in the 2016 election. The Democrats’
embrace of free-market policies, which reached its apex under Clinton, may
have helped rejuvenate the party in the 1990s and early 2000s, but that
embrace has now crippled it. Hillary Clinton’s shocking loss to Donald
Trump—whose signature economic pledge was to reverse the “bad deals” of the
past few decades—simply highlights a generation of Democratic Party
politics that has now come crashing to an end.

Two new books help fill in the details of the rise and fall of Clintonian
economics and politics: Bill Clinton, a short biography by Michael Tomasky,
and Shattered, a narrative account of Hillary’s 2016 election loss by
Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. These demonstrate neatly how Clintonism—a
politics of triangulation in a neoliberal age—eventually undermined itself.

As its title suggests, Tomasky’s volume—an entry in the Times Books series
on American presidents—is a brief, crisp, and overly sympathetic telling of
Bill Clinton’s story. It covers, with aplomb, his early career as Arkansas
governor, his long-shot campaign for president, and his later career as a
globe-trotting philanthropist. At the center of the book, however, is not
only the tale of a president from a town called Hope but also the outlines
of how Clintonism, as an expression of post-welfarist liberalism, came into
being.

Early in his presidency, Clinton developed what would become the key
feature of his politics: Recognizing that the New Deal coalition between
Southern Democrats and the Northern working class had fallen apart, he set
out to win over those people who voted for the GOP. This required
triangulation, especially in a context in which the free-market right had
won a near consensus over the perceived failures of the welfare state. As
Tomasky argues, Clinton was genuinely concerned with improving the lot of
working-class Americans. Yet all of his policies to that end were hemmed in
by a neoliberal framework that had been embraced by both sides of the aisle
by the 1990s. Sometimes this was against his wishes—when discussing his
first budget, Clinton famously complained, “You mean to tell me that the
success of my economic program and my reelection hinges on the Federal
Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?” But it also became a central
feature of Clintonism.

This economic straitjacket was the result of a fight that had started
decades before. After the Great Depression and the Second World War,
classical laissez-faire economics had been profoundly discredited, and the
Democratic Party had come to accept that strict controls on the markets and
protections for workers—in the form of pro-union legislation, the
regulatory state, antitrust policy, and so on—were needed to moderate the
ruthless swings of capitalism.

[snip]

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