Facebook
X
LinkdIn
Copy Link
In the weeks since Donald Trump won the presidential election, Democrat supporters, amidst much gnashing of teeth, have offered up a range of post-mortems. While The View host Sunny Hostin and MSNBC presenter Joy Reid have blamed Kamala Harris’s defeat, predictably enough, on American “racism” and “misogyny,” others have been more constructive. Last week, onetime Obama strategist Steve Schale said in an op-ed that the party — “a shell of itself” — had turned off groups like Hispanics with “socialism talk” and special-interest issues irrelevant to their lives. Democrat veteran Bernie Sanders echoed him, calling out his party for becoming one of “identity politics” rather than trying to appeal to the American working class. While Schale calls urgently for “structural changes,” the Wall Street Journal is more precise in its analysis: “The Democrats Need Another Bill Clinton.”
Clinton was able to halve the national deficit, foster record numbers of new businesses, and bring unemployment down to its lowest level in twenty-eight years
You can see the WSJ’s point. It was at a similar crisis moment for the Democrats that Arkansas governor Bill Clinton came along as presidential candidate in 1992. They’d just lost three elections in a row by overwhelming margins to their Republican opponents, and seemed the kind of high-taxation, big government party that Reaganism had seen off for good. Yet the forty-three-year-old Clinton — probably the only “Democratic presidential candidate in America,” his biographer Ian Hamilton wrote, “with the necessary intellect, charisma, cunning, shamelessness and sheer willpower” to win the presidency — brought his party back to the center ground and to two terms of office.
Part of the excitement, following the end of the Cold War, was the generational shift. Unlike the patrician, buttoned-up George H.W. Bush, Clinton — good looking and easy-going, with his Southern drawl, saxophone playing and let-it-all-hang-out emotion — was visibly a man of the Sixties. His entire form of Democratic politics seemed to break new ground. “Slick Willie” may have rejected Bush’s laissez-faire capitalism, but gone too were the bloated government programs, the punitive taxation and the pandering to identity groups associated with his own side.
His speech in 1992, on securing the nomination, made it clear: “In the name of all those who do the work and pay the taxes, raise the kids and play by the rules, in the name of the hardworking Americans who make up our forgotten middle class, I proudly accept your nomination for President of the United States. I am a product of that middle class, and when I am President, you will be forgotten no more.”
With the three rules of campaign manager James Carville pinned to the wall of his headquarters — “Change versus More of the Same; The Economy, stupid; Don’t forget health care” — Clinton went to work on the electorate.
Fighting a battle on two fronts (a popular if slightly batty independent, Ross Perot, was also standing), his campaign was a model of focus and discipline. Unlike Kamala, he’d made a canny if unconventional choice of running mate. The forty-four-year-old Al Gore may not have been from a different wing of the party or even a different part of the country, but his New Democrat credentials hammered home the young duo were, unashamedly, offering genuine change.
Kamala Harris, in 2024, spouted an array of apparently uncosted promises — “We will provide access to capital for small business owners, entrepreneurs, and founders…We will end America’s housing shortage and protect Social Security… We will cut the red tape that stops homes from being built… America [will have] the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world, etc.”
Yet Clinton, in a typical speech, identified just three or four problems — healthcare, graduate debt, unemployment, or the need for government to supply proper retraining schemes in an increasingly globalized world — and would outline them lucidly to his listeners: “Let’s suppose you have a little plant in Johnstown and you make light bulbs. And you work with 400 folks. And your competition is from overseas. And the only way you can beat the competition is to stay in Johnstown and spend $2 million on a modern piece of equipment. This is a practical example. Your government will not give you a tax credit to write that equipment off. But if you shut your plant down and move it overseas, you get a tax deduction for shutting the plant down.”
His solutions — to overhaul the student debt-repayment system, to impose health insurance schemes on businesses for their workers, to raise taxes for the wealthy and cut them for the middle classes and working poor — he would explain clearly and practically, with an absence of waffle or mystifying verbiage. Part of Clinton’s schtick was to feel your pain — sometimes, in queasy fashion, to the point of tears — but convince you his intelligence was still ticking over, that if he couldn’t find a remedy, who could?
He told his audiences that he understood their resentments and shared them but tried to enlarge their sympathies as he went. Here he is on those claiming welfare, in 1992: “I’m for making people on welfare go to work, but you’ve got to understand why they don’t. Most people who are trapped on welfare and don’t go to work don’t do it because they have no education, they have no skills. If they went on to work, they’d get a minimum-wage job, they couldn’t afford child care and they’d give up the Medicaid coverage which gives their children medical benefits. Nobody in their right mind hurts their kids.”
‘The only times you’ve invited me on the show are to discuss a woman I never slept with and a draft I never dodged,’ Clinton told one TV host
Bush’s Republicans, alarmed by their opponent, threw everything they could at him, and they didn’t have to look very far. Scandal after scandal dogged his campaign, many of them based in fact. There were dodgy property deals, Republicans claimed, yet to be properly probed. Clinton had avoided the draft and demonstrated disloyally against the Vietnam War in London. He was a “skirt chaser,” for over a decade carrying on a dalliance with (among others) a nightclub singer called Gennifer Flowers. To all these charges, Clinton responded with a mixture of denial and disarming candor.
“Ted,” he shot back at one TV interviewer, “the only times you’ve invited me on the show are to discuss a woman I never slept with and a draft I never dodged.” At other times he confessed he’d lived a “far from perfect life” and that, if he’d been against the Vietnam War in his youth, he wasn’t ashamed of it and still felt the same way: “If you choose to vote against me because of what happened twenty-three years ago, that’s your right as an American citizen, and I respect that. But it is my hope that you will cast your vote while looking toward the future.’
Unlike Kamala in the recent election — whose relentless attacks on Trump made her look sour, obsessive and lacking any credible program to put forth of her own — Clinton tried to avoid retaliating against Bush in kind: “I honor his service to our country… and I wish him well. I just believe it’s time to change… I know we can do better.” Slowly voter-disapproval turned to admiration at how well he’d weathered the attacks.
“Say what you want but do not say he quits,” wrote columnist Jimmy Breslin. Even the New York Post spoke respectfully of Clinton, noting his “strength of character,” “tenacity” and “extraordinary grace under pressure.” On November 3, 1992, he fairly romped to the White House with 370 Electoral College votes to Bush’s 168.
Clinton’s presidency may have sailed into the choppiest of waters soon after, with many of his initiatives torpedoed by Republican sworn enemy Newt Gingrich in Congress. By 1994, his blocked healthcare initiative was in tatters (and Hillary’s co-presidential career with it), while his second term slid into a mire of sleaze following the exposure of his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky and the lies that followed. But he was able to halve the national deficit, foster record numbers of new businesses, and bring unemployment down to its lowest level in twenty-eight years.
Viewed three decades on, Clinton’s two election wins, and the memory of him as one of the more reassuring, broadminded and feel-good presidents, seem one of US history’s happier twists. “How,” he asked in his autobiography My Life, “did Americans come to choose their first baby-boom president, the third youngest in history, only the second governor of a small state, carrying more baggage than an ocean liner?” It’s a question Harris’s heartbroken acolytes, once the mudslinging stops, might pick themselves up to ponder.
