Fuzzy Math On Behalf Of Team Clinton
Big Tent Democrat writes:
I think it is interesting that Bill Clinton actually won his elections by 5 and 9 points and yet someone like Meyerson talks as if Clinton was a 51-49 President. I also think it is interesting that Meyerson does not for a moment consider the SIMILARITIES between the Obama campaign and the Clinton campaign of 1992 especially. There is a willful blindness to this from some circles.
I don’t really remember the ‘92 campaign. I was 10 at the time. So I won’t try to jump into the discussion on the second part of the argument. However, the first part is ridiculous: Clinton won in’92 with 43% of the vote and in ‘96 with 49% of the vote. Neither time around did he manage to convince even 51% of voters to choose him; he merely won pluralities in enough states to hold a comfortable electoral college margin over his opponents.
“5%” and “9%” margins sound great, but they don’t mean that President Clinton won a sweeping mandate when they refer to a president who was actually less than “51-49″. He did an admirable job of squeaking into the White House as a Democrat in a conservative country. Nothing more, nothing less.
February 1, 2008 at 10:18 am
I literally have no idea what you, the guy who wrote the blog post, or Meyerson are trying to say. As far as I can say, Meyerson thinks Clinton is the best candidate IF this country will only elect Dems on a 51-49 basis, but that conservatism’s “destruction” (asserted but relatively unproven) means that Obama can win without constantly triangulating and finding the middle way. Blog guy suggests that Democrats don’t win on 51-49 majorities (which seems to be a tangential mathematical point having nothing to do with Meyerson’s actual point) as seen through Billy Boy, and that Obama hasn’t proven anything yet, he just mutters “change” over and over again like some well-spoken mantra. You seem to take blog guy’s non-response to Meyerson and respond to it, all the while focusing on 51-49 as meaning a non-mandate, when all they really are using it for is close races where every vote counts (and thus, every policy decision must be crafted and tightened down to a mediocre middle).
That was not their point, so far as I can tell, and blog guy is right in saying that, even in a race where he didn’t receive 51% of the vote, Bill Clinton never really had to tooth and nail fight for every single vote, to the point of sacrificing his whole agenda. He was less than “51,” but he wasn’t less than “51-49″ in the way they use it. Also, this conversation has spiralled away from what Meyerson even talked about anyway,
February 1, 2008 at 10:28 am
Well it’s a good thing you claimed to have no idea what any of us were trying to say and then immediately and accurately summarized the entire conversation. Well, almost accurately: You don’t really seem to get what is important about the “51-49″ argument, although you did follow the argument just fine in logical terms. Way to throw around insults that are immediately disproven by yourself.
February 1, 2008 at 10:37 am
Oh, and as for the part where you disagree with my position on the whole thing: “[A]nd blog guy is right in saying that, even in a race where he didn’t receive 51% of the vote, Bill Clinton never really had to tooth and nail fight for every single vote, to the point of sacrificing his whole agenda,” what part of Clinton’s not-sacrificed agenda did he successfully enact? He was the Coolidge of Democrats: He did nothing when nothing was the right thing to do* (and nothing was the right thing to do in part because the mood of the country was so 51-49 that any move he made risked a disastrous overreach backlash situation).
Clinton was a pretty good president and he deserves credit for winning twice when the country was not only 51-49 but probably in reality 51-49 going the other way. But I can’t name a single major progressive accomplishment he can claim from his time in office, in part ude to the forced moderation from the whole 51-49 thing. If HRC wants to run on her husband’s presidency, getting back to the real issue at stake, that’s going to be a problem for her in the Democratic primary.
*Except in Rwanda, where nothing was decidedly an awful thing to do.
February 1, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Clinton was responsible for the Family and Medical Leave act and the Brady Bill. He raised taxes on the wealthy and expanded the EITC to cover more low wage earners. He vetoed the Partial birth abortion ban and appointed two strong advocates of the right to choose to the SC. And he did much of this over the objections of an extremely hostile GOP congress. He did pass some legislation which was a lot less progressive than the aforementioned initiatives and compromised on many issues which pissed off the hard core left wing of the Dem. party but I think he gets a bad rap as a “centrist.” Half of the time you read a story about about the Bush administration “rolling back” liberal idea X they are overturning a progressive policy enacted under Clinton.
February 1, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Wasn’t the Family and Medical Leave Act passed under Bush I and vetoed, in which case Clinton wasn’t responsible for the legislation so much as responsible for allowing a popular bill to finally become law? And what good, exactly, has the Brady Act done aside from resulting in such a bloody fight that every Democrat in the country is now terrified of touching gun control as an issue? Reagan also raised taxes on the wealthy during the latter half of his presidency, and Bush I was so hated by the right partially because he broke a vow to avoid raising taxes. Vetoing a bill is not the same as getting something done, and appointing staunchly pro-choice justices is the absolute bare minimum I would expect from a Democratic president elected in large part thanks to very strong support from Democratic (ie, largely pro-choice) women. As for the EITC? Let’s call that the epitome of my central point: Bill Clinton did a lot of incremental good by taking small steps to move the country’s policies to the left-of-center rather than the right-of-center, but I can’t name, to quote myself, a single MAJOR progressive accomplishment he can claim.
Again, I really liked Bill Clinton’s presidency. He was competent and intelligent and on balance made things better for Americans rather than worse. But I think Democrats fool themselves by pretending it was an era of liberal utopia rather than an era of very careful and often uninspiring compromise.
February 1, 2008 at 3:23 pm
“But I think Democrats fool themselves by pretending it was an era of liberal utopia rather than an era of very careful and often uninspiring compromise.”
I hope Obama doesn’t have the audacity (of hope) to back a non-Daniller-supported candidate in 2024.
February 1, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Also…ALL ideas currently supported by Obama (or Clinton for that matter) are ideas that have at least been broached by lawmakers in the past. Is there any piece of legislation that ANY president is responsible for under this rubric? Would even ending the war be an action attributable to the new president using this logic?
February 1, 2008 at 3:49 pm
Assuming you’re referring to the Family Leave thing, I wasn’t complaining that the idea wasn’t new. I was saying that it’s a) not a particularly huge progressive accomplishment so much as a minor one that makes a difference in people’s lives but doesn’t real change anything in the big picture and b) not something Bill Clinton personally fought for to the degree Liam seemed to imply. A president campaigning on a promise to bring the troops back from Iraq in his capacity as head of the military would indeed strike me as a somewhat different scenario.
And, of course, Sean is still fundamentally missing the point regardless of Bill Clinton’s personal involvement in that one particular piece of legislation (which is of little surprise considering that it’s a debate about how to achieve a progressive change in the country and Sean is not a committed progressive but rather some sort of left-leaning legal pragmatist or something and therefore isn’t concerned about quite the same issues regarding the future of the Democratic Party). I think HRC would also end the Iraq war. I think she would get roughly the same health care plan enacted in her first term as would Obama. I think they would both make raising the minimum wage and ending the Bush tax cuts priorities. All of this is why I would happily vote for HRC over any idiot the Republicans could possibly nominate.
The actual point of the “51-49″ argument was that Bill Clinton governed as though he had no margin for error (which was indeed often the case) and got things done incrementally without ever changing the nature of national opinion. Nothing Hillary has said in this campaign has convinced me that she would do things any differently from her husband. On the other hand, I believe Barack Obama has the ability and desire to turn our country more progressive in outlook, not just in policy. You can certainly disagree with me about whether I’m overestimating Obama or underestimating Hillary, but, for good or ill, I fail to see how Bill Clinton governed as anything other than a moderate 50+1 president in the 1990’s.
Finally, as to this: “I hope Obama doesn’t have the audacity (of hope) to back a non-Daniller-supported candidate in 2024.”
In fairness, I like and respect Bill Clinton and therefore have given his support for his wife due consideration in making my decision. I’ve never consciously devalued him because he is ardently supporting the candidate I support less in this primary, I’ve only devalued him because he’s acting like a petty jerk of late rather than as the commanding and charismatic leader I always admired. Or, at least, that’s how he seems to be acting in my opinion. It’s debatable, but it has very little bearing on the accomplishments of his presidency.
February 1, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Kittens.
February 1, 2008 at 5:36 pm
all previous claims about know-nothingness aside, I think you’re inserting what you think the 51-49 number means, not what the original authors meant by it. You assume it’s a choice that HRC would make, while obama would choose to crusade. The original back and forth correctly surmises that it isnt so much a choice, but a binary state of affairs. Presidents either face a 51 situation or they don’t. Maybe obama represents A hope that the country is in one of the non51situations, but he didn’t CAUSE that to be the case. Rather, the question is whether the country is 51d or not, and what THAT answer means as far as candidates. I think that thinking about it Andrews way confuses cause and effect, especially when cpntemplating how HRC would govern. Also,andrew is right in assuming I care very little about any one platform, especially a “progressive” one that has grown to such large range as to mean nothing. Also I typed this whole thing on my iPhone, so I must be right….and awesome