PHILADELPHIA — When Bill Clinton takes the stage at the Democratic National Convention Tuesday night, he will be addressing a party vastly changed from when he last accepted the nomination.
Back then, Clinton declared the era of big government was over. He said welfare should be a second chance, not a way of life. He proposed mending welfare and affirmative action, even he would end neither. He briefly entertained bipartisan entitlement reforms, although they ultimately went nowhere.
The Democratic Party nominating Hillary Clinton for president supports expanding Social Security. It is more hostile to welfare reform and would weaken the work requirement. Ask Jim Webb how far a critique of affirmative action might get you, much less a Sister Souljah moment.
In 1996, then-President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law. A large majority of Democrats in both houses of Congress voted for it. Clinton was ambivalent about the law but still ran ads boasting about his role in its enactment on Christian radio stations as he ran for a second term. The Democratic platform, to say nothing of the Supreme Court, now asserts a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.
Bill Clinton is famous for saying abortion should be safe, legal and rare. This year’s Democratic platform pledges the repeal of the Hyde amendment, originally passed by a Democratic-controlled Congress, and doesn’t even make any rhetorical concessions to abortion opponents. Hillary Clinton’s Supreme Court appointments would further entrench Roe v. Wade and could even erode Casey v. Planned Parenthood.
The theory for how Bill Clinton contributed to the economic boom of the 1990s was that his tax increases — on upper earners only! — increased revenues and reduced the deficit, thereby lowering interest rates and stimulating growth.
Clinton’s Rubinomics wasn’t the theory behind Barack Obama’s stimulus package. In fact, today’s Democratic Party is once again much straightforwardly Keynesian and the runner-up for its presidential nomination was a Democratic socialist.
There were some genuine centrists and even mild conservatives in Bill Clinton’s Democratic Leadership Council in the 1990s.
But the group was largely founded to counteract the political liabilities that caused Democrats to lose three presidential elections in the 1980s: too weak on crime and national security, too weird on social and cultural issues, too hostile to business and economic growth, too supportive of government benefits for people who did not work.
New Democrats were pro-business, (relatively) pro-balanced budget, pro-middle-class tax cuts, pro-welfare reform, tough on crime, more hawkish on foreign policy. Even in the 1990s, some progressives worried this was Republican lite. But Bill Clinton was a winner while Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis were losers. So was Al Gore when too many liberals voted for Ralph Nader.
Obama upended all this. Clinton loyalist Paul Begala didn’t believe Obama could win with a coalition of “eggheads and Africa- Americans.” Begala was wrong.
Bill Clinton thought Obama’s South Carolina primary win was no more significant than Jesse Jackson’s. He was wrong. Then Obama was able to win as a more or less transparent liberal in a competitive race with Mitt Romney, who unlike John McCain wasn’t totally weighed down by Iraq or the financial crisis.
Bernie Sanders’ Democratic primary campaign was largely a race against Bill Clinton’s legacy and the aspects of it Hillary had embraced. It was Bill Clinton who signed the law repealing part of Glass-Steagall. It was Bill Clinton whose crime bill arguably worsened the mass incarceration problem. Bill Clinton gave us welfare reform, NAFTA, a lower tax rate for capital gains than regular income and more Democrats for the death penalty.
DLC-style politics led half the Democrats in the Senate, including Hillary Clinton, to vote for the Iraq War. It made her slower to embrace gay marriage. Even in the one area where Hillary arguably outflanked Sanders, the swiftness of her support for Black Lives Matters, she was taking a different tack than her husband would have in internal party politics.
Even Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, is running against some of the Clintons’ vintage policy positions: NAFTA, Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Iraq War. He opposes free-market entitlement reforms and you never hear him say the era of big government is over.
Bill Clinton is still a revered figure within the Democratic Party and a reminder that Democrats once delivered better than low labor force participation rates and 2 percent growth. But Hillary knows this isn’t Bill’s party anymore and Democrats no longer fear the issues or voters that beat them in the 1980s.
