We're now on the 41st and probably final day of my daily presidents threads celebrating the 250th anniversary of the USA.Today we have Bill Clinton (b. 8/19/1946), who served as president from 1993 to 2000. Prior to being president he was the twice governor of and attorney general of Arkansas. He was the first president in quite a while to have no military history, and the second to be impeached after Andrew Johnson. Notable actions or events during his presidency include Don't Ask Don't Tell, the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Waco Siege, the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, the Brady Bill, ratifying NAFTA, Whitehouse.gov and the World Wide Web, the Omnibus Crime Bill, the Defense of Marriage Act, the 1996 Campaign Finance Controversy, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, the State Children's Health Insurance Plan, the Adoption and Safe Families Act, the Foster Care Independence Act, the Bombing of Iraq, the Bombing of Yugoslavia, Operation Gothic Serpent, the 1995 - 1996 Shutdown, the Republican Revolution, Operation Infinite Reach, the Dayton Accords, the Whitewater Controversy, Travelgate, and the Monica Lewinsky Scandal and his Impeachment, What do you think of man who had sex with that woman?Link to previous thread>>18551137As an aside, thank you for participating in these threads. I will probably make this the last one so as not to break board rules. Which is a shame as if we'd continued we'd finish the day before July 4. Oh well. C'est la vie. I'll probably do something similar at some point in the future, but like with states or something like that.
>>18552389monster
>>18552389NAFTA was the final end of America forever.
Both of his Supreme Court appointments were total LOLcows.
>>18552389normalized blowjobs. i mean that though. used to be that girls who gave head were known as the town bicycle and most wouldn't do it.
>>18552389the 94 midterms were the first use of post-Fairness Doctrine "media" to win elections through lies and demagogic populism
>>18552389under Clinton started the trend where any time Democrats had a government trifecta they would try to establish Maoism with LGBT characteristics in America until getting punted in the next midterms
>>18552485Was that before or after he appointed an affirmative action black woman surgeon general who said it was ok for schools to teach children how to masturbate?
The abortion issue helped drive the South out of the Democrat camp.
>>18552389Systematically erased almost six decades of Democrat control of the House overnight.
>>18552495since the FDR years the DNC consolidated their national machine. from 1933 to 1968 the White House was Democrat-controlled for all but eight years, a result of which a significant amount of the Federal judiciary consisted of Democrat-appointed judges who consistently made rulings that allowed the party to gerrymander districts in their favor. from 1969 to 2008 the White House was Republican-controlled for all but 12 years, resulting in the judiciary doing the exact opposite to give the party electoral advantages. the consolidation of race-based districts in the South in 92 also helped move those states towards the Republican camp.
>>18552495there was also the fact that a lot of prominent Democrats in the early 90s were involved in significant sex or corruption scandals and conservative talk radio capitalized on this
Midterms tend to go against the party in power ever since the Second Party System, and Clinton was not especially well-liked in his first two years, in fact he was elected with <50% of the vote. Hillarycare and appointing two far left Supreme Court Justices was also not a help to anything.
Ross Perot took just as many votes from Clinton as he did from Bush.
>>18552515Clinton initially had a lot of the same issues as Carter, that he came from a state that lacked any significant ties to Washington and he didn't really know what he was doing, though unlike Carter he did eventually hire competent staff. However his first year was a bit rough.
>>18552485On the contrary, the left was strongly critical of him in the '92 primaries as they perceived him as too moderate.
>>18552525none of that changes the fact that Clinton very much did govern from the left his first two years.>his Supreme Court appointments>affirmative action Surgeon General who supported pedo grooming of kids>having Maya Angelou read poetry at his inauguration>attempted nationalized health care and abolition of the 2nd Amendment
>>18552465^This. Rush Limbaugh was this loser dweeb who got beaten up in school so he became a shock jock to feel some sense of power and accomplishment. Dude was a grifter who likely never believed his own words.
The Washington Post had a good podcast mini-series on the 94, 06, and 10 midterms. For most of the 61 years from 1933 to 94 the House was safely Democrat-controlled. There was the momentary fluke with the 80th Congress when Truman's initial inexperience and voter disgust with New Deal government centralization allowed Republicans to regain power, and they also had control of Congress in Eisenhower's first two years off riding his coattails but those were exceptions. Most of the time the GOP were content to be a foreign policy party that just controlled the executive branch.
>>18552507Talk show hosts like Limbaugh were very good at casting Democrats as the party of douchey rich coastal lefties.
>>18552389These were fun threads with good discussion, good idea to have these chronologically. Thanks for the effort.
>>18552548they weren't wrong? Democrats didn't seriously try to contest the heartland states in a long long time.
>>18552560Well in the 88 election Dukakis did pull strongly in the Midwest because Reagan lied to farmers.
most of the racist evangelical Southern voters left the Democrat coalition after the 60s
>>18552567The Constitution was a large series of compromises to give rural states undeserved power.
>>18552569Which is not really true since Virginia was the most populous state until the 1810s and it did not have any large urban areas. Mike Mansfield from rural Montana the longest-serving Senate Majority leader in history was also a major supporter of New Deal and Great Society legislation.
The traditional union worker Democrat base was in serious decline by the 80s, Mondale and Dukakis had failed when they tried to appeal to it so the party under Clinton shifted their focus to the coastal professional class instead.
>1992-2000This is the tutorial mode. >rock bottom energy prices due to soviet collapse>no china threat yet>no big enemy at all desu>pre-9/11
>>18552572thanks to Reagan propaganda relentlessly attacking unions
>>18552577Unions fucked themselves over. The reputation of organized labor in the 70s-80s was at an all-time nadir. It was coked-up auto workers smashing up Hondas and guys sitting in the back of the plant reading a Playboy instead of working, but they still got paid and retired on a nice pension at 60.
>>18552582https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq7wnMvLYg4&t=54
>>18552582Do you seriously and unironically believe this? You're literally regurgitating half a century old propaganda.
>>18552572i agree Democrats lacked an answer to Reagan. Clinton eventually beat them through triangulation.
>>18552590he did it so well that his own party lost Congress in 94 and for the rest of his presidency he was just signing Republican bills into law
>>18552596You're spending all this time talking about Clinton, but refuse to look at the other side. Republicans were victorious for a reason and it wasn't because of neoliberalism or Clinton
>>18552599I'm only answering his question about what happened in 94 onward. Democrats adopted corporations-come-first-policy in the time frame of OPs question and have massively been punished by voters for it. Republicans are well known to do well with culture wars, which works well when neither party delivers anything economically and the primary voter demographic (which statistically remains white, non-college educated) has seen wage -declines- since mid 80s. It's gotten so bad that US life expectancy has started decreasing for the last ~5 years. People's wages are decreasing (specifically for the largest voting block - white, non-college educated), neither party does anything to fix, one party yells "if only all browns were deported and all gays were rounded up and put in evangelical run pray-the-gay-away reeducation camps then everything would be ok" and you're surprised when it works?
>>18552588Well my grandfather was in the USW and he saw firsthand what a unionized plant looked like by the 70s. It was not pretty. It was exactly as >>18552582 described.
Can an American tell me, a humble yuropoor, why Bush sr. got BTFO so hard? What did he do that was so bad? Was it just that he was an old stiff and Clinton was cool?
>>18552605What happened in 94 started well before Clinton. This focus solely on neoliberalism reeks of an agenda. There were a multitude of factors that led to the reorganizing of the political landscape. My goodness, the Republicans called in the Southern Strategy for a reason.It worked. Then we can talk about cable news, and talk radio, and Newt Gingrich's Contract with America, and social media. The list goes on and on and on. If it were as simple as embrace liberal populism then Bernie Sanders would have been a two term president.
>>18552612>Can an American tell me, a humble yuropoor, why Bush sr. got BTFO so hard? What did he do that was so bad? Was it just that he was an old stiff and Clinton was cool?That was exactly it. Also after 12 years of Republican presidents voters were ready for a change.
Neoliberalism in the US didn't start with Clinton, although he's the one that fully implemented it as the dominant force in the Democratic party and its policies.Winning elections for the Democrat party is as simple as actually materially improving the lives of most people. That's blatantly obvious. It is not some kind of rocket science as you'd like to pretend. Republican strategy works solely when people's lives get worse, because then they can successfully focus on someone to blame and because then their slogan of government is bad looks true.Note, it's not "running on policy you don't plan to implement", it's the actual result of implementing that policy that wins elections over the long period.Clinton in 92 campaigned on infrastructure investment, affordable healthcare, affordable education, corporate responsibility. These look very much like the Democrat platform of today, because they've failed to deliver it since literally the Clinton days.
>>18552623That’s it, heartland state voters are clamoring for all those things you listed. That’s exactly why they voted Republicans in power to deliver on exactly zero of those promises.That solely explains the shift in party dynamics and change of voter attitude.Sometimes I forget those deep red states are bastions of progressive policy.
>>18552627You'll find that every single poll ever done shows a majority of voters in pretty much every state want infrastructure investment, affordable healthcare, affordable education, corporate responsibility.Democrats keep running on it, and keep failing to deliver. It's no wonder that people aren't falling for it after decades of that, but polls continue to show the obvious:--people want policies that obviously benefit them and their family.
>>18552630And if these polls were a perfect representation of how voters behaved, Republicans would never win an election again. I mean, universal healthcare has been popular for decades, so why doesn’t that motivate people to actually vote for candidates who support it?Look, I’m not entirely sympathetic to the Democrat Party but the idea that Republicans win solely because Democrats triangulated ignores the fact that sentiment changed regarding governments role in people's lives. If you want a Bernie-type candidate to win then you need to ostensibly, vastly alter the electoral dynamics of this country. And I’m sorry, but all those Democrats in the south and rural America pre-Clinton were not progressive, nor were they delivering on anything you listed above before they lost their seats.
>>18552641Polls are a representation of what people want. If Democrats delivered what people want, Republicans would have trouble ever winning elections again. This has literally happened in the past, where Republicans only controlled the House for four out of 61 years.Instead Democrats run on delivering, and then fail to do anything because corporate donors won't let them. It's not a surprise the voters punish them for that. You would have a point if Democrats actually delivered and then lost. But instead they do the opposite. The one time they did strongly deliver under FDR he went on to four terms.It's insane that people spout policies with 70-80% support among voters are unpopular. How is it anything but clear that delivering those policies would make the party that did so extremely popular. Especially given how "moderates" have failed to deliver for 30 years at least and destroyed the party in at minimum local and state elections. "I wonder why Democrats lose elections when they keep running on change and then delivering nothing, I just can't understand."
The Democrats' attempted gun grab in '94 probably helped things along too. Besides, they forgot that the vast majority of crimes and homicides are committed with small capacity handguns and banning fully automatic weapons would have a minimal effect on crime.
>>18552649For gun control advocates the AWB was a half measure that they thought would lead to the abolition of scary "assault weapons" and would open the door for stricter measures across the board. Consider the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence used to be Handgun Control, Inc. and the National Coalition to Ban Handguns.The general population sees handguns as a defensive weapon, while the public perception of "assault weapons" as purely offensive. Gun control advocates have a much better chance of getting restrictions on "assault weapons" than they do handguns, even if handguns make up the vast majority of weapons used in crimes.
>>18552650Was part of that galvanization the existence of studies (or at least talking points) that the ban would have little to no effect on crime?
>>18552652The only study I am aware of regarding that came near the end of the ban when the sunset clause was about to go into effect. The DOJ commissioned study stated that assault weapons were rarely used in crimes to begin with (when's the last time you heard of someone using an AK-47 to rob a liquor store?) and were unlikely to affect anything and same with large capacity magazines stating that it was unclear that LCMS played any major part in most homicides as most ended only after ten rounds had been fired. Despite coming to the conclusion that it had such tiny impacts, the author still advocated in the report to keep the law in place.
Clinton threw the old New Deal Democrat base overboard. NAFTA obviously wasn't well received by union workers and the failure to pass universal health care. Next to nothing the party base cared about was passed.
>>18552389he ran as a Southern centrist. there were a number of those back then, including Al Gore, Dick Gephardt, and Sam Nunn. Gore and Gephardt moved to the left after Clinton was elected while Nunn became irrelevant. the Democrat Party since Clinton increasingly appealed to rich coastal professionals. they essentially forgot about the rural vote after the 80s and told heartland state voters they're bigoted racist reactionaries for not wanting to go along with Marin County carrying oversized dildos in a leather parade shit. their voter base is 100% urban and coastal nowadays.
>>18552659Gun control was proof of that. It's a policy mostly favored by city voters as a way of curbing urban crime, but goes over poorly with rural voters.
i think the biggest sign of how bad '94 was for Democrats was how Ted Kennedy was reelected to the Senate with under 60% of the vote. He got 58% against some guy named Romney or something like that.
>>18552617Has the non-cool candidate EVER won a US election? Seems like a big popularity contest.
>>18552688He got 61% in 1982 when Democrats gained seats.
>>18552689should have included the 1960 election as well
>>18552691the 82 elections only resulted in minor changes anyway
>>18552688I'm old enough to remember back then and there was a serious chance that Kennedy could have lost his seat to Romney. He did not have favorable poll numbers as was the case with pretty much every Democrat incumbent that year.
Clinton won only 43% of the vote in 92 with a pretty tenuous coalition of "new" Democrats (ie. coastal liberals) and "old" Democrats (ie. blue collar heartland state voters) that the GOP could easily split apart.
It began even before the 92 election upset. Everything in American politics for the last few decades has revolved around GOP revenge for the Robert Bork fiasco. Democrats led by Ted Kennedy absolutely eviscerated him in the Senate confirmation hearings. you have to remember that Democrats and the various women, LGBT, and black activist groups really really hated Bork because of his role in Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre and nominating him to the USSC was like waving the red cape in front of the bull.
>>18552703as others have said, Clinton had the deck stacked against him in a lot of ways. the media including a lot of liberals made fun of him in 92-94. liberal opposition to him really played into Republican hands.
>>18552465that would be correct. the Fairness Doctrine got repealed whereas for the preceding 46 years news programs had to represent both sides of an argument fairly.
>>18552715Yeah, they looked down on him in ‘92 as just another hick southern governor. There was an snl skit at the time I’m going to butcher that went something like “Arkansas used to be dead last in these state categories, now under Clinton they’re 49th! Paul Tsongas was the man that the establishment actually wanted that year
>>18552718Reagan's FCC chairman had decided to repeal the Fairness Doctrine, which had been passed in 1941 to remove controversial broadcasters like Charles Coughlin from the airwaves as the country was about to go to war. The Democrat-controlled Congress opposed this and passed a bill to uphold the FD but Reagan vetoed it. This enabled a flood of right wing shock jocks like Limbaugh to flood the AM dial.
>>18552727they tried liberal talk radio, they had NPR and Air America and it was pretentious faggy trust fund kids from Marin County and whatnot talking about how middle America was so stupid and reactionary for not appreciating the beauty and spiritual enlightenment that gay butt secks can bring you.
>>18552646I think democrats are more unified on actual policy than Republicans but Republicans are better at messaging and their openly biased media is actually popular. Where the right accuses mainstream media of having a liberal bias when really the only popular media with a bias is MSNBC, and CNN to a lesser degree. But the big names are all pretty fair like wapo, nyt, ap, Reuters, local fox, NBC, CBS, and ABC. The right has just been "playing the ref" for a long time.
>>18552744My cousin was a media relations director for a certain state Democrat Party back in the early 90s, and he found that the major news networks would pretty much air any talking points you gave them without fact-checking them first. He later went to Washington D.C. and found the same thing applied, and that it's gotten worse since because the media would push stuff like the Russia collusion hoax without batting an eye; they're a wholly owned subsidiary of the DNC. Think when NBC fired Rhonda McDaniels for not being in lockstep with the party line and Rachel Maddow said it was a good thing because "our network can't function unless everyone is on the same page."
Most of the 103rd Congress's actions seemed really out-of-touch and counterproductive because the economy was still sluggish from the early 90s recession and they were wasting time on stuff like gun-grabbing nobody had asked for.
>like Carter, Clinton had the issues of being a Southerner with few ties to D.C. and was an easy target for coastal liberals to portray as a country-fried hick>incompetent White House staff in the beginning (he eventually did hire competent people like Dave Gergen to assist him)>Hillarycare, ughh, Hillarycare>gun-grabbing which instantly erased the working class part of his 92 coalition
>>18552760Trying to put Hillary as a co-president/the new Eleanor Roosevelt. That was a horrible mistake because nobody liked her except shrill feminist cat ladies and she was a total charisma vacuum.
>>18552763that was correct. nobody wanted the First Lady to be a co-president. Eleanor sort of got away with it back in the day because of her husband's enormous popularity, and she wasn't nearly as off-putting to people as Hillary was. A lot of people who liked Bill did not like her.
It's fair to say that the AWB finished the Democrat Party in the South. They weren't coming back from that one.
>>18552769The Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging?
as anon said, the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine allowed far right shock jocks like Rush Limbaugh to take over the airwaves and engage in lies and populist demagogery. it was two straight years of Hillary=radical feminazi who support mandatory castration of men and they even attacked Chelsea who was literally 13. imagine how low you have to go to diss a 13 year old girl.
>>18552773t. LBJfag
I'm old and I had said that Clinton was likely to win since late in '91. One reason he won (with all of 43% of the vote) was that he was young and cool-looking to Gen X, but by the midterms the AWB, Waco, Hillarycare, and gays in the military was basically asking pissed-off /pol/tards to form a pitchfork mob.
>>18552769Democrats used to be friendly with the NRA, but that...that...you notice after the 1994 debacle that the DNC never seriously pushed gun control since, Obama even legalized bump stocks.
>>18552796all of his subsequent actions like quietly putting Hillary in the basement and locking the door, removing the more controversial members of his administration, moving to the center, etc happened after the horse had already bolted, had he done those by mid-94 he might have saved the elections for the Democrats.
>>18552801putting the AWB provision in the Violent Crime Control Enforcement Act was the kiss of death. it led to shouting matches on the House floor with some Congressmen saying cya to their colleagues who voted for it. not just Democrats, but Republicans who voted for it too got primaried out. as you said, it was such a disaster that the DNC pretty much quietly buried gun control and has not touched it since.then add in the national ID card, Hillarycare, Hillary being an unelected co-president, Waco, a DEI surgeon general who promoted pedo grooming of kids, etc.
>>18552763They hated her, funny enough, because she saved her husband from being hated with the 60 minutes interview and redirected it all onto herself in the process https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/hillary-clinton-2016-60-minutes-1992-214275/
>>18552569>The Constitution was a large series of compromises to give rural states undeserved power
>>18552796I was one of those mobsters but I was like, 12.
>>18552569It was more like large versus big states. The entire country was mostly rural and urbanization didn't become a thing until the post-Civil War years.
>>18552914*Large vs small states I mean
Bill Clinton did nothing wrong, and I'm tired of pretending like he did. Though, Herbert Walker should've won that election admittedly. Seth McFarlane plays a pretty good Bill.
>>18552769A good deal of Republican gains in 94 did come in Southern states.
>>18552942What about all the island stuff?
>>18552715Clinton's approval rating in June 93 reached a record low of 37%.
He was a very-ear-to-the-ground politician who tended to operate by poll numbers and didn't have a strict ideological commitment.
>>18552820Given that Democrats had had control of Congress for the vast majority of the last six decades it was pretty hard for them to shift the blame for nearly anything off their backs.
By '96 there was no question Clinton had become much more popular and his reelection was pretty much a shoe-in since the economy was going strong by then and Republicans had kind of overreached a bit. Some moves like welfare reform and tax cuts were popular, others like trying to ban cartoon porn were completely retarded wastes of time that ended up getting tossed by the courts.
>>18552801so lemme get this straight, they'd been doing gun grabbing since FDR.>ban machine guns (1933)>ban sending guns through the mail (1968)>'86 AWBwithout any opposition but one weakly worded and essentially unenforceable part of the '94 crime bill sinks their shit forever.
>>18553112idk you realize just how Democrats had nearly nothing to oppose them for all those decades. the rise of conservative talk radio was a huge game changer.
beginning with the Civil Rights Act all the racist Southern Democrats crossed the aisle to vote Republican and thus the Southern Strategy
One of the political trends of the post-92 era is that the parties have each adopted much more unified ideologies and voters have sorted themselves politically. In 1972 Nixon won 49 states and yet the Democrats won the House and Senate. Nixon had to work with this Congress knowing that a Dem could indeed beat him in most states and Democratic congressmen had to work with Nixon knowing that their voters could elect a Republican. Such a scenario today is almost an impossibility.
the US political system is very unusual in that it allows the head of government/state and the legislature to be controlled by different parties, this doesn't happen in most countries
>>18553108Clinton was much more popular than his party. He was a lot like Eisenhower or Nixon where they were popular, their parties not necessarily so.
getting rid of Congressional earmarks had a lot to do with changes in how elections work. it used to be that a given Congressman was more likely to vote for an unpopular bill if his district got pork out of it. say you pass a gun control bill. your cowboy constituents in Colorado won't approve of that, but if they get pork then it might be easier to sell them on it.
>>18553228>>18552389Now in Washington, DC...There's Democrats and the GOP...But the ones in charge are plain to see...The Clintons, Bill and Hillary!
thanks for the threads OP.
>>18552389Decent president if you were middle class. The start of the right-wing going full bore on the insanity because they hated that he had been a dope smoking hippie boomer.
>>18552609The American Car industry ate shit because it made shit cars and the Japanese made good ones, and it made shit cars because that's what the executives wanted to make. It wasn't the Unions who designed those cars to have negative gas mileage. It wasn't the Unions who designed those cars to be giant tanks that couldn't make a 10 degree turn. It wasn't the Unions who decided to buy the lowest quality materials available. It wasn't the Unions who decided the industry should run on planned obsolescence where the cars gave out every three years to force you to buy the new model.
>>18553254it was however the unions who assembled cars like chimpanzees while drunk and huffing nose candy with dents, improperly aligned body panels, the wrong equipment the car was ordered with, upside down trim pieces, cars shipped without oil in the engines, etc.
>>18553647>>18553254some of that shoddy q/c was deliberately to keep prices down for the consumer. if you want tight manufacturing tolerances you're going to have to charge more. car and housing prices have ballooned in recent decades because people aren't willing to put up with what boomers put up with.
>>18552820btw gun control is a liberal not a leftist policy. the left has always supported the right of the working class to arm themselves. further, a number of gun control laws including the 1968 one were specifically targeted at 60s militants.
>>18552389>>18552391He didn't rape that woman, which makes him a cuck. On the flipside, he primed the subprime mortgage crisis, which makes him a friend and good person who gets BJs.>>18552718They still do that. It's just that one side is corrupt and the other wants millions to die, so it's hard to represent their positions in a fair and balanced manner that doesn't sound like you're personally against the death of millions.
>>18553815>housing prices have ballooned in recent decades because people aren't willing to put up with what boomers put up with.The quality of home construction has steadily decreased since the 60s, not just the standards but the quality control itself is abysmal. Things have never been shittier post-WW2 then right now when it comes to home building.
>>18553915are you Squidding me? most 50s houses were cheap, hastily assembled dollhouses since they needed to take care of the housing shortage in a hurry. back then a lot of home renovation was also sketchy stuff done by your buddies who might have done welding or electrical work on ships during the war that would not pass inspection or code.
>>18552582That sounds better than what we've got now.
>>18552413Is that real?
>>18552744The two parties didn't have as much of a uniform national agenda back then and voting was more based on religious and ethnic background than ideology. Grover Cleveland functionally had the same exact beliefs as Republicans of his day outside supporting lowered tariffs.
>>18552518There's not any real evidence to back this up. Clinton was the most voted for Democratic candidate to that point, while Bush had a huge decline from '88.
>>18554914low tariffs had been a traditional Democrat plank because their main voter base was in the South, but even there some lobbyists were in favor of protectionism especially sugar and citrus growers
>>18554914Cleveland was against monopoly capital, interventionism and tariffs. That was basically the pre-TR GOP plank.
>>18554918>Cleveland was against monopoly capitalbefore or after he had the Army shoot striking workers?
>>18552942Up for a little Nafta Lois?
