Burying Bill - Clinton that is... [View all]

[Agschmid]

Why Hillary Clinton must turn her back on parts of her husband’s political legacy to win in 2016.

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If Bill Clinton had a chief political goal in his two terms as president, it was to win working-class whites and restore the Democratic Party as the home for their concerns. To that end, Clinton and his allies were enthusiastic supporters of legislation such as the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, and the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996—laws that spoke to the cultural concerns of lower-income whites.

Clinton didn’t succeed in luring working-class whites back, but he stopped the bleeding, strengthening Democrats in Rust Belt and mid-Atlantic states, where they were crucial. And while this wouldn’t save Al Gore in his bid for the presidency, it would keep Democrats competitive in House and Senate races and contribute to their huge wins in the 2006 midterm elections.

Now the picture is different. Since Barack Obama’s election in 2008, working-class whites—and whites overall—have left the Democratic Party in droves. At the same time, the party has moved to the left, pushed by an Obama-led coalition of young people, minorities, and socially liberal whites. One result is that, under a more liberal Democratic president, those Clinton-era policies have come under sustained assault. Before the Supreme Court struck its key provision, the Defense of Marriage Act was all but abandoned by the Obama administration, part of the rapid march toward broad acceptance of same-sex marriage. Welfare reform is still law, and the crime bill is still on the books, but as with DOMA, a new generation of liberals has challenged the underpinnings of both, with louder calls for state support of families and children and greater skepticism of the criminal justice system.

The fact of this new coalition puts Hillary Clinton, who seeks to succeed Obama on her own merits even as she’s indelibly tied to the first Clinton presidency, in a difficult place. Her task is to reassemble and re-energize Obama’s coalition, while also winning whites who may have left the party during Obama’s tenure, and even moving some whites (namely, white women) to the Democratic column.

Source.