Reply #45: We agree again, Teena -- no big surprise there!

[IrateCitizen]

I, too, think that the Democratic Party needs to move beyond Bill Clinton. I'd even go a step further, and say that a great deal of the difficulty now faced by the Democratic Party can be traced through the effects of the Clinton presidency. I honestly believe that while he was a short-term relief from 12 consecutive years of Republican rule, in the long-term he did the party more harm than he helped it.

Clinton's main strength was charisma, not the policies he promoted. After he got burned on health care (and a lot of that was his own fault, IMHO, for being too timid to take on the insurance companies), he never put forth another bold proposal his entire term in office. I think the best description I've heard of the Clinton years was a political strategic retreat -- a brilliant one, but a retreat nonetheless.

The big problem in all of this is that retreat is held up as an example of the kind of victory we should aspire to.

Michael Moore reached a lot more people this election than Bill Clinton ever could.