Posted on 06/11/2005 11:00:40 AM PDT by Che Chihuahua
MILLIONS of Americans despise Bill Clinton. They have done so since he became a presence in national politics in the early 1990's, and they continue to do so today, more than four years after his retirement from public office.
The passion of the Clinton haters is a phenomenon without equal in recent American politics. It is not based on any specific policies that Clinton promoted or implemented during his years in office. It is almost entirely personal. In its persistence and intensity, it goes far beyond anything that comparable numbers of people have felt about Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan or either of the presidents Bush. It surpasses even the liberals' longstanding detestation of Richard Nixon. The only political obsession comparable to it in the past century is the hatred that a significant minority of Americans felt for Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
In this respect the phenomenon is all the more puzzling. Roosevelt made enormous and sometimes reckless changes in the American government and economy, and when his critics loathed him for it, he loathed them back. ''They are unanimous in their hate for me'' he said of them in his 1936 re-election campaign, ''and I welcome their hatred.'' Clinton, on the other hand, was a centrist who undertook no dramatic transformations of society or government and, what was more, showed himself to be an instinctive conciliator who believed in compromise almost to a fault.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
...over the course of 500 pages, Harris also documents the history of a president who, however frustrating he may have been in style and method, usually made the right choices in the end -- even when he felt that he was hurting himself politically. The 1993 spending cuts and tax increases, over which he agonized for months, ultimately reduced the federal deficit, reassured financial markets and set in motion the prosperity that marked the second half of the decade. The 1996 Welfare Reform Act, which Clinton signed against the advice of his closest Democratic allies, turned out to be the most successful domestic policy initiative of the 1990's...
This is spin beyond call of duty to political party. It is a also logical inference that this book review is a compendium of the partisan ravings of a literary lunatic driven insane after hour upon hour of uncritical listening to Airhead America.
Because they are still crazy after all these years, the left is trying to create a legacy for this do-nothing president. Why, you might ask? It's simple, Clinton II: The Abomination will opening soon at a political theater near you. The left's well organized and connected neo-communist pundits are cleaning up the reviews of the first installment of the franchise, a.k.a. Bill Clinton's eight year abomination fronting as a serious presidency. This clean-up also would ensure that Hillary would not have any road blocks to impede her "Long March" to the White House and the eventual Stalinization of America.
Make no mistake, that in order to disguise Hillary's intentions, Bill Clinton's image must be cleaned up and reinvented as a centrist compromiser extraordinaire. He was nothing of the sort. Instead Bill Clinton's legacy is correctly that of a do-nothing wastrel, except where it came to satiating his personal hedonistic desires. Bill Clinton, was never proactive in foreign or domestic policy with three exceptions. The domestic exceptions were the aborted attempt to foist socialist health care on Americans and the largest single confiscatory tax act in U.S. history. In foreign policy, we are still mired in Euro-politics with no exit strategy in Bosnia. Clinton was simply reacting to the request of spineless Europeans that always seems to ask America to clean-up their messes. Except when forced upon him, such as welfare reform, Clinton never took any initiatives that contributed to the good governance of the republic.
Therein lies the true legacy of Bill Clinton, that of a Pavlovian dog who only reacted to the stimuli around him.
Thanks to a GOP house and senate, they prevented Clinton from doing any economic damage. However, he did sell us out to every tin pot commie who threw a dollar his way. You know the old saying, drag a dollar bill by a democrat.....
Yeah, like the snap of a thong. He only reacted.
Big mystery why folk hate him, a president who could never got more than 43% of the American people to vote for him. Which means, at best, he started out with 53% of Americans who'd rather have had someone else as president.....
and it only got worse!
"It is almost entirely personal. In its persistence and intensity, it goes far beyond anything that comparable numbers of people have felt about Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan or either of the presidents Bush."
What planet is this guy living on? I don't remember thousands of people marching in the street with signs of Clinton as Hitler. Yes, we have our own Dr. Raoul in his devil mask, but we felt mostly disdain for Clinton, a deeply flawed man.
They think Bush is the antiChrist himself. I have never seen hatred for a president like I see it for Bush.
Oh no it doesn't! I, personally, despise Jimmy Carter more than Bill Clinton. I remember vividly the hatred the media showed for Ronald Reagan, which was astonishing in intensity...until GW Bush came around. There's never been anything like the animus the left shows this guy. You don't have to hang around too many news sites that allow commentary before somebody posts a picture of Bush morphing into a chimp, or asks plaintively where Lee Harvey Oswald is when you need him. This Bush-hating stuff is nuts.
But Clinton? He was just a smug, smarmy, good ol' boy who couldn't keep it in his pants. His soul belonged in Arkansas wearing a white patent leather belt and matching shoes and selling used Ford Torinos on the automile. If my feelings for him became worthy of the word "hatred" it's because I believed him when he shook that finger in my face and told me he didn't have sex with that woman. Everybody hates being duped.
Prediction: Hillary will not be nominated. Too many democrats cry at watching their money go up it smoke.
Prediction: A Democrat will win the White House ... Evan Bayh of Indiana.
Prediction: Bill will support Hillary, but Bill's ills she will never shake.
Prediction: The Republican nominee will be defeated b/c A) most likely, a weak defeatable candidate - who is torpedoed during the campaign b/c of scandle of some kind, or B) less likely, a Third Party Candidate ala Perot.
Prediction: All the ground work for this will be laid in a major recession that will begin during 2006 and intensify during 2007/2008.
Evidence? The history of previous elections, and the current economic climate. And none of this presumes a major attack against the USA. Should THAT occur, which I don't believe for a second it will for a long time, then the Republican just might win. But I still doubt it, though of course I prefer that result.
The key point is the recession, how strong it ends up being. I'm pretty sure it will not be a fun ride....; Greenspans recent comments on interest only mortages are a harbinger of the underlying fundamentals that will drive it...
Thanks Che. But this is 'pearls before swine'. The NYT libs and the Clinton worshippers will forever be in total denial.
Facts will never bother this crowd...witness 'Her Hillariness' and nightmares like Dean and Kerry still lurking about. Abandon all notions of somehow dealing reasonably with this level of insanity.
Prediction: A Democrat will win the White House ... Evan Bayh of Indiana.
----
He worries me too. If he gets a backbone and acts like a leader instead of a legislator, he'd be favored over the Republican in the Midwest states. Richardson as VP would help them too stealing away Hispanics.
Describing that man takes a sailor's mouth, so I'll just bump your article up to the top. If I said what I'm feeling right now .... well, you know exactly what I mean, doncha?!
Jay Severin, a talk show host up here in New England thinks Harold Ford is a formidable candidate but I thought he's been exposed as involved in a nasty kickback scheme which should take him out of the running forever.
>>
I have never seen hatred for a president like I see it for Bush.
<<
You must've missed the Reagan years. Remember? Ronnie caused AIDs, the homeless, african famine blah blah blah blah blah.
1- I really don't know what the R's are doing (except for an energy bill).
Never underestimate the appitite for govenment handouts and dictate. People want to have government pay their bills and tell other people how to live.
If the Republicans can't even defund PBS!, when they control the House, Senate, and White House they will have shown what they stand for, and are no longer worth supporting.
You've got my second there, pal. But both did an enormous amount of damage to America. Carter gutted our intelligence agencies, especially the CIA via the Church Committee, along with huge economic and military hits and giveaways to America's enemies. Maybe his biggest sin was eliminating the Shah of Iran and opening the gate for the crazy Muslim Imams.
Clinton did much the same, especially with idiotic appointments like Hazel O'Leary to Energy, who opened secret files to the whole world; and his giveaways of military secrets for campaign contributions. This is just a tiny list for both.
It's not surprising the NY Times and its reporter don't recognize the "sleaze factor" when it's visible and smelling right in front of them. They think that's the way the world's supposed to be.
A candidate like Bayh will be able to beat the republicans like a drum over the border issue.
Powerline
http://powerlineblog.com/archives/010715.php
Unreal
The lead review in tomorrow's New York Times Book Review is Alan Ehrenhalt's review of the new Clinton book by Washington Post reporter John Harris: "Measuring his success." Here's how the review begins:
Millions of Americans despise Bill Clinton. They have done so since he became a presence in national politics in the early 1990's, and they continue to do so today, more than four years after his retirement from public office.
The passion of the Clinton haters is a phenomenon without equal in recent American politics. It is not based on any specific policies that Clinton promoted or implemented during his years in office. It is almost entirely personal. In its persistence and intensity, it goes far beyond anything that comparable numbers of people have felt about Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan or either of the presidents Bush. It surpasses even the liberals' longstanding detestation of Richard Nixon. The only political obsession comparable to it in the past century is the hatred that a significant minority of Americans felt for Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Ehrenhalt's assertion that Clinton-hatred is without equal in recent American politis is of interest. Is it true? My sense is that the hatred of liberals for Nixon and Reagan exceeded the right-wing detestation of Clinton. And my sense is that the current mainstream Democratic detestation of President Bush exceeds the Republican detestation of Clinton. How would one go about measuring the breadth and intensity of the antipathies? Has any serious scholar done so? I don't know, but does Ehrenhalt? If he has any evidence to support his thesis, it would be nice of him to let us know.
Ehrenhalt follows his ipse dixit regarding Clinton-hatred with another regarding its source: "It is not based on any specific policies that Clinton promoted or implemented during his years in office." Ehrenhalt does not even mention Clinton's proposed federal takeover of the health care system or any of the other controversial proposals that fixed Clinton's political persona in our minds during his first two years as president. It was these proposals that caused observers like me to conclude that Clinton was a phony -- that he donned the camouflage of a moderate to conceal his left-liberalism. Clinton's 1992 campaign themes of "ending welfare as we know it" and making abortion "rare," for example, sounded good, but once in office Clinton seemed to have no more intention of acting to end the entitlement system than he did of affecting abortion.
Ehrenhalt credits Clinton with the economic policies that produced the prosperity of the 1990's. Put to one side his celebration of Clinton's "spending cuts and tax increases" and focus on Ehrenhalt's treatment of the 1996 welfare reform. The 1996 welfare reform of course derived from the Republican congressional majority produced by the 1994 election and the conservative intellectual critique of AFDC. Ehrenhalt writes:
[O]ver the course of 500 pages, Harris...documents the history of a president who, however frustrating he may have been in style and method, usually made the right choices in the end -- even when he felt that he was hurting himself politically. The 1993 spending cuts and tax increases, over which he agonized for months, ultimately reduced the federal deficit, reassured financial markets and set in motion the prosperity that marked the second half of the decade. The 1996 Welfare Reform Act, which Clinton signed against the advice of his closest Democratic allies, turned out to be the most successful domestic policy initiative of the 1990's.
Clinton's contribution to welfare reform consisted principally of his role in creating the 1994 Republican congressional majority. In 1995 and 1996 Clinton had vetoed two earlier versions of the welfare reform law that he ultimately signed. In other words, the most successful domestic policy initiative of the 1990's was one that Clinton opposed until he signed it.
Ehrenhalt provides the example of Clinton's signing the 1996 welfare reform as action taken because it was the right thing despite its political cost. Dick Morris devotes most of chapter 16 of Behind the Oval Office, his book on the 1996 campaign, to Clinton's deliberations over the welfare reform act. Ehrenhalt to the contrary notwithstanding, Morris powerfully demonstrates that political imperatives led to Clinton's signature on the bill. Morris's portrayal of Clinton's deliberations includes policy concerns, but the politics are clearly dominant. Morris advised Clinton that his veto of the bill would "cost him the election":
Mark Penn had designed a polling model that indicated that a welfare veto by itself would transform a fifteen-pont win into a three-point loss. Of all the developments that could realistically happen to affect the race, a welfare veto and Powell as Dole's VP ranked the worst in their impact on the president's fortunes.
Ehrenhalt apparently doesn't find the history relevant to his point, perhaps because it belies it.
Posted by Scott at 07:42 AM | Permalink
WHAT???? Was the writer absent from the world from 1992 - 2000????
Clinton was and is the MSM's darling. He never even received 50% of the popular vote in either 1992 or 1996. He's much like John McCain in that his constituency consists of the NY Times' editorial staff and news room.
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