Then would I be right in assuming that you scorched the skin off of the Democratic Party for selling the last shreds of its soul to keep Bill Clinton in power?
Dan
PS — doesn't count if you didn't write it before his Senate "trial."
Then would I be right in assuming that you scorched the skin off of the Democratic Party for selling the last shreds of its soul to keep Bill Clinton in power?
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Dan, yours it eh easiest of all. the answer is yes. See my (apologies: very long) article at BostonReview.net.
A relevent exceprt:
Bill Clinton hired Dick Morris to prevent what was seen, in the context of a single career, as an unacceptable horror: a looming reelection loss. Morris persuaded him that the modern Democratic Party’s founding principle—long-term investment in programs to create more economic equality—was unacceptably inflexible. For Clinton and Morris, the solution was plain. The Democratic Party had to shed everything that was slow-moving and lumbering in its ideological presentation. They had to turn a dinosaur into a lean, mean short-term vote-producing machine.
The Congressional losses of 1994 touched Clinton’s deepest anxieties, and made him willing to weaken the institution that made him, for personal survival. Dick Morris did it the way a CEO would. By showing indifference to any stakeholder but the swing voter, he gladly risked the loyalty of those who had been willing to stick with the institution through thick and thin. “The fact that it would anger Democrats was not a drawback but a bonus,” Stephanopoulos recalls of Morris’s strategy—just as angering long-term stakeholders is a bonus for a corporate manager looking to prove to Wall Street his macho bona fides. It gives the stock a goose. The only risk being, of course, the long-term health of the institution.22
Political scientists, having established that party identification is the best predictor of voting behavior, need to study how many party identifiers the Democrats lost specifically as a result of this kind of thinking. They need to measure the opportunity cost of doing what Dick Morris said needed to be done to win the 1996 election and the opportunity cost of the Morris-like habits that currently saturate Bill Clinton’s party. Now that Dick Morris has been disgraced, it’s easy to laugh at him. But we all know what happens to those who laugh imperiously in parables. He lost the battle. But did his legacy of stock-ticker thinking also lose Democrats the war?
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As for fighting to keep Bill in power regarding Monica, what can I say: I think the Democrats who fought against Clinton's conviction were defending the spirit of the Constitution against a constittutional coup. None of you are going to agree with me on that.
I think it would have been better to impeach him based on the informal vote-buying Clinton did to get NAFTA through, but that's just me.