The biggest irony of the 2016 campaign is Hillary Clinton running as the sort of liberal Bill Clinton once ran against. The Democratic party has moved too far left to accept the former president, or at least the version of Bill Clinton that dominated Democratic politics back in the 1990s.
The overarching project of his political career was to pull the party back toward the center. Barney Frank recalls, while Clinton was in office, getting no response to a letter he’d sent to “The Democratic President of the United States” because the post office classified it as “addressee unknown.” Within a few years of Clinton’s reign, politicians such as Paul Wellstone and Howard Dean began to refer to themselves as representatives of the “Democratic wing” of the Democratic Party.
To succeed today, Hillary Clinton—like any national Democrat—must win over that wing. But doing so will encourage Republicans to paint her as too beholden to the party’s liberal, urban, heavily minority base. If those attacks succeed and she loses, it will be back to the future for the GOP. That line of attack is why Bill Clinton self-consciously sought to ditch the losing liberal policies of the party’s previous presidential nominees, such as Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale. Democrats lost five out of the six presidential elections between 1968 and 1988, going 0-for-3 by the time Clinton ran in 1992. There was a lot of talk at the time about the GOP holding a “lock” on the Electoral College. Clinton and other so-called New Democrats thought they could regain voter trust by taking a tougher line on social and spending issues. Hillary Clinton is doing the opposite.
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