Prometheus 6

Prometheus 6, please school me on President Clinton. People, including me at one time, sweared by this guy. He gets credit for the economy, the surplus, on and on. A co-worker that says he worked on the welfare reform legislation that Clinton was ‘forced’ to sign his own version because of a Republican Congress. But how is it their fault? Didn’t he campaign on changing welfare?

And I’m sick of people telling me that so many people were and are  ‘making a living’ off of welfare. Was that really possible, with the max probably being 3K/yr?

What is this guy’s true record?

Thanks,

That's too broad a topic for a simple answer. Plus I got my issues, which may or may not be yours. So let me start by asking WHY you swore by him.

I was a pretty ignorant, unsophisticated, uneducated, immature, drug addled individual at that time. It's only in the last year or two that my interest in politics and what's going on in the world has come to the fore.

That's okay. The question is, what impressed you such that you swore by him?

A lot of liberals swore by Clinton because he has been one of the only Democrats fortunate enough to win elections in the last 40 years.  He was able to accomplish this partly because he took conservative issues and put a progressive spin on them.  Study the role the DLC has played in American politics the past twenty years.  You will better understand Clinton's relationship to progressive politics.  I am sure other contributors would be able to add more extensively to this analysis.         

This is indeed a broad subject.  Part of the difficulty is the confusing distribution of power in the Usonian system of government.  In the UK, the ruling party bears nearly 100% of responsibility for the performance of government during its tenure.  The UK is, however, a special case,* because it is parliamentary, two-party, and unitary democracy.  That means the party with the largest number of seats in the House of Commons chooses the prime minister, and the PM is the chief executive.  Clashes between the legislature and the executive are rare and headline-grabbing.  Until 2000, Westminster was the only government the UK had: Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland were governed by ministers in the PM's cabinet.

Contrast that to the USA, where the political parties are splintered (European political parties are usually monolithic), most domestic policy is actually made by state governments, and there is well-nigh inevitable conflict between the executive and legislative branches.

Usually people judge Pres. W.J. Clinton as  if he were PM of a unitary state, but the problem is that presidents must not only make compromises, they must do so enthusiastically or else they look doomed.  I am pretty sure that WJC was not intending to carry out the sort of "welfare reform" he did, and I don't think he was keen on the Helms-Burton "Cuban Democracy Act," but I can't prove what I think and he's not going to help me because his strategy includes permanently endorsing the outcome of his administration.

I read several books on the way Clinton governed; most of them were largely hostile-from-the-left, so to speak.  Yet they failed to convince me that Clinton was not an effective legislative strategist.  He usually managed to get plans passed by slender votes, suggesting that he took full advantage of every ounce of good will he had at his disposal.  Usually his concessions to the right were in the context of wholesale capitulations by state-level Democratic parties.  California, for example, went totally into the Democratic column towards the end of the Clinton years, but the Republicans were able to play the state legislature like a Steinway grand.  So a lot of the bad press WJC got (from the left) was actually part of a severe structural problem in the Democratic Party.   

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*The great majority of democratic republics, especially those with authentically democratic governments, have parliamentary systems; the USA has a "presidential system" which is used in most of Latin America.  While this would seem to make the UK the norm, it is distinctive in so far as it is a 2-party system and has been since the 18th century.  Continental nations like Germany, France, et alia, have numerous parties who must govern in coalitions.  In many cases the coalition includes the two largest parties, e.g., Germany is governed by a coalition of the SPD and the CDU--that country's [very crude] analogue of the Democratic and Republican Parties, resp.

One common misunderstanding about US politics is that we use the term "party" to refer to an organization very different from European parties.  One could say that North American parties and Japanese parties fit one mold, and European ones fit another.  In Europe, parties have class origins and have evolved into ideological entities.  In North America and Japan, parties are sectional.  They do not historically have a class basis, so they don't really have an ideological basis.  The GOP does now, because it was captured by the Conservative Movement (CM); the CM is a conspiratorial movement consciously modeled on the Communist Party, except for ideology (obviously).  As the CM has captured the GOP, the CM has also used some ingenious methods for consolidating itself ideologically.*  European parties are monolithic; they organize as teams, and run lists of candidates.  There are many parties that run as a coalition, but the parties themselves have noisy congresses to secure democratic centralism.  Except for the Labour Party in the UK and the curious CDU in Germany, party leaders don't normally have a region basis of support.

In the USA, parties are themselves coalitions of thousands of individual, temporary campaigns.  The national parties are loose confederations with rules geared to avoid alienating regions--hence, the odd primary system.  As sectional organs, parties aren't really ideological; ideological orientation is ad hoc, based on sectional needs.  As a president, Clinton had to govern with the support of a party that was at a profound disadvantage relative to its opposition: the CM acts rather like a trust for the Republican cartel, giving it a cohesion normally found only in Northern European parties, such as the Danish SDP.  Hence, he had to be a master of coalition politics.

From this angle, I think Clinton was undeniably the most talented president the USA has had since April 1865; FDR comes close, but I think Clinton beats even him.

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*In my opinion, the CM has mimicked the KPD (Kommunist Partie Deutschland) as it was in the Weimar Republic.  Granted, the KPD was defeated and eradicated by the NSDAP, but there are compelling reasons why it's a better model than the NSDAP.

ALSO: France, Spain, and Italy have some minor elements of sectionalism in their politics.  Central European countries tend to have more explicitly sectional politics, but form coalitions on ideological lines.