[PEN-L:6275] Re: Re: Re: Happy Days Are Here Again

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

J. Barkley Rosser, Jr. wrote:

>      How much of this stuff would Clinton have
>done if the Dems had retained control of the
>US Congress?  (quite a bit of it, I think, but not
>all of it)

Clinton never did anything to campaign for Congressional Democrats - quite
the contrary, he triangulated himself against them.

As Hitchens writes in his splendid new book on Clinton:

<quote>
Clinton is the first modern politician to have assimilated the whole theory
and practice of "triangulation," to have internalized it, and to have
deployed it against both his own party and the Republicans, as well as
against the democratic process itself. As the political waters dried out
and sank around him, the president was able to maintain an edifice of
personal power, and to appeal to the credibility of the office as a means
of maintaining his own. It is no cause for astonishment that in this
"project" he retained the warm support of Arthur Schlesinger, author of The
Imperial Presidency. However, it might alarm the liberal-left to discover
that the most acute depiction of presidential imperialism was penned by
another clever young neoconservative during the 1996 election. Neatly
pointing out that Clinton had been liberated by the eclipse of his
congressional party in 1994 to raise his own funds and select his own
"private" reelection program, Daniel Casse wrote in the July 1996
Commentary.

<block quote>
Today, far from trying to rebuild the party, Clinton is trying to decouple
the presidential engine from the Congressional train. He has learned how
the Republicans can be, at once, a steady source of new ideas and a perfect
foil. Having seen where majorities took his party over the past two
decades, and what little benefit they brought him in his first months in
office, he may even be quietly hoping that the Democrats remain a
Congressional minority, and hence that much less likely to interfere with
his second term.
</block quote>

Not since Walter Karp analyzed the antagonism between the Carter-era
"Congressional Democrats" and "White House Democrats" had anyone so deftly
touched on the open secret of party politics. At the close of the 1970s,
Tip O'Neill's Hill managers had coldly decided they would rather deal with
Reagan than Carter. Their Republican counterparts in the mid-1990s made
clear their preference for Clinton over Dole, if not quite over Bush. A
flattering profile of Gore, written by the author of Primary Colors in the
New Yorker of October 26, 1998, stated without equivocation that he and
Clinton, sure of their commanding lead in the 1996 presidential race, had
consciously decided not to spend any of their surplus money or time in
campaigning for congressional Democrats. This was partly because Mr. Gore
did not want to see Mr. Gephardt become Speaker again, and thus perhaps
spoil his own chances in 2000. But the decision also revealed the
privatization of politics, as did the annexation of the fund-raising
function by a president who kept his essential alliance with Dick Morris (a
conservative Republican and former advisor to Jesse Helms) a secret even
from his own staff.
</quote>

Doug