ShareThisEdwards Boxes Bill Clinton's Shadow
While it doesn't represent as big a challenge as that facing Republicans in dealing with the undead legacy of George W. Bush, Democratic presidential candidates, past and present, have had to take some position on the very different legacy of Bill Clinton.
The subject was obviously central, and occasionally debilitating, to Al Gore in 2000. In 2003, Howard Dean, then the Democratic front-runner, did a speech characterizing the Clinton administration as a semi-successful exercise in "damage control" in a right-tilting Washington.
Today the Democratic candidates' take on the Clinton legacy is complicated by the fact that the 42d president's wife is the front-runner for the nomination.
Part of Barack Obama's stump speech suggests that all the controversies of the Clinton Years are part of a baby boomer generational conflict that the country should simply get beyond. But he doesn't criticize The Big He in any particular way.
Two marginal candidates have been willing to voice the semi-submerged hostility in some Left/netroots precincts to Bill Clinton's political and policy views. Mike Gravel comes right out and says he thinks Clinton sold out the party to corporations. And Dennis Kucinich frequently suggests that Clintonism has made it hard for voters to tell the difference between Ds and Rs (an assertion, BTW, that got him booed at the YearlyKos conference a few weeks ago).
But until yesterday, no major presidential candidate Went There. In Hanover, New Hampshire, John Edwards delivered a speech that combined Obama's anti-nostalgia rap with a Gravel/Kucinich-style assault--implicitly at least--on Clintonism, past and present, as representing a corporate-dominated Washington culture of corruption and impure compromise.
To be sure, Edwards doesn't mention either Clinton by name. But the speech is loaded with all sorts of dog-whistle code phrases for Left-activist criticisms of the Clinton administration's politics and policies, denouncing "triangulation," "legislative compromises," "corporate Democrats," "Democratic insiders," "Washington establishment," and a "corrupt system" that was prevelant long before Bush took office. And these phrases were generally deployed in a way that suggests moral equivalence between Bush and both Clintons ("We cannot replace a group of corporate Republicans with a group of corporate Democrats, just swapping the Washington insiders of one party for the Washington insiders of the other.").
Lest someone think he was talking about, say, Ben Nelson, Edwards broke code with one phrase: "The American people deserve to know that...the Lincoln Bedroom is not for rent." And the MSM certainly hasn't had any problem understanding what Edwards was talking about.
IMHO, this should be troubling to any Democrats concerned about party unity and winning in 2008. It's one thing for Edwards to argue that his (often-impressive) policy platform is more thoroughly progressive than HRC's, or even that HRC is captive to a timid, incremental approach appropriate to the 1990s but not to today's circumstances. And had Edwards couched his remarks with one-sentence acknowledgements of the vast differences between Clinton and Bush administration policies, and the even vaster differences between HRC's approach to every major domestic issue (the sole subject of the speech) and that of every GOP candidate, nothing he said would be objectionable to unity-minded Democrats.
But he didn't do that. And speaking as someone with no personal stake in anybody's campaign, I hope he backs off this tack and at least gets into the habit of defending all Democrats against the sure-to-emerge Republican claim (especially if they nominate a candidate with no prior congressional service) that Bush's sins were attributable to a Washington culture he shared with his predecessor and his predecessor's wife. Edwards can emulate Obama and simply argue it's time for a new politics and new policies. But if Hillary Clinton winds up being the Democratic nominee, it will not be helpful if her GOP opponent can quote John Edwards to the effect that she can't possibly offer change.
But what Edwards is doing here will actually have a good effect. Let's say that the GOP does in fact take up your argument--well, then, you have the modern GOP arguing that corporate influence is too pervasive. If the two parties are duking it out over which one is less controlled by corporations, then isn't that a good day for progressivism?
In short: intra-party critiques are OK as long as you're trying to outflank on the left, because that pushes the whole debate leftward. And even somebody whose views aren't as liberal as mine should see that as valuable in a climate like we have today, where whether to eliminate the estate tax is considered a serious political debate.