Is Barack Obama right about Bill Clinton's presidency?

First, I want to apologize for calling Iceberg Slim a liar here.  I do believe that she is wrong when she says the Obama team didn't play the race card, but I should have given her the benefit of the doubt.  Emotions run high during the primary season and one day soon we will have to work together.  I also want to apologize for a diary that was perceived as an attack on Michelle Obama. (link)

I did not intend it as an attack, but I can understand how it could have been perceived as such.  I should have worded it better.  My main point was that the media has not treated the Obamas with the same scrutiny as it has the Clintons.  The two pieces that people took the most exception with raised questions that I felt sure would be raised if Obama becomes the nominee and for which I felt the Obama supporters could find good answers.  My only excuse for the poor wording is that I stayed up almost all night researching that piece.  So I was really tired.  And after I posted the diary I had to go teach a full day of classes.  

I found it interesting to see that others agree with me that the Obama campaign has been treated with kid gloves by MSNBC in particular, so much so that the question was raised as to whether it raised expectations too high.  (link)

1994 Retirements

I think one has to have selective memory to blame President Clinton for all the Democratic ills of the 1990s.  In response to the losses mentioned by the Obama campaign (link), there are several other possibilities to consider.  First, Democrats had a lot of retirements in 1994.  From the Stanford Review (link):

The cornerstone of Republican wins in 1994 was taking a decisive majority of seats that were left open by retiring Democratic incumbents, many of whom were embattled in the bank scandals.

Congressional Scandals

Second, there were the abovementioned scandals related to Congress that had nothing to do with President Clinton.  The House Banking Scandal  and the Congressional Post Office Scandal are two main examples.

It really is the economy stupid.

Third, one cannot underestimate the effects of the economy in an election year.  Ruy Teixeira gathered new evidence to show that instead of an ideological shift in the 1994 electorate, it was more of a response to the poor performance of the economy. (link)

President Clinton's approval ratings over his two terms reinforce Ruy's thesis.  In 1994, President Clinton's approval ratings were indeed low.  They were at the lowest of his terms in office.  By 1996 his approval ratings had rebounded in almost direct proportion to improvement in the economy.  Before 1996 his average was 51%.  After the economy kicked into gear in 1996, his average was 61%. (link)

Bill had record high approval ratings

Fourth, President Clinton's approval ratings, which seemed to follow the strength of the economy, were at 65% at the end of his second term.  In fact, if you want to compare him with Reagan, they both had a career average of 57%.  Bill's 65% approval rating at the end was the highest among recent presidents. Reagan ended with 64%, even after that landslide win in 1988, and JFK had 63% at his death. (link)  This seems to contradict the idea that he was to blame for the party faltering. Even when one factors in the Lewinsky mess, he still had high approval ratings.  And since he had higher approval ratings he has at least circumstantial evidence to show that he affected the trajectory of the nation as much as Reagan, whom Obama gave the trajectory changer crown to.

Contract with America over-hyped

Fifth, though Barack Obama is on the record saying that Republicans were winning the war of ideas, their biggest idea at the time, the Contract with America, was introduced so late in the 1994 election season that it seems likely it really had little effect at all. (link)As mentioned above, there is a lot of evidence to show that the economy was much more of a factor than those vaunted "Republican ideas."

Al Gore won.

Sixth, Barack is actually wrong about Al Gore losing the 2000 election. Gore won the popular vote with the most votes any Democrat had ever gotten up to that point.  And he actually won FL by a narrow margin.  If the 2000 election had not been stolen from Gore, no one would even be talking about Bill trashing the Dem brand.  It is amazing how some of the same knowledgable Democratic activists readily point out that Gore actually won and still yet blame Bill Clinton for losing the 2000 election.  Personally, I think the biggest trajectory changers in the US are those five Republicans on the Supreme Court who gave Florida, which Gore also won, to George W. Bush. (link)

Obamaism = Clintonism.

Finally, I think it is odd that Obama claims to be the real change agent and to claim that the Clintons are "the tired politics of the past" when, in actual practice his methods are demonstrably similar to Bill's.  I tried to subtly hint at that here.  Matt Compton stated it more clearly here:

For many bloggers, the problem with Obama was—and is--that he’s been playing into a much-derided "triangulation" meme in appealing to voters without traditional Democratic credentials. As Ezra Klein said last Tuesday, Obama was using "old politics of centrist caution and status quo bias." Markos Moulitsas walked back from his announced intention to vote for Obama, saying "you have to have your head stuck deep in the sand to deny that Obama is trying to close the deal by running to the Right of his opponents. And call me crazy, but that's not a trait I generally appreciate in Democrats, no matter how much it might set the punditocracy's hearts a flutter." Matt Yglesias tempered his former enthusiasm for the candidate as well, writing "while there's a lot I like about Barack Obama, if he wins Iowa it won't have been by running hard on the things I like best about him."

The great irony here is that, ostensibly, the thing that gives so many bloggers pause about Barack Obama is the very thing that they hate about Bill Clinton's presidency. In fact, the strategy of using "centrist caution" to reach out to swing voters and Independents has been called Clintonism for a long time now.