The Future of Bill Clinton’s Past

When we finally achieve our goal of a benign dictatorship, one of our first edicts will make required reading of the great historian C. Vann Woodward’s essay on “The Future of the Past,” which usefully explains how the past is always changing to meet the political needs of the present. He wrote mostly how the isolationists will seize on one explanation for the fall of Rome while the internationalists will prefer another, with the environmentalists preferring something about lead vases the social conservatives noting all those orgies and such, and how various ethnic groups will have differing opinions on the discovery of America, but we’re sure he would have also mentioned the recent revisions of the history of Bill Clinton’s presidency.

As we lived through it the era seemed the best of times and the worst of times, to borrow a phrase, with the Reagan boom echoing with audio enhancement by some financial legerdemain, and the right-wing Congress that got elected half-way through his first term forcing a more or less balanced budget and further financial deregulations and serious welfare reform and a few tough-on-crime measures and some big trade deals as well, but there were also all the tawdry sex scandals and a worrisome sense that some of those sneaky policies about affordable housing and such would sooner or later explode the economy. The first draft of history called it a rousing success, though, and for some time the consensus was that he’d been not half-bad, and at least had spared the country the “Hand-Maiden’s Tale” theocracy that surely would have resulted from another Republican.

This reading of history proved useful until recently, when Clinton’s long-suffering wife, former Senator and Secretary of State as well as First Lady Hillary Clinton, found herself in a presidential race with self-described socialist and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is more righteously liberal. Now no less a liberal pundit as Thomas Franks is lamenting “Bill Clinton’s odious presidency” in his telling of “the real history of the ’90s,” and it’s something to see. The author of the national best-selling book “What’s the Matter with Kansas?,” which explained that Kansans tend to vote Republican because they’re too crazed by Christianity to embrace the truth faith of socialism, and which was the worst book we ever read on Kansas politics, has a new title out that explains how Clinton’s tenure was a disaster for a liberals. He grudgingly concedes that Clinton achieved modest increases in the minimum wage and top tax tax brackets, and made a failed attempt at health care reform, but notes that the rest of what he’s remembered for was mostly the doing of the hated House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his fellow right-wingers and that even the economic good times were largely a matter of accounting tricks and Enron-schemes and dot-com bubbles.

As much as we’re delighted to hear such a left-winger as Franks at long last acknowledge these points, it is of course in service of the liberal agenda. Those tawdry sex scandals are now conceded, but that’s only because the religious right is now reduced to fighting for the right not to participate or same-sex weddings and saving nuns the cost of contraceptive coverage, and the woman who defended her husband’s serial abuses is not out on the campaign trail saying that any woman who alleges a sexual assault should be believed. Those tough-on-crime measures saved thousands of black lives, but now there’s a Black Lives Matter movement that that is more concerned about the mass incarceration of murderers of black men and women. Don’t mention trade deals on a Democratic campaign trail, either, or even a Republican one, because those are now out of fashion, no matter what economic benefits they’ve brought. That welfare reform bill that proved so popular and effective prior to its repeal-by-executive-action under President Barack Obama is now described as “the repeal of welfare,” and the distaff Clinton is to be tarred with that as well. There’s no mention of the awful affordable housing policies that drove a housing bubble whose popping popped the entire economy, which of course is all blamed on those de-regulations, or how the lack of concern with Middle Eastern terrorism might have manifested itself a few months into Clinton’s successor’s first term, so it’s not an altogether satisfying revisionism.

Still, we’re pleased to see some long overdue Clinton-bashing going on over on the left. It’s only fair, what with the current Republican front-runner is telling dubious tales about Gen. John “Black Jack” Pershing’s pig-blood soaked bullets and rehashing pure hogwash about Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill getting along and spouting the “Bush lied, people died” mantra and embracing the kind of protectionism and Wall Street-bashing that even Bill Clinton was too smart to embrace. Perhaps some future date will revise that ridiculous history, if it serves someone’s political needs.

— Bud Norman

The Democrats’ White Men Problem

The Democratic party has a problem with white men. We mean that in the vernacular sense that it has an animosity toward white men, but also in the literal sense that it is creating political difficulties for the party.

Whenever the Democrats win an election there is an obligatory spate of sneering stories about how the Republicans are demographically doomed to irrelevance as the party of white men, but after a big win such as the Republicans scored in the recent mid-term races even the most Democratic media are obliged to acknowledge that white men remain a formidable voting bloc. White voters accounted for 75 percent of the electorate in the mid-terms, the Republicans won their votes by a whopping 62-to-38 margin, and among the men who comprised approximately 50 percent of that category the voting was even more lopsided, so there has been some journalistic soul-searching about how the Democrats might broaden their appeal to white men.

One of the more thoughtful pieces appeared in The New York Times, where the apparently white and male Thomas P. Edsall bravely conceded that many of the Democratic party’s policies do not serve the economic self-interest of white males. He notes that Obamacare takes $500 billion of funding over ten years from Medicare, which benefits a population that is 77 percent white, and shifts it to subsidies for the uninsured, who are 59 percent non-white, and admits that many other aspects of the law have a similarly racial redistributionist effect. He clings to the hope that some minimum-wage hike referenda that passed in a few heavily white states suggests a willingness among white men to embrace central planning, fails to note a wide variety of other anti-white Democratic policies from affirmative action to anti-coal legislation that would lay off Loretta Lynn’s father to the Justice Department’s stated policy of not pursuing hate crime prosecutions on behalf of white victims, among countless other examples, and he quickly veers into the usual nonsense about the Republican party’s opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage and other social issues that tend to play better with blacks and Latinos than white people, but we appreciate his willingness consider that white voting patterns are to some extent rational rather racist.

More typical of the Democratic ruminating was Andrea Grimes’ foul-mouthed analysis at a pro-abortion web site of Wendy Davis’ hilariously inept attempt to win the governorship of Texas, which blames the debacle on white people’s lack of empathy for the poor black and brown women eager to abort their potential black and brown children. She fails to take stock of the embarrassing fact that Davis lost several majority-Hispanic counties which had previously been reliable Democratic constituencies, or Davis’ blatantly dishonest biography or any of her other countless gaffes, including some less than empathetic jibes about her opponent’s physical handicaps, and instead recycles the usual stereotypes of narrow-minded white people. The possibility that such unabashed racial and sexual prejudices might have had something to do with Davis’ landslide defeat has also apparently escaped Grimes’ attention, and that of the party at large.

The common Democratic complaint that white people are uniquely self-interested is all the more unconvincing after so many years of the “What’s The Matter With Kansas” argument that white people have been duped into voting against their economic self-interests by wedge issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion. Our frequent conversations with non-white folks and a sampling of their popular music suggest that blacks and Hispanics are more prone to anti-homosexual sentiment than the average white person, polling data verifies that Davis’ ardent enthusiasm for abortion was a key reason for her failure to carry those majority-Hispanic counties, the Democrats might have squeaked out a few southern Senate races with the large number of black of voters that have been aborted since Roe v. Wade, Asian-Americans in California are questioning their loyalty to a party that insists on affirmative action schemes that punish their overachievement, and there’s bound to be some limit to even the non-white Democrats’ patience for the party’s insistence on opening the borders to an unlimited influx from the third world. Writing off the vast majority of 75 percent of the electorate worked well enough in the ’08 and ’12 presidential elections, but the Democrats are wise to question the long-term viability of the strategy.

Although we are loathe to offer the Democrats any useful advice, as white men we will note that they have other pressing problems in winning our vote. The Democrats’ project of endlessly expanding government power, except of course for its ability to restrict abortion even in the most late-term circumstances, will inevitably infringe on the individual liberty to which white men have been long accustomed. A resulting racial spoils system will also offend a majority of white men, who have been successfully hectored by the past decades of education and popular entertainment into a belief in color-blind policies. The Democrats’ immigration policies might well succeed in diminishing the white male’s share of the vote, but we suspect that we’re not the only ones who resent being told by a bunch of mostly white know-it-alls what to eat and what kind of car to drive and what kind of light bulbs to screw into our lamps, and that freedom and economic opportunity will eventually have a broader appeal.

— Bud Norman

What’s the Matter With Kansas Democrats?

One of those internecine Republican primary challenges is happening right here in Kansas’ fourth congressional district, but what little national attention it has received is because it is so atypical. Instead of a tri-corner hat-wearing tea party amateur challenging a squishy moderate incumbent, which is the modern media’s preferred matchup, this race has a second-term incumbent with impeccable conservative credentials being challenged by a former longtime congressman promising a return to the good old George W. Bush-era days of earmarking porkbarrel spending for the district.

There’s plenty to say about this peculiar political tactic, and at some point before the August primary we’ll get around to saying it, but at this point we’re most intrigued by the widely varied perceptions of the race we’ve been hearing. Almost all of our Republican friends expect an easy win by Mike Pompeo, the incumbent with the impeccable conservative credentials, while almost all of our Democrat friends are confidently predicting a victory by Todd Tiahrt, the former congressman promising to once again bring home the federal bacon.

The Democratic prognosticators don’t expect that any Republicans in these parts share their enthusiasm for porkbarrel spending, but instead expect Tiahrt to win because they well remember how very popular he was the anti-abortion forces in the district. Way back in ’94 Tiahrt knocked off a more-or-less moderate Democrat who had held the seat for 18 years by appealing to the union dues-paying machinists in the local airplane plants and the would-be sophisticates in the white collar jobs as well as wooing enough of the farm vote to complete a coalition, and Tiahrt did it with a lot of help from the religious right activists who were singing “Oh, What a Mighty God” at the election night victory party. The scene scared the bejeezus out of the local Democrats, who continued to attribute Tiahrt’s electoral success solely to the religious right even as his margins of victory swelled with voters who found that he was a more-or-less moderate sort of Republican who brought home the bacon and was predictably unable to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision.

We try to explain to our Democrat friends that the anti-abortion movement is not a cult of personality that blindly follows any politician, and note that Pompeo’s voting record on abortion issues has been just as consistent and ineffectual, but they won’t believe it. We also try to tell them that while social issues such as abortion are still of importance to Republicans they are lately less important to the average primary voter than economic matters such as the outrageous national debt that Tiahrt wants to increase, but this is usually dismissed as crazy talk.

Kansas Democrats remain enamored of the “What’s the Matter With Kansas” thesis that Thomas Frank cooked up, which holds that no one really believes that capitalism and freedom nonsense except for the Koch brothers and a few other well-heeled plutocrats who have been hoodwinked the proletarian rubes into voting against their economic self-interests with a bunch of religious hooey. We note that conservative media ranging from National Review to the Rush Limbaugh show rarely mention the social issues these days, and then only because their liberal counterparts have forced the discussion with efforts to subsidize contraception and abortion or are employing McCarthyite tactics against religious dissenters, but of course they never pay heed to these voices and prefer to assume that it’s a non-stop Billy Sunday sermon. They can’t imagine any other reason that the district’s voters have consistently rejected the Democrats’ kindly offer to redistribute some wealth this way.

The past six years of stubborn unemployment and underemployment and falling wages and skyrocketing debt and even increased income inequality have done nothing to shake this faith, which could be described as religious if you really wanted to irk a local Democrat. Even those union dues-paying machinists at the airplane plants are finding it hard to see how it’s in their economic interests to support a president who routinely rails against “corporate jets,” and the thousands of locals employed by the much-hated Koch brothers have the same qualms, but the Democratic party that seeks their votes continue to regard their views as a result of some sort of snake-handling ritual. They might be right about the Republican primary, although we’re more inclined to the views of our Republican friends, but the Democrats are likely to find themselves out of power around here for at least another decade if they continue to believe in appealing myths.

— Bud Norman