The 'disastrous consequences' of Bill Clinton's vision and policy haunts the Democratic Party—and the nation—to this day.
Thirty years ago this month, Bill Clinton launched a presidency he claimed, in his inaugural address, would"reinvent America." Clinton was right: he did reinvent America, definitively shifting the Democratic Party away from a politics that saw economic security for American working people as the fundamental task of government, a path that had brought the party decades of political success.
We should not romanticize the achievements of these years: many of these reforms initially accommodated white supremacy in the south and privileged a male breadwinner model of economic security. Johnson's War on Poverty focused far too much on the supposed deficiencies of African Americans and should have spent more resources employing people directly rather than focusing on job training.
Clinton wasn't the first Democratic President to take the party away from its focus on economic democracy. Jimmy Carter had first begun to move Democrats away from that promise, responding to the economic crisis of the 1970s by pushing to limit government spending, cutting taxes for the wealthy, and deregulating industries to the detriment of workers.
In 1992, as Clinton put it, workers in the U.S. would excel as long as the nation's political leaders understood one important truth:"Education today is more than the key to climbing the ladder of opportunity. In today's global economy, it is an imperative for our nation." In short, Clinton effectively gave up on trying to use government to ensure working people had good jobs, and instead argued it would be enough to simply push for better education and worker retraining.
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