New Donkey takes on left-wing lie that Clinton destroyed the Dem Party [View All]

[dolstein]

It has become accepted gospel among the far left fringe that the downfall of the Democratic Party can be directly traced to the rise of the DLC and the election of Bill Clinton as president. Of course, anyone even remotely familiar with American political history would know that this is complete bunk, but because so many left-wingers are willfully ignorant of political history, this "big lie" has continued to spread, and many DU'ers now routinely make this charge.

Fortunately, NewDonkey.com has effectively ripped this argument to shreads in a recent post. I have posted some excerpts below. The entire post can be found at www.newdonkey.com.

<<Did Clinton Destroy the Democratic Party?
In the new issue of Atlantic Monthly, National Journal political columnist Chuck Todd adds his not-insignificant voice to a bit of emerging Conventional Wisdom about recent political history: the idea that Bill Clinton was responsible for the decline of the Democratic Party over the last decade or so, especically at the non-presidential level. He concludes by suggesting that Democrats begin their recovery by avoiding close association with anybody or any organization contaminated by excessive identification with "Clintonism."

. . .

First, the planted axioms:

(1) Clintonism was about "triangulation" and "splitting the differences" with conservatives; and

(2) Democrats controlled the House and Senate before Clinton was elected and controlled neither when he left office; thus, he, and his strategy of "triangulation" and "splitting the differences" must have caused this decline.

. . .

. . it represents a good example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) logical fallacy, really no different than the assumption that George Bush's foreign policy has thwarted Jihadist Terrorism because there have been no strikes on the U.S. since 9/11.

That becomes more obvious when you look at the alternative explanations for 1994, which include (a) many years of pent-up popular frustration with a Democratic-dominated Congress, skllfully exploited by the GOP's dishonest but resolute alliance with the term-limits and balanced-budget movements; (b) a huge number of Democratic retirements; (c) the racial gerrymandering that guaranteed big southern losses in the House; and (d) the first big mobilization of the Christian Right.

And then there's the Big Bertha of factors, which I'm sure Todd is familiar with: 1994 as the culmination of a gradual but steady trend towards realignment of the two parties on roughly ideological lines, which gave the GOP its big opportunity (in conjunction with the four factors mentioned above) to make huge gains in areas of the country previously represented and governed by relatively conservative (certainly far more conservative than Clinton-style) Democrats. . . .


. . .

Finally, you really have to look at where Democrats lost ground in 2002 and 2004 to see how truly laughable it is to suggest that "centrism" was some kind of fatal curse for our congressional and presidential candidates. Does anybody really think that, say, Max Cleland would have won re-election in 2002 had he been more of a loud-and-proud old-fashioned pre-Clinton Democrat? Or that Brad Carson could have won Oklahoma last year if he had come out for a single-payer health care system? Give me a break.