|
I think it was a combination of propaganda against Clinton, and actual disasters committed by the Wal-Mart Administration. If you think back to 1992, you might remember a very excited, hopeful feeling of change, and reclaiming America after the horrible corporate darkness and criminality of the Reagan-Bush years, and the largest number of indictments and unindicted co-conspirators of any Administration, even Nixon's. Clinton won by a landslide, had huge crowds at the Inauguration, walked along the crowd on the street shaking hands, Maya Angelou read a beautiful poem that then became a best-seller, etc. Then they took office.
Immediately, there started to be scary things said--"a new kind of Democrat," not like the old, not like the saintly Roosevelt, who had saved a Nation; "business-friendly"; "let's not be so associated with unions," etc.--and a huge influx of corporate consultants and business groups the Democrats had never been associated with before. Cliton would go out on these "I feel your pain/fear, etc." tours, then come back and help to deregulate a safeguard we used to have, or lowered corporate taxes and shifted them onto us. There was a frightening feeling that this was not a Democrat at all, but a corporate Republican, with the same ties, doing the same things. For the first time, we in the Midwest, reliant on manufacturing jobs, protections, etc., did not know what these people were going to do to us next.
What year did both the disastrous NAFTA and the disastrous GATT pass Congress, pushed by Clinton and Gore? 1993 (GATT was December; Harry Truman had refused to sign it, and now here it was). This not only decimated our region's manufacturing economy, which has never recovered, but introduced a huge trade deficit that has only exploded since, every time there is a new "free" trade agreement among capitalists. "Democrats" were no longer on our side, but were as corporate Republican as Republicans. None of our issues were ever referred to anymore; there were only corporate deals and fundraising. At this same time, after another uprising of the people over unaffordable health care, the so-called "Clinton plan" (like the recent "Medicare" insurance and pharmaceutical industry Part D prescription mess, that only made all costs worse and shifted profits further to corporations and away from Government regulation), was this 1000+ page mess that moved people onto HMOs--disastrously, incomprehensibly, only to trick them and cut their coverage--rather than take on the God-damned problem and either bring universal health care coverage, or at least put a freeze on prices/profits, tax excess profits, etc. It solved nothing, was so complicated and corporate-driven that there was no support for it, it finally died, and nothing else was done!
This in a nutshell was what happened--I will never forget the kind of frightened, perplexed attitude toward these people, as if--What the fuck kind of "Democrats" are these? What are they going to do to us next? etc. Support for this group dropped off sharply as soon as people knew what kinds of corporate lobbyists they were, that they were never going to address any of our problems, except to give lip service for votes, and that voting for a "D"LC type, was just like a vote for a Republican. The only difference was which corporations they were going to funnel money to. Clinton gave us shit like the "V-chip," rather than regulating the media, then deregulated the media's ownership further with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, just like a fascist Republican, then we were supposed to buy this stupid "chip" from the same capitalists who had disenfranchised us. When the Clinton Administration really showed itself to be completely corporate and anti-middle class, anti-worker, cutting the poor off welfare rather than improving the pay of workers in non-skilled jobs that could still be found after NAFTA, etc., then enthusiasm for this type of "alternative" to Republicans was gone. They never helped us--all we ever heard was "competitive, competitive," which under certain circumstances you only recognize as corporate code; it means "more deregulation coming."
|