Former President Bill Clinton’s hour upon the stage at the
Democratic National Convention – actually, it was 48 minutes – was mostly a
5,896 word defense of Obamacare. Following his speech, the fact-check vultures at the Washington Post dampened some of his fanciful political rhetoric.
Mr. Clinton is sometimes lovingly remembered by both
moderate Democrats and Republicans as a president who was willing to reach
across party lines to slay ungovernable deficits. During his first term, Mr.
Clinton cut spending and raised taxes on upper income taxpayers. Because the
economy of his day had been revved up by traditional methods employed by his
predecessors – tax reductions and moderate regulatory reform – Mr. Clinton was
able to use additional revenues pouring into the treasury to offset an alarming deficit.
The budgets offered by Mr. Clinton and affirmed by the U.S. Congress were in
balance – indeed, they contained surpluses -- unlike the current the non-budget offered by President Barack Obama.
The last time Congress passed a budget, weighing in at $3.53 trillion, was in 2009.
Although Democrats commanded the White House and both houses of Congress
following the elevation to the presidency of Mr. Obama, no budget was passed.
Had Mr. Obama during his first two years in office focused the
bulk of his attention on solving the continuing mortgage crisis and restoring a
flagging economy through means adopted in the past by Camelot President John
Kennedy, he would not have needed Mr. Clinton to pump up his present reelection
campaign. To be sure, settling the mortgage crisis would have been very painful,
because the housing crisis could not have been remedied without flushing toxic
assets from the market; people who could not afford mortgage payments under a
sound lending policy very likely would have lost their homes. But with a
restoration of sound banking processes and the repurchase of housing by
creditable homeowners, the housing industry would have roared back. Prudent
cuts in government spending would have left disposable cash in the pockets of
taxpayers, money that might have been spent to stimulate the economy.
Mr. Obama, utopia gleaming in his eye, reached for the brass
ring instead. He set the country on a path to universal healthcare through the
Orwellian titled Patient Protection
and Affordable Care Act (PPACA),
more commonly known as Obamacare, though it might more accurately be called
Pelosicare after then Democratic Speaker of the U.S. House Nancy Pelosi.
By most accounts,
Mr. Clinton’s nominating speech at the convention “did the job” expected of
him. While Mr. Clinton came to praise not to bury Mr. Obama, Mr. Obama, who
begins to resemble Eugene Debs during the transformative 1912 Democratic
election, has long since buried Clintonism and Clinton, once the Great White
Hope for moderation in the Democratic Party.
In a cover story
appearing in Newsweek just prior to the Democratic convention, “Why Barack Needs Bill,” Peter Boyer got it right:
“So, Clinton will be in Charlotte, but Clintonism—that brand
of centrist New Democrat politics that helped make him the first president of
his party to win reelection since FDR—will be mostly missing. Conservative and
centrist Democrats, so critical to Clinton’s efforts to reform welfare, balance
the budget, and erase the image of the party as being reflexively
anti-business, have nearly vanished.”
Extremism in the cause of liberty, Senator Barry Goldwater
used to say, is no vice. For Mr. Obama, extremism in the cause of the
progressive ideal is no vice, and caution in the face of conservatism is no
virtue.
The kind of Democratic moderation associated with Mr.
Clinton and the moderate Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) is nowhere to be
seen in Mr. Obama’s record, his rhetoric or his politics. Mr. Obama is – what
he and others have so often accused Republicans fighting a brave regard action
against the progressive onslaught of being – a utopian extremist.
Mr. Clinton at the convention was as lively as the Clinton
of yore. But in the Obama era, he is a
corpse at the table, now effectively buried under the progressive rubble.
History, and some Democratic and Republican moderates, will
remember Mr. Clinton fondly as a not unpleasing cross between Hubert Humphrey,
the “happy warrior,” and Huey Long, belching a fiery rhetoric from his nostrils
and scorching Republicans.
But Democratic moderation, along with the moribund DLC,
belongs to an age gone and forgotten. Just ask Senator Joe Lieberman, an
Independent spurned by his party and perhaps the last moderate Democrat in a
state filled with progressives with knives in their brains.
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