It’s not like Bill’s party of 1992 anymore
As Bill Clinton prepares to take the stage here Tuesday night at the Democratic convention, he’ll be appealing to a party that’s drifted far from the more moderate, new Democratic movement that he led during the 1990s en route to two terms as president.
The question is whether the 42nd president in 2016 can resonate with a more progressive party, while still reaching the conservative Democrats who enthusiastically backed him and now say they won’t support his wife.
Clinton has spoken at every nominating convention since 1988, and a review of his remarks demonstrates just how different the party’s message is today.
Bill Clinton is, in many ways, the face of some of the most controversial policies now being debated within the party. They include the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement as well as crime legislation he signed into law that many African Americans blame for skyrocketing youth incarceration rates.
“Is it easy to reconcile the preferences of people who joined the party and peo- ple who have left? No,” said Bill Galston, a former domestic policy adviser to Clinton.
“I know what Bill Clinton would do left to his own devices, which is offer a detailed defense” of his policies, Galston said. “I know he won’t do that.”
That’s because of voters like Jill Dunham, a 56-year-old telecom worker from Michigan who voted for the former president. “I thought he was a great president,” she said, but “there are a few things I didn’t truly understand back then,” she added, citing the crime bill. “As I get more politically knowledgeable, I’m not thrilled with it.”
The Democratic Party of 2016 that Hillary Clinton now leads looks very different than the last time a Clinton was running for a first term in the White House.
In his 1992 address in New York City’s Madison Square Garden, Clinton sounded populist notes similar to what is being espoused today, such as declaring access to health care a right. He also shared, for the first time for many, his personal story about growing up poor in Arkansas.
Yet his broader theme, in which he touted “a New Covenant based on responsibility,” included a number of more conservative social and economic ideals, such as pledges to end welfare “as we know it,” balance the budget and to expand school choice.
That more fiscally conservative approach stands in contrast to some of Hillary Clinton’s goals, such as a proposed debt-free college tuition plan for public university students.
It’s not hard to see why Donald Trump, the billionaire real estate mogul, may be appealing to some of Bill Clinton’s voters in old coal-mining towns across Appalachia and in the Rust Belt.
Much like Trump’s message 24 years later, Clinton framed his candidacy around the notion that government itself was fundamentally broken and cast himself as an agent of change, vowing to break the stranglehold of special interests. Hillary Clinton’s vow is to build on the “progress” of the previous administration.
“Is it easy to reconcile the preferences of people who joined the party and people who have left? No.” Bill Galston, former domestic policy adviser