“She exuded this sense of strength and self-possession that I found magnetic,” Bill Clinton said, describing the first time he saw his wife Hillary, the Democrats’ new nominee for president.
His charming story to a rapt convention Tuesday night was vintage Clinton — empathetic, emotional, personal and masterful. He painted a picture of someone almost too busy pursuing social justice to stop for a moment and agree to marry him. It was about as effective an antidote as possibly to the reality Americans have seen all too clearly this past year, of a calculating, duplicitous politician who has monetized her public service and readily sacrifices principle for ambition.
Whether the speech is effective in humanizing and relaunching Mrs. Clinton for the umpteenth time, the sight of Bill on the Democratic convention stage Tuesday night was a reminder of a bygone era for Democrats. This year, Secretary Clinton’s ambitions dictated a sharp move to her left, into the mainstream of a Democratic Party that rejects most of what her husband stood for in the 1990s. For the Democratic Party of Clinton, a party still reasonable in many of its policy positions, which had a much stronger claim to mainstream American values, is already extinct as Democrats move in the direction of this year’s losing candidate, socialist Bernie Sanders.
To be sure, conservatives were not keen on Bill Clinton when he was in office. By nearly every measure, they heaped much more abuse on him than they ever have on President Obama. (Don’t forget, they actually impeached the guy.) But today, Clinton is more a reminder of the time when his party placed the priorities and interests of working people ahead of ideological purity on global warming and the pursuit of futile but economically damaging energy policies.
His presence is a reminder that Democrats were once willing, at least grudgingly, to participate in conservative reform of the welfare system, even if it was only, back in 1996, to bolster its electability.
Once upon a time, Democrats acknowledged abortion as something regrettable — remember when President Clinton spoke of it being “safe, legal, and rare” — rather than as something akin to an ideological sacrament.
It was Clinton, similarly, who signed the North American Free Trade Agreement. His party once embraced free trade, in accordance with universal agreement of economic experts. Free trade is as beneficial today as it has always been, but the Democratic Party has abandoned it.
There was a time when Democrats supported freedom of speech, and did not make a main theme of their convention the curtailment of the First Amendment in the name of campaign finance restriction, as they have in speech after speech this week. In fact, at one point Democrats even believed in the Fifth Amendment rights of defendants to due process and also the presumption of innocence, which they are now working to eviscerate for those who have the misfortune of being placed on a (frequently erroneous) terror watch list by police.
There was a time when Democrats did not leap to delegitimize legitimate concerns about crime as a form of cloaked racism, making a self-serving exception only for those who propose scaling back gun rights as the solution. There was a time when Democrats did not view all tax-rate reductions as evil, as when Clinton himself signed a large cut in the capital gains tax, causing revenue from that tax nearly to double and the helping economy of his late presidency to boom.
Nor did Democrats always speak as they have this week, as if bigger government was the solution to every problem. It was Bill Clinton, after all, who prematurely declared that the era of big government was over.
There was a time when Democrats did not find it so trendy to embrace socialism, an ideological system that has destroyed human freedom and human life in every nation and at every time it has been adopted as official policy.
Incidentally, the Clinton era was also a time when Democrats were forced to make arguments for their policies, lacking the lazy shortcut of attributing all differing policy views to racism, even on apparently unrelated topics. It is a shortcut that Obama has himself laudably avoided, but which his presidency has occasioned.
The Republicans’ decision to nominate Donald Trump in Cleveland last week involves the at least temporary abandonment of longstanding beliefs and politics. But the Democrats’ metamorphosis into an extremist left-wing party is much more fundamental and will prove longer lasting. The party of Bill Clinton was gone long before his wife’s nomination, and the restoration of the Clinton family to the presidency will not bring it back.
