Bill Clinton: A Moderate Republican |
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to download this material for personal, not-for-profit, use. If you duplicate it for others, attribute it to Charles M. Kelly. Print copies are still available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and used copies are widely available on the internet. Clinton: A Moderate RepublicanForget the Monica Lewinski debacle. She's irrelevant. Clinton was a disaster for liberals and Democrats because he was a closet Republican and was a major cause of the wealth and income gap that exists today between the rich and middle- and low-income Americans. Voters now identify his economic policies that benefitted investors and the wealthy at the expense of workers—primarily, but not exclusively, NAFTA, WTO and "globalization"—with today's liberals and Democrats. As they say, "Why vote for a Democrat if their economic policies are just as bad as the Republicans." The Wall Street Journal agreed. From the November 7, 1996 issue:
According to the biased-conservative-news-media, Clinton was right where Big Business wanted him: in the middle of the road between the Republican right wing of Congress, and the moderate Democrats in Congress. In other words, The Wall Street Journal and America's right wing have successfully changed our definitions of balance and moderation. Traditional "Eisenhower Republicanism" (Clinton) is now considered moderation, and is almost nonexistent in the Republican party. Traditional "Truman Liberalism" is now considered extremist and is increasingly rare in the Democratic party. This means that big corporations, the wealthy and the powerful have convinced the American voter that:
Conservatives have been very effective in palming off these economic absurdities. Even many former liberals have changed sides, having joined the ranks of the affluent, and having forgotten what kinds of governmental policies got them there. Democrats are long overdue in
disavowing much of Clinton's economic policies. They erroneously feel they
must leave his legacy untarnished if they are to regain the confidence of
voters. The opposite is true: they absolutely must educate the
public, including many Democrats, about who destroyed working-class
incomes through globalization—Republicans and conservative Democrats.
To get a roaring stock market, Clinton and the
Republicans were willing to exchange high-paying manufacturing jobs for a
larger number of poor-paying service jobs. And now the pressures on
American incomes are creeping up the economic and social ladder to
high-skill and professional jobs.
It’s an economic disaster, and—until Democrats are
willing to accurately place blame where it belongs—they’ll never be able
to truly level with the American public about what needs to be done now.
The answer to our economic problems is NOT more of the same—globalization
and a whole range of anti-labor legislation—but just the opposite.
As America continues to drift to the far right, with
the help of some pseudo-Democrats, the charade continues Now go to:
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