I arrived at the Barnes & Noble just as “An Evening With Bernie Sanders” was drawing to a close, and while browsing, I couldn’t help but notice: The 20-somethings filing out of the event with the senator were reacting as if they’d just met The Beatles.
This was Nov. 14, 2016 — less than a week after Election Day. The corpse of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was still warm. Sanders was 75 years old, but no matter: He was the future of the Democratic Party — or at least his ideas were, and the enthusiasm with which he shepherded his flock to them.
So the recent wave of liberals “reckoning” with Bill Clinton’s sexual offenses should be put into proper context. It is not the beginning of the end for the Clintons atop the Democratic Party. It’s just the end.
Fact is, Bill and Hillary have become irrelevant to Democrats’ policy approach and ideological vision. They’re finally expendable. So the mea culpas from Bill’s defenders proliferating through lefty media, from the New York Times to Politico to Vox, are anything but brave. They’re convenient.
The party had been moving well to the left of the Clintons and Bill’s presidency for years. Indeed, Hillary repeatedly ran into trouble on the campaign trail because of Bill’s presidential record, some of which she vocally supported at the time.
Take crime: In 1994, President Clinton signed a bill mandating longer sentences for certain crimes and put thousands more police officers onto the streets. It was blamed for entrenching the disproportionate incarceration rates of minorities.
In defending her husband’s tough-on-crime posture in 1996, Hillary warned of “the kinds of kids that are called ‘super-predators.’ No conscience, no empathy, we can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.”
In February 2016, Hillary was interrupted at a private fundraiser by an activist looking for an apology both for the mass incarceration of African-Americans and for the “super-predators” remark. The bill became a point of contention, and during a debate with Sanders, Clinton went so far as to apologize. Sort of: “I’m sorry for the consequences that were unintended and that have had a very unfortunate impact on people’s lives.”
Another major achievement of the Clinton presidency was welfare reform, specifically work requirements in a bill put forth by the GOP Congress and signed by Clinton.
But President Barack Obama tried to water down those requirements in 2012, and in 2016 Sanders characterized it as a bill designed to “go after some of the weakest and most vulnerable people in this country.”
Bill Clinton’s response? He claimed Hillary had tried to get him to push the bill to the left.
Then there’s the North American Free Trade Agreement, signed by Clinton in 1993. A vocal segment of Democrats and Republicans blame it for shipping jobs overseas. By 2008, Obama was knocking NAFTA. In 2016, Hillary was reduced to waffling on a trade pact she negotiated as secretary of state when it came under fire from the Sanders wing of the party.
Gay rights? Hillary, like her husband and like Obama himself in his first term, affirmed marriage as between one man and one woman. Now it’s standard fare for Democrats to support marriage equality. When NPR’s Terry Gross asked Clinton whether she’d always supported gay marriage but opposed it for political reasons, she accused Gross of “playing with my words.”
President Clinton also signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, designed to raise the bar for lawmakers to force Americans to violate their religious beliefs. But state bills echoing RFRA’s protections became the primary battleground for Christians who didn’t want to participate in gay weddings or pay for contraception for employees.
So Hillary backed off: “They’re different laws in different times with a different intent,” Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill said of one of the new state proposals.
As first lady, Clinton’s health care reform crashed and burned. By the time she ran against Sanders in 2016, ObamaCare had been implemented and Democrats increasingly claim it doesn’t give the government enough control over health care. Sanders and his supporters are busy making “Medicare for all” the party’s new litmus test.
Liberals abandoning their defense of Bill’s boorish bedroom behavior, then, is the final indignity. The Clintons have thrown many contemporaries under the bus in their quarter-century atop Democratic circles. Hopefully there’s still room under there for two more.