On the eve of the debates, it’s starting to look like Hillary Clinton could lose to the most inexperienced major party nominee in American history.
A lot of older liberals in politics and the media are frustrated at younger voters like me who like liberal policies but don’t like the Clintons much. Many of us voted for Bernie Sanders, and as such he’s also drawing some criticism too. Why can’t we just fall in line and be seen but not heard?
To start with, talking down to teenagers and young adults isn’t a great way to earn their votes or respect. Especially since the older Democrats have been talking down to us for the entire election while insisting that Hillary Clinton was incredibly electable. Look how that turned out.
But that condescension also reflects larger problems. The Clintons perfected their brand and strategy in the 20th century. That strategy is now backfiring spectacularly in the 21st and almost no one seems willing to see it.
In the early 1990s and late 1980s, the Democrats seemed to be in much the same position the Republicans are now. They dominated Congress, but had lost the popular vote for the presidency in five of the prior six elections. Bill Clinton promised the Democrats that he could bring the party back to power by softening their image with Southern whites and distancing the party from civil rights causes in the process.
During the 1992 campaign, he made a point of selecting another white, Southern man as his vice presidential nominee and denouncing a black hip-hop artist and activist. He even asserted that rioting and protesting African-Americans were the real racists. Bill Clinton also responded rudely to a protester at an event challenging him on his response to AIDS.
The point was to be acceptable to people who didn’t like the social changes in America, even if it meant throwing vulnerable demographics under the bus. He continued this through his presidency, signing the Defense of Marriage Act and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell into law, both of which were reversed in recent years as LGBTQ rights have expanded. Bill Clinton also signed a crime bill into law that would incarcerate many African-American men with mandatory minimums. His “reforms” to welfare hurt most of America’s poorest while he simultaneously relaxed the regulations on Wall Street. His policies with crime and welfare also created a series of incentives that have broken apart families, even after prison sentences are served.
The Clintons also popularized triangulation, the practice of taking a more moderate stance than your own party to draw crossover votes, and the use of oddly exact words (see: sexual relations with that woman). Nowadays, those don’t work out quite as well. Both help lead to the impression that the Clintons are the politician's politicians.
And triangulation has been a spectacular disaster as of late. Democratic attempts to compromise with Republicans who would not be compromised with led to watered-down stimulus and health care bills that still got no Republican votes in Congress. Subsequent attempts by Southern Democrats to run to the right led to almost all of them getting defeated as the Tea Party rose to power.
Which is half of the Clintons’ problem nowadays. However hard they try to show Southern whites that they’re just like them, that opportunity has passed. However many Sistah Souljah’s they denounce, the people Clinton courted in 1992 are now ardently lined up behind a party they could not possibly out-prejudice. They could try to get around this the same way Obama did, by building up a groundswell of support among young voters and people of color, but the actions of the Clintons over the last few decades have made earning the trust of young people much harder.
She wanted a big, beautiful wall on the border during the Bush administration. She’s called black children super-predators and talked about "bring[ing] them to heel." Do I trust the Clintons with the rights of minority groups? No, and they’ve given me ample reason for it.
Hillary Clinton was consistently more hawkish than President Obama and Vice President Biden, ushering in the war on Libya that was both illegal and failed to bring peace to the country. I don’t have living memories of peacetime and almost all of my memories of Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which she supported, have been of unwinnable and ill-advised wars.
And, as a member of a generation that basically grew up online, her support for the Patriot Act and opposition to Edward Snowden don’t sit well.
Even with all of that said, I don't hate the Clintons, and I understand why they did what they did. Maybe it was necessary in the 1990s. They might have honestly been doing they best they could at the time. As a historian, I'd be relatively kind to them. But that was then and this is now. The same strategy that worked in the 1990s isn't great for now, either ideologically or politically.
I'll still with her, in the end, and I won't even pretend that both sides are equally bad. But I might be a little guilty after putting my ballot in the mail.