[livius drusus]

Originally Posted by Clutch Munny

I dunno. Maybe we're finding it a little to easy to forget the conditions under which at least much of Clinton's presidency was conducted.

I don't think I am. From my perspective at the time, Clinton was not even remotely left wing, and all of his policies reflected that.

Didn't he make a serious attempt at a national health plan, for instance, though he knew it would be opposed and undermined? (And it was.)

Sure, but the plan was a classic example of how Clinton's desire to please everybody ended up satisfying nobody. Another example of that was the icky "don't ask don't tell" policy. It seemed to me that the inception of both those plans was as close to liberal as Clinton ever got and their failure ensured that he would never go down such a road again.

I mean, he was dealing with Republican houses that at one point shut down government altogether rather than play ball. Blanket assertions about his not putting his principles into action strike me as likely minimizing the extent to which this was determined by circumstance.

Indeed, it looks somewhat like the Fundamental Attribution Error.

Perhaps, but the very definition of a Clinton Democrat is one who, though putatively liberal, holds right-wing positions, particularly on economic issues, drug laws and Southern Strategy code like "welfare reform". Perhaps he genuinely believed in these positions as a matter of principle, but that just doesn't seem likely to me, just like it doesn't seem likely that he actually thinks local gay marriage bans are the right the thing to do on principle. It seems more likely to me that principle matters less to him than winning, be it in elections or legislative battles.

The point is not, of course, that Clinton was a committed idealist; just that he might have been no more a whore than most politicians, but perceptive enough not to bother (often) with attempting what he knew he would not be permitted to complete.

I don't recall calling him more of a whore than most politicians; I just think he's more of a genius in his whoredom than most politicians. I don't agree, however, with such a passive description of his choices. He didn't just avoid advocating for genuinely leftish (lost) causes; he advocated and implemented genuinely rightish ones.