Republicans thinking fondly of Clinton?

[summer]

I've read two articles on this today so I'll C/P them separately. Thoughts? And yes, one is the Daily Beast. So sue me.

www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/31/why-sarah-palin-s-reputation-has-plummeted-as-bill-clinton-s-has-grown.html

Time cools passions and adds perspective. This seems especially true for the tumultuous Republican love affair with Sarah Palin. It was intense, it was irrational—and it’s over.

Dick Cheney is just the latest conservative icon to join the chorus of voices who recognize that the selection of Sarah Palin for vice president was a major-league mistake. The man who first brought Palin to John McCain, Steve Schmidt, famously came to that conclusion before the 2008 campaign even ended. Now Team Romney doesn’t even want her to be seen at the same podium in Tampa. And in perhaps the unkindest cut, Mindy Meyer, the Legally Blonde-inspired 22-year-old conservative New York State Senate candidate known in the tabloids as “the Magenta Yenta,” dismissed Palin by saying, “She's just so oblivious to the issues.”

There’s a reason for this broad-based cooling of affections. In the past four years, something like an organic consensus has emerged. Doubts that began with talk of “death panels” only grew with mutterings about “blood libel.” Over time, the reflexive Republican impulse to defend her honor became replaced with exhaustion and embarrassment.

Even some of the most devoted Palinites are left wondering what they were thinking.

Take David Kelly of Colorado Springs, the one-time treasurer of the Draft Sarah 2012 committee. In 2009, when I interviewed him, Kelly believed that Palin “represents the silent majority of this nation ... she invokes what conservative America’s all about: God and Country.” Now he’s come to a different conclusion.

“You may be shocked to hear that I am no longer a Palin supporter,” he told me over the phone. “I think what attracted me to her in the first place was the fact that she’d say things that you’d hear at the Thanksgiving table when your relatives are there and go, ‘There’s my crazy aunt, but she nails it every time.’”
Sarah Palin and Bill Clinton


But now? “I realize that she’s another Republican talking head,” says Kelly, who is today a proud Ron Paul supporter. “I don’t think she has the caliber to make a great leader for this nation in these times ... She’s off my radar. It’s a sad statement.”

Yes, it’s been a bad breakup. But signs of trouble were there for a long time. In December 2010, just one month after the Tea Party triumph, an ABC poll found that “59 percent of voters said they wouldn’t cast a ballot for Palin and only 8 percent of Americans said they’d ‘definitely’ vote for her.”

Almost a year later, in September 2011, a McClatchy-Marist poll found that “by 72 percent to 24 percent, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents do not want Palin to run for president in 2012. Even among Tea Party supporters—a group that likes Palin—68 percent do not want her to run.”

The polarization has faded in favor of a general understanding that for all her talents, Palin was not ready for presidential prime time.

Objectivity is elusive, but eventually something like balance creeps into our assessments.

This new consensus is a vindication for her critics, especially Republican skeptics like Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker, who described Palin as an “attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.” In the hothouse atmosphere of 2008, Parker’s statement earned her some 20,000 emails, many of this vintage: “You’re not one of us, you’re one of THEM, the liberal lovers, the flag-burners, country haters, the ones who want to kill god and put Stalin in his place and see this nation destroyed by a sea of brown people and gays.”

Now even such inspired bile seems like a museum piece. Absent the chance that she could be a heartbeat away from the presidency (or a candidate herself), Palin no longer stirs the kind of passion that sold magazines and divided families. The fascination has faded. Instead, there is an aura of embarrassment bordering on amnesia, even from some one-time supporters. This dynamic will ultimately affect Michele Bachmann fans as well.

While I was writing this column, an interesting bit of contrasting data hit the wires. Bill Clinton has a 66 percent approval rating, matching his all-time high. Coincident with this news is the announcement that Bubba will be the Wednesday night keynote speaker of the Democratic convention in North Carolina.

It is surreal but true to say that Bill Clinton is now the Republicans’ favorite living Democratic president, a person who even Newt Gingrich now refers to with nostalgia and something like respect.

No more is Clinton attacked as far-left ’60s radical—he is recognized as the essentially centrist Southern governor he always said he was. His wife—perhaps even more hated by the right in the 1990s—is widely regarded as a stabilizing force in the Obama administration as secretary of state.

One interpretation of this reversal of fortune is that the Clintons look good because the Obamas are so bad. But reflect on the fact that so many of the attacks are the same—including a column originally published on WorldNetDaily calling Clinton a Marxist Manchurian candidate—and you quickly come to the more obvious conclusion that the problem lies in the reflexive hyper-partisanship that distorts the characters of political figures beyond realistic recognition.

Over time, we start to see these figures more clearly. No one is as good as intense advocates believe or as bad as overheated opponents insist. But I think it is worthwhile to note that the more reasoned criticism of Sarah Palin now seems to be widely accepted. And on the flip side, American consensus about Bill Clinton—for all his well-documented flaws—has erred on the side of his moderate defenders. Objectivity is elusive, but eventually something like balance creeps into our assessments. The result is not always nonpartisan.

The takeaway for this current election is to not fall for the overheated attacks—or overzealous defenses—of either candidate, especially when they echo old fear-mongering scripts. Falling for the fever of hyper-partisanship tends to make fools of us all, in time.

[summer]

www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2012/08/09/158505518/on-the-trail-even-republicans-spin-clinton-years-into-gold

This week, the presidential campaign has been dominated by debate over the welfare law from the 1990s. It's just the latest example of how both sides are trying to use the Clinton years to their advantage — portraying them as a halcyon golden age.

As long as Bill Clinton has been on the public stage, there have been people of both parties willing to say negative things about him. But this year, even high-profile Republicans are waxing nostalgic about Clinton's administration.

"President Clinton got four consecutive balanced budgets," Newt Gingrich told CNN last week after Democrats announced that the former president will have a prime speaking spot at their national convention. "President Obama's had huge deficits. So I think having Bill Clinton there is going to remind people of the Democrat they used to like, and may in fact shrink Obama by comparison."

On the campaign trail this week, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has been applauding the Clinton welfare program as an accomplishment for the ages.

"One of the things that happened in the last couple of decades was one of the greatest bipartisan successes we've seen. And that was President Bill Clinton and Republicans coming together to reform welfare," Romney said at a rally in Illinois on Tuesday.

For Republicans, praising Clinton can show that they are not mindless partisans. It's a way of saying, "There are Democrats I like, just not the one in office right now."

Of course, the Democrat in office right now has tried to co-opt Clinton's legacy, too. On the campaign trail, Obama makes it sound like he's running to continue the Clinton administration.

"My theories have been tested. Last time they were tried was by a guy named Bill Clinton," Obama said last week in Portland. "And that's why I'm running for a second term as president of the United States. To go back to what works!"

There's a simple reason for all of this Clinton hagiography: People like the guy.

"He's clearly popular among independents and relatively popular among Republicans as well," says Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center.

Kohut says today's presidential candidates are less popular than Clinton, and Americans look back on his presidency fondly. In the mid-1990s, there were no big wars and the economy was booming.

"The majority of people rated the shape of their family finances as excellent or good. It was 56 percent. Today, only 41 percent do that. So harkening back to the era of prosperity associated with President Clinton in the second term, it would be a positive thing," Kohut says.

But it could be a risky strategy for both parties, because Clinton is not just a symbol.

Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution worked in the Clinton administration and knows full well that the man can throw a curveball.

"Bill Clinton — because he's a living, breathing human being — will continue to talk, and as we've seen on different occasions, the longer Bill Clinton talks, the more likely it is that something interesting, in the political sense, will come out of his mouth," Galston says.

Something "interesting" came out of his mouth on CNN in May — a comment about Romney that left the Democrats shouting, "Cleanup in aisle Clinton!"

"There's no question that in terms of getting up and going to the office and, you know, basically performing the essential functions of the office, a man who's been governor and had a sterling business career crosses the qualification threshold," Clinton said.

Republicans who mischaracterize the Clinton years might have to deal with the former president himself weighing in — as he did this week on the welfare debate. In contrast, when people deify Ronald Reagan, there is no chance that the Gipper will rise up from the grave and veer from the talking points.

[IIOY]

I didn't read the articles but this wouldn't surprise me. Clinton moved to the right on a lot of political issues, especially during his second term and mostly because he had to in order to get anything accomplished, thanks to the Republican Revolution in 1994. There were balanced budgets, welfare reform, etc.. I would guess that Rs praising Clinton get a twofer - they can claim bipartisanship while simultaneously taking credit for those accomplishments.

[Deleted]

The Democrats have been slowly moving to the right as the Republicans have become more and more conservative.

Ronald Reagan their icon looks more liberal than Obama some days.

It is a strange world we live in.

[Deleted]

Many republicans love Clinton in retrospect because he was a middle of the road democrat. People are pinning for him in this devicive climate of current politics.

And no, the left is not moving to the center while the right goes extreme lol. Both are extreme right now, unfortunately. They keep doing it in response to each other.

[secretlyevil]

I am rolling thinking that the Rs are missing Clinton!

[ChillyMcFreeze]

There actually are lots of people who identify a trend of Dems becoming more centrist while Repubs continue to drift right. This one is kinda low on details, but it says basically that the Dem party focuses on individual legislation (DADT, Ledbetter, etc.) while Repubs build their platforms on broader themes (abortion, tax cuts), so Dems are more prone to compromising to get that legislation through.

www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/after-the-midterms-why-de_b_773672.html

This one gets at what almost any political scientist will tell you, that Repubs are simply better at marketing themselves than Dems. Both sides are yelling to "focus on the economy," but the Repubs have historically had better luck at getting a visceral response from constituents. So again, Dems are forced to bend to that strong messaging from Repubs.

seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2013410378_dionne12.html

These aren't great sources, but they have some good points. I know I read more in depth stuff in grad school, but my head might explode if I try to search Jstor this early.

[Deleted]

Aug 10, 2012 7:26:23 GMT -5 secretlyevil said:

I am rolling thinking that the Rs are missing Clinton!

Why? You don't believe it or you think its dumb they do?

Because many do, especially right now.

[Deleted]

Chilly: i'll search too. The things I've read show the public has moved more left. So if you are basing central off of the current public opinion, then dems would be more central. However, the individual parties have each moved farther to the extreme from where they were. So the public has moved more towards the old dems POV, but the dems have not moved toward the center.

But I will have to search too, which will be later today.

[secretlyevil]

Aug 10, 2012 7:34:12 GMT -5 @irishbride said:

Aug 10, 2012 7:26:23 GMT -5 secretlyevil said:

I am rolling thinking that the Rs are missing Clinton!

Why? You don't believe it or you think its dumb they do?

Because many do, especially right now.

Just thinking about the sex scandals. I can't believe today's conservative right misses Clinton. I can definitely see more middle of the road Rs missing him.

[Deleted]

The fiscal conservatives miss him. Remember, not all reps are the christian right

[GailGoldie]

Aug 10, 2012 8:01:39 GMT -5 secretlyevil said:

Aug 10, 2012 7:34:12 GMT -5 @irishbride said:

Why? You don't believe it or you think its dumb they do?

Because many do, especially right now.

Just thinking about the sex scandals. I can't believe today's conservative right misses Clinton. I can definitely see more middle of the road Rs missing him.

that's me - a middle of the road GOP. I actually voted for Clinton... liked him- still do. Don't agree with everything he stands for- but felt he was a good leader.