>What about Truman's successor, Ike? Yes, yes, he hired Dulles and oversaw
>coups in Iran and Guatemala. I'll grant you that. But for me his one shining
>moment came when he stopped the Israeli/Brit/French invasion of Egypt in
>1956. Oh, can you imagine the howls were there an Israel First chorus on
>hand then? Also, Ike gave us "military industrial complex," and he didn't
like/trust
>Nixon.
and Justin wrote:
>Interesting how the Dems don't do these things when they actually have the
>power to do them. What they do is Republicanism Lite, or not so Lite.
>Clinton gave us GATT, NAFTA, the MAI, TANF, and the global intervebtionism
Ike was a mixed bag-- far better than the rightwing Taft wing of the party he defeated for the nomination in 1952 on most foreign policy and domestic issues, but Ike's civil rights advocacy was half-hearted at best. In many ways, Nixon was far better than Ike on that issue.
I highly recommend folks read Caro's MASTER OF THE SENATE, since it makes clear that there were real majorities for progressive legislation for many years, but the rightwing coalition of southern Democrats and Republican conservatives would suppress in committee or filibuster anything that got near the floor for a vote. One reason the 60s brought us so much legislation was not that the Dems had become so much more progressive, but they finally had the numbers to overcome conservative filibusters and could pass a generation-long backlog of legislation. Almost everything passed in the 1960s had been proposed by Truman and the Democrats in their 1948 platform.
Just as Clinton would be remembered for national health care, labor law reform, campaign finance reform and a number of other issues filibusted to death by the Senate in 1993-94. The conservatives have a simple strategy-- block any progressive legislation from passage so that progressives have nothing to go to the electorate with to justify voting for those progressives on economic issues, then use cultural issues as the salient issue to recruit their votes.
So we had massive filibusters and opposition from 1993-94 against labor law reform, campaign finance reform, and a number of other issues-- then the GOP mobilized the NRA and Christian coalition on guns and god to take over the Congress. I will grant Justin Clinton's betrayal on NAFTA in his first term, which "the Dems" opposed en masse, in the House voting by a 2-to-1 ratio against, despite the pleading by their President. In fact, it was the overwhelming vote of the Republicans that passed NAFTA, one more reason why the Dems are far superior to the GOP, despite Clinton's individual defection on the point.
This is the problem with this debate usually-- folks who want to attack the Dems take one issue by one politician (Nixon on wage-and-price controls) and declare that position representative of the Republicans, then picks out the worst acts of an individual Democrat (Clinton on NAFTA and TANF), and then declare there is no difference between the parties. Apples are compared to orange over time and political space, with no reference to the actual existing choices at the time.
Nixon existed in a context of far more liberal legislation moving through Congress. Every proposal he made (except for his guaranteed income plan, which tapes have revealed to be a not serious proposal) was a more conservative version of legislation the Democrats were proposing in Congress. Nixon and the GOP in Congress were far more conservative than Democrats promoting legislation.
Comes Clinton-- he was a bare majority of Democrats in both the House and the Senate and could pass his first budget by only a one-vote margin in each chamber. He didn't have the votes to pass his moderate jobs bill and he faced filibusters for labor law reform, campaign finance, health care and a range of other issues he was seeking to pass. On all of them, except NAFTA, he was more liberal than the GOP opposition. And the Democrats as a body, including two-thirds who voted against NAFTA were far more liberal still.
And even on TANF, the GOP position was to end the entitlement not only for AFDC, but for Medicaid and AFDC (which the GOP Congress just revived as a bill yesterday). Clinton vetoed two versions of welfare reform and kept Food Stamps and Medicaid as entitlements. He claims to have believed that if he did not sign the third bill, GOP President Dole would have been elected in 1996 and the plan he promoted as Senate leader would have become law-- and not only AFDC, but Medicaid and Food Stamps would have lost its entitlement status.
I think Clinton was a coward on the issue and wrong, but he was hardly a gleeful attacker of the welfare state like the GOP. His own plan for welfare reform actually increased funding for child care, for job training and would have meant more money for those in need, not less. He didn't have the votes for passage because he faced a rightwing GOP Congress.
Context does matter in evaluating politics-- I have no doubt that Nixon with a rightwing Congress would have terrorized minorities and the poor and Clinton with filibuster-proof majorities in Congress would now be remembered as the savior of labor and health care in this country. That is the true measure of the difference between the men.
-- Nathan Newman
-- Nathan Newman