----- Original Message ----- From: "Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com>
> No doubt, Clinton's a nice guy in sme ways and
>if he had spine and sopport he woulda do0ne the right thing, but hedidn't,
>so he did the wrong thing, and in Nathan's double standard, he gets credit,
>while Nixon, whom everone agrees was a nasty, getsd blamed for not only the
>evil that hedid, but also the evil that Nathan has no dobt that he would
>have done if given a chance,
Not a proper summary of what I said-- the point is that whatever good Nixon did, it was only to minimize and prevent better legislation from being passed and whatever bad Clinton did (except for NAFTA) was done with the goal of preventing worse legislation from being passed.
The standard is this-- remove each President and let the Congress of the day pass what they wanted. The result in Nixon's case would have been far better and more progressive legislation, while in the case of Clinton, not only would the Great Society but chunks of the New Deal would have been repealed.
Clinton made what I think is the wrong judgement of TANF, but I and you might be wrong. Maybe if he had vetoed the third GOP version of welfare reform (much watered down compared to the earlier versions due to Clinton's veto), Dole might have won the Presidency and a far worse version would have been passed in 1997. In that case, Clinton as president was not only better for the poor than if Nixon had been in office but better than if Nathan or Justin had been in office.
-- Nathan Newman