Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
In a major political address this week, former President Bill Clinton bluntly dissected the Democrats' recent electoral losses. Moving to the left, he said, is not a solution -- but fighting back is.
Dec 6, 2002 | Former President Clinton minced no words in a speech he delivered Tuesday at NYU dissecting his party's serious losses in the midterm elections. "Democrats have to have ideas to win," he said. "We were missing in action in national security and we had no positive plan for America's domestic future." To get the party back on its feet, he says, hard changes need to be made -- but moving to the left is not one of them.
The following is the full text of his speech to the Democratic Leadership Council.
Thank you very much and good afternoon. Mayor O'Malley, congratulations on being the Esquire cover boy. I hope it's just the beginning of greater things to come. Senator Bayh, Senator Carper, Representative Tauscher, Representative Meeks; John Sexton and the NYU family, which now includes two of my former administration members, Jack Lew and Cheryl Mills; and all the others here who were part of our team, Mack McLarty, my first chief of staff and special envoy to Latin America, Don Baer and Tom Freedman; Al From, Bruce Reed, Will Marshall and all the DLC family: I thank you for welcoming me back. I may have to take my glasses out this morning to read my handwritten notes. When you're not the president anymore, one nice thing is you don't have to say what anybody else wants you to say. So, I wrote this speech out this morning after coming back late from Mexico last night and I may or may not be able to read it without my glasses.
I am enormously proud to be a member of the DLC, to have been there at the beginning, to have done the work that we did between 1984 and 1992, work based on a vision of America at the turn of the century with opportunity for all, responsibility from all, and a community of all our people. We also wanted America to be the world's leading force for peace and freedom, prosperity and security. We had a strategy rooted in new ideas and on the oldest of America's missions: to constantly form a more perfect union. We implemented those ideas: AmeriCorps, the Empowerment Zones, community policing, charter schools, welfare reform, always going beyond false choices. We believed that we could have fiscal responsibility and social investment; that we could be good for labor and business; that we could grow the economy and clean the environment; that we could prevent and punish crime.
It turns out we were right. In 1995, Thomas Patterson, a highly regarded scholar of the presidency, said that although I had made more and more specific commitments when I ran for president in '92 than any previous candidate, I had already kept a higher percentage of those commitments than the previous five presidents. Something, I might say, you would never have known by reading the press, but Patterson, after all, was a scholar interested in evidence, not ideology. I say that because I want to give the DLC a lot of the credit. Because we worked for years and years on these ideas together, and because a lot of the governors with whom I served, including then-governors Evan Bayh and Tom Carper, used the states as laboratories of democracy to test them. So we didn't have to wake up the morning after the election and wonder what we were going to do. We knew what we wanted to do and we set about doing it.
We had remarkable support from the Democrats in Congress, but even after the Republicans won a majority, we were still able to enact most of our initiatives, thanks in no small measure to the wonderful work that was done by the members of my staff and cabinet and our allies in the Congress.
Democrats have to have ideas to win. Republicans will always have more powerful interest groups and the fervor of right wing emotions, as we saw with the Confederate flag issue in Georgia and South Carolina in this recent election. They have an increasingly right wing and bellicose conservative press, with the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal emboldened by the last election, to urge that what we should really be doing is raising taxes on lower income working people so they will come to hate the government just as much as the editors of the Wall Street Journal do. And we have an increasingly docile establishment press, to be fair, partly because of the enormous trauma of September 11th and its aftermath.
On the other hand, the cultural bases of the two parties are more or less even, about 45 percent of America each, and we win on the issues when we put them out in a balanced and fair way and people can hear what we have to say. We have to find a way that brings people together across party and income, racial and religious lines. In the recent election I was honored to do what little I could, mostly to keep our candidates from being even more badly outspent than they were going to be anyway. In the future, that will be done by others, especially as the presidential campaign takes over. I beg to differ with those who think we don't have leaders of today and tomorrow who can do that. I think we have a lot of very, very good and able and articulate people in the House and the Senate and in other areas of public life. I think the most important thing is that we have to get the ideas out there. The work I do most of the time on most days is connected with my foundation and it's also tied to the ideas that we developed in the DLC. I work on economic opportunity, community service and education at home and around the world, on fighting AIDS and building democracy.
But I still care a lot about my party and I care even more about my country. And I still believe ideas and results matter when people can hear evidence over ideology. The evidence shows that our approach worked. We had 22 and a half million new jobs, the most ever in any eight-year period. The longest economic expansion, the highest home ownership and the lowest minority unemployment ever recorded. The largest increase in college aid in 50 years, thanks to the Hope Scholarship, another New Democrat idea. The largest increase in health insurance for children in 35 years. The first three surpluses in 70 years. Eighty million people protected by the patients' bill of rights by executive order. Thirty-five million people taking advantage of family leave, a bill that was vetoed during the previous Republican administration.
Almost 8 million people moved out of poverty in those eight years, 100 times as many as moved out of poverty in the Reagan recovery. We had more millionaires and more billionaires than they did and we moved more people out of poverty.
So, if evidence triumphs over ideology, there's got to be an audience for our ideas. We had the lowest crime rate in 27 years. The lowest welfare rolls in 35 years. The largest land protection program in the lower 48 states in 100 years since Theodore Roosevelt; 43 million more Americans were breathing clean air when we left than when we started. We had nearly 300 trade agreements and they accounted for about 30 percent of our growth in those remarkable years. We ended ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo, made peace in Northern Ireland, had seven years of peace in the Middle East until Mr. Arafat made the disastrous mistake of turning down the peace offer that we made in December of 2000. China and Russia were integrated more closely with the West with the World Trade Organization, partnerships with NATO and other cooperative endeavors. The Global Debt Relief Initiative was the most innovative international approach in decades, giving debt relief to 25, soon to be 32 nations, but only if they could prove they put all the money into health education or economic development. And we proved that diversity and excellence go hand in hand with appointments throughout the government and to our judgeships. We pursued a vision of America and the world based on American values and new ideas, and we had a strategy to make it all work.
"I've read all the people who say that the Democratic Party is dead. But I respectfully disagree." I first said that on May 6th, 1991. I believed it then and I believe it today. Now, in the last two years, we've lost two elections. Well, we sort of lost in 2000 but we really did lose in 2002. I don't want to dwell on the past because politics is best understood through the prism of the future. But I would like to offer a few thoughts.
First of all, I don't think you can underestimate the impact of the psychological toll of September 11th on the American people. We long to be united and we long to be strong. Secondly, the Republicans won on message, money and turnout. The money couldn't be helped. We did the best we could. And let's not forget that in 1998, they outspent us by 100 million dollars and we gained seats in the House of Representatives when they thought they'd win 30. We lost no seats in the Senate, when they thought they'd win five. It was the first time since 1822 that the president's party had won seats in the House in the 6th year of a presidency and in 1822, we were a one-party country. So, in fact, it had never happened before.
Let's talk about the other things. The problem with our message was that to Democrats and Independents, we were missing in action in national security and we had no positive plan for America's domestic future.
It's not fair to say we were missing in action on national security. The Democrats supported the president against terror; they overwhelmingly supported the defense increases. Most of them supported the administration on Iraq. It was amazing that they were able to make such a big deal over the Homeland Security bill, a bill that was Senator Lieberman's proposal, which the administration opposed for seven months before finally deciding that it was the only wedge issue they had because they didn't have Iraq or terrorism anymore. But it's our fault that we let it happen. Now because of the national security issue and because we had no positive plan on the economy and other domestic issues, we had no access to a large majority of voters who were otherwise predisposed to vote for Democrats for two reasons: one, they thought by 20 points that the administration had given insufficient attention to the economy and other domestic issues; and second, they thought by 23 points that other things being equal, it would be better to have more Democrats in Congress to restrain the extreme impulses of the Republicans on the environment and other special interest issues.
The turnout problem was related to the message problem, but not entirely. In Georgia, where Governor Barnes was 9 points ahead in the polls on the Saturday before the election, and where Senator Cleland was still ahead, they lost in part because for the first time in the history of that state, white men in 2002 voted in exactly the same numbers in which they voted in the 2000 presidential election. In North Carolina, Erskine Bowles was only 2 or 3 points behind on the Saturday before the election in the polls and gaining. He lost by 9 points in spite of the fact that he got more votes in 2002 than John Edwards did when he won in 1998. Why? Because the white turnout was 10 percent higher than the African-American turnout. In Georgia and South and North Carolina, we won all of our big elections in '98 because the turnouts of African-Americans and white voters were identical.
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