Bush, Clinton, Bush … Clinton?

September 28, 2007

Anytime she’s asked the “legacy” question, Sen. Hillary Clinton has a pretty good misdirection policy — she reminds everyone what a great president her husband was.

That’s not a bad way of avoiding the subject, but the quality of Bill Clinton’s presidency isn’t really the issue.

Forty percent of Americans have never lived when there wasn’t a Bush or a Clinton in the White House. Anyone got a problem with that?

With Hillary Rodham Clinton hoping to tack another four or eight “Clinton” years on to the Bush-Clinton-Bush presidential pattern that already has held sway for two decades, talk of Bush-Clinton fatigue is increasingly cropping up in the national political debate. […]

And now, if Hillary Clinton were to be elected and re-elected, the nation could go 28 years in a row with the same two families governing the country. Add the elder Bush’s terms as vice president, and that would be 36 years straight with a Bush or Clinton in the White House.

Already, for 116 million Americans, there has never been a time when there wasn’t a Bush or Clinton in the White House, either as president or vice president.

Does a nation of 303 million people really have only two families qualified to run the show?

Ideally, candidates should be judged on merit alone. If Hillary Clinton is the best qualified and most capable candidate, she deserves support. Her husband’s career is irrelevant.

But given concerns about family legacies, it’s not quite that simple.

“We now have a younger generation and middle-age generation who are going to think about national politics through the Bush-Clinton prism,” said Princeton University political historian Julian Zelizer, 37, whose first chance to vote for president was 1988, the year the first President Bush was elected. And as for the question of fatigue, Zelizer added: “It’s not just that we’ve heard their names a lot, but we’ve had a lot of problems with their names.” […]

David Gergen, director of Harvard University’s Center for Public Leadership and an adviser to presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton, said there does seem to be concern about the possibility of giving “the two dynasties” another four or eight years.

“I think we would be fundamentally healthier if we broadened the zone of candidates who could make it to the top,” he said.

Over the last 30 years, every single Republican presidential ticket has featured someone named Bush or Dole. Over the last 55 years, every single Republican presidential ticket except one has featured someone named Bush, Dole, or Nixon.

But this is a bipartisan issue, dealing with entirely modern times. Clinton’s fudging the question a bit with a clever misdirection. One of these days, she may need something a little stronger.

this has long been a primary reason why I’ve opposed a Hillary nomination. Just doesn’t seem right.

  • Gee, after Hillary does eight years, do you suppose we’d get Jeb, and then Chelsea, and then Jenna? Maybe we could dispense with this eternal campaigning and fundraising? That might make it worthwhile—-maybe;_)

  • This seems to me a classic case of IOKIYAR.

    Nobody complained (much) about the legacy issue when Bush 43 was elected. But now that the Democrats might have an ongoing legacy in the White House, it’s the end of the Republic as we know it.

    What doesn’t seem right is the Bush family holding power for that long and doing such a terrible job of it. Seriously, say what you will about Hillary but should would be orders of magnitude better than George W.

  • Let’s keep in mind that the last two Dem presidential candidates were Al Gore and John Kerry, neither of whom were named Clinton and neither of whom managed to make it to the big dance. At least the Clinton name has a patina of success attached to it, which is rare enough these days.

    At this point I don’t think the world really cares who the next president is as long as they have a big fat ‘D’ next to their name. And while Hillary might not be my first choice, if she’s the nominee I’m going to vote for her because the alternative is too horrible to even contemplate.

  • The “legacy” objection has got to be the dumbest objection to HRC EVA and it reeks of sexism. Is it the simple fact that she’s married? What if two people who were close friends were president one after another? Would it help if she started using her maiden name?

    WTF are people talking about?

    One of these days, she may not something a little stronger.

    Should “not” that be “need”?

  • I discussed this when it came up yesterday. The only family legacy here is the Bush family. The elder Bush spent 12 years in the White House and tried for another 4. The younger Bush will have spend 8 years in the White House. White it’s still very unfair to judge Hilliary Clinton on the length of time her husband spend in the White House, to pin on her the amount of time George Bush and George Bush have spent in the White House is completely and utterly unfair.

    The numbers thing (116 million Americans!) is a scam and a giant fraud. Perhaps we should ALL run things. Perhaps we should hold an election every day, for a new president every day, with term limits of only one day in office. That way the maximum number of families may rule, and everyone my know a multitude of rulers. That seems to be the logical implication of the argument, and obviously it’s absurd.

    Of course Clinton is fudging on this, and I don’t blame her. It’s a dishonest and veiled attempt at saying she should be disqualified, and for nothing that has to do with her merit, or any semblance of democratic principles.

  • Ideally, candidates should be judged on merit alone.

    Things like:

    Did you authorize use of force in Iraq?

    Did you vote for the Patriot Act?

    Do you think it’s right to punish news outlets for being critical of you with limited access?

    If we don’t agree with someone, are they automatically a terrorist?

    Why don’t you display leadership in the Senate?

    You’re campaign has the momentum of a runaway freight train. Why are you so popular?

    Why is there a disconnect between the policy the people want and their support of a candidate who is unlikely to support that same policy?

    Or should I just accept that merit means name recognition in this country?

  • i think this is a total non-issue, on par with $400 haircuts. essentially, this penalizes Hillary not for any of her stances, not for her abilities or lack thereof, but for the fact that her husband is the only D who has managed to win elections. Had there been a President Kerry for 4 or 8 years after W’s first term, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

    Nor is it like family “dynasties” are unprecedented. Whether it is John Adams and John Quincy Adams shortly after the founding, or whether it is JFK and the fact that more Dems than I can count still fervently wish RFK could have and would have been President in the 60s and 70s.

    Moreover, as HRC and Bill have both pointed out in response to this issue, it is unfair to suggest the Presidencies were the same. Lets see, under Bush I, the defecit exploded. Under Clinton, we got to a surplus. Under Bush II, the defecit exploded. Bush I was imperial and out of touch, Bush II has no intellectual curiousity; Clinton both “felt your pain” and was a total policy wonk. The Bushes give us Thomas and Scalito; Clinton gave us Ruth Ginsberg.

    There are a lot of reasons someone might oppose HRC on policy grounds – the war, lobbyists, etc. There are a lot of reasons someone might oppose HRC on personal grounds – she seems too private and controlling. But this strained argument about the inherent problem off too many Bushes and Clintons just doesn’t stand up to any real examination. It is a PR ruse to reject Hillary in a way acceptable to Bush-hating Democrats. And given that it serves to preclude the first credible possibility for a female President based on who she is married to, it can’t help but come off as loaded with latent sexism.

  • Dismiss the legacy issue all you want. The reasons the GOP want Hillary is because she’s disliked and most people already have their minds made up about her and she’s the most likely to continue their disasterous total war policy.
    Couple this with the fact that the legacy issue will suppress voter turnout and you’ve got trouble for Democrats down ballot. A lot of people already feel their vote is meaningless and when the defacto candidate is from one of the two families who’ve been running this nation for over 10% of it’s existence, you just reinforce thier belief.

    They’re tired of the ‘royalty.’

    Let’s keep in mind that the last two Dem presidential candidates were Al Gore and John Kerry, neither of whom were named Clinton and neither of whom managed to make it to the big dance. -Crumudgeon

    Yeah, because they weren’t named Bush or Clinton. This only proves the legacy argument.

    Of course, as much bad that comes to Hillary from this legacy issue she gets back 10 fold for being related to Bill, so I’m not sure she’s so worried about it.

    Obviously my complaints about Hillary run much deeper and more issue oriented than what her last name is, but I do feel that name recognition coupled with early primaries will benefit her undeservedly and that having her on the ballot will result in lower voter turnout which will harm Democrats down ballot.

    I don’t think this is a something that can so easily be dismissed as many of you do. Think like an average voter, not an engaged one.

  • Family legacy should have no bearing on Presidential status. However, there are still Bush supporters, so it stands to reason there are those that believe in Presidential legacies.

    As one writer indicated the GOP wants Hillary to run because A) she is unlikely to win, B) If she does win she will continue with the same foreign policies and it’s business as usual in the White House.

  • doubtful, you obviously have every right to favor or disfavor who you like for your own reasons; I understand your issues-based problems with HRC.

    But I do want to push back on your argument about electability and down-ballot problems. Lets assume average voters are the ones who get randomly polled. and lets assume – i think pretty safely – that name recognition advantage decreases as the campaign goes on because other candidates become better known. How does one reconcile your argument with the fact that HRC’s lead in hypothetical matchups is increasing, and is larger than any other Dems? That is, he does better in the general than Obama or Edwards and the magnitude of that advantage is growing as the electorate gets to know Obama, Edwards, and the Rethugs better.

    The unelectability issue just strikes me as a left-side myth made of wishful thinking and individual anecdotal examples. We tried to predict electability as the most important creteria in 2004. It gave us four more years of Bush.

  • Let’s not blame the Clintons for this contrived crisis before it even occurs. The real crisis is the disaster of the Bush administration, and the Republican top tier candidates, three of which are actually worse than GWB (who would have thought you could find even one worse nominee a year ago?), and a fourth, Mitt Romney, who is a real life chameleon man a la Woody Allen’s “Zelig.”

    For God sakes, let’s not solve the dual-dynasty problem by creating one a thousand times worse with one of these fools at the helm.

  • It’s not fair to Hillary, but the dynasty issue is a huge problem for me. I’ll vote for Hillary if she gets the nomination, but dynasties seems very unhealthy for a democracy (not that they were any great success in European monarchies either). Dynasties become all about entrenched entitlement and self-perpetuation: consider whether any English peasant saw an iota of difference between Yorks and Lancasters, white roses and red roses. I objected to George II in 2000 because his candidacy was justified only on the basis of nepotism and dynastic inertia. It’s not like the Bush dynasty has justified its existence by yielding a single acceptable politician or statesman, and while Clinton was not bad, he owes most of his positive reputation to a favorable contrast with a long sad string of disappointing presidents. We can do better than this.

    That being said, I’m all in favor of Democrats referring to the Republican party as the Bush party (thus “Guiliani and Romney are the leading Bush Party candidates”).

  • But I do want to push back on your argument about electability and down-ballot problems. -Z

    I’d like to clarify that I don’t think Hillary’s likeability would prevent her from being elected. I don’t think there is anything the GOP can do to prevent whomever wins the Democratic primary from winning the general short of eggregious cheating.

    But I do think that the distaste people have with her will not inspire people to vote, and I think it will be harder to pull moderate conservatives into the fold who have already made up their minds about her. Getting them to consider a Democrat at the top of the ballot is the first step to getting them to be more open minded about the others.

    I can’t explain why she keeps polling better. Perhaps it is a result of the media blackout on candidates other than ‘the big three,’ or a result of several high profile endorsements. Maybe it’s just a snowball effect. Obama and Edwards are not running their campaigns well lately, either, and that could have an effect.

    Like I said above, there is a disconnect between what people say they want their leader to do and the policies of those they are likely to choose.

    I definitely don’t think she’s unelectable, I just don’t think she’s the best we can do and would be harmful to the party overall. I don’t see her serving a second term if elected in 2008.

  • I don’t like Hillary, but she is definitely not a defective clone of Bill. She is married to a Clinton. Her blood line is not Clinton’s. She doesn’t look like him or think like him. She is just married to him. W, though, is his father missing 20% of the necessary genes.

  • I don’t like Hillary, but she is definitely not a defective clone of Bill. She is married to a Clinton. Her blood line is not Clinton’s. -Jen Flowers

    Exactly. Like a Queen and a King.

  • Dunno about this legacy thing…I’d suggest one look at this as a simple marketing phenomenon, instead of anything through the prism of history…isn’t this more about product spin off?…I mean, aren’t the Bush 43 years the “Green Acres” to his Dad’s “Petticoat Junction”?…

    I think it’s inevitable….

  • You know I’ve heard some lame-ass arguments put forth in my time, many of the all-time lamest fairly recently in fact, but I frankly can’t remember the last time I heard one as lame as this. I note that we’ve also had several president’s whose first name was John, so I guess we’d better rule out John Edwards. And why stop with names? Come to think of it, every single one has been also a man so far and look where that’s gotten us. That would argue for Clinton again, her being a woman and all but of course in addition to having married a Clinton (and one from the wrong side of the tracks to boot) she’s also white, and you know we’ve had way too many of those. Richardson and Obama have ethnicity on their side but they’re both men, and we’ve already ruled out any more of those. Guess if we’re gong to start disqualifying people on the basis of traits that have nothing to do with who they are as people, we’re going to have to widen our candidate search considerably.

    I’d also point out that at the end of the day, it’s a damned shame that George W. Bush didn’t turn out to have much in common with his father besides the name. George H.W., for all his faults and they were many, did at least have sense enough to pour piss out of a boot… most of the time.

  • doubtful at 7, you can now add another question which should be posed to the candidates: Did you authorize the use of force in Iran?

    Clinton was the only candidate on the stage the other night who did, and today Sen. Jim Webb called the Kyl-Lieberman amendment a war resolution. The dynasty issue is the least of my objections to Clinton.

  • I think the legacy question is a serious one, for several reasons.

    First, I think it’s just about undeniable that Hillary Clinton would not be in the commanding position she is now in had her last name not been Clinton. If she’d married someone else who didn’t get to be president, she might be an important national politician, but she wouldn’t be the presumptive favorite for a national party nomination. So to those who think her last name is an incidental happenstance (like the commenter who brings up the notion that it is an irrelevant as John Edwards’ first name), you are just wrong. It’s quite important.

    Nor do I think we should regard the fact that these political dynasties are bipartisan as some reason to not think about the question (the implicit thrust of those who claim that it’s unfair to consider Hillary’s family when the Bushes where more blatant and disastrous). To the contrary, the fact that we’re seeing the same dynamic in both parties suggests it’s a larger issue than just the Republicans. It goes along with the establishment in the U.S. over recent decades of a proto-aristocratic overclass, where rich governing elites hand down their advantages from one generation to the next and disparities of income grow and grow. A country whose governing class is both corrupt and self-perpetuating won’t last long.

    But the real problem with this sort of inbred political culture is what we can see already in Hillary Clinton’s campaign organization. Her pollster, Mark Penn, is the perfect embodiment of the reflexively centrist DLC insider type, and he’s not alone. If Clinton wins, we can expect the same collection of FOB’s that we saw in the last Clinton administration to descend and take many of the new administration positions (Michael O’Hanlon, call your office). At least Warren Christopher is too old to be considered for a position.

  • Forty percent of Americans have never lived when there wasn’t a Bush or a Clinton in the White House. Anyone got a problem with that?

    But what percent of voters have lived when there wasn’t a Bush or a Clinton in the White House? Bush was ’88. So all that’s saying is 40% of Americans are under 19, which means that a bunch of those people can’t vote, anyway. The people who are voting can compare other presidents to the Bushes or Clintons.

  • This is just another angle of the ongoing attacks against Hillary. These attacks started before Bill Clinton was elected President and he announced that Hillary would have an active role in his administration.

    Personally, I don’t get it. Hillary is an intelligent woman…oh. Now I’m starting to remember. The attacks started with comparing Hillary to Babs, remember how happy Babs was with just baking cookies? And how evil Hillary is for expecting something more out of life than baking a mean chocolate chip cookie?

    The influence of the nutjob Christian Conservatives who want to take us back to 1930 have over the media is strong enough and repeating these ridiculous attacks only give them credibility. So, why not talk about something else? Like how are we going to keep these crackpots from destroying life on this planet with their idiotic belief in fairy tales?

    The issue of the day is the Christofacists against the Isamofacists and everyone else is going to get screwed.

  • It’s absolutely a fair issue to raise.

    First of all, Bill Clinton was a B- president at best; he just looks Rushmore-worthy compared to Duhbya. The cautious centrism and eternal triangulation (“I’d alternate in a Yankees-Cubs World Series”? Get the fuck outta here! This offends me as a progressive; it absolutely horrifies me as a phanatical baseball follower) of the Clintons might have been palatable in the ’90s, when we weren’t coming off eight years of reactionary disaster; we absolutely can’t afford it now.

    But my real concern is that, with the executive branch already in a position of near-total dominance over the legislature (with the judiciary now assuredly Republican–a subsidiary of the current executive), the dynasty dynamic probably makes it that much harder to bring things back into balance. When you add in Sen. Clinton’s clearly autocratic temperament, this gets very scary, very fast. I no more want a (nominally) Democratic monarch than a Republican one.

  • You know, this is a great issue. It’s not a big deal now. But do make sure to bring it up in 2016, when Jeb Bush runs.

  • 28 years is a long time to further the Council on Foreign Relations agenda of a North American Union. They need Hillary to finalize the scheduled merger of the 3 countries, Canada, USA and Mexico, in 2010. The two families have worked so hard toward this goal. Time for Hillary to bring it home. Say goobye to the USA as we know it.

  • How can the dynasty issue be one for the Bushes and not for the Clintons?

    History reveals that the Bushes are long entrenched within a family with far greater cohesion and advantage than that which the Clintons bring to the table of politics.

    It near foolish to suggest that with former President Bill Clinton’s background, or with Hillary’s background, that dynasty is even an issue, much less one with legs.

    The illusion of dynastic succession built upon a Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton is merely one of words – not one of dynasty. Bush I and Bush II are dynastic succession by virtue of father and son as surely as Adams I and Adams II.

    That is not the case with Clinton I and Clinton II. As spouses, there has never been, nor will there probably ever be a situation in American history or global history where wives automatically are preferred public officials to follow their husbands. With the disparagement of women in global history, this could not be possible, and it is one of the reasons Hillary’s campaign is important to the world, to reveal that it is possible to have equally qualified, and equally positioned candidates that happen to be married. But in the tradition of male leadership, and female leadership, it is very unusual, and very unique.

    To ignore that uniqueness is to discount women so aggressively as to prevent them the very empowerment that America claims they prefer, that is consistent with a society that respects equality of opportunity, and equality of gender.

    Dynasties have always been built upon father and son succession from the beginning of time, and America rooted in her British legacy has understandable reservations about the creation of Dynasty. But a reservation now, after 400 years of building the presumption of dynasty in all walks of life and business is not one that should single out Hillary Clinton as a perpetuation of that tradition. It would be unfair, and it would be deceptive to do so.

    Considering the number of women Senators who have filled out the balance of terms of spouses in many other Senatorial situations suggests that it would be unreasonable to treat Hillary as any more threatening than others have been treated. It would bring to bear upon her unusual bias, not consistent with the equal treatment that other spouses have been privileged to receive – on their own merits, close personal relationships acknowledged.

    There is no dynastic consideration here any more than there was dynastic consideration for other spouses. Though she runs for President on her own merits, there is no reason to cripple her with a suspicion of dynastic succession to hamper her efforts, or create an illusionary wall where there is none.

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