Bill Clinton raised a few eyebrows over the weekend — and even drew quite a bit of criticism — for giving himself a little pat on the back for a job well done while campaigning in Lebanon, Indiana.
Just in case you were wondering how Bill Clinton feels about his tenure as president, he said this to a crowd here:
“Folks, it’s always a mistake to bet against America. It was tough in 1968, and we came back. It was tough in 1992 and we wound up with the eight best years we’ve had in modern history.”
As the crowd roared in agreement, he concluded, “We can bring America back.”
I suppose we can debate what constitutes “modern history,” but I’m very much inclined to think Clinton’s quite right about this. His tenure wasn’t perfect, but looking back over the last couple of generations, his boast actually sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Clinton’s presidency got off to a relatively rough start, and the Republican take-over of Congress in ’94 was unpleasant. As a party, Democrats, in general, were not necessarily better off at the end of Clinton’s term in office than at the beginning.
But in terms of overall national strength? I’d put Clinton’s eight years up against any in a very long time. Indeed, I don’t think it’s an overstatement to believe that Hillary Clinton’s initial role as the ’08 frontrunner was driven, at least in part, to a widely-held belief that she might follow in her husband’s footsteps and restore some Clinton-era peace and prosperity.
Yglesias noted, “[T]here was a solid 5+ year peacetime boom in there with few precedents, and American living standards really did reach a peak in 1998-2000 that was higher than anything in our earlier history and that we’ve yet to regain. If you’d been president then, you’d be bragging, too.”
There’s a reason Clinton left the White House with the highest approval ratings since JFK.
Ezra does a nice job of adding a historical perspective.
…1995-2000 was a pretty great time for America. This was true, in part, because of roaring economic growth and the tech boom and the fall of the Soviet Union and relative global peace. But it was also true because America’s had a growing economy for most of its history and almost every year is better than the year before it. We’re richer, can buy more interesting stuff, cure more diseases, sample more types of cuisine, and all the rest. FDR might have been a better president than Bill Clinton, but the late-90s, which featured both the internet and cholesterol lowering medication, were quite a bit more pleasant than the early 40s.
I guess the counterargument here is that there are certain moments of national purpose and triumph (like the immediate post-war period) that made American life better than a simple economic reading would suggest and certain moments (like the George W. Bush period) in which a mood of fear and insecurity and national disappointment rendered the moment less pleasant than the objective statistics would suggest. But fluctuations aside, the beauty of living in a rich, developed, and growing nation is that things keep getting better, and so every decade features some of our best years up till that point. The 90s happen to look particularly good right now because Bush is a bif screw-up, but I have high hopes for 2011-15.
Something to look forward to.
As for the Big Dog, I don’t have any problem agreeing with his boast, or even giving him a pass on his self-congratulations. I think the question that matters now, though, is whether his success as a president can necessarily be transferred to his wife’s campaign. After all, Hillary has some very impressive skills, talents, and experiences, but they’re not the same skills, talents, and experiences as her husband.