To this day, when Bill Clinton makes appearances on behalf of his wife’s presidential campaign, he’ll frequently take the stage to the sound of his signature song from the 1992 campaign: “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow.”
Increasingly, there’s ample evidence that the song’s chorus is actually the opposite of the message the Clinton campaign is emphasizing now. In the closing weeks before the early contests, the senator’s team apparently isn’t emphasizing the future so much as it’s creating a referendum on the 1990s.
After months of discussion within her campaign over how heavily she should draw on her husband’s legacy, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is closing out her Iowa and New Hampshire campaigns in a tight embrace of Bill Clinton’s record, helping fuel a debate about the 1990s with Sen. Barack Obama that she thinks she can win.
As part of the Clinton strategy, the former president is playing an increasingly prominent public role as an advocate for his wife. He appears to have overcome concerns within the campaign over how closely she should associate her candidacy with his time in office and over whether his appearances could draw attention away from her.
Both Clintons are making the case that theirs was a co-presidency — an echo of Bill Clinton’s controversial statement during the 1992 campaign that voters would get “two for the price of one” if they elected him. At times, the former president has seemed to cast the current race as a referendum on his administration.
To be sure, this may be a pretty good campaign strategy. Bill Clinton isn’t just a popular figure in Democratic circles nationwide; he’s the dominating political figure of the generation and the most popular politician on the planet. Whenever Hillary Clinton is confronted with the “legacy” question, she has a quick and well-received retort: “I thought my husband did a really good job in the 1990s.” The implicit, if unstated, message: “If one President Clinton produced peace and prosperity, what’s wrong with another?”
Active Democrats, the kind of who participate in primaries and caucuses, may find all of this very appealing. One recent NYT poll found that 44% of Dems said they are more likely to support Hillary because of Bill. In a close race, that’s a sizable advantage.
But running in 2008 on a decade-old record is not without risks.
“If our opponents want to make this a referendum on Bill Clinton’s presidency, they are making a mistake,” Howard Wolfson, Clinton’s communications director, told the NYT, “both because it’s a referendum they would lose on the merits and because Democrats are focused on the future and the change that needs to be made going forward.”
As messages go, this one’s a little awkward. Dems are focused on the future … so vote for Clinton based at least partly on her husband’s performance in the 1990s.
Bill Clinton is hitting the [experience] theme hard as the voting in Iowa and New Hampshire draws closer, pointing back to the 1990s, citing his record as his wife’s, referring to the work “we” did in office and, for the most part, brushing past or ignoring the tumult of those years. […]
Obama has made challenging the 1990s a mainstay of his platform, saying it is time to “turn the page” on the partisanship — and implicitly the scandals — of the Clinton era. This is a major part of his case that he is the most electable Democrat, able to expand the electoral base to states where Hillary Clinton is still viewed as polarizing.
But the Clintons regard any discussion of the Nineties to be good for them, evoking memories of a booming economy and a time when the United States enjoyed greater popularity around the world. […]
On Thursday night in Holderness, N.H., the former president returned again and again in his hour-long speech to the achievements of his administration as proof that his wife would be able to bring results if she were elected. Several times, he cited the statistics on the economic gains of the 1990s — the rise in family income, the decline in poverty and in the number of uninsured, and the increase in students obtaining college aid (“I still know the numbers,” he said).
He contrasted these gains with what has occurred during the Bush administration, casting the past seven years as a dismal detour or regression in the march of progress that began in the 1990s and would continue with Hillary Clinton’s election. “Hillary says, ‘My vision is that America must make a new beginning by first rebuilding the middle-class dream,’ ” he said.
For all his talk about the 1990s, though, the former president does not go into great detail about the role his wife played in his administration, instead simply leaving the impression that she was part of the team that brought about the decade’s gains.
I just don’t know what to make of all of this. The nation was on firm footing in 2000 — it’s hard not to like peace and prosperity — and the country was poised to stay on track, before a certain Supreme Court ruling led to the guy who came in second getting inaugurated. Maybe voters, particularly Dems, are happy to look back and ask one Clinton to pick up whether the other Clinton left off.
But elections, historically, are about the future, and emphasizing the First Lady’s role in policy matters a decade ago a) may be a tough sell; and b) actually sidesteps a compelling policy vision of where Hillary Clinton says she’d like to take the country.
I guess we’ll know for sure whether this is a wise strategy or not in a few weeks, but I have my doubts.