A few days before Bush was inaugurated in January 2001, The Onion ran one of the greatest satirical pieces of the decade: “Mere days from assuming the presidency and closing the door on eight years of Bill Clinton, president-elect George W. Bush assured the nation in a televised address Tuesday that ‘our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over.'”
I thought of that piece yesterday when reading about Rudy Giuliani’s latest attack on Hillary Clinton.
In a potential preview of next fall’s presidential contest, Mr. Giuliani, who is seen as the front-runner for the Republican nomination, directly attacked the leading Democratic candidate, Mrs. Clinton, over a speech she gave Tuesday in New Hampshire bemoaning the return of “robber barons” and promising to pursue “shared prosperity” by increasing taxes on Americans making more than $200,000 a year.
“This would be an astounding, staggering tax increase,” Mr. Giuliani told reporters yesterday after a visit to a restaurant on the edge of California’s Silicon Valley. “She wants to go back to the 1990s…. It would hurt our economy. It would hurt this area dramatically. That kind of tax increase would see a decline in your venture capital. It would see a decline in your ability to focus on new technology.” (emphasis added)
Now, I realize that Giuliani is probably still honing his stump speech, and he hasn’t quite figured out a rationale for his presidential campaign, but going after Hillary Clinton for wanting to bring America back to the 1990s isn’t exactly a persuasive pitch. Most of the country would love to go back to the ’90s — I’d even go so far as to suggest it has something to do with Hillary Clinton’s support in the polls.
When it comes to Giuliani’s criticism, there’s actually a more obvious flaw in the former mayor’s thinking. As Steve M. explained very well, telling a bunch of venture capitalists in Silicon Valley that a return to the ’90s would be awful demonstrates an almost comedic confusion: “The 1990s? Er, wasn’t that when everyone with a pulse over the age of 13 was a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, or the recipient of a Valley VC’s money? Is it even humanly possible to have had more high-tech entrepreneurial capitalism than we had in the 1990s?”
I don’t see how.
But Giuliani’s ’90s-bashing seems misplaced regardless of location. It’s spectacularly dumb in Silicon Valley, but I suspect Giuliani would be hard-pressed to find any area, company, or industry (except maybe defense contractors) that would prefer this decade to the last.
Atrios had an interesting post recently about the national sense of malaise.
There have been 3 presidents during my adult life – Bush, Clinton, Bush – a period of optimism bookended by pessimism. At the end of Bush I there was a recession. It wasn’t a very big one but it seemed to be accompanied by growing pessimism about the future. Maybe it was just that I was graduating from college roughly around that time, but there was a sense of diminished opportunity, of diminished options. That changed during the Clinton era, when eventually everything seemed possible. There was something new and wonderful, the internet, and there was the great sense that the future could be bright. Some of this was “irrational exuberance,” but some of it was based in reality. Real wages were going up. Inequality was shrinking and black unemployment was declining. The deficit was gone and thought could be given to some positive and necessary things the government could do. The sense of possibility was back.
And then little George turned it all to shit.
I’m fascinated by this 72% wrong track number. I’d like to understand it more. I’m not sure I have sense of the basic reasons why so many people think things are going to hell. We can all come up with various possibilities, and there won’t be one single answer, but I still think there’s probably a coherent narrative to be teased out. I’m just not sure what it is.
Giuliani is warning people that a return to the ’90s would be dangerous. I don’t think anyone is going to believe him.