Once again, let's consider the famous Kristol memo...
Quote:December 2, 1993 - Leading conservative operative William Kristol privately circulates a strategy document to Republicans in Congress. Kristol writes that congressional Republicans should work to "kill" -- not amend -- the Clinton plan because it presents a real danger to the Republican future: Its passage will give the Democrats a lock on the crucial middle-class vote and revive the reputation of the party. Nearly a full year before Republicans will unite behind the "Contract With America," Kristol has provided the rationale and the steel for them to achieve their aims of winning control of Congress and becoming America's majority party. Killing health care will serve both ends.
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The "clinton baggage" which Kristol, in his abiding concern for american citizens, wishes us to be without is, as Krugman notes, a product of Kristol and company.
One of my abiding bamboozlements relates to wondering how many of the folks on this thread have actually read Toobin's or Conason's or Brock's books on this history? It can't be very many of you.
But the reality, however injust and ahistorical it might be, is that the meme of "the clintons are amoral, self-obsessed, dirty-fighters who'll do anything to win" may have won the day even among many liberals (and even if it is far more correctly understood as an exact projection of the people who set about the task of deligitimizing Clinton and his administration from the outset of his administration and running right through today).
Damned unfortunate if that's the case because it is a propagandist revision of what is real but it ought not to surprise a whole lot because these people are good at this. Here's a line from Kristol's recent column at Weekly Standard where he's rooting for a surge in Bush's popularity in this last year...
Quote:It is important to Republican prospects in 2008, and to conservative prospects beyond, how the Bush administration is judged.
link To write this more honestly, Kristol's point is that any lingering consensus that the Bush administration represents a dismal failure, with dishonesty, with war-mongering, with increasing disparity between rich and poor, with a lack of compassion for real people, with its assaults on privacy and civil rights, with its broad and pervasive taint of corruption, with its moves towards evisceration of the constitution and towards totalitarian-style power through all the manifestations of its unitary executive theory...will work serious damage on the 'republican brand'. It is
precisely this marketing/propaganda approach to republican political discourse which tells us why they strive to protect the 'Reagan legacy" so seriously and why they continue to lay on with trowels all of the "Clinton baggage" narrative.
But let's say for the sake of argument that the damage is done. Let's say that this campaign has been so successful that only an Obama candidacy might lead to dem victory of the WH (not certain, but let's assume it).
Then it really better be the case that once Obama has achieved the candidacy, then through the general campaign, and then through the entire length of his presidency, that he had better hire up all of the people in the Clinton universe who fully appreciate what will be coming Obama's way and who will be absolutely willing to confront the fact that this is not going to be pattycake.
