Episode 25: William J. Clinton
Show Notes
Overview:
Today’s episode is all about William Jefferson Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States, the first baby boomer to hold the office, and indeed, the second youngest man ever elected president. Clinton’s legacy is ongoing and a work in progress even now nearly thirty years since he took office. Changing political winds, changes within the democratic party in particular, a changing sensibility over welfare and the war on crime, and let’s face it, a different sensibility of what constituted sexual harassment than was the case during the early 1990s have all changed how we view not only this period, but this man. And we’re going to get into all of it today, as we rush forward through the 1990s across the bridge to the 21st century.
So here’s our quick primer on Bill Clinton, a complicated, fascinating, conundrum of a man, whose political enemies and allies alike nearly universally agree was the greatest natural politician of his generation—with perhaps the greatest unfulfilled promise.
Unlike so many others we’ve discussed this season, Clinton was NOT born to wealth and privilege. Indeed, he wasn’t even born a Clinton. His father, William Jefferson Blythe, tragically died in a car accident months before the future president was born in 1946. Raised initially by his raucous and fun-loving mother and his equally stern and disciplined grandmother, Bill took the name Clinton when his mother remarried in 1950. They moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, a resort town smack dab in the midst of a sea of a conservative evangelical state, predominantly southern Baptist, and the partying and gambling of the town vs. the spiritual discipline of its region seemed to represent both sides of the young boy has he grew up. Clinton was always the smartest kid in the class, and won at everything he touched, the kind of young lad city elders could point to as a proud representative for their community. He could also party when they weren’t looking. In this way he was just like his idol, John Kennedy, whose hand Clinton shook in July 1963.
Educated at Georgetown University, then Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, Bill came back to the United States in 1970, where he met the most important person in his life: a young, brilliant, studious fellow student at Yale University Law School named Hillary Rodham. She had a bright future ahead of her indeed.
Which she decided to share with Bill, whose political ambitions led him to run for Congress from his home state of Arkansas in 1974. He lost, but only by a little in a race against an incumbent expecting to win by a lot, marking Clinton too as a rising political star. Indeed one anecdote from that election tells us quite a lot. The day after election day, so the day after he lost, Clinton was up bright and early to shake hands down on main street, thanking supporters and already working voters for the next time.
The next time came only two years later when Arkansas elected him their Attorney General at the age of 30. Two years later he was their governor, one of the nation’s youngest, ever. He made some mistakes his first time in charge, lost his bid for re-election, and then worked even harder to win back the Governor’s mansion the next time round. This time he won re-election, then won again, setting himself up for a presidential bid in 1992.
1992 was an unusual moment for Democrats. President George H.W. Bush was coming off the highest approval rating for any president ever recorded in the wake of the country’s Cold War and Gulf War victories, and an 87% approval rating has a way of scaring off potential opponents. The Democratic Party was also in flux, torn between those who held fast to the New Deal liberalism of the Great Society, and those who thought voters had moved to the right in the era of Nixon and Reagan. Remember, Republicans had won five of the six presidential elections since 1968.
Clinton believed if you couldn’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. He embraced centrist policies that fused liberalism and market solutions in what he liked to call a ‘third way,’ rising to the head of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group of conservative Democratic eager to challenge Republicans on what had become their own turf.
And it worked. Clinton won, and pushed for national health care reform as a top agenda item. And lost the fight. He also lost the House of Representatives to Republican control in the 1994 midterm election for the first time in forty years. Republicans already controlled the senate.
So what did Clinton do? If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. He pushed for welfare reform, broad anti-crime legislation, free trade, and ultimately a balanced budget, all traditionally Republican issues. The political war of the 1990s between him and House Speaker Newt Gingrich got so bad the government shut down for a while, leaving Gingrich with egg on his face and Clinton a message for voters in the ’96 election: ‘the era of big government is over.’
He won, but spent much of his second term mired in scandal. There’s something else about Bill Clinton we haven’t mentioned yet. People loved him and also really hated him. He represented the smug intellectual elite to some, a philanderer of loose morals to others, and in reality, the epitome of what Baby Boomers loved and loathed about themselves. He also made his wife a key member of his administration, indeed offering voters “two for the price of one,” and frankly not every American was ready for such a powerful woman at the pinnacle of Washington politics.
Investigations into financial dealings led in time to investigations into his personal life, including of course the revelation that he’d had a sexual relationship with a young White House Intern. Voters didn’t much care—Clinton’s approval ratings actually went up in the ensuing months, but Republicans made him only the second President formally impeached in American history. He won his Senate trial when votes came down along partisan lines, but in a broader sense lost the contest that mattered most when voters rejected his Vice-President in favor of Texas Governor George W. Bush in the razor-thin 2000 election. It was time to “restore dignity to the oval office,” Bush said on the campaign trail, and voters knew just what he meant.
So quite a lot of talk about with Clinton, a man who always seemed to find just the right way to both get himself into trouble and then talk his way out of it. Our guests today help us unpack this man and his times. We began with Dr. Sarah Coleman, author of The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America, but more importantly, a much beloved alum of the CPH Post-doc program.
We then turned the conversation to Dr. Carly Goodman, one of the nation’s leading experts on the confusing but critical US Visa Lottery, and also a co-editor of the Washington Post’s influential “Made by History” series.
Together our guests illuminated two key themes.
First, changes in immigration policy were changing the face of America
Second, new media, in particular right wing media, responded with anxiety to that changing face
Guests:
Dr. Sarah Coleman is an Assistant Professor of history at Texas State University. Her research focuses on immigration, race, public policy and rights in the United States. Dr. Coleman is a former advisor to President Biden during the Obama Administration and in the US Senate.
She just published her first book, The Walls Within, which traces the struggle of politicians, activists, interest groups, communities and the courts to define the rights of immigrants in the United States after the passage of the Hart-Celler Act of 1965.
Dr. Coleman was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Southern Methodist University, received her PhD from Princeton University, and her dissertation was awarded the 2017 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.
Follow Dr. Coleman on Twitter.
Dr. Carly Goodman is Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern American History at La Salle University. An immigration historian, she completed her Ph.D. in history at Temple University in 2016. She writes frequently for the Washington Post and is co-editor of the Made By History blog at the Washington Post.
Her first book project is on the U.S. diversity visa lottery. For her dissertation, “Global Game of Chance: The U.S. Diversity Visa Lottery, Transnational Migration, and Cultural Diplomacy in Africa, 1990-2015,” she conducted research and interviews in Ghana, Cameroon, and the United States, touching on topics from legislation in Congress to the history of internet spam to African cyber cafés. Her next project is on the history of the contemporary anti-immigration movement in the United States. She also serves as the Digital Communications Officer for the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.
Before coming to La Salle, Dr. Goodman was communications analyst and Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow at the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia, and prior to graduate school, she worked at Human Rights First, where she focused on U.S. interrogation and detention and refugee and asylum issues. She lives in South Philadelphia with her family.
Follow Dr. Goodman on Twitter.