The timing for the conference in Little Rock, Ark., couldn’t have been worse. But apparently the participants didn’t notice.
Commemorating the 25 years since the 1992 presidential election may have seemed like a great idea when the geniuses at the Clinton Foundation began planning a big party for their boss. But the celebration held last weekend coincided with the epidemic of famous men accused of sexual harassment or assault, which reminded us of Bill Clinton’s equally horrible behavior.
But even before the #metoo movement began rewriting the history of the Clinton administration, Democrats were already done with them. Though the party is primarily focused these days on the “resistance,” Hillary’s willingness to blame everyone but herself for her loss as well as her whining about the result’s legitimacy is a gift to President Trump and an embarrassment to Democrats.
Yet just when it seems that the Clintons have been transformed from the ultimate power couple on an inevitable path back to the White House into political pariahs, Democrats would be wrong to ignore how the 1992 and 1996 elections were won.
The Clintons may be toast but what the Democrats need now to prevail against Trump is exactly the kind of centrist appeal that propelled those wins and enabled the 42nd president’s ability to govern effectively without being in thrall to his party’s left wing.
The Clintons’ fall from grace was long overdue, and not without irony. The new consensus about the way prominent men got away with harassing and assaulting women has caused many liberals to express regret for the scorched-earth campaign they waged against Bill’s accusers.
The notion that saving his presidency was more important than the claims of the women he victimized was an article of faith for Democrats as well as those claiming to be feminists. But Hillary’s trashing of his accusers now seems no different from what Roy Moore’s defenders say.
Even before liberal pundits at The New York Times and opportunists like Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand began retroactively calling for Bill Clinton’s resignation, Democrats were done with the former first family.
Neither the Clintons nor their faux charity that operated as a thinly veiled political slush fund have anything more to offer after an incompetent campaign handed the presidency to Donald Trump. As longtime Democratic operative Donna Brazile indicated by writing a book throwing Hillary under the bus, no one need ever fear their wrath again.
Candidates who once looked to them for help will shun them like the plague. They will linger on the fringes of political life, an inescapable part of our political history but also an embarrassment to Democrats that may make the way the party once distanced itself from Jimmy Carter look like a warm embrace.
But at the moment when even many of their former loyalists have stopped listening to the Clintons, Bill actually has a lot to say that his party ought to be hearing.
Bill Clinton’s charm may have helped seduce a nation but his election victories were the product of an ideological flexibility that struck most Americans as sensible even if it also drove conservative opponents and hardcore liberals crazy. He understood voters wanted a strong economy and stability, not recycled Great Society liberalism.
He could appeal to white working-class voters as well as African-Americans and Hispanics, a skill Democrats have lost as their party has become almost exclusively a coalition of urban white liberals and minorities. Trump won because he reflected those working-class attitudes and concerns. Clinton knew that talking down to blue-collar Americans and ignoring or criticizing their worries on culture and social issues is a nonstarter, but such attitudes are second nature for today’s Democrats.
Democrats are convinced they’re headed to victory because of Trump’s unpopularity. But they’re going to need a politician with the sort of historic appeal of a Barack Obama in order to win without relearning the lessons Bill Clinton taught them in the ’90s.
Since no such magical candidate is available, unless they begin acting, as Clinton did, as a party of the center rather than of the hard left, they could be setting themselves up for another astonishing defeat in 2020.
Jonathan S. Tobin is opinion editor of JNS.org and a contributing writer for National Review.
Twitter: @jonathans_tobin