Say what you will about Bill Clinton — I’ve certainly made my displeasure towards him and his presidency known on multiple occasions — but at the very least Democrats had some ideas of what they were getting into when he ran for President and then later when he held the office for eight years.  That he was a more conservative Southern-style Democrat was no surprise, and when he lashed out so suddenly, so unexpectedly, and so stupidly at Sister Souljah, he pretty much fired a warning shot across his party’s left bow, as if to say, “Stand back.  We are centrists, and if you raise your voices against us we will come down on you as hard as we will come down on anyone on the right.”  As a strategy for placing and keeping Bill Clinton in office, it’s hard to argue with the results, even if the end result was to continue to allow the right-wing of this country to pull the “centre” more and more into their camp without argument.  It’s no coincidence of history that Ralph Nader began to run for the presidency during the Clinton years.

Still, even centrists Democrats were appalled in 1996 when President Clinton signed Republican welfare reform into law.  Little else in the twenty years of Republican presidents that followed LBJ and the Great Society did so much to directly dismantle the systems put into place by the great liberal leaders of this country to provide a safety net to protect the unfortunate and the unlucky among us from the vagaries of national and international economies.  That includes all eight years of Ronald Reagan running this country into the ground, and it was championed and signed into law by a Democratic president, and yet to this day Clinton is lionized as one of the great Democratic presidents of the twentieth century.

Why did Clinton sign legislation that was so antithetical to everything the Democratic Party has stood for since the days of FDR rescuing this country from the brink of self-destruction at the hands of unchecked business interests?  Well, in the first midterm election after his election the Democrats got spanked, in large part because he was stuck trying to right the economy after his Republican predecessor tanked the whole system, and Americans were fed up with waiting for things to get better.  (Ironically, it was the very tax hikes that doomed Bush 41’s reelection campaign that ultimately played a huge part in the economic recovery that followed.)  Facing sinking poll numbers, Clinton veered even further to the right, bringing in Dick Morris — yes, that Dick Morris — as an advisor, who told Clinton that either he had to sign the welfare reform into law or he’d lose to Bob Dole in 1996.  (By that time the economy had recovered enough that Clinton would have gotten reelected anyway.)  Even with Clinton making all these concessions, moving himself and his party further to the right, the right-wing of this country continued its relentless attacks against him, even going so far as to call him, against all common sense for anyone who knows the actual definition of the word, a socialist.

Fast-forward twelve years, when a sinking economy once again proves the Republicans’ undoing.  Unlike in 1992, though, the Democrat who rises above the others for the party’s Presidential nomination, Barack Obama, is far from a conservative Southern Democrat.  His voting history in the Senate is hardly akin to Bernie Sanders’, but he speaks openly and passionately about putting severe shackles on Wall Street to prevent the recurrence of the banking crisis that almost undid this country completely.  He claims he believes American should join the other major Western countries in adopting a single-payer health care system.  He promises to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and other laws that unfairly discriminate against Americans.  While he’s not a Dennis Kucinich, he’s the closest thing to a real liberal the Democrats have put up for President since Walter Mondale, and he beats John McCain rather handily.

In the nearly two years that have followed Obama’s inauguration, though, we see that he has once again dragged his party, and the country, further to the right.  He wouldn’t even let single-payer advocates join the preliminary negotiations for health care reform, and the legislation that was passed was mostly devoid of anything that could provide serious assistance to the tens of millions of Americans who can’t get health insurance, not to mention the hundreds of millions more who are still subject to the capriciousness of health insurance CEOs who care more about protecting their multi-million dollar bonuses than helping Americans get better and stay better.  The financial reform package that passed earlier this year wasn’t that much better, and after pledging in his State of the Union address earlier this year that this would be the year that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell finally gets pulled from the books, we’re still waiting.

In the meantime, the irrational right continues to claim at every opportunity that Obama is a socialist — has no one learned yet that the Republicans will keep up that mantra even if somehow Joe Lieberman becomes President — and voters once again dissatisfied with the economy’s slow recovery (thanks in large part to Obama and his administration watering down stimulus legislation) — have sent a sharp rebuke to the Obama administration in the midterms.  Unlike in the nineties, though, when at least we had that year and a half between the midterms and Clinton signing welfare reform into law, Obama can’t seem to bend over for the Republicans fast enough.  Never mind the fact that the Senate will still be in Democratic hands come January; those Republicans who got elected last month haven’t even been sworn into office yet, and Obama’s main mission in life right now seems to be to get Republican tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans passed through Congress while the Democrats still, if only for a brief period of time, enjoy comfortable majorities in both houses of Congress.

I won’t bother repeating the old saw of how those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, but between the passage of time since the New Deal and the efforts of Republicans and their big business friends to obfuscate its greatness, perhaps it’s too much to ask for modern Democrats to look at how unabashed liberalism rescued this country from even deeper economic woes than we’ve faced these past few years.  Asking Democrats to look back two and a half years, when promises of reining in business and not letting the military-industrial complex continue to run roughshod over this country led to an electoral sweep, doesn’t seem to be too much to ask for.  The way Obama has moved further and further to the right at every possible step, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear him name Ann Coulter as one of his senior advisors before the year is through.

Those tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy will do nothing to stimulate the economy.  They poll poorly, as they always have, but the irrational right continues to push them, essentially using them to bully us by threatening even more job cuts if the people to finance their elections don’t get more money, money that they’ll more than likely use to pay themselves huge bonuses than actually improve the lives of the people who are forced to toil for them just to put roofs over their heads and food on their plates.  Republicans are, essentially, bullies; watching one segment of Sean Hannity’s nightly television show will provide more than enough proof of this.  Obama likes to joke about how he was the “skinny kid with the funny-sounding name,” and not only has this skinny kid begun to willingly give his lunch money to the bullies, but now he’s stealing his friends’ money to give to the bullies, even though they continue to bloody his nose at every possible opportunity.

It’s nice that House Democrats have stood up to Obama, but sadly in less than a month we’ll be entering the era of Speaker John Boehner — the thought literally sends shivers through my body — and the way the Republican Party is marching lockstep right now, his House will get tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy passed.  The Senate may remain Democratic, but Harry Reid seems even more willing to give Republicans what they want than Obama.  We have seen this before, and it’s why so many of us cannot and will not provide any support to the Democratic Party, and have joined the Green Party (if we haven’t gotten so disillusioned as to quit politics altogether).  I wish I could see a future where only middle-class and working-class Americans get their taxes cut, but we’ve seen this episode before, and we all know how it ends, so let’s not fool ourselves into thinking there’s going to be a last-minute twist ending this time around.

The only difference is whereas Clinton took four years to grossly betray the core principles of his party, Obama won’t even take a full two years.  Perhaps that’s fitting, given how Americans’ attention spans continue to diminish.  At this rate, if the Clinton model is anything to go by, it’ll only be another two years before we see another Republican president.  Suddenly the prospect of Sarah Palin winning the presidency in 2012 doesn’t seem quite so crazy any longer.