Matthew Yglesias » Life at the Bottom

Oct 30th, 2008 at 10:09 am

Life at the Bottom

Chris Bertram, in the course of knocking Bill Clinton’s accomplishments, argues:

There is a criterion that any progressive government ought to meet. It is one that I might quibble with in a seminar but not in life. A progressive (left, liberal, social-democratic government) ought to alter social arrangements so that they work significantly more to the benefit of the the least-advantaged members of society that they did when that government came to power. Well, The Wire is fiction, and I’ve never visited the West Side of Baltimore, but did Clinton make a difference in places like that? And are the Valleys of South Wales less (or more) hopeless places than they were ten years ago?

Not only is The Wire fiction, but it’s set during the Bush II years and based heavily on reporting that David Simon did in the Reagan-Bush years. In the real world, violent crime dropped substantially in American cities during the nineties. And then there’s the poverty rate. Consider this data from EPI’s report “Reversal of fortune: Economic gains of 1990s overturned for African Americans from 2000-07″:

Again, things got better during the nineties. Did they get as good as they ought to be? No. But if the trends that existed during Bill Clinton’s administration has continued for eight additional years instead of being reversed, things would be much better than they are today.

Meanwhile, Bertram derides “‘in the circumstances’ excusing” on behalf of both Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. But the circumstances are importantly different. In the American context, you can’t change the laws more than congress will agree to change the laws. The positions Clinton outlined were consistently more leftwing than the positions adhered to by the median members of congress (conservative southern Democrats in 1993-94 and conservative Republicans in 1995-2000). If Clinton had staked out a bolder, more leftwing position, it wouldn’t have made any difference. Conversely, had congress enacted Clinton’s health care plan, we’d say that Bill Clinton was, along with FDR and LBJ, one of the three great architects of the American welfare state. That didn’t happen, but not because Clinton was too much of a sellout — it happened because congress wouldn’t approve his proposal.

That made for a disappointing administration in many respects, but not for lack of trying on the part of the administration. And despite Clinton’s difficulty in enacting large-scale semi-permanent institutional change, his tenure in office really did make life much better for people at the bottom.

Comments
33

Filed under: Clinton, Economy, History

33 Responses to “Life at the Bottom”

Ted Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 10:16 am
Word. With any luck, the “median member of Congress” next February will not be as conservative as he was in 1993.

I think there’s pretty good reason to expect that he won’t be a conservative southern Democrat in any case.
strasmangelo jones Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 10:18 am
Not only is The Wire fiction, but it’s set during the Bush II years and based heavily on reporting that David Simon did in the Reagan-Bush years

He actually did quite a bit of reporting in the Clinton years, too.
Steve LaBonne Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 10:28 am
Look, Bill was by no means a bad President, but let’s not pretend he came close to fulfilling the potential that his brains and political skills appeared to promise. He pulled in his horns so far after the 1994 election that he was completely in survival mode- and that’s survival for Bill, and to hell with the Democratic Party- and basically stopped even trying to shape public opinion. He was almost purely reactive for those last 6 years, and of course all the post-Monica time was completely lost. (In retrospect I almost wish the Senate had convicted him so Gore could have run as the incumbent without dealing with Bill’s baggage.)

Conversely, I supported Obama over Hillary not because he’s more progressive than she is- they’re two peas in a pod on substance- but because he understands the vital importance of organization-building and consensus- shaping, and she plainly doesn’t.
El Cid Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 10:29 am
I have made many criticisms of Bill Clinton, but I had never faulted him for failing to make life better for inhabitants of The Wire.

Also, I have heard that The Wire is a prominent television series which some people really enjoyed. I wonder if anyone on this blog may have perchance seen an episode or two?
strasmangelo jones Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 10:31 am
Matt, you sound as though Clinton merely “disappointed” by failing to pass some liberal legislation like health care reform. This is not the case. In fact, Clinton actively supported – and on occasion fought members of his own party to pass – conservative legislation like welfare reform, NAFTA, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, DOMA, the crime bill, etc. In the case of welfare reform, this was an instance of a nominally liberal, Democratic president realizing Ronald Reagan’s dream by gutting an element of the New Deal.

There is a stubborn, willful blindness present in a certain brand of liberal commentator who kind of shrugs at Clinton, says “oh, well, he didn’t pass health care” and refuses to look at everything he did pass that actively made the lives of poor people worse. Throughout the primaries, at a time when every pundit and their mother started reminiscing on the Clinton Legacy, there was no serious attempt to reevaluate the impact of welfare reform, or NAFTA, or of mandatory minimums, or any other less-than-pleasant policy of the Clinton years. This is yet another area where you either need to do some research or you probably need to shut up.
The Other Steve Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 10:32 am
Matt,

If I may point out. We are now in the Age of Obama, not the Age of Clinton. When we talk about poverty today it would be wise and prudent to remember that over half of those Americans below the poverty line ARE NOT AFRICAN AMERICAN.

Talking about poverty in terms of race serves no other purpose than to reinforce Republican racial stereotypes.

Obama understands this. Why can’t you?
Steve LaBonne Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 10:34 am
Strasmangelo said it much better than I did.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 10:36 am
That didn’t happen, but not because Clinton was too much of a sellout — it happened because congress wouldn’t approve his proposal.

Clinton didn’t help matters by being so secretive. He didn’t get Congress on board, which is Clinton’s fault. While Congress shares blame by being a bunch of spineless whimps, Clinton didn’t do himself any favors in the manor in which he went about trying to get it passed.
SomeCallMeTim Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 10:45 am
In the real world, violent crime dropped substantially in American cities during the nineties.

I looked this up once, and, as I recall, mid-sized cities like Baltimore and Newark were not much improved over the past. If I’m remembering properly, the information came from a series in The Sun. All of which is only to say that while things improved under Clinton, the benefits did not fall uniformly across the country, and the picture is more complicated than you seem to be suggesting. And I say that as someone who would be fine with a return to Clintonism if it could be done without the ritual act of obeisance to the Southern conservatives.
Brett M. Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 10:56 am
The basic point of the post is clearly right–Clinton did about as well as he could do given the positions of the members of Congress. The big unanswered question, partly raised in some of the comments, is whether Clinton, or the Democratic Party more generally, could have done more to shift leftward the position of the median member of Congress. My hope with Obama is that he is building much more of a movement than Clinton ever managed, which will succeed both in electing a more Democratic and liberal Congress and may also be used to help pressure that Congress to pass progressive measures. Will it work? I have no idea, but I do think that Obama has a better shot at it than Clinton because of the type of campaign he has run, and also because the economic crisis has made the public more open to major change.
blah Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 11:11 am
That didn’t happen, but not because Clinton was too much of a sellout — it happened because congress wouldn’t approve his proposal.

And why wouldn’t Congress approve his proposal?

At a retreat for Senate Democrats, Hillary was asked by Bill Bradley, “whether the Clinton’s failure to meet their promise of submitting health care legislation to Congress in one hundred days… would make it more difficult to win passage… Perhaps some substantive changes might be required in the interest of realism, Bradley suggested. No, Hillary responded icily, there would be no changes because delay or not, the White House would ‘demonize’ members of Congress and the medical establishment who would use the interim to alter the administration’s plan or otherwise stand in its way.” [A Woman In Charge, p. 304]

“[Bill] Bradley and [Pat] Moynihan later said they were flabbergasted at Hillary’s words and attitude that afternoon, but each came to believe that the incident was indicative of something more revealing about her character… ‘That was it for me in terms of Hillary Clinton,’ Bradley said many years later. ‘You don’t tell members of the Senate you are going to demonize them. It was obviously so basic to who she is. The arrogance. The assumption that people with questions are enemies. The disdain. The hypocrisy.’ Lawrence O’Donnell explained the depth of Moynihan’s disappointment with the woman who would eventually replace him in the Senate. The senator ‘didn’t hold grudges, didn’t personalize such matters,’ said O’Donnell. ‘But the “demonizing” colored his perception of Hillary, and how she operated, for the rest of his life.’” [A Woman In Charge, p. 304]

http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/09/obama_campaign_sends_out_resea.php

My two cents’ worth–and I think it is the two cents’ worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993-1994–is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life. Heading up health-care reform was the only major administrative job she has ever tried to do. And she was a complete flop at it. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given. And she wasn’t smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly.

So when senior members of the economic team said that key senators like Daniel Patrick Moynihan would have this-and-that objection, she told them they were disloyal. When junior members of the economic team told her that the Congressional Budget Office would say such-and-such, she told them (wrongly) that her conversations with CBO head Robert Reischauer had already fixed that. When long-time senior hill staffers told her that she was making a dreadful mistake by fighting with rather than reaching out to John Breaux and Jim Cooper, she told them that they did not understand the wave of popular political support the bill would generate. And when substantive objections were raised to the plan by analysts calculating the moral hazard and adverse selection pressures it would put on the nation’s health-care system…

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001600.html
bigbadwolf Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 11:13 am
on crime, i would be very wary of giving clinton any more credit than i would give guiliani. that is some, but i think there are a lot of variables that were beyond easy control and that do not respond well to the sort of tough-guy, lock-em up strategy that clinton too embraced. one of those, i think from my work experience, is that violence is cyclical. a lot of young men get killed and then their younger friends, brothers, and cousins, say, this has gotten out of hand. then 10 or 15 years go by and those who have not ever seen a high level of violence and do not so fear it, start things up again. there’s little that authority acting only as authority can do about that. there is little doubt in my mind that anti-poverty programs help reduce crime, in large part becuase the potential group that is . i am very much less sure that crackdowns and lock-em-up programs do much more than make people feel good. the reality is that the people who are the best criminals are the least likely to get caught
Sharon Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 11:20 am
Matt,

I lived in Baltimore in the ninties and while Clinton’s programs may have helped a researcher on Johns Hopkins’ East Baltimore campus, but the West Side of town got more violent, desparate and poor. The destruction of many working-class black and white neighborhoods occurred during the Clinton years. A lot of that had to do with the drug wars, but you can’t really say that Clinton’s policies really ameliorated the decline. We had a neighborhood near mid-town that was referred to as “Frontier Town.” You know why we called it that? “‘Cause it was like the Wild West, baby!”
Chris Bertram Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 11:28 am
I’m happy to be corrected by those more knowledgeable than myself (probably, that’s most of you). But on a couple of points:

(a) I asked whether Clinton made a difference in places like that. So pointing out that the Wire was set in a different period it hardly to the point.

(b) I wrote about the alteration of “social arrangements” so that they work more to the benefit of the least advantaged. Showing that income figures temporarily trend this way or that (and then extrapolating) is, again, hardly to the point. After all, economies fluctuate. Both the New Deal and the Attlee welfare state were long-term institutional changes.
Tom from the Bx Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Incomes for poor people rose under Clinton, partly because of the increased EITC. But Bertram was not asking about incomes, he was asking about “social arrangements,” for which the explanatory precedent was the achievements of the Attlee government in Britain and the New Deal in the United States. So he’s talking about something that penetrates everyday life much more than a modest income increase, something that changes life chances much more than that, something that changes politics much more than that, and something much more durable than that too.

The decrease in crime during the 1990s — the waning of the crack epidemic — did indeed penetrate everyday life for poor people (and other people too) to an enormous extent. But one can reasonably ask to what extent that was a result of the Clinton administration’s action.

Also, I’d say that today we need a Roosevelt rather than a Clinton even more than we did in 1992.
jeff Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Bill Clinton’s Legacy:

Welfare Rerorm, increased incarceration, stepping up the war on drugs, black lower class social mobility increased, black male labor force drop outs increased. In fact, inequality, by and large, despiting short term labor market tightening, increased.

Public housing, via Hope VI and MTO, was destroyed through the repeal of one for one housing demolition rules. And the “one-strike” rule for felon tenants increased marginalization and homelessness.

In short, Bill Clinton did little to serve the poor, and especially the urban poor. He did not change the safety net or systematically alter labor market dynamics, ensuring that “these people” do better, rather he helped shred it. So while some cohorts made short term gains–as the economy boomed and labor markets tightened–the urban poor were actually rendered more vulnerable to downturns, which came.

But continue the partisan cheerleading on clinton’s behalf and crowing about the great urban crime drop (mass incarceration and aggregate economic gains).
Jasper Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Matt: Completely off topic, but, since you mentioned The Wire, how about an open thread Mad Men post, now that season II has wrapped up. Don’t you watch it?
MBunge Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
One of the small but significant vitures of an Obama win (knock on wood) is that it will give both Dems and Reps a chance to reevaluate the legacies of their two biggest figures in the last 30 years.

Dems and Libs need to face up to the fact that while Clinton did, on balance, a lot of good for the country, he tore the heart out of the party and the movement and replaced it with nothing but himself.

Reps and Cons need to look back at who Reagan actually was and what he actually did, both of which bear little resemblence to what the GOP has become today.

Mike
Al Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
A progressive (left, liberal, social-democratic government) ought to alter social arrangements so that they work significantly more to the benefit of the the least-advantaged members of society that they did when that government came to power.

Income inequality exploded in the Clinton years. Now I don’t think that income inequality is that big a deal, so long as people at all levels are improving. But, to the left, income inequality is a big deal – it doesn’t matter much if the bottom is improving if the top is improving by much more. Judged by the degree to which income inequality has increased, Bush has been a much, much better president than Clinton.
jeff Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Should read “black lower class social mobility decreased
DRR Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
It seems like some people are holding Bill Clinton up to heroic standards. No he didn’t implement another “New Deal” neither did anyone else besides FD fucking R. Did Clinton ever have as massive a partisan advantage as FDR or LBJ? Was the climate for liberalism much less the continued ascendancy of a radical conservatism more amicable in his administration compared to the other two. You’re right, Clinton was not FDR or Clement Atlee, much less in a political climate much more hostile to the New Deal itself and with a partisan minority in both houses of congress. It seems if we continue to hold our elected leaders to such standards, we will be contonually disappointed.

And no Clinton didn’t implement welfare reform, he signed it….after he had vetoed the thing twice and it was brought to him yet a third time. Anti Clinton partisans, in a fit of intellectual dishonesty like to pretend that Clinton’s parsed political speech promising to end welfare had anything to do with the bill that eventually came out of the Republican congress. Read the literature on the proposed Clinton welfare reform legislation pre-1994. It was basically smoke & mirrors effort to dissolve welfae as a hot button political issue rather than to significantly alter the program.

In these discussions I’m rarely disabused of the suspicion that the majority participants always assume they would be a better President than whoever was in office, This conceit is especially shallow when the large body of them liken the ability to achieve something in politics to the way The Green Lantern overcomes his foes.
Asher Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
his tenure in office really did make life much better for people at the bottom.

How? Which policies did this? How do you know it wasn’t just economic growth?
LaFollette Progressive Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
“How? Which policies did this? How do you know it wasn’t just economic growth?”

Did the economy grow in the Bush years? By what mechanism does “just economic growth” increase poverty rates under a Republican Administration and decrease poverty rates under a Democratic Administration?
Dilan Esper Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
That didn’t happen, but not because Clinton was too much of a sellout — it happened because congress wouldn’t approve his proposal.

Actually, it happened precisely because Clinton was a conservative (not a sellout– he never was a liberal). Clinton is simply opposed to single payer. So rather than advocating for it, and then forcing a compromise which would have created universal coverage through the private sector, he made universal coverage through the private sector the “left” position, which meant that the only thing that could pass is the “centrist” position of incremental health care reforms like portability.

You have to go into Congress with the farthest left proposal and force the center to the left. Clinton was a conservative who foced the center to the right.

That doesn’t mean he didn’t have some accomplishments that helped ordinary people or that Bush 41 or Dole would have been superior. It just means that his conservativism– and not simply the ideological makeup of Congress– is a big reason why we had ever-so-slightly less right-wing than the Republicans government during that period.
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Life at the Bottom

33 Responses to “Life at the Bottom”

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