Sometimes it takes the young to show us older folks where we’ve taken a wrong turn. The question is whether we will have sense enough to listen? The answer to that question lies with what happens to the campaign of Hillary Clinton.
Hers is a campaign built on eidolons (see what search engines do with that one)–not the fantasy creatures or rock bands or loudspeakers–but the other definition that envisions epaulets that perch on the shoulders of history where their truth-dazzling glitter speaks of epic deeds that exist only in a mind’s idealizations. Hillary Clinton’s version of the 1990s is an eidolon–a phantom version of a past that never existed.
In New Hampshire Clinton succeeded in making this phantom past become real for enough voters that she pulled off what is already being referred to as the second Clinton comeback. But like other phantoms, this one also has its dark side, for by building her campaign on an imagined golden age she threatens to cost the Democratic Party the support of the new young voters who have brought it new energy.
The lines in the campaign have now been drawn. The contest has become both generational and ideological. Hillary Clinton won 39% of the New Hampshire vote for the same reason she lost Iowa–demographics. Her base continues to be older people, especially older women. Twenty-eight percent of New Hampshire residents fall into the 45-64 year old age group versus 25% for Iowa. An astounding two-thirds of New Hampshire primary voters were over 40, compared with only 60% in the Iowa caucuses. Twenty-two percent of Iowa caucus goers were 18-24 versus half that number who voted in the New Hampshire primary. (CNN Data)
As for ideology, Clinton captured only 38% of the Democrats voting, while candidates that are part of Democracy for America’s progressive list–Obama, Edwards and Kucinich–captured 55%. So in that sense Hillary Clinton lost New Hampshire. In fact if Kucinich’s votes had gone to Obama, as many of them did under the Iowa caucus rules, the New Hampshire race would have been a dead heat or Obama would have had a larger percentage than Clinton.
Among progressive Democrats there is a real fear that 2008 could turn out like 2004 as the so-called New Democrats once again beat down a challenger to the philosophy of triangulation that has ruled the Party for over a decade. Will Barack Obama be the Howard Dean of this campaign? Will the Democratic establishment give us another John Kerry?
My DC son said as much in a Monday email. Like many young Democrats, he is an enthusiastic Obama supporter, who also says if Hillary Clinton wins the nomination, many young people will be weighing their options. Judging by the polls, this feeling is not uncommon among his generation. It has nothing to do with personality and everything to do with logic.
He and others believe Clinton’s campaign has made a tactical error they find incomprehensible. My son summed it up well, “If she’s been for change for 35 years, why is everything so screwed up?”
Think about that for a minute. Those 35 and younger have lived most of their lives in a screwed-up world, a world of problems handed to them by those of us 35 and over: global warming, economic inequity, education, Iraq and Afghanistan, health care, social security. Add your favorite issue to this formidable list.
Face it; we older folks have not exactly been good stewards. As for Ronald Reagan’s famous “morning in America,” this generation were kids or not even born during those years. To voters my son’s age, Reagan might as well be Harry Truman or John Kennedy. My son captured this well when he said his generation had grown tired of hearing the older generation constantly refighting a war that is almost half a century old–Vietnam.
Knowing my liking for the rapper Common, my son gave me his 2004 CD “Like Water for Chocolate” for Christmas. Hillary Clinton and her advisors have probably never heard of Common, but they ought to listen to the brilliant first track, “Time Travelin’.” I like Common because his rhymes make me think. Each time I listen I hear something new, view something differently. The first line says it all:
What, what we do this time.
Which words get the emphasis? That’s what the 2008 campaign is all about.
For those who don’t listen to Common, statistics tell the story. There has been a concerted public relations campaign to portray the 1990s and the Clinton administration in particular as some golden age. My son doesn’t think of the 90s that way and neither do I.
Statistics reveal a different perspective. Bill Clinton and the New Democrats with their triangulation made it clear they no longer believed in the idea of government as the guarantor of the level playing field that had governed the Democratic Party since the days of William Jennings Bryan. I’ll be writing more on this in a future analysis of Clinton’s Second Inaugural.
For now, some graphs will suffice to make the point. If you’ve followed this blog, you’ve seen these graphs before. In essays using them, I have shown how America’s downward slide began with Ronald Reagan and has essentially continued ever since. In fact, as we all intuitively sense, it has grown worse under George W. Bush. What I did not write about is how those same graphs show Hillary Clinton’s evocation of the 90s as a golden age is an eidolon.
Let’s begin with the issue that has been the most critical for America — the widening disparity in income, which currently is the worst it has been since the days of the Robber Barons. You don’t hear Hillary Clinton talking much about this one in her evocations of the 1990s. The graph below shows why.
The data in the above graph comes from the two leading researchers in this area, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez,
What they found is best explained in a letter to the Wall Street Journal.
Our work has shown the top 1% income share has increased dramatically in recent decades and has reached levels which had not been seen since before World War II and even since before the Great Depression when including capital gains.
The letter estimates:
the top 1% disposable income share has most likely more than doubled since 1980.
Note both the letter and that graph show that far from being a golden age, the 1990s represent a time when the disparity dramatically increased. Note particularly the dramatic upswing between 1995 and 2000 when guess who was President.
Let’s take another bread and butter issue–household debt. If you think the 1990s were a golden age, check out the graph below
Note again a dramatic upward slope occurs from 1995-2000. But pay attention to the bottom lines. Clintonites like to boast that median household income increased during the Clinton years, which this graph confirms, but note that the increase was gradual and that the real measure of a family’s economic security–the gap between debt and income–went up. The bottom line of the bottom line adds up to people becoming worse off, not better.
Hillary Clinton likes to boast that in her 35 years of experience she did something about health care. The graph below shows a more complex and less rosy picture.
Yes, health care premiums dipped between 1993 and 1996, but by the end of Bill Clinton’s term they were just about back where they were when he started–8.3% in 2000 vs 8.5% in 1993. So for half of the fabled golden years, the health care crisis improved, but for the other half it became worse. In medical terms, the patient relapsed.
I could throw up additional graphs showing that Hillary Clinton’s portrayal of the 1990s is a myth, but I need to respect the bandwidth of my server and you readers. It may stand as one of the most telling assessments of the Presidency of George W. Bush, that we would look back to the 1990s with nostalgia. But looking back to the 1990s as a blueprint for the future just because George Bush may well be the worst President of them all is a recipe for disaster.
Now to keep my mailbox from bursting with indignant letters (and one idiot who tried to take down this site) from FOBs (you remember that acronym–Friends of Bill), let me hasten to add that I’d take Bill Clinton in a minute over those members of the Bush family who preceded and followed him. Clinton, after all, did reduce the deficit. He did have to deal with one of the nastiest Congresses in a long time. His foreign policy did not seek to become the second coming of Teddy Roosevelt.
Peter Senge, the systems thinker, likes to talk about mental models, which are the pictures of reality we all carry in our heads that govern how we see the world. The 2008 Democratic campaign is at its heart a clash of mental models. Hillary Clinton and her followers want to bring back the 1990s. Barack Obama wants to take us into the future. One looks back, the other looks forward.
This is what young people are trying to tell us. It is not merely that they do not see the 1990s as a golden age, but they see little point in using a flawed past as a road map for the future. Put this way; is it any wonder Clinton captured only a minority of New Hampshire voters?
Everyone now asks whether Hillary Clinton can become President. There is a simple answer to that–not if she keeps looking backwards, dreaming of eidolons.
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