Word: clinton
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...hard line against crime and too often associated that crime with blacks. Today, by contrast, roughly 1% of Americans say crime is their top issue, and no one even knows what Obama's position on the death penalty is. For Obama, that's an enormous boon, and Bill Clinton deserves a lot of the credit. His policies--especially his bold proposal for 100,000 new cops--helped bring down the crime rate. And by embracing the death penalty, he eliminated one of the GOP's best wedge issues. That embrace was ugly at times, as when Clinton flew back...
...starters, Clinton deracialized American politics. He didn't deracialize it completely, of course. But knitting together a coalition of blacks and whites is easier today because Clinton restored the Democrats' credibility on economic issues and took three of the most racially toxic issues in U.S. politics--crime, welfare and affirmative action--off the table...
...Clinton also removed the word welfare from America's political lexicon. In the mid-1980s, when pollsters conducted focus groups with Reagan Democrats, they found that when they talked about government help for the needy, voters saw it as welfare: taking money from whites to give to undeserving blacks. That attitude was hugely unfair, but it was a political reality. Clinton changed that when he reformed welfare in 1996. By making it brutally clear that people who didn't work wouldn't get much help from Washington, he made it harder for Republicans to tag Democratic antipoverty programs as handouts...
...affirmative action, Clinton took the air out of a deeply polarizing issue by "triangulating" it-- tweaking preference policies rather than abolishing them or defending them outright. But perhaps Clinton's most important contribution to Obama had little to do with race. The Clinton presidency restored the Democratic Party's reputation for economic management, which Jimmy Carter had nearly destroyed. By almost 20 points, according to the Pew Research Center, Americans today trust Democrats over Republicans to guide the economy--a huge boon to Obama in what looks like a recession election. Obama owes much of that advantage to George...
...Clinton had been more principled, if he had been less of a panderer, if he had tried to be purer than his political opponents--if, in other words, he had been more like Obama--he might have opposed the death penalty, vetoed welfare reform and unambiguously defended affirmative action. He might also have gone with his liberal base, not Wall Street, and chosen economic stimulus over deficit reduction in 1993. And had he done those things, Barack Obama would probably not be in a commanding position to become the next President of the U.S. So as they bid Clintonism goodbye...