Gather round, boys and girls!
The New York Times has a fairy tale it wants to tell you—about the magical land
of Centrism and how it needs to be saved from the sinister Lefties….
Oh, you’ve heard this story
before? Yes, it’s true—the Times has been telling this same story for years,
always with the same thrilling leaps of logic (Extra! Update, 6/04; Extra!, 7–8/06; FAIR.org, 1/11/11,
5/27/15,
5/23/16).
This time (New York Times
op-ed, 7/6/17),
it’s told by Mark Penn—identified as a “pollster and senior adviser to Bill and
Hillary Clinton,” not as a PR consultant for
corporations like Microsoft, Merck, Verizon, BP and McDonald’s—and Andrew
Stein, identified as a “former Manhattan borough president and New York City
Council president,” rather than as a Trump
supporter and convicted tax
cheat.
Shh! They’re coming to the
good part now:
After years of leftward drift
by the Democrats culminated in Republican control of the House under Speaker
Newt Gingrich, President Bill Clinton moved the party back to the center in
1995 by supporting a balanced budget, welfare reform, a crime bill that called
for providing 100,000 new police officers and a step-by-step approach to
broadening healthcare. Mr. Clinton won a resounding re-election victory in 1996
and Democrats were back.
The Democrats were back! It’s
true that Bill Clinton won re-election in 1996—with 49 percent of the vote in a
three-way race—but Democrats, in the real world, lost the House in 1994 as a
result of Clinton’s right-leaning policies, particularly
NAFTA, and Republicans held it for the next 12 years. Republicans took back
the Senate in 1994 and controlled it for the remainder of Clinton’s
administration, with the Democrats never having more than 50 seats until 2009.
When Clinton took office, Democratic governors outnumbered their GOP
counterparts, 30–18—and when he left office, it was 30–18 the other way.
If that’s coming back, I’d
hate to see staying away.
