Rewriting History - Clinton style

By Ron Beasley

I wonder if a professor would leave out the contribution of the Soviet Union in WWII.  Clinton supporter and history professor Sean Wilentz  has done the equivalent - he left the impact Ross Perot out of Bill Clinton's 1992 win over George HW Bush. 

With her overwhelming victory in Kentucky on May 20, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has completed her sweep of the crucial primary states adjoining the Ohio River -- and the fight for the Democratic nomination has entered its final phases. Having picked up a net gain of nearly 140,000 votes between Kentucky and Oregon, Clinton is now well poised to win the Puerto Rico primary on June 1 - and clinch a majority in this year's popular vote, even if the disputed returns from Michigan are discounted. Under those pressures, the Barack Obama campaign and its sympathizers have begun to articulate much more clearly what they mean by their vague slogan of "change" - nothing less than usurping the historic Democratic Party, dating back to the age of Andrew Jackson, by rejecting its historic electoral core: white workers and rural dwellers in the Middle Atlantic and border states.

Without a majority of those voters, the Democrats have, since the party's inception in the 1820s, been incapable of winning the presidency. The Obama advocates declare, though, that we have entered an entirely new political era. It is not only possible but also desirable, they say, for Democrats to win by turning away from those whom "progressive" pundits and bloggers disdain variously as "Nascar man," "uneducated," "low information" whites, "rubes, fools, and hate-mongers" who live in the nation's "shitholes."

Wilentz seems to be implying here that race was not a factor in Hillary's wins in Appalachia.  This itself is foolish since 20% of the Clinton voters admitted they voted for her because she was not black and the percentage was probably much higher.  But it's from here that Professor Wilentz fails as a history teacher.

Northern white working-class defections to the Republicans grew steadily in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Republican's Watergate debacle temporarily halted the trend, but the disasters of the Carter presidency, especially its mishandling of economic woes and foreign policy, accelerated the defections in 1980. In his two successful races, Ronald Reagan won the support, on average, of 61 percent of white working class voters, compared to 35 percent for his opponents, Carter and Walter Mondale. (Both times, Reagan carried Ohio and Pennsylvania handily.) As the caricature of "Reagan Democrats" as racist militarists hardened among "new politics" advocates, they strove to make up the difference by creating an expanded base among African-Americans, college-age, and college educated voters. The result was yet another humiliating defeat for the Democrats in 1988.

Bill Clinton's shift to a centrist liberalism stressing lunch-pail issues--"Putting People First"--won back a large number of Reagan Democrats in 1992, enough so that, by the time Clinton won his second term in 1996, Democrats could claim parity with Republicans by winning a slim plurality among non-college educated working class white voters. But the perceived elitists Al Gore and John Kerry lost what Clinton had gained, as George W. Bush carried the white working-class vote by a margin of 17 percent in 2000 and a whopping 23 percent in 2004.

If you thought there is something missing in this narrative you would be right - Ross Perot is missing.  Bill Clinton didn't get those voters in 1992 Ross Perot did.  They have the numbers over at Comments from Left Field.

In 1988, Bush the First received 53.37% of the vote nationally; Dukakis got 45.65%  But in 1992, while Clinton only got 43% of the national vote, Bush got 37.45% and Perot got 18.91%.  Combine those, and Bush/Perot got 56.36% of the popular vote in 1992 � which looks very similar to the 53.37% Bush got in 1988.

[.....]

So the theory that Professor Wilentz proffers is a myth � Bill Clinton did not win the working class vote.  And while Gore* and Kerry may have lost because they were �perceived elitists,� as Wilentz states, they also did not have a candidate taking 15-20% of the Republican vote in working class counties helping them � Clinton did.  If it weren�t for Perot, Clinton would have never won in 1992 and we probably wouldn�t see his wife running for president now.

This is something to keep in mind the next time Hillary�s supporters claim that she can win the working class vote.  Her husband never did, so what makes them think that Hillary can?

I was a Hillary Clinton supporter until January when her campaign began to look like a Rove/Attwater/Republican campaign.  The Republicans have used the tactic of rewriting history and it would seen that the Clinton supporters have adopted it as well.