Bill Clinton needs to go away: Why his presidency has become a political liability
In a widely circulated video yesterday, Clinton defended programs that have ballooned both prison and poverty rates
DANIEL DENVIR
Salon.com
Bill Clinton is no doubt his wife’s double-edged sword: Though he is among the most charismatic politicians of his era, he’s also prone to saying things that make campaign life rather awkward. The big problem, however, isn’t just that Bill Clinton can’t keep his mouth shut. It’s that his right-leaning New Democrat policy record is a bad fit for today’s liberal politics.
Yesterday, speaking in Philadelphia, Clinton responded to protesters by defending two now-very-controversial bills that he signed into law: The 1994 Crime Bill, widely criticized for fueling mass incarceration, and so-called welfare reform, which dramatically reduced poor people’s access to government aid.
At the same time, he insisted that Hillary Clinton had nothing to do with either. And that gets at one of her campaign’s unshakeable dilemmas: They are running on what’s still popular about the Clinton years and trying run away from what’s not. That, of course, is impossible. And in Philadelphia, the balancing act tripped as a frustrated Bill Clinton lashed out at protesters with a full-throated recourse to throwback war-on-crime rhetoric.
“I don’t know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack and sent ’em out into the street to murder other African American children,” he chided. “Maybe you thought they were good citizens. She didn’t. She didn’t. You are defending the people who kill the lives you say matter. Tell the truth.”
That’s what will get the headlines, and possibly spark a hashtag. And for good reason. But what’s most remarkable is that Clinton made a case for the laws that just doesn’t add up. On the Crime Bill, he blamed Republicans for the the “increased sentencing provisions,” and said that the law created “a 25-year low in crime” and a 33-year low in the “murder rate.”
Protesters, he said, were “afraid of the truth” for not letting him speak. But the truth is not what Clinton was speaking.
“I was around in 1994 and very engaged on the crime bill, and it was quite clear that it was Bill Clinton’s legislation, not forced on him by the Republicans,” emails Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project.
Indeed, tough-on-crime posturing was nothing new for the Bill Clinton who left the campaign trail in 1992 for Arkansas to preside over the execution of a man so mentally disabled after a suicide attempt that he reportedly put aside his last meal’s pecan pie “for later.” In his 1994 State of the Union, Clinton endorsed three strikes laws, saying “those who commit repeated violent crimes should be told when you commit a third violent crime, you will be put away and put away for good, three strikes and you are out.”
As for the decrease in crime, that’s real. But it’s not clear which provisions of the bill it is that Bill believes are responsible. Whatever he had in mind, the evidence suggests that he’s wrong that his law had anything to do with it.
If he’s claiming the decrease came about because of the surge in federally-funded police hired by localities, he’s likely wrong there too: Most researchers have found that it had little to no effect on crime. And if he’s referencing the harsh sentencing, the best available evidence suggests that he’s wrong on that as well: A groundbreaking 2014 study from the National Research Council of the National Academies found that “the increase in incarceration may have caused a decrease in crime, but the magnitude of the reduction is highly uncertain and the results of most studies suggest it was unlikely to have been large.”
The truth of the matter is, as Maurer explains:
“Crime was already going down before the crime bill was adopted. This was due to a number of factors, not least of which was the waning of the crack cocaine epidemic of the late 1980s.”
On so-called welfare reform, meanwhile, Clinton made a point of denying that the law led to increased black poverty.