The Perils of Following the Clinton Model

President Obama and the Democrats headed off a government shutdown late Friday night by agreeing to a plan that, just months earlier, they had warned would potentially cripple the weak economy and result in tens of thousands of additional jobs lost.

But, somewhat infuriatingly, now Obama is selling the deal as a courageous and bold strategy that he, essentially endorses. Ezra Klein writes that Obama is following the Bill Clinton strategy straight toward reelection:

The Obama White House is looking toward the Clinton model. After all, Clinton also suffered a major setback in his first midterm, Clinton also faced down a hardline Republican Congress, Clinton also suffered major policy defeats, and yet Clinton, as the story goes, managed to co-opt the conservative agenda and remake himself into a successful centrist. The Obama administration has even hired many of Clinton’s top aides to help them recapture that late-90s magic.

Klein notes that this myth “misses something important” in ignoring how the booming economy—and not Clinton’s centrist triangulation—was the essential ingredient in creating Clinton’s successes.

But that’s not the only thing this myth misses. By co-opting the conservative agenda and remaking himself as a successful centrist, Clinton passed some seriously conservative legislation that continues to wreak enormously damaging consequences, from the perspective of liberals. The three most obvious—and most odious—bills are the Prison Litigation Reform Act, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, and the draconian cuts and restrictions to the Legal Services Corporation.

A quick primer:

· The PLRA: Passed in April of 1996, it severely restricts prisoners’ abilities to bring lawsuits that challenge the conditions of their confinement. The law requires them to jump through enormous hoops before suing the prison that allege constitutional violations in the facility, such as inadequate health care, overcrowding, or physical abuse.

·AEDPA: Part of the Republicans’ Contract with America, AEDPA gathered steam following the Oklahoma City bombing and was passed the same day as the PLRA. AEDPA ushered in unprecedented restrictions on habeas corpus appeals. It forces federal courts to defer to state court judgments so long as they were not unreasonable, even when the federal court acknowledges that the decision was incorrect as a matter of law.

·LSC: The Legal Services Corporation was created in 1974 to ensure that poor people have equal access to justice. Also in 1996, Congress imposed draconian restrictions on the type of work LSC could do, the most damaging of which was banning LSC from bringing class action suits against the government. Clinton signed these cuts into law as part of his wide-ranging welfare reform.

The story goes that Clinton, in a masterful stroke, came out of the 1995 and early 1996 shutdowns by moving to the center, alienated the far-right Republican House, and effectively took up the cry of centrism that carried him straight to re-election 10 months later. But this story obscures the seriously long-lasting and far-reaching policy damage that Clinton’s triangulation wrought. If Obama’s goal is only to get re-elected, his strategy of embracing the cut-the-debt-at-all-costs rhetoric is smart. But if his goal is to protect progressive priorities, and to avoid doing lasting policy-level damage, he needs to pause before following Clinton’s road to centrism.