When the GOP decided they loved Bill Clinton
It was in comparison with President Obama.
It was in comparison with President Obama.
Some of you may recall my piece for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting earlier this month in which I discussed the media rehabilitation of George W. Bush. Left on the cutting room floor was this discussion of the rehabilitation of Bill Clinton at the expense of Barack Obama.
It’s hard to imagine after the partisan rancor from the 2016 election, but the GOP and right wing media had praise for Bill Clinton during the Obama years. As early as March 2009, Reason columnist Steve Chapman bemoaned the perceived leftism of Obama as opposed to the cautious centrism of Clinton. In October 2010, The New York Times published a collection of Clinton’s enemies full of good natured praise and warmth for the former President.
In particular, The Times wrote, Clinton’s “recent description of Sarah Palin as “somebody to be reckoned with” earned him some kind words from Mr. Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, the right-of-center television host.”
Comparisons continued through 2013 — though as the 2016 election drew nearer they fell off.
Conservative commentator Armstrong Williams wrote for The Hill in 2011 that he missed Clinton’s sense of compromise
Clintonite Lanny Davis wished for a more fiscally conservative Obama in the mold of Clinton, who “loved the presidency,” in a 2012 column for Fox News
Fox personalities Brit Hume and Chris Wallace were lost in 90s nostalgia after Clinton’s keynote during the 2012 Democratic Convention
Former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr, a fierce Clinton opponent during the latter’s presidency, penned an op-ed for Time titled ‘I Miss Bill Clinton’ with a clear message: “Obama is no Bill Clinton; and the country is the worse for it.”
But perhaps the most blatant and egregious example of the partisan nature of last-guy normalization in the Obama era came from Newt Gingrich during a Sept. 9, 2012 appearance on CNN, the former House Speaker whose tenure was marked with frequent, venomous conflict with Clinton including two government shutdowns. Gingrich used his old adversary as a tool to delegitimize Obama: Clinton was a “real” president, Gingrich sneered, Obama a “pretender.”
But this is nothing new in American politics and the media’s reaction to neoliberal ideology. The US political system has been normalizing the right wing ideologies of the leaders of the past for decades by unfavorably comparing the current executive to their most recent inter-party predecessor.
From Trump to Bush, Obama to Clinton, Bush to Bush, Clinton to Carter, and Bush to Reagan, the office of the presidency is used as a cudgel to cajole or shame the current President into toeing the line for the American state. What’s most important is that the interests of American industry — including the military industrial complex — are protected and the stability of the American capitalist order is maintained.
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