Don’t forget that he repealed Glass-Steagel and signed the Commodities Futures Modernization Act.

I really don’t get the alternative history some people have of Clenis as some sort of progressive unicorn pony, but there it is.

THEY INVENTED THE TERM SISTA SOULJA MOMENT FOR THIS MOFO.

Good fucking Lord. NAFTA. Glass-Steagall. DADT. DOMA. Catastrophic cuts in WELFARE. The guy who flew back to Arkansas to watch a guy get executed to prove his “tough on crime” credentials. Not to mention the goddamned DLC.

Have they ANY ounce of self-awareness?

I really don’t get the alternative history some people have of Clenis as some sort of progressive unicorn pony, but there it is.

That phenomenon mystifies me as well. I remember being something of a firebagger during the Clinton administration since BC was way to my right (as is Obama, though I think less so). But it never occurred to me for a second to make common cause with that era’s teabaggers or screech about primarying a sitting Democratic president who was under siege by Gingrich & Co.

Now, I did fall off the sane wagon and vote for Nader when Gore picked the mewling, sanctimonious Lieberdouche as his running mate. But good Christ, I learned my lesson during the Bush years and will never be that goddamned thick again.

Hey Betty, can I join you in the guilty admissions department?  I voted for Nader too the first time, since the polling showed overwhelmingly that my state was going Dubya in a big way.  I consider that the one mistake in my lifetime voting career, though my ultra-lefty Nader-to-the-end friend thinks it was my only sane moment.

I really don’t get the alternative history some people have of Clenis as some sort of progressive unicorn pony, but there it is.

Part of it is standard Clinton myth (you know, kind of like a “fairy tale” or something), but some of it was surely fueled by the madness of aught-eight, in which the Hillary camp convinced itself that Obama was a latte/pinot grigio/Dijon mustard Democrat and Hillary was the second coming of Eugene V. Debs.  How they managed to keep up the “Hillary knows how to fight back” narrative despite eight years of Bill’s triangulatin’ (another term, like “Sista Souljah moment,” we owe to BC—and his BFF Dick Morris) and despite her vote on Kyl-Lieberman and that way cool summit meeting with Richard Mellon Scaife—that I don’t really know.

Warning: contains spoiler.

Bill was disappointing from before the get-go, when he went back on his campaign promise to help the Haitian boat people, but after the proto-repugs started persecuting him and Hillary, the Dems united, pretty much, is what I recall. I spent many hours arguing in an unquiet manner with Ken Starr fans.

If only President Obama would do something wildly stupid but legal that we could defend him for like that! But no, he had to be quietly respectable and sane instead. What was he thinking?!!

But good Christ, I learned my lesson during the Bush years and will never be that goddamned thick again.

Betty, String, this is where I reluctantly rise from my chair and say, “My name is Jewish Steel and I am a Nadervoter.”

If I keep voting for the IWW’s candidate somebody’s going to take notice, right?

Good lord.  Really?  The first vote I made was for Nader instead of Clinton in 1996 (after making sure Clinton had pretty much clinched the presidency) specifically because I wasn’t satisfied with Clinton’s politics and policies.  This whole revisionism of history thing is distasteful.

Betty, String, this is where I reluctantly rise from my chair and say, “My name is Jewish Steel and I am a Nadervoter.”

I am too - Nader 2000. But I will say that if I lived anywhere other than Utah I’d have voted Gore.

A very popular diary at GOS recalls the moment when Clinton stared down the Republicans and they blinked.

Oh, kee-rist, it’s by that slinkerwink person.  Proclaiming that SuperBill knew when to draw the line against Republicans.  Like welfare *reform*.  And DADT.  And repeal of Glass-Steagall.  The Repubs did not want those things yet Bill stood firm.

Hi, asiangrrl!

Yeah, similar to stringonastick, Gore was a lock here in Lincolnland. Voting for Nader was sold to me as a way for the Greens (he was a Green, rt?) to get matching federal funding and thus keep valuable issues before the public.

Oh, and thanks Greens for my Republican Senator Mark Kirk. That’s working out great, ain’t it?

Utah

Whoa.

Still, Mormons are pretty nice folks individually, I’ve found

Mormons are pretty nice folks individually, I’ve found

That’s been my experience in ~35 years of living in Utah as a (white) non-Mormon, YMMV for more visible minorities. But the church is pretty benighted wrt gender/race/alcohol/foolin’ around/most everything else.

Obama could’ve gone out and purchased the winning ticket for last night’s PowerBall lottery and then donated the winnings towards saving entitlement programs.  That’s what I would’ve done—and the fact that he was unwilling to take even such a modest step shows whose side he was on all along. 

And don’t get me started on the fact that, despite being “the basketball president” he failed to bet $10B on the Mavericks winning the NBA last season, which would’ve solved innumerable problems for this country. Or a similar bet on Shackleford to win the Preakness.  But he didn’t.

Call me cynical, but I think the reason why he didn’t do these things is pretty obvious: he wanted this crisis to happen.

Yeah, I used to live in AZ. Lotsa LDS there too, as I’m sure you know.

And here up in Nauvoo IL, natch!

String, Jewish Steel, Xecky, Asiangrrl—y’all make me feel like less of a dumb ass, and for that I thank you. Of course, I voted for Nader 2000 in FLORIDA, so shame must be apportioned fairly. Still, it’s good to know I’m not alone. Maybe that’s why we have a reformed smoker’s zeal against firebaggery…

Voting for Nader was sold to me as a way for the Greens (he was a Green, rt?) to get matching federal funding and thus keep valuable issues before the public.

He never joined the party, no, but if the Greens had cleared that five-percent bar in 2000, they would definitely have moved the Overton Window so far left that we’d now be talking about the glorious day the workers’ collectives drove the Koch brothers out of the country.  If only they had nominated Peter Camejo in ‘04 instead of David Cobb, how different the world would be…

OK, enough snark at the poor Greens.  My Clinton era:  I bailed in 1995 and joined the New Party.  Voted “meh, wtf, Clinton” in ‘96 only because Nader wasn’t on the ticket in Illinois.  When Gore named Lieberman his running mate in 2000 I swore to my wife I would vote for Eugene McCarthy (by this time I was totally annoyed with Nader).  Eventually voted for Gore with industrial-strength nose-clamps, after having a vision of Dick Cheney stamping on a human face forever.

But then there was my 1980 vote for Barry Commoner, cast in the deluded belief that there was no way Carter could lose New York.  All I can say is that at least I knew better than to go for that Anderson fellow.

All I can say is that at least I knew better than to go for that Anderson fellow.

I voted for Anderson, because he could only afford 5 minutes of national TV time the night before the election, unlike Carter and Reagan who both got a half-hour each.

He was a dork and his wife had a gooney name, but his message was timeless. “I can’t tell you honestly that I know what to do about all the problems facing America today. But neither can my opponents. Nobody knows.”

John B Anderson Wiki:

In the 2000 U.S. presidential election, he was briefly considered as possible candidate for the Reform Party nomination but instead endorsed Ralph Nader.[13] In January 2008, Anderson indicated strong support for the candidacy of fellow Illinoisan, Democratic contender Barack Obama.

Well, I’ll be.

This is proof that HRC wouldn’t have gone for this deal because the new feminism demands that women do exactly what their husbands would have done.

Roooar!

Weird. I thought my sister told me John Anderson died this week, but maybe I was still in a post-op haze. I will confess that I had a brief thing for Anderson, but it was before I could vote so didn’t really count. I’ve pretty much been a straight Dem voter since 1984 (the first year I could vote), except for voting for Jim Edgar for governor of Illinois in 1990 (he was the Republican candidate, but the Dem, Neil Hartigan, was a total weasel and had even less of a pro-choice record than Edgar’s IMO).

And I voted for Rich Whitney, Green, for governor in 2006 because it was either Blago, Some Damn Republican (wasn’t voting for ANY of the bastards during the Bush years, doubt I ever will have reason to again), or Green, and I figured that it would help the Greens get statewide major-party status, which it did. And which they probably lost after the 2010 elections.

I’m sure the fact that Whitney’s name appeared on absentee ballots sent to largely African-American districts as “Rich Whitey” had no impact whatsoever. (Honestly, I’m not sure it did—it just made me laugh my ass off at the time.)

AHEM.  People please to read that I voted for Nader when he was running against Clinton, not Gore.  I voted for Gore.  Reluctantly.  It wouldn’t have made much difference in MN, though.  My state is firmly Democratic when it comes to presidents.

Did the mod(s) correct my post? Thankee!

All due respect to HRC, the fact that she couldn’t even control the infighting among her own staff speaks somewhat of her leadership ability, even if it’s not a predictor of her hypothetical presidency.

And it has to be said: Obama got a lot of her husband’s stalwarts the second he won the primary, and more after he got elected. (That was probably the 2 times I truly regretted voting for the guy.) We are getting a continuation of the Clinton legacy in more ways than one.

I voted for Anderson, because he could only afford 5 minutes of national TV time the night before the election, unlike Carter and Reagan who both got a half-hour each.

While we’re fessing up to our seekrit firebagger histories, the thing that got me about Anderson was (a) his 50-cent gas tax, which of course would be insanely regressive, and (b) his insistence (vs. Teddy Kennedy) that the US could not “afford” national health care.  When, of course, what we can’t afford is the crappy system we’ve had since then.  So I went Even Purer, all the way to Commoner and the Citizens Party.

OTOH, I did not know ‘til much later that Anderson was a big advocate of proportional representation, and that (as I learned from reading Lani Guinier’s Lift Every Voice) the Illinois House was actually elected by PR until 1980—which meant, among other things, that there were no “safe seats” (Ds could get elected downstate, Rs in Chicago) and that the Illinois House had 40 percent more women than any other state legislature.  So good on him for that.

Remember when both Tom Tomorrow and Doonesbury depicted Bill as a giant waffle?  Good times.

I won’t know what to think about the Big Dog until Dark Avenger shows up and tells us what John Boehner says about Clinton being a better president than Obama.

I will confess that in the very early days of the ‘08 election cycle, I was besotted with the notion of “moderation”, and so I was a supporter of “Unity ‘08”. And then I guess I got some sense knocked into me, because I realized how stupid that shit was.

That bit of tape will put Christie on Pammycakes toilet paper tablet for sure; Pammy’s all about burning any bridge with a Muslim on it.