OK, yall convinced me to watch some Bill Clinton 1992 speeches to recheck everybody's 28-year-old memories of what he was like before taking office, including mine. There are plenty of those videos online. I've watched a couple of them now, adding up to a couple of hours of video time, although I did skip through some introductions & clapping periods.
So, what did he say...
- appreciation for a "noe more status quoe" sign somebody was holding (potatoe reference I presume)
- change, change, change... "The American people have voted to make a new beginning"... change change change...
- pointing out the economic trend toward people doing more work and getting less income for it
- saying the American Dream has become too much of a "struggle"
- criticizing Bush 1 for shifting money up from the poor to the rich
- saying the government should "invest in our people" more
- "put people first" instead of "putting money first"
- a lot about how exorbitant college costs are (one of these speeches was at a college)
- proposal for more college grant & loan money and a change in how it's managed
- proposal for higher taxes on the rich
- listing a few issues he saw as particularly important: AIDS, environment, and converting our spending from "defense giant" to "domestic giant"
- description of USA as "under-educated" and "under-invested" (there were two more "under"s but they were "organized" and "led", which could come from anybody)
The theme was a lefty theme and every single policy point was a lefty policy point. He mostly sounded like Bernie. This is no surprise, since it also fits perfectly with
his official campaign slogans "It's Time to Change America" and "For People, for a Change" and "Putting People First".
But the goal was to try to find centrist/righty things I had either not noticed in the first place or forgotten since then. So I made a point of collecting as much as I could even stretch & contort into maybe possibly sounding righty-ish from the perspective of somebody trying to strain as much rightiness, or at least non-leftiness, as possible out of anything & everything...
- He did suggest hiring more police, which doesn't sound righty or lefty to me. I remember that the idea was being talked about in general at the time but not whether it split along party lines or right/left lines. Hm... now that I wrote that, I seem to recall Rush saying it sounded silly/pointless.
- He also mentioned getting government bureaucracies to be smaller & cheaper, which sounds like he was accepting the premise that they were too big & expensive, but his answer to it was not to have them quit doing what they do, but to have them do the same stuff more efficiently.
- He referred to the USA as a "republic" once. But he also referred to the way it runs itself as a "democracy" or "democratic" repeatedly.
- There were lots of references to Republicans and Perot-ites in a welcoming, cooperative tone. Some quotes include literally "I welcome their cooperation" and "bring our people together" and "we're all in this together" and even "unity". But it was entirely about treating them with decency & respect instead of hostility & hatred, and welcoming their help if they were to come to his positions, not that he agreed with theirs or would move to theirs.
Mission failed; there's not a single solidly un-lefty thing in there when he's talking about what government should actually do. At best, there's one that isn't doesn't really have let & right sides and one that you could say accepted a righty premise but still gave it a lefty answer, totaling a couple of minutes surrounded by a couple of hours of leftiness. I'm sure nearly all politicians have a few points against their own overall trends like that. All I could get otherwise was a rather uncontroversial (especially back then) word choice (on which he still used the alternative more) and a tone of togetherness, and even that was just togetherness with anybody who'd be willing to join him on his goals, not rolling over for others' goals just to get together.
The actual contents of his own slogans & speeches from back then really only allow two honest ways for anybody to call his campaign moderate now:
1. Remembering how he governed and blurring it all together in memory as if his governance must have reflected his campaign
2. Mistaking a respectful, polite attitude & approach to the opposition for agreement or acquiescence. (Yes, it is possible to fail to shriek about somebody else being a demon from Hell but still actually be opposed to them. The Democrats would be in much better shape today if they understood & accepted that.)
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And the funny thing about all that is that it wouldn't really change much anyway even if this had turned out otherwise. The general premise that centrist Democrats win and leftist Democrats lose would still be false overall; the examples proving it false would have just been one data point less overwhelming.
