Bill Clinton a Pragmatist?

Are you kidding me?

The recent electoral defeats suffered by the Democrat party have prompted many sympathetic pundits to urge President Obama to abandon, for a time, his ideologically driven agenda, and "pivot" to a more pragmatic approach. Typically, they point to the strategy employed by then President Clinton after the disastrous for Democrats mid-term elections of 1994. That election cycle gave majority control of both the House and Senate to the GOP for the first time in 60 years. As the story is told, master pol Bill Clinton understood like no one else the altered political climate and developed as a consequence the new strategy of "triangulation", ingeniously playing the left liberal base of the Democrat party against the hard right of the Republicans, thereby saving his party from itself and embarrassing the overreaching Newt Gingrich-led GOP.

The problem with this story is that it's bull#$%&, as it was even while it was being manufactured, as is most everything to do with Bill Clinton.

Clinton "pivoted" and "triangulated" because he had no choice. (By the way, may we please dispense with these silly words? How about "changed" and "compromised"? No, no, no. Those words simply won't do as they fail to carry the cachet necessary to convey the insider status most reporters and pundits crave. But I digress.) The truth is Clinton was in a politically weak position as president from the beginning as he was elected in 1992 with only a 43% plurality. The 1994 election returns served to confirm that status. In 1995, and thereafter, he was able to make deals with the Republican congress chiefly because he abandoned his liberal policy agenda and the rhetorical justification along with it. Please recall that, "The era of big government is over."

But none of this ever had anything to do with Clinton's pragmatism, the same pragmatism that is now being urged on Obama. Bill Clinton was the singularly most undisciplined and unprincipled president of the twentieth century. He changed and compromised not because he was a pragmatist, but simply because it was the path of least resistance. This man ultimately wanted most only to list 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as his address. I'll leave his desire for the perks that came with it to your imagination.