There’s a historical irony here: Bill’s presidency is often associated with small-bore initiatives such as midnight basketball and school uniforms—the opposite of those big, transformative ideas that liberals dream about. But that view misses so much. I believe Bill’s impact on our party and our country was profound and transformative. He reinvented a moribund party that had lost five of the previous six presidential elections, infusing it with new energy and ideas, and proving that Democrats could be pro-growth and pro-environment, pro-business and pro-labor, pro–public safety and pro–civil rights. He reversed trickle-down economics, balanced the federal budget, challenged Americans to embrace a new ethic of national service with AmeriCorps, and presided over two terms of peace and broadly shared prosperity.
The new Democratic Party he built went on to win the popular vote in six of the next seven elections between 1992 and 2016. He also inspired a generation of modernizing progressives in other Western democracies, especially Tony Blair’s New Labour Party in the United Kingdom. In short, there was nothing small bore about the Clinton presidency.
I believe my presidency also would have been transformative because of the big ideas I proposed to build an economy that works for everyone, not just those at the top. Here are a few of them:
First, we need the biggest investment in good jobs since World War II. This should include a massive infrastructure program that repairs and modernizes America’s roads, bridges, tunnels, ports, airports, and broadband networks; new incentives to attract and support manufacturing jobs in hard-hit communities from Coal Country to Indian country; debt-free college and improved training and apprenticeship programs to help people without college degrees get higher-paying jobs; support for small business by expanding access to capital and new markets and cutting taxes and red tape; a big push to expand clean energy production, including deploying half-a-billion solar panels in four years; and major investments in scientific research to create the jobs and industries of tomorrow.
Second, to make the economy fairer, we need new rules and incentives to make it easier for companies to raise wages and share profits with employees and harder for them to ship jobs overseas and bust unions. We have to make sure Wall Street can’t wreck Main Street again, and get smarter and tougher on trade so American workers aren’t caught in an unwinnable race against subsidized or state-owned industries, substandard labor conditions, or currency manipulation.
Third, we have to modernize workforce protections with a higher minimum wage, equal pay for women, paid family and medical leave, and affordable childcare. We should defend and improve the Affordable Care Act to reduce prices and expand coverage, including with a public option.
Fourth, we can pay for all of this with higher taxes on the top 1 percent of Americans who have reaped the lion’s share of income and wealth gains since 2000. This would also help reduce inequality.
I could go on, but that gives you a flavor of some of the things I would have tried to get done as President. Unfortunately, despite the fact that I talked about these ideas endlessly, they never got much media attention, and most people never heard about any of them. I failed to convince the press that economics was more important than emails. But it was. Just as frustrating is the fact that I never managed to convince some skeptics that I really was in it to help working families. I thought that based on my years fighting for health care reform, my record in helping create jobs as a Senator, my efforts to raise the alarm before the financial crisis, and my early commitment to address the opioid epidemic, people would see me as a proven change maker and a fighter for children and families. Instead, I never quite shook the false perception that I was a defender of the status quo.
In my more introspective moments, I do recognize that my campaign in 2016 lacked the sense of urgency and passion that I remember from ’92. Back then, we were on a mission to revitalize the Democratic Party and bring our country back from twelve years of trickle-down economics that exploded the deficit, hurt the middle class, and increased poverty. In 2016, we were seeking to build on eight years of progress. For a change-hungry electorate, it was a harder sell. More hopeful voters bought it; more pessimistic voters didn’t.
Another lesson from this election, and from the Trump phenomenon in particular, is that traditional Republican ideology is bankrupt. For decades, the big debates in American politics were about the size and role of government. Democrats argued for a more active federal government and a stronger social safety net, while Republicans argued for a smaller government, lower taxes, and fewer regulations. The country seemed fairly evenly divided, or perhaps tilted slightly to the center-right. Then Trump came along and pulled back the curtain on what was really going on. We learned that many Republican voters didn’t have any problem with big government, so long as it was big government for them. Perhaps this has always been true—you may recall the infamous sign at Tea Party rallies that read, with no hint of irony, “Keep Your Government Hands off My Medicare”—but Trump brought it out into the open. He promised to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, while abandoning free trade and getting tough on bankers, in direct contradiction of Republican orthodoxy. Instead of paying a price for it, he swept away all his more traditional GOP rivals. Once in office, Trump abandoned most of his populist promises and largely hewed to the party line. But that shouldn’t obscure the fact that many of his voters wanted to chuck the orthodoxy and preserve entitlements. The reality is that doctrinaire trickle-downers who control Congress wield enormous power without having any real constituency for their policies outside the Republican donor class. When Republicans were opposing Obama or attacking me, they could unite against a common enemy, but now that they’re in power and people actually expect them to deliver results, we’re seeing that there’s little holding the Republican Party together.
The implications of all this are potentially profound. If Trump can’t deliver for working families, Democrats have to, and be able to explain it. It may be hard for us to match his grandiose promises, because we still believe in arithmetic, but we can offer real results. We still believe in trade, but we’ve got to be clearer about how we’d be tougher on countries trying to take advantage of American workers, and how we’d provide more funding up front for people hurt by foreign competition. We still believe in immigration, but we have to make a better case that if done right it will help all working people.
Democrats should reevaluate a lot of our assumptions about which policies are politically viable. These trends make universal programs even more appealing than we previously thought. I mean programs like Social Security and Medicare, which benefit every American, as opposed to Medicaid, food stamps, and other initiatives targeted to the poor. Targeted programs may be more efficient and progressive, and that’s why during the primaries I criticized Bernie’s “free college for all” plan as providing wasteful taxpayer-funded giveaways to rich kids. But it’s precisely because they don’t benefit everyone that targeted programs are so easily stigmatized and demagogued. We’ve seen this with the Affordable Care Act. For years, it was attacked as a new subsidy for poor people of color. A lot of working-class whites didn’t think it benefited them at all, especially if they lived in states where Republican leaders refused to expand Medicaid. In white-majority states where Medicaid was expanded, such as Arkansas and Kentucky, the beneficiaries were overwhelmingly white working families. But many voted for Trump anyway, betting he would take health care away from “others” and let them keep theirs. It was only when many Americans realized that repealing the ACA would take away universal protections they had come to enjoy, especially regarding preexisting conditions, that the law became popular. Medicaid’s expansion has made it more popular, too.