Did you see my bricks? I bought a couple of those bricks when they built the joint. I wish I'd known you were going -- I would have asked you to check on it for me!

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Well, "Chris" (please a secondary identifier)... I don't think there's much point to arguing over the Clinton administration, but there were LOTS of extraordinary achievements...

Family and medical leave, AmeriCorps, the assault weapons ban, millions of new acres of national monuments, the S-CHIP program, 100,000 new cops, and lots more... And don't forget the longest economic expansion in American history.

But I wasn't talking about the presidency. I was talking about the themes of the campaign.

Let's be honest here - Clinton got elected in 1992 because of Ross Perot.

That said, like Kari I remember that campaign quite fondly. I was a college sophmore and I transfered my registration from D.C. to Indiana so Clinton could have one more vote in that red state. I voluntered at the local Indiana Dem office (an oxymoron at the time in Richmond Indiana). I remember in my youthful exuberance pledging to drink a beer for every 25 electoral votes Clinton won on election night and actually doing it!

That campaign was about hope and change and I loved Bubba.

Sadly these days the idea of him wagging his finger and talking about Jesse Jackson is the only thing that comes to mind when I think about Clinton. He is going to be in Oregon this weekend and I am just pissed at him that he is going to foul up traffic around the Timbers game at PGE Park. That is how low my estimation has fallen of him. A soccer game is far more important than he is.

Makes me really sad.

I feel about Clinton the way someone might feel about a dyfunctional father -- pissed about the ways that he messed up, but ultimately still loving the guy. And yes, I get that's why you're supporting Obama -- although I think he understands hope, deep down and viscerally, even better than Bill did.

Different Chris here. I was an early 30s college professor at the time you describe, Kari, who at the probably comparable point in my own life was facing the advent of Reagan and moving out to seek work in the Carter/Reagan recession. If there were comparable inspirations in my own life it would have been the soaring rhetoric of another convention speaker, who didn't end up running for president (Mario Cuomo), and perhaps the Jesse Jackson campaign of '88, which also purported to be a movement, but proved one that fell apart in the end because Jackson kept it too focused on his person and personality -- and Jackson at least nominally had a movement organization, the Rainbow Coalition, for which there is no Obama equivalent.

Anyway, back to 1992. At that time I knew a number of engaged, humane, energetic & hence attractive younger people. And I have a very distinct memory of going to a party that one such gave as a college senior, in part to share his experiences of some travel to East Africa, India and Nepal (he was the son of an anthropologist who worked in Nepal). This must have been shortly after the '92 election but before the inaugural.

I met a young woman there, who had taken time off to work as an intern in Salem, and then on the Clinton campaign. And she was just blown away by the fact that Clinton had won. I think perhaps she had doubted he would. So she was just standing there astonished, almost dazed, wondering what came next, because in the election of Bill Clinton, the far horizon of her imagined possibilities for progressive politics had been reached.

To me that was astonishing in a different way, and at later moments of reflection incredibly depressing, as a measure of how successful the Reagan reaction had been on much of the youth of the '80s. Because to me, even then, Clinton was a hope only in the sense that his administration might open up more political space for hopes to his left. And in the event that proved to be an illusion. He shut down progressives and backed attacks on us by the DLC, he triangulated against us, he abandoned and punished his friends and rewarded his enemies.

I went off him definitively with his disgusting abuse of his ostensibly close friend from law school Lani Guinier, whom he trashed over malicious race-baiting misrepresentations of her writings and rather theoretical ideas, which he did not even bother to read or have his staff read before trashing her. Instead he accepted the lies that she was a "quota queen," when actually her ideas were about routes to black inclusion alternative to classic affirmative action; all this despite his rep as a brilliant engaged idea man. Instead he let himself be rolled again and again by the kind of petty non-issues Obama and Clinton have been facing. Bill Clinton bears much of the blame for the development of that kind of political culture, because he so frequently rolled over and triangulated, so often rewarded the behavior.

Anyway, I share many of the criticisms voiced by other Chris above. For me Clinton was not the man from Hope so much as the man of dashed hopes. Which may be why I'm so cautious about the enthusiasm for Barack Obama's faith, trust and pixie dust politics, even as I profoundly distrust Hillary Clinton for her contributions to the Clintonite cementing of Reaganism.

I agree with much of what Kari said. It was Clinton's 1992 race that got me involved in politics beyond the local school board.

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No, "welfare reform" was not one of the things he got correct. People always like calling it "welfare reform," but in actuality it was the destruction of welfare. There is no welfare anymore - his "reform" got rid of it. We still have TANF, which you can only get a few years out of your entire life, and a pittance of food stamps. That's it. There are no longer payments to poor families so they can buy the things they need that aren't covered by food stamps (like toilet paper, shampoo, cleaning supplies) or use it for additional food, the electric bill, etc. My sister was on welfare during those years. She was struggling enough and when welfare was pulled out from under her, she was in a hole she couldn't get out of. She had to move back in with all of us with her children. She had to drop out of college so she could work more hours. And she ended up on what little assistance there was still left for a lot longer than she would have had she been able to stay in school and finish her degree.

Yeah, I agree that welfare reform was particularly shortsighted.

I've never understood why the conservatives yammer on and on about how mothers ought to stay home with their children rather than work - and yet, they sought the destruction of the very program that makes it possible for mothers to stay home with their children.

And then refused to pay for child care when they forced said mothers out of the home...nice.

Robert Reich was the hero of that administration. I certainly liked the Clintons in the 90s, but he was by no means progressive. He was no friend of the 4th amendment for example, allowing all kinds of curtailment of rights to "protect against crime."

Also, I believe the final accounting on those "100,000 cops" was it turned out to be about 15,000. I may not have the number right, but it was nowhere near 100K when all was said and done.

And of course, he's trashed his legacy with what a dick he's been this cycle. The sooner we forget about the Clintons, the better for this country.

This is so totally not the point of this post, but I've got a source that says they actually funded all 100,000 cops. TJ, what's yours?

On welfare I'm with Kari & Jenni & Kristin.

The paradox you point out goes deeper & back further, though, Kari. Part of what let AFDC or whatever its final acronym was be done down was the argument that welfare encouraged out-of-wedlock childbearing (at the time often and inaccurately confused with teen pregnancy, which actually peaked in the 1950s, but in the context of huge numbers of young-age marriages).

But insofar as there was some truth to that (and broader social trends of single women bearing children show it can only be some truth), it was a product of requirements in the law that there be no male in the household for eligibility.

Those requirements were likewise imposed by conservatives, although much earlier and including large numbers of conservative Southern Democrats. While there was a general argument about not supporting lazy or malingering able-bodied men, something that goes back at least to Elizabethan laws to punish "sturdy beggars", it also was ineluctably tinged with racist arguments and imputations about the alleged laziness of black men, & probably Chicanos & Puerto Ricans in relevant parts of the country. Those in turn were tied to strong interests in keeping racially discriminatory low wages low -- cf. exclusions of largely black/latino/filipino agricultural and domestic workers from NLRA & minimum wage laws.

Behind all of this is a central debate about how to understand poverty. Is it primarily an artifact of the structure of society? Say of defining "full employment" as national average 5% nominal unemployment, not counting "discouraged workers" and those who don't claim unemployment because benefits have run out, when that 5% is really 2% or 3% in many communities, and much higher, sometimes into the double digits, in other communities where there just aren't more jobs? If your social structure requires a substantial proportion of people to be unemployed and treats lower levels of unemployment as economically bad so that policy should be to increase it, blaming people for joblessness becomes dicey at best. Never mind the 2/3 of people in poverty who worked full time, even after the great working class income gains of the '40s-'60s (while large majority of poor remained employed workers, the majority of workers ceased to be poor, as it had been through the Great Depression).

Or is poverty primarily due to characterological, psychological or "cultural" deficiencies (as in "culture of poverty"/"underclass" theories)?

While I lean strongly toward the structural end, people I regard as reasonable would often probably argue for some mix, while perhaps disagreeing about the mix, and perhaps about whether psychology and culture might have structural-experiential determinants.

But Bill Clinton skewed the debate heavily against the structural view by taking up the Reaganite mantra of "individual responsibility" in virtual isolation from societal considerations.

A telling feature of how far that went was that Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the main intellectual godfathers of "culture of poverty"/"underclass" arguments for welfare reform, going back to Johnson, and the author of "benign neglect" as Nixon's house Democrat on social policy, and later senator from New York (does Hillary have his seat?), actually voted against the law Clinton signed.

Moynihan's no vote was exactly for the reason Jenni states, that "reform" was really abolition. Moynihan wanted drastic revisions in the content and operations of welfare, but he thought welfare should remain an entitlement. And he probably would have wanted Jenni's sister to be able to finish school.

Along with Kristin's childcare point, the construction of "workfare" in such a way that it obstructed and disfavored education as a route out of poverty, and in effect treated work as a punishment for alleged sins of bad character, was a particularly nasty aspect of making the "reform" punitive.