by Abigail Hoile (’17)
Saxophone-playing, French-fry eating and smooth-talking Bill Clinton was the Democratic counter-offer to old-school and lackluster George H.W. Bush, elected easily in 1992 by utilizing both the young and the minority electorate, typically uninspired and underrepresented by any presidential candidate before Clinton. The Black turnout especially in the 1992 election was historic, beaten only by 2008’s turnout rate for Obama’s first campaign.
While Bill Clinton was by no means a representation of the populist attitudes simmering underneath the surface of every election, he did bring an air of informality and accessibility to the most powerful position in America, embodying the notion of the “people’s president”.
His eight-year administration was rife with military blunders and controversial decisions, not to mention lawsuits and sex scandals that dragged on into the early aughts, all of which he was overwhelmingly responsible for. Regrettably, unpopular decisions that blighted Bill Clinton’s legacy also landed on his wife, especially as she started her political career in the national spotlight.
But the more time that passed after Monica Lewinsky and the Gore/Bush debacle, the more untarnished and nostalgic the name “Bill Clinton” became, and the fewer people went as Lewinsky to Halloween parties in favor of Hanging Chad costumes instead.
Bill was remembered for his crime reformations instead of the Defense of Marriage Act, remembered for his health care policy instead of indecision regarding the Rwandan genocide. People remembered Hillary for Monica. They remembered her for her “inappropriate” audacity to take up an involved role in the administration led by her husband, for redefining the role of First Lady.
Bill became the image of presidential geniality and charm. Hillary became the image of a political insider as she was elected to Congress as a senator and played by the same back-alley rules everyone must in order to achieve anything in gridlock-ridden Congress.
The 2008 election will be remembered in history for its uniquely diverse slate of candidates: the two major Democratic candidates for the nomination were Obama, a half-black man with a non-English name, and Hillary Clinton, former first lady and a woman. It was a nasty primary (by pre-2015 standards), as Hillary was hit with an onslaught of corruption accusations and misogynistic messages and assumptions; Obama was attacked ruthlessly by the racist birther movement (prominently supported by Donald Trump himself) well into his first term as president. As if conservative backlash wasn’t difficult enough, Obama and Clinton bitterly fought it out until Obama won the party nomination and the two seamlessly transitioned from political enemies to allies.
But 2008, for Clinton, will always be the turning point in her career and her national perception: the nation was introduced to Hillary Clinton, presidential candidate. After her primary loss and subsequent powerful position in the first Obama administration, many political experts and analysts from both sides of the aisle began to see her as a 2016 shoe-in.
Obama announced that Clinton was his Secretary of State pick in 2008, mere months after the Democratic National Convention. Although she was overwhelmingly celebrated by her Democratic supporters, Hillary’s time as Secretary Clinton was utilized later to drag her name through the mud. She took a different approach to foreign policy by relating it directly to the people affected instead of dealing exclusively with world leaders
Barack Obama ushered in the most progressive legislative agenda in the nation’s history. It focused on civil rights, representation, economic equality, gender equality and eventually, full support of LGBT rights. But for the majority of his eight years, Obama fought against gridlock brought on by this era of divided government: the conservative Republicans that controlled Congress disapproved of any legislative action they could. They relied on their constituents (white working class Americans) to angrily protest the Affordable Care Act, federal protection against discrimination—anything that shone a political spotlight on the disadvantaged and the minorities of America. With the increase in the political power of these people, the white majority began to experience an apparent loss in political power, exacerbated by the societal focus on discrimination and the advent of minority-led social justice reforms in all platforms of daily life: schools, the internet, the entertainment industry, and political language.
Ideas like “implicit bias” or “inherent racism” were introduced into every day conversation and they paralleled extraordinarily polarizing and controversial events occurring every other day in America, from highly publicized police brutality to the subsequent Black Lives Matter movement; from public shootings to domestic and foreign terrorism; from the implications of the Confederate Flag to the determined questioning of the accepted societal concept of “gender”. Many of these events held at its center a sort of resentment and blame towards the white, male majority and in the conversations about race and gender and sexuality that swept across the country, straight white people felt immediately singled out and attacked, having to constantly take the defensive.
By giving oppressed voices a platform to speak, many white people felt like their platforms were being taken away, and with the progressive, diverse face of the Obama administration, the inherent racism and bias that comes with being part of the unoppressed majority bubbled under the surface and created resentment towards the progressive agenda.
Enter Donald Trump, casting his bid for president.
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was in many ways unique and unprecedented—that much is obvious. But his tactics and strategies followed the same structure employed by many Republican candidates before him and built upon one specific form of bigotry that has plagued political language for decades now. According to George H.W. Bush’s campaign strategist, Lee Atwater, this “dog-whistle politics” or coded language that means different things to different groups of people started by necessity as a form of racial oppression after the apex of the Civil Rights Movement.
“By 1968,” Atwater was infamously recorded in 1981 saying, “you can’t say ‘n—-r’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like ‘forced busing’, ‘states’ rights’…Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
Here, Atwater was describing the “Southern Strategy” that Nixon’s campaign employed in the 1970s to win over poor, working class whites in the South who normally vote Democratic. The theory was that appealing to the racial fears of poor whites in crime-ridden neighborhoods would convince them to vote Republican. The issue was, however, that you couldn’t be openly and obviously racist for fear of alienating moderate, middle to upper class Republicans who would object to racial slurs, but not the dog-whistle politics that talk about one thing, but secretly implicate the civil rights movements for minorities, women, and gays—all movements Nixon wanted to suppress (13th).
Campaigns built on fear became so powerful for the Republican Party that it took about 15 years for Democrats to realize that to win the White House, their policies had to be far more moderate in order to be taken seriously and trusted with issues seemingly concerning “public safety”. Enter Bill Clinton, playing saxophone on MTV and supporting the death penalty.
Even though his election is considered the real start of the Progressive Democrats, Clinton was a moderate president who didn’t shy away from using the fear and racism of working-class whites to win an election and further garner support. A contradictory figure, he was both racially exploitive and progressive, as he talked directly with black leaders in shaping his policies but used coded language to address them and the “Super-criminals” of urban streets. Trump may have learned more from Bill Clinton’s campaign than Democrats like to admit.
Before he even voiced his presidential hopes, Donald Trump resisted the validity of President Obama based on the suspicion that he was born somewhere outside of the US (namely, Kenya), and pressured him to release his birth certificate to prove he was constitutionally able to be president. This opened the floodgates for his opposition to raise doubts about his religion, his nationality, and his patriotism in the interest of “national safety” and “political honesty”—all to invalidate his campaign based off of nothing but the color of his skin and his name.
From his campaign to his election to his term as president, Trump established himself as a virulent Obama critic and as a voice for the white working class electorate who felt threatened by his progressive agenda.
When Donald Trump announced his candidacy in his own New York Trump Tower in May of 2015, the nation wrote him off as a joke. We were not going to elect a man with a reality show instead of political experience to lead our nation—that much was clear from the start.
And yet, here we are.
The 2016 election will go down in history as the most chaotic and unbelievable campaign modern America has ever seen. There were plenty of qualified and mainstream candidates (Clinton, Rubio, Cruz, Bush), but the fringe candidates like Independent-turned-Democrat(-ic socialist) Bernie Sanders and millionaire-Democrat-turned-millionaire-Republican Donald Trump represented a break from the political establishment, and that’s where the independent and youth vote factored heavily in deciding the outcome of the election. Both candidates were hailed as “political outsiders” and representative of the “common man”—even though Sanders had been in Congress for 40 years and Trump was first introduced to the world as a multi-million-dollar business mogul. It was their rhetoric and message that so invigorated the masses; Sanders wasn’t afraid to try and de-stigmatize the ideas of socialism and prepare a platform that would at least attempt to bring many far-left dreams to fruition, while Trump employed a not-so-subtle fear rhetoric that voiced many racial and nationalism-related concerns the burgeoning alt-right movement and conservative Republicans had been shamed for voicing.
But despite their vibrant bases, political experts and the majority electorate seemed to agree that these sudden political icons would be out of the limelight by the time the primaries were finished. That was true for Bernie, as he conceded the nomination shortly before the Democratic convention. But Trump hung on, something that baffled the nation. It was a mystery as to where Donald Trump found the support he needed to win primaries and come out strongly in polls, as his campaign was rife with scandal after scandal, most of them prompted by him and his “tell it like it is” campaign strategy. His twitter and his rallies became breeding grounds for outlandish accusations and ideas, rousing crowds to near-violence as protesters were forcibly removed, often with violent encouragement from Trump himself. His misogyny ran rampant and became a go-to attack from the opposition from his first altercation with Megyn Kelly during the first Republican debate, after which he implied she was hostile towards him because she was menstruating. Quotes and videos surfaced from decades previous, all starring Trump explicitly saying objectively sexist things, including the infamous video with Billy Bush released just days before the general election. He refused to release tax returns and tried to avoid his ongoing Trump University lawsuit, as well as fielding increasingly prolific accusations of sexual harassment and abuse from a variety of female figures, including a prominent network journalist. Any of these alone would be enough to shut down any other campaign, so why didn’t Trump fade away like everyone thought he would?
Well, why would he, when we as a nation have supported and elected the Trumps of the past?