Thinking through the Clinton administration is much in the air. Is Bush a conrinuation, a shift, or what? Arre the rpoeblems we now have prepared earlier (Reagan, Bush 1, but also our bully attitude going way back, Phillipines, Alamo, and...)
Clinton was hated not simply because of who he was but because of the structure of political forces that brought him into power and defined his presidency.
Boot points out that "Clinton's presidency ("The era of big government is over!") essentially ratified the huge transformations wrought by Ronald Reagan." Put more correctly, Clinton understood that the Democrats could get back in the White House if they appealed to parts of the coalition of voters that had elected Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. And so he set out consciously to do that. He fractured the existing winning coalition by producing a combination of economic policies designed to appeal to middle class voters while accepting certain elements of the values agenda that had played so well for the Republicans. He focused on issues like crime and welfare, emphasized his populist roots and religious sensibilities, while at the same time maintaining strong ties to secularism, feminism, and civil rights. In this way Clinton threatened to create a new winning coalition by borrowing the rhetoric of his political opponents and becoming a more "Republican version" of a Democrat.
You might think that Republicans would welcome such a candidate. Well, many independent and moderate republican voters did. But Republican politicians, and the conservative base of the party did not. They believed that Clinton was a Democrat who stole their ideas and rhetoric, and was secretly committed to promoting a liberal secular agenda. He was trying to put one over on the American public. Moreover, Clinton gained the White House at a time when Republicans believed that theirs was the "natural party of government," to use a phrase sometimes associated with the British Conservative Party. They had put together an effective coalition of interests that had dominated Presidential politics for some time. Who was this upstart to keep them out of the White House? So for many members of the Republican base, Clinton was easy to hate. He was a liberal wolf in sheep's clothing and he had no right to take the Presidency from the party it rightfully belonged to.
Clinton is not the first President of this type. In fact, there have been at least three in our nation's history: They are Clinton, Grover Cleveland, and Richard Nixon. Cleveland co-opted economic elements from the Republican Party and became the first Democrat to win the White House since the Civil War, taking the Presidency from the natural party of government since Reconstruction, that is, the Republicans. Cleveland actually won the popluar vote three times, but was denied the presidency the second time because he lost the electoral college. Nixon also co-opted wide swaths of the Democratic liberal domestic agenda while forming a new coalition that split apart traditional Democratic constituencies. Just as conservatives did not trust Clinton, liberals did not trust what was then called the "New" Nixon. He was a conservative wolf in sheep's clothing, who had stolen the White House from the party that had dominated it since 1932. (I'll get to Eisenhower in a moment, don't worry).
...
All of these reasons suggest that George W. Bush's Presidency has structural features that are similar to those of Clinton's, Nixon's and Cleveland's Presidencies. That means that we should expect that his political opponents will hate him quite fiercely, and that they will attack him through scandals and attacks on his character.
Whether those attacks succeed (or, equally important, whether they should succeed) in any particular case depends on a whole host of factors, including, among others, whether the President really does have serious character flaws and whether he really does have something to hide. We should not assume that because all of these Presidents were hated that they were equally flawed and equally culpable. Rather, I'm trying to get a handle on the sturctural features of American politics that would produce this level of hatred and these sorts of attacks.
