Defying the Odds

by James W. Ceaser

  58. Murray, Coming Apart, 43–44.

  59. Natalie Kitroeff, “Robots Could Replace 1.7 Million American Truckers in the Next Decade,” Los Angeles Times, September 25, 2016, http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-automated-trucks-labor-20160924/.

  60. Christopher J. O’Leary, Randall W. Eberts, and Brian M. Pittelko, “Effects of NAFTA on US Employment and Policy Responses,” OECD Trade Policy Working Papers, No. 131 (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/5k9ffbqlvk0r-en.

  61. U.S. Census Bureau, “America’s Foreign Born in the Last 50 Years,” July 4, 2016, https://www.census.gov/schools/resources/visualizations/foreign-born.html.

  62. Jeffrey S. Passel and D’Vera Cohn, “Overall Number of U.S. Unauthorized Immigrants Holds Steady Since 2009,” Pew Research Center, September 20, 2016, http://www.pewhispanic.org/2016/09/20/overall-number-of-u-s-unauthorized-immigrants-holds-steady-since-2009.

  63. Robert P. Jones et al., “How Immigration and Concerns About Cultural Changes Are Shaping the 2016 Election: Findings from the 2016 PRRI/Brookings Immigration Survey,” Public Religion Research Institute, June 23, 2016, http://www.prri.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/PRRI-Brookings-2016-Immigration-survey-report.pdf.

  64. Jason DeParle and Sabrina Tavernise, “For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage,” New York Times, February 17, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/us/for-women-under-30-most-births-occur-outside-marriage.html.

  65. Pew Research Center, “Parenting in America,” December 17, 2015, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2015/12/2015-12-17_parenting-in-america_FINAL.pdf.

  66. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife Among White Non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st Century,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112, no. 49 (December 8, 2015), http://www.pnas.org/content/112/49/15078.full.pdf.

  67. Gina Kolata and Sarah Cohen, “Drug Overdoses Propel Rise in Mortality Rates of Young Whites,” New York Times, January 16, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/science/drug-overdoses-propel-rise-in-mortality-rates-of-young-whites.html.

  68. Robert P. Jones, Daniel Cox, Betsy Cooper, and Rachel Lienesch, “The Divide Over America’s Future: 1950 or 2050? Findings from the 2016 American Values Survey,” Public Religion Research Institute, October 25, 2016, http://www.prri.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/PRRI-2016-American-Values-Survey.pdf.

  69. Andrew J. Cherlin, “Why Are White Death Rates Rising?” New York Times, February 22, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/22/opinion/why-are-white-death-rates-rising.html.

  70. Eduardo Porter, “Where Were Trump’s Votes? Where the Jobs Weren’t,” New York Times, December 13, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/business/economy/jobs-economy-voters.html.

  71. Jones, “How Immigration and Concerns About Cultural Changes Are Shaping the 2016 Election.”

  72. Murray, Coming Apart, 61–68.

  73. Darren Walker, “Internships Are Not a Privilege,” New York Times, July 5, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/05/opinion/breaking-a-cycle-that-allows-privilege-to-go-to-privileged.html.

  74. Lauren A. Rivera, Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 99.

  75. Ibid.

  76. Ibid.

  77. Charles Murray, “Trump’s America,” Wall Street Journal, February 12, 2016, http://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trumps-america-1455290458.

  78. Joan C. Williams, “What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class,” Harvard Business Review, November 10, 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-the-u-s-working-class.

  79. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Union Affiliation of Employed Wage and Salary Workers by Occupation and Industry, January 28, 2016, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.t03.htm.

  80. Alec MacGillis, “Go Midwest, Young Hipster,” New York Times Magazine, October 22, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/opinion/campaign-stops/go-midwest-young-hipster.html.

  81. Four were in northern Virginia: Falls Church City, Loudon County, Fairfax County, Arlington County. One was in Maryland: Howard County. See U.S. Census Bureau, “Median Household Income: Counties in the United States,” December 9, 2015, http://www.census.gov/did/www/saipe/data/highlights/files/releasesummary_county2014.xls.

  82. Economic Innovation Group, “The New Map of Economic Growth and Recovery,” May 2016, http://eig.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/recoverygrowthreport.pdf.

  83. Alyssa Davis, “In U.S., Concern about Crime Climbs to 15-Year High,” Gallup, April 6, 2016, http://www.gallup.com/poll/190475/americans-concern-crime-climbs-year-high.aspx.

  84. U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Crime in the United States: Violent Crime, September 26, 2016, https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-2015/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/violent-crime.

  85. Jeff Greenfield, “Trump Is Pat Buchanan with Better Timing,” Politico, September/October 2016, http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/donald-trump-pat-buchanan-republican-america-first-nativist-214221.

  86. Jessica Taylor, “Obama Says Trump ‘Exploiting’ Anger, Fear Among ‘Blue-Collar Men,’ ” National Public Radio, December 21, 2015, http://www.npr.org/2015/12/21/460281546/watch-obama-says-trump-exploiting-anger-fear-among-blue-collar-men.

  87. Patrick J. Egan, “Ashton Carter and the Astoundingly Elite Educational Credentials of Obama’s Cabinet Appointees,” Washington Post, December 5, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/12/05/ashton-carter-and-the-astoundingly-elite-educational-credentials-of-obamas-cabinet-appointees/.

  88. Mayhill Fowler, “Obama: No Surprise That Hard-Pressed Pennsylvanians Turn Bitter,” Huffington Post, May 25, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mayhill-fowler/obama-no-surprise-that-ha_b_96188.html.

  89. Michael D. Shear and Dave Philipps, “Progress Is Slow at V.A. Hospitals in Wake of Crisis,” New York Times, March 13, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/14/us/obama-va-hospital-phoenix.html.

  90. Lee Fang, “Where Have All the Lobbyists Gone?” The Nation, February 19, 2014, https://www.thenation.com/article/shadow-lobbying-complex/. For a list, see “Obama Officials Who Have Spun through the Revolving Door,” n.d., https://www.opensecrets.org/obama/rev.php.

  91. Thomas Frank, “The Life of the Parties,” Tomdispatch, June 30, 2016, http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176159.

  92. Robert P. Jones, Daniel Cox, Juhem Navarro-Rivera, “What Motivated Voters During the 2014 Midterm Elections?” Public Religion Research Institute, November 11, 2014, http://www.prri.org/research/survey-2014-post-election-american-values-survey-what-motivated-voters-during-the-midterm-elections/.

  93. Ceaser and Busch, Upside Down and Inside Out, 115. See also Gwen Ifill, “Clinton Goes Eye to Eye with MTV Generation,” New York Times, June 17, 1992, http://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/17/us/the-1992-campaign-youth-vote-clinton-goes-eye-to-eye-with-mtv-generation.html.

  94. Ceaser and Busch, Upside Down and Inside Out, 115.

  95. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment Trends in Newspaper Publishing and Other Media, 1990–2016,” June 2, 2016, http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/employment-trends-in-newspaper-publishing-and-other-media-1990–2016.htm.

  96. Emily Guskin, Mark Jurkowitz, and Amy Mitchell, “Network News: A Year of Change and Challenge at NBC,” State of the Media, March 18, 2013, http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2013/network-news-a-year-of-change-and-challenge-at-nbc.

  97. Dolf Zillmann, Jennings Bryant, and Aletha C. Huston, eds., Media, Children and the Family: Social Scientific, Psychodynamic, and Clinical Perspectives (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1994), 28.

  98. The Nielsen Total Audience Report, Q2: 2016, September 26, 2016, http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/reports/2016/the-nielsen-total-audience-report-q2–2016.html.

  99. Tabitha Soren, “Hillary Clinton and the Ghosts of MTV,” New York Times, August 21, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/opinion/campaign-stops/hillary-clinton-and-the-ghosts-of-mtv.html.

  100. For an
early analysis of the political Internet, see John J. Pitney Jr., “Tangled Web,” Reason, April 1996, http://reason.com/archives/1996/04/01/tangled-web.

  101. Cornelia Grumman, “Dole Error Hurts Web Site Plug,” Chicago Tribune, October 8, 1996, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1996-10-08/news/9610080226_1_bob-dole-dole-spokeswoman-dole-fruit.

  102. Amy Mitchell, Jeffrey Gottfried, Michael Barthel, and Elisa Shearer, “The Modern News Consumer,” Pew Research Center, July 7, 2016, http://www.journalism.org/2016/07/07/the-modern-news-consumer.

  103. Art Swift, “Americans’ Trust in Mass Media Sinks to New Low,” Gallup, September 14, 2016, http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media-sinks-new-low.aspx.

  104. The issue became the basis for a book by William F. Buckley Jr., which Nathan Glazer discussed in “The Enmity Within,” New York Times, September 27, 1992, https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/07/16/specials/buckley-anti.html.

  105. “Against Trump,” National Review, January 21, 2016, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430137/donald-trump-conservative-movement-menace.

  106. Greenfield, “Trump Is Pat Buchanan With Better Timing.”

  107. Gil Troy, “The Bernie Sanders–Fueled Alt-Left Viciously Attacked Me,” Time, December 7, 2016, http://time.com/4593753/bernie-sanders-alt-left/.

  108. Amy Mitchell, Jeffrey Gottfried, Jocelyn Kiley, and Katerina Eva Matsa, “Political Polarization & Media Habits,” Pew Research Center, October 21, 2014, http://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/political-polarization-media-habits.

  109. Dan Cassino, “Fairleigh Dickinson Poll Shows 90 Percent of Trump and Clinton Supporters Believe in Conspiracies That Smear the Candidate They Oppose,” Fairleigh Dickinson University, October 11, 2016, http://view2.fdu.edu/publicmind/2016/161011.

  110. Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller, The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 5.

  111. Pew Research Center, “GOP’s Favorability Rating Edges Lower,” April 28, 2016, http://www.people-press.org/2016/04/28/gops-favorability-rating-edges-lower.

  112. Oliver Darcy and Pamela Engel, “The GOP Must Do Something About the Conservative Media Industrial Complex If It Wants to Survive,” Business Insider, October 24, 2016, http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-conservative-media-hannity-limbaugh-drudge-2016-10.

  Chapter Two

  From Little Rock to Chappaqua

  The Democratic Nomination Contest

  In 1992, the Democratic Party nominated forty-five-year-old Bill Clinton of Little Rock, Arkansas. In 2016, it nominated sixty-eight-year-old Hillary Clinton of Chappaqua, New York. The nominees were different in important ways, and so was the party that they led. Before we examine her road to the nomination, we need to take a brief look at his.

  BUBBA’S LOST WORLD

  As Upside Down and Inside Out explained, Bill Clinton was the most conservative Democratic nominee since Jimmy Carter in 1976. His nomination was a triumph for the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a group founded by political operative Al From to encourage the party to adopt moderate positions. DLC members eyed Clinton as a possible champion in the 1988 nomination contest, but he opted out of the race. The nomination instead went to Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. Although the campaign of George H. W. Bush would paint him as a hardcore liberal, he tried to run as a non-ideological technocrat, emphasizing his record of getting poor people into gainful employment. “In many ways,” wrote DLC’s Al From, “he was the candidate of a party that had begun but not completed a transition. Dukakis sent the message that, unlike Mondale, he was not an interest-group liberal, but he never really told the voters who he was.”1 Bush’s victory was a sobering moment for Democrats. No incumbent vice president had won a presidential election since Martin Van Buren. Only a year before, in the wake of the 1987 stock market crash and the Iran-Contra scandal, Bush had looked like a goner. If Democrats could not beat such a vulnerable candidate, many of them reasoned, they must be doing something wrong.

  Concern about electability provided an opening for Bill Clinton, who had a record of winning moderate and conservative voters as governor of Arkansas. Despite his education at Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale, he had a cultural affinity for his fellow Southerners—hence his nickname of “Bubba.” In 1989, he accepted From’s offer to chair the DLC, which provided him with a travel budget and enhanced visibility.2 Clinton ran for the 1992 nomination, benefiting from his position in the middle of the inside-outside axis. He lacked the insider liabilities of Washington-based candidates; yet his “outsiderism” was temperate enough for political leaders and campaign contributors.3 The nomination calendar was another asset. “Super Tuesday” was the label coined in 1984 for a day on which multiple states, including several in the South, held primaries. In 1992, Super Tuesday worked as DLC had planned. Clinton had a base of lower-income working-class whites and got enough African American support to sweep the South.4

  Clinton belonged to the “New South” generation of Democratic politicians who combined moderate-to-conservative positions on most issues with support for civil rights. In Arkansas, he had always enjoyed a strong relationship with African American voters, which gave him some flexibility. During the campaign, he criticized rap artist Sister Souljah, who made comments in an interview that appeared to endorse the killing of white people. (She said that Clinton had taken her words out of context.) When Jesse Jackson took exception, Clinton said that he would “not back down on what I said.”5 The episode strained his relationship with black leaders but did not break it. On the other hand, it reassured moderate white voters that he was not a captive of identity politics.

  Disregarding the conventional wisdom that a running mate should provide regional and ideological balance, Clinton picked Al Gore, a fellow DLC politician who came from an adjoining state. And like Clinton, the 44-year-old Gore was a baby boomer. By choosing him, Clinton was sending a message that the Democratic Party was setting its 1980s ways aside, opening its doors to Southerners and moderates, and embracing youth. Soon after the convention, a TV spot drove the point home:

  They are a new generation of Democrats, Bill Clinton and Al Gore, and they don’t think the way the old Democratic Party did. They’ve called for an end to welfare as we know it, so welfare can be a second chance, not a way of life. They’ve sent a strong signal to criminals by supporting the death penalty. And they’ve rejected the old tax and spend politics. Clinton’s balanced 12 budgets and they’ve proposed a new plan investing in people, detailing $140 billion in spending cuts they’d make right now.6

  It is common to dismiss campaign ads as fluff, but in important ways, this message did foreshadow Clinton-Gore policies. “End welfare as we know it” was a term of art, vague enough to encompass anything from modest reform to abolition. In the end, Clinton signed legislation that replaced the old federal welfare program with one that imposed work requirements and limited how long recipients could receive benefits. Congressional Democrats split over the issue, but the bill passed with overwhelming GOP support.7

  Crime had long been a vulnerable point for Democrats. From the 1960s to the mid-1990s, the United States suffered historically high levels of crime.8 (In 1992, the rate of reported violent crime was more than four times higher than it had been in 1962.9) Fear of crime had helped the Nixon and Wallace campaigns of 1968, and twenty years later, the Bush campaign used the issue against Dukakis by accusing him of letting murderers out on furlough. Clinton was determined not to be the crime issue’s next victim. As president, he signed a far-reaching crime bill that funded thousands of police officers, expanded the federal death penalty, banned certain firearms, and mandated life sentences for many repeat offenders.

  On economic issues, he did open his party to GOP attacks by pushing for a tax increase in 1993. But by his second term, the tax hike had combined with spending restraint and economic growth to produce budget surpluses. He worked with the GOP to pass NAFTA and even h
eld secret talks with Gingrich on Social Security reform.10 But before the talks could produce a legislative proposal, the Lewinsky scandal broke open. It would preoccupy Washington for months, and it ruined any chance for bipartisan cooperation on further domestic reform.

  Clinton survived the scandal because Americans believed that his offense—lying about sexual misconduct—did not rise to the level of impeachment. But they did not think that the Clinton household was entirely clean.11 Throughout his administration, there had been stories about questionable ethics, some centering on Hillary Clinton. During his governorship of Arkansas, for example, she had gotten a sweetheart deal in cattle futures through a lawyer for Tyson Foods, a key interest group in the state. “It’s one of those things somebody gets put into a good thing,” one legal expert told Newsweek. “It’s harmless, but it doesn’t look wonderful, does it?”12 Such incidents took their toll. Even before the couple left the White House, “Clinton fatigue” was showing up in surveys.

  In foreign policy, he signed legislation committing the nation to the removal of Saddam Hussein and the establishment of democracy in Iraq.13 After Saddam stopped cooperating with nuclear inspectors in 1998, Clinton ordered air strikes. “If Saddam defies the world and we fail to respond, we will face a far greater threat in the future,” he said. “Saddam will strike again at his neighbors. He will make war on his own people. And mark my words, he will develop weapons of mass destruction.”14

  Despite his troubles, Clinton ended his tenure with a good approval rating.15 So suppose a time traveler had gone back to January 1, 1992, and told political commentators that the winner of that year’s election would eventually boast of a balanced budget, welfare reform, tough crime legislation, and NAFTA. Moreover, the winner would also try to reform Social Security and oust Saddam Hussein. Most who heard the time traveler would have said, “Whoa, Bush is going to win this thing after all!” In many ways, Clinton overcame the legacy of Democratic defeats by preempting Republican issues. During the 1990s, commentators held that Clintonism would be the way of the Democratic future.