The 42nd president of the United States just turned 80 this past week, and you have to be pretty long in the tooth yourself to remember how very young Bill Clinton seemed when he first ran for the White House in 1992. He was objectively pretty young, actually; 46 when he took his first oath of office, he was the third-youngest president in U.S. history. But beyond the biological facts, his campaign relentlessly promoted the idea of party and national reform and renovation, a theme of youthful vigor reinforced by Clinton’s very unconventional choice of 44-year-old Al Gore as his running mate against 68-year-old George H.W. Bush. One campaign poster at the time showed Clinton and Gore together over the caption “Young Guys. Great Hair.” (This was before Gore began losing his hair and Clinton’s turned prematurely grey).

Nowadays, many progressives dyspeptically remember Clinton’s “New Democrat” brand and following as mere packaging for pro-corporate neoliberal policies that betrayed the party’s traditional working-class and minority constituencies. But it very much did address the psychological needs of a tired and demoralized Democratic Party that had lost three straight presidential elections by large margins and was slipping rapidly in Congress and in state governments, especially in the South and Midwest. Clinton’s pledge that he was a “different kind of Democrat” was what many swing and base voters wanted to hear. It also helped head off what might have been an existential threat from Ross Perot’s third-party bid (as Perot himself acknowledged in temporarily abandoning his candidacy, saying, “The Democratic Party has revitalized itself. They’ve done a brilliant job, in my opinion, in coming back”).

Indeed, it was reasonably clear that the midterm calamity Democrats experienced in 1994 was less about anything Clinton had done in his brief period in office than about the demise of the old Democratic coalition he was seeking to replace. Any doubts about that subsided with his big 1996 reelection win and the shocking gains Democrats made in the 1998 midterms (the first midterms since 1934 when the party controlling the White House gained seats). As Clinton left office, Democrats appeared to have once again achieved parity with Republicans, going on to win the popular vote in four of the next five presidential........

© Daily Intelligencer