To argue that he hurt the Democrats by compromising with Republicans in certain, specific areas is extreme and ignorant. Compromise is a key cornerstone to our system, quite correctly so, and the results proved Clinton right. Period. Nothing is perfect, nobody is perfect, check the bottom line to see how it all shakes out in the end. The only thing Clinton did to hurt Democrats was his marital infidelity. The scumbag Republicans jumped all over this, impeached him over this, spent 40 million dollars on a fishing expedition over this (initially supposed to be about Whitewater until they quickly admitted there was nothing there) talk radio still talks about this, and they made their political hay entirely of this. Had the Democrats at the time had any backbone they would not have abandoned Clinton and forced the Republicans to talk policy. The GOP would have had no chance! Instead we ended up with the anti-intellectual Bush leaguers winning. A global disaster borne far more of politics than substance.

This country is going down now with the crazy, idiot, stubborn dictator of a president called George Bush Jr. The war is going too long and Iraq is capable of governing themselves now. Why don’t they impeach President George Bush for what he did? It’s not fair that President Bill Clinton got impeached for lying about an affair yet Presient George Bush is getting away with everything.

Clintonism or the so called third way admitted almost all the criticism that the conservatives had been hammering the liberals with. That is, Clintonism agreed with the conservatives that the welfare program was a “handout” to lazy people so Clinton “reformed it” by kicking people off welfare lists in cases they couldn’t find a job. This giving in to conservatives also included his willingness to sign the Marriage Protection Act which has practically disenfrenchised gay people throughout the country, exempting them from many benefits that straight married couples enjoy. Most importantly, Clinton’s third way fetishized the free market ecnonomy, essentially agreeing with Reaganesque assumptions that market will correct many ills of the society. Consequently, Clinton signed the NAFTA (North American Foreign Trade Agreement) that has shipped millions of jobs overseas, has worsened the conditions of the workers in Third World Countries, and has mostly benefited the big international corporations. Not so accidentially, Hillary Clinton has promised to revisit the NAFTA and has gone as far as acknowledging that it was essentially a bad idea.
We have to be fair and acknowledge that the “third way” ideology was a way of getting back to power when “liberal” had been a taboo word after a decade of awful Reaganism. But to progressives like myself, the third way often seems like a sellout to the conservatives, admissions of guilt on the part of “liberals” in the Democratic party in cases where there should have been no feelings of guilt (such as welfare, gay rights, workers’ rights, etc).

Finally, Clinton’s foreign policy. His foreign policy successes should be rightfully acknowledged since they were huge. He came closest to ending the intractable Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and ended the bloody war in Bosnia, after the Bush I’s administration failed to do ANYTHING (along with the Europeans) to stop the war in its beginning and prevent Yugoslavia from falling apart. But it is also in the Balkans that I would point out two major policy blunders that have been overlooked:
1) The Dayton Accords, which ended the war in Bosnia, effectively divided the country and created a strange monster composed of two semi-autonomous, state-like entities that are preventing the country from functioning. Worst of all, in 1997, just one year after the war had ended, Clinton insisted that “free and fair elections” be held on municipal and federal levels in Bosnia, despite protests of many policy experts who argued that this would only cement the nationalists’ hold on power. And, they did. The elections were held in the climate of postwar fear and hatred and therefore legitimized the nationalist parties that had waged teh war in the first place and completely marginalized the multiethnic parties (such as the Social Democrats). This paralysis still pervades the Bosnian society.
2) The NATO bombing of Kosovo. I supported the bombings in 1999 when they were taking place, but have changed my mind since then. The Kosovo Albanians started teh conflict by attacking Serbian police along teh Kosovo border and then warped up the charges of genocide against the Serbian authorities (but of course there had been heavy handed repression of Albanians by the Serb police, but nothing like genocide which did occur in Bosnia in 1995). On the eve of the war the Milosevic regime was about to fall, but the bombings rallied people around Milosevic and postponed his departure. Finally, the agreement that Milosevic finally signed in June 1999, ending the bombing campaign, was the same agreement that Clinton offered to him at Rambouille before the bombing minus one important clause: that NATO troops would have no access to the territory of Serbia, the clause that Clinton administration used to claim that Milosevic was being uncooperative. So,my question is: if the final agreement ending the war contained no such clause, why the bombing? The bombing also targeted civilian facilities throughout Serbia and was a flagrant violation of the UN Charter as well as the Geneva Conventions.
3) Finally, Clinton’s bombing of Baghdad in 1998. Acting on flimsy evidence that Sadam had tried to assassinate Bush I Clinton just randomly bombed Baghdad in 1998. Completely uncalled for!

So, while I like the guy, I do believe some of these policies (especially in the domestic arena) hurt the Democrats by making them look more like Republicans and may have inadvertently led to the disastrous W. Bush presidency.

That’s why I say, enough dynasties in 2008–Vote for Obama!