Bill and Hillary Clinton’s Pitch in Iowa: ‘I Love the ’90s’

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Bill and Hillary Clinton’s Pitch in Iowa: ‘I Love the ’90s’

Bill and Hillary Clinton’s Pitch in Iowa: ‘I Love the ’90s’
By ADAM COHEN
Published: December 12, 2007
Grinnell, Iowa

Bill Clinton, his once salt-and-pepper hair now almost all salt and his fiery speaking voice subdued, went on a swing through Iowa on Monday. The trip — the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign’s fight-celebrity-with-celebrity answer to Oprah Winfrey’s stumping for Barack Obama — was meant to be forward-looking. But Mr. Clinton could not help looking backward.

His talks, which were chock full of references to his White House days, underscored a largely unspoken fault line between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama. Their battle is, to a great extent, a referendum on a decade.

It is hard to think of the onetime boy governor of Arkansas and “Comeback Kid” as a nostalgia act, but Mr. Clinton was quick to concede that it was so. He had become, he said wryly, an old racehorse that the Democrats haul out every two years at election time to see if he can still make it around the track. Now, when he speaks about national health insurance, he talks about his heart surgery. The man whose theme was once the musical refrain, “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow,” told a gym full of Grinnell College students that at some point “you realize you have more yesterdays than tomorrows.”

The polls say voters today are desperate for change, and Mr. Clinton, ever the obliging politician, gave his audiences what they came for. The theme of his engaging, unscripted remarks — delivered to audiences in Ames, Newton, Grinnell and Iowa City — was that Mrs. Clinton has always been a “change agent.” He cited examples from her antiwar speech at her Wellesley graduation to her recent Senate campaign to get body armor for troops in Iraq.

Mr. Clinton, however, had a way of returning to the 1990s. When he warned that the growing gap between rich and poor was one of the nation’s biggest problems, he noted that the poorest Americans had it better “in the eight years we served.” He told his Grinnell audience about the millions of additional people who got student aid during his years in office, and he worked in as an aside that in his two terms in office, 22.7 million jobs were created.

In praising his wife, Mr. Clinton talked about her lifetime of accomplishments but paid special attention to her work as first lady. On one stop, he blurted out something that seemed to be on his mind all day. “I hear a lot of people say we don’t want to refight the battles of the ’90s, and I agree with that,” he said. “I sure would like to have some of the victories of the ’90s.”

A few years ago, Mr. Clinton made a now-famous observation about a different decade. “If you look back on the ’60s and think there was more good than bad, you’re probably a Democrat,” he said. “If you think there was more harm than good, you’re probably a Republican.”

In the current presidential primary, the Clinton campaign is based largely on a speeded-up nostalgia — like the VH-1 television show “I Love the ’70s.” It is premised on the notion that the 1990s — with its strong economy, technology boom and pre-Sept. 11 innocence — was a golden age rudely interrupted by two terms of George W. Bush.

Mr. Obama is more forward-looking. When he talks of uniting the nation and moving beyond partisanship, he could be attacking the Clinton era as much as the Bush years. His supporters see him as a new kind of president, ushering America into a more diverse, more global, post-ideological age.

Put that way, the advantage might appear to be Mr. Obama’s, since he comes off as the more profound agent of change. On the other hand, in presidential elections, voters rarely venture far outside their comfort zones. They may not be able to imagine what an Obama presidency would look like, while they can remember a Clinton presidency quite well.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/12/opinion/12wed4.html?_r=1&oref=slogin