Slick Willy rewrites history, wants credit for accomplishments of Republican congress!

Bill
Clinton thinks he deserves more credit for reforming welfare and
balancing the budget.

“I go crazy every time I read the
conventional wisdom,” he said Friday night at his presidential
library in Little Rock, Ark. “So part of the Republican narrative
is that I was ‘saved’ from myself by the election of the
Republican Congress [in 1994] that ‘forced me’ to do welfare
reform and ‘made the balanced budget possible.’”

Clinton
said reporters and commentators “keep saying this, overlooking all
relevant facts.”

The 42nd president said Arkansas had been a
test case for reform during his governorship. At the federal level,
he said 43 states received federal waivers to implement welfare
reform before the GOP-controlled House passed the final bill.

“And
yet I kept reading how this was ‘a Republican idea,’ just because
President Reagan had a good story about a welfare queen and a
Cadillac who didn’t exist,” Clinton said.

The feisty
comments came during 20 minutes of unscripted remarks that
immediately followed a one-hour panel discussion commemorating the
20<sup>th
anniversary of Clinton announcing his run for president in front of
the nearby state house. They showcased a Clinton determined to
present himself as a transformational figure.

Six senior aides
from the 1992 campaign had waxed nostalgic, praising their old boss
for revitalizing the Democratic Party and changing the way campaigns
are run.

When Clinton took the microphone, he riffed on the
importance of offering voters a compelling story line.

“I’m
telling you this to point out that we need a coherent narrative,”
he said. “The No. 1 rule of effective politics, especially if the
people you’re running against have a simple narrative — that
government is always the problem, there is no such thing as a good
tax or a bad tax cut, there’s no such thing as a good program or a
bad program cut, no such thing as a good regulation or a bad
deregulation — if you’re going to fight that, your counter has to
be rooted in the lives of other people.”

His speech included
an attack on the tea party governing philosophy.

“We need to
understand that one of the things that tends to tilt things toward
the Republicans’ anti-government narrative is our country was born
out of a suspicion of government,” Clinton said. “King George’s
government was not accountable to us. That’s what the Boston tea
party was about. When the tea party started out, at least they were
against unaccountable behavior from top to bottom. Then it morphed
into something different. If you want to go against that grain,
you’ve got to tell people you understand it’s a privilege and a
responsibility to spend their tax money, but there’s some things we
have to do together. And that’s what the purpose of government is,
to do the things that we have to do together that we can’t do on
our own.”

“If we can make that choice credible,” he
added, “then our candidates — starting with the president — and
our principles will be fine.”</sup>

Among
friends and longtime supporters, the 65-year-old looked at ease and
spoke lovingly about the aides and Arkansans who helped him get to
the White House two decades ago.

“We were looking at total
meltdown about a week before New Hampshire,” Clinton recalled,
praising James Carville for the way he handled the blow-up over the
Vietnam letter.

“He likes to act crazy because it helps him
get speaking gigs,” Clinton joked. “He figures if he goes around
acting like he needs a rabies shot that more and more people will
want to see him.”

Clinton said commentators struggled to
deal with him when he stepped onto the national stage because he did
not fit easily into one easily defined category.

On the issue
of race, he bragged about having the highest percentage of
African-Americans on his professional staff of any state attorney
general in America in the late 1970s.

Panelist Vernon Jordan,
the civil rights icon who chaired Clinton’s presidential transition
in 1992, heaped on praise.

“The party was lost at sea,”
Jordan said. “And Bill Clinton came in 1991, and he was to the
Democratic Party what Rosa Parks was to the civil rights movement. …
He was to the Democratic Party what Martin Luther King became to the
movement. It was change. It was different. It was fresh. It was
young. It was also experience. He’d been governor a long time. It
was renaissance time in the Democratic party, and a lot of the older
Democrats had to be brought around.”

Al From, the founder of
the Democratic Leadership Council, marveled at Clinton’s ability to
give the same charter school speech to two different groups with
opposite interests and get them to see him as on the right side of
the issue.

Frank Greer, media consultant to the 1992 Clinton
campaign, said it took someone from the South to bridge the gap
between working whites and African-Americans.

“He understood
it because he had lived it,” he said. “It was growing up in the
South.”

Former Little Rock Mayor Lottie Shackleford, deputy
campaign manager in 1992, talked about how Clinton was a party
outsider who did not initially attract many movers and shakers.

“It
was true grass roots,” she said.

Carville talked about the
innovations in the 1992 Clinton campaign. Every campaign has a war
room now. The “it’s the economy, stupid” mantra has long become
cliché. The candidate bus tour that seemed somewhat novel when
Clinton did it is now standard practice for national
candidates.

“The campaign was not just a different way,”
Carville said, “but it was sort of a cultural transformation in
American politics.'

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