Lessons From the Clinton Era for Today's Political Challenges

0:00 Speaker 1 Well, Sunday morning, time to think about things. What is today is Hank Shankoff, democratic strategist. He’s been around forever like I have. And I told him about the party that we had for President Clinton the other night and how everybody in that room, maybe one hundred people were talking about what does it take to bring the Democratic

0:25 Party back to common sense? Well, Hank Shankoff, you should have been in that room because your ears must have been ringing.

0:34 Speaker 2 Well that’s kind of John, and thank you very much. Audience. Listen. It was a different time if you look at it.

0:40 Speaker 3 And I helped write the Edge for the President and shot the first ones that went up in early nineteen ninety five because he was electorally in trouble and he wanted to win the race. You know, I remember going through the statistics that we cut Edge that talked about, you know, Clinton comes to office, the economy screwed up,

0:55 the Republicans have made a mess of things, you know, all kinds of chaos. What he did was he stabilized the economy. We had. We were not a deader nation. The country was at peace overall.

1:07 Speaker 1 And I remember Kankhancliff, I remember Nuke Gingwidge and him brought the deficit down, which is unheard of, from five and a half training down to five.

1:18 Speaker 3 Trade it was nothing, and the country functioned better. People were working, you know, the country going through a jobs problem. Our rates were outrageous.

1:27 Speaker 2 The cost of things was tough.

1:29 Speaker 3 You know, it was the economy stupid, as James Carrville was smart to say in nineteen ninety two. And when Clinton had a second term, he did the best he could. There were two errors. Welfare reform, he’ll tell you, was one, and the crime bill could have been better. But putting one hundred thousand cops on the street throughout the country

1:44 meant a lot. The problem is that it didn’t capture the people it should have been captured. But look, it was a more rational time. And if you and he had been a governor, so he understood governance at the most bottom level, and he understood people.

1:59 Speaker 2 He was a self which was also important.

2:01 Speaker 3 If you said to him, it said to Hi about country music, you can name any anybody who’d ever performed any place and he tell you where. I mean, that’s the kind of guy he was. Because he was at the he was much more directed toward the people that needed the services, and he really had compassion, and he

2:18 also read everything.

2:20 Speaker 2 So what we now have is a.

2:21 Speaker 3 Generation of Democrats who don’t read everything, don’t read anything in some cases, who are simply professionals for the purpose of being professionals in government, just.

2:29 Speaker 2 Like the Republicans.

2:30 Speaker 3 We have the political industrial complex, which cares not about the will of the people, but cares about keeping people on the payroll so they can collect a lot of money for jobs that used to pay very little. They can have pensions, they can have the health insurance that most Americans can’t afford. So on AOC blabs, I always say,

2:45 let her give her health insurance away to the people she wants to help, because she’s got a better deal than most any other American. It’s called the system that the members of Congress have and a pension and the rest.

2:55 And we have this political industrial class that’s going to stay in power as long as they can because that’s all it knows how to do. It doesn’t know how to serve people. It knows how to stay in power and serve itself. And the consultants are part of that. Frankly, the whole consultant thing has changed dramatically because the amount

3:09 of money involved here. So we have a monstrous political bureaucracy kept in power by people who wanted to stay in power not for the public but for themselves, and a political class of consultants who really don’t care about ideology or anything else. You know, we used to call ourselves warriors. And Joe Napolitan, who’s gone now but who

3:28 is my mentor and helped create the political business, always said that we were the clarions of democracy. That’s not the case anywhere. What we are now is the clarions of bank accounts. Whole different things.

3:38 Speaker 1 John, understood, and all we want, you know, the most priority in me is safety for our kids and grandkids that are walking around our city, our states, our country.

3:56 Speaker 3 And thank you.

3:58 Speaker 1 Why certain certain democrats are taking the position that they representing the criminals more so than the than the citizens.

4:12 Speaker 3 Well, they’re representing disruption, John, because they seem to think that disruption is a fine thing, and that disruption in the way it is occurring, which is much more violent than it was during the sixties or any other period where we’ve had the civil civil disobedience of significant kind, is okay. Why, because that’s what the population seems to want,

4:31 and they’re not interested in restoring order so much as they are in discussing restoring order, and the police have become a liability for some of them, which is a tragedy. You know. The relationship between the publican police has gone through its moments, and the George Floyd homicide frankly changed the entire way we view policing in this country. But

4:52 we need police, and we need we need courts that are stable, and we need judges that are able to make reasonable decisions based upon the law. What we’ve created, and even in New York State is an ideological bench of judges and.

5:03 Speaker 2 Attacks on the police department.

5:05 Speaker 3 Which will ultimately in New York City particularly, which will ultimately result, depending who’s running.

5:10 Speaker 2 The place, in chaos and disorder. That’s simple.

5:13 Speaker 3 You cannot have it both ways. And people are talking about John have never largely in the streets, have never.

5:19 Speaker 2 Had a tough day.

5:20 Speaker 3 I have never had to put a talus on their hands. Are the most panpher generation in history, have eaten more regularly than any other generation ever created, have been housed more regularly, yes at higher cost unfortunately, and have frankly spanned to gain the greatest transfer wealth in the history of mankind in the next ten.

5:39 Speaker 2 Years or so.

5:39 Speaker 3 So the complaints are overwhelming. The desire to make change is yes there. The desire to come up with a platform that makes any sense is not there because they’ve been trained very differently. Their interests somehow revolve around foreign affairs, notably obsession with the Jewish state. And ultimately this will deteriorate, simple, it will deteriorate.

6:02 Speaker 1 Well, thank Shankloff. Anything else you want to tell you a mark and people on a Sunday morning.

6:07 Speaker 3 Yeah, you have to go back and go back to being what America was, you know, and the great European that’s helpful. The French who came to the United States and wrote about it in the early nineteenth century said, this is the most overorganized religious, most religious place in the world.

6:22 Speaker 2 Well, it’s not the most religious place in the world anymore, and.

6:25 Speaker 3 It’s not over and over organized because our civic culture Masons, Kawanans, Lions, Rotarians, volunteerism, volunteerism, and our hospitals, candy stripers and on in our schools is kind of depleting. Because this generation of young people coming up don’t believe that’s important, and we haven’t trained them properly. My advice get back into churches, synagogues and mosques if you and create a pacivic culture and start

6:49 teaching civics in our schools again and stop telling children lies.

6:53 Speaker 2 It would be a very good thing, John, if we started doing that.

6:56 Speaker 1 Well in this day of AI and the things that are going on the Internet and the amount of lies going on the Internet. I pray for our culture and civilization. Thank you, shank shank Off. Let’s continue this conversation because it needs continuing, and we’ll catch up again.

7:12 Speaker 2 Real soon, I hope. So, John, all the best to you and your listeners.