1078 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy
Clinton’s Political Strategy
Like Truman after the Republican sweep of 1946, Clinton rebuilt his popularity
by campaigning against a radical Congress. He opposed the most extreme parts
of his opponents’ program, while adopting others. In his state of the union
address of January 1996, he announced that “the era of big government is over,”
in effect turning his back on the tradition of Democratic Party liberalism and
embracing the antigovernment outlook associated with Republicans since the
days of Barry Goldwater.
In 1996, ignoring the protests of most Democrats, Clinton signed into law
a Republican bill that abolished the program of Aid to Families with Depen-
dent Children (AFDC), commonly known as “welfare.” Grants of money to
the states, with strict limits on how long recipients could receive payments,
replaced it. At the time of its abolition, AFDC assisted 14 million individuals,
9 million of them children. Thanks to stringent new eligibility requirements
imposed by the states and the economic boom of the late 1990s, welfare rolls
plummeted. But the number of children living in poverty remained essentially
unchanged. Nonetheless, Clinton had succeeded in one of his primary goals:
by the late 1990s, welfare, a hotly contested issue for twenty years or more, had
disappeared from political debate.
Commentators called Clinton’s political strategy “triangulation.” This
meant embracing the most popular Republican policies, like welfare reform,
while leaving his opponents with extreme positions unpopular among middle-
class voters, such as hostility to abortion rights and environmental protection.
Clinton’s strategy enabled him to neutralize Republican claims that Democrats
were the party of high taxes and lavish spending on persons who preferred
dependency to honest labor. Clinton’s passion for free trade alienated many
working- class Democrats but convinced much of the middle class that the
party was not beholden to the unions.
Clinton easily defeated Republican Bob Dole in the presidential contest of
1996, becoming the first Democrat elected to two terms since FDR. Clinton had
accomplished for Reaganism what Eisenhower had done for the New Deal, and
Nixon for the Great Society— consolidating a basic shift in American politics
by accepting many of the premises of his opponents.
Clinton and World Affairs
Like Jimmy Carter before him, Clinton’s primary political interests concerned
domestic, not international, affairs. But with the United States now indisput-
ably the world’s dominant power, Clinton, like Carter, took steps to encour-
age the settlement of long- standing international conflicts and tried to elevate