For Hillary to Survive, Clintonism Had to Die

On the night of the New Hampshire primary in 1992, Bill Clinton began his speech by declaring that “New Hampshire has made Bill Clinton the comeback kid,” but by its end he was announcing a kind of tactical shift. The message of empathy for middle-class pain that had dominated his campaign—and carried him to second place in the economically depressed state—was far from the animating cause of his bid to lead the Democratic Party. “Tomorrow morning I will carry this campaign away from New Hampshire,” Clinton said. “I will go all across this county, to the rest of the nation, asking them to embrace the New Covenant that I have advocated to restore opportunity and increase responsibility and rebuild a sense of the American community.”

To anyone who had followed the opening phase of Clinton’s life as a national figure, “New Covenant” was familiar code for the bundle of policy positions—many cultivated by the moderate Democratic Leadership Council—that allowed the Arkansas governor to introduce himself to the country as a New Democrat. Each represented a carefully calibrated diversion from the liberal orthodoxy of the previous decade; Clinton expressed little patience for identity politics, was a cheerleader for free trade and held to an unrepentantly hard line on crime and drug use. Just three weeks before the New Hampshire primary, Clinton refused a request for clemency against Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally disabled double-murderer, whose execution offered a useful occasion to demonstrate his unambivalent view toward the death penalty.