The return of the Clinton Democrats (not really)

The Clinton Democrats were spawns of the Democratic Leadership Council, a proudly centrist, pro-business and hawkish (by liberal standards) outfit within the Democratic Party, which is why left-wing Democrats often distrusted and occasionally despised it. Jesse Jackson said DLC stood for "Democrats for the Leisure Class" and ridiculed it as a "Southern white boys club."

The DLC closed up shop in 2011, in large part because the Democratic Party has moved so far to the left (a fact repeatedly confirmed by Pew and Gallup surveys showing that Democrats favor activist government more than they used to and are much more comfortable calling themselves liberals than they were even a decade ago).

So it's interesting that Ms. Grimes, and a number of other Democrats, are calling themselves "Clinton Democrats." Ms. Grimes goes so far as to insist, "I'm not Barack Obama." She won't even say whether she voted for Obama in 2008 or 2012, invoking her constitutional right to ballot secrecy -- a right she eagerly waives to tell people she supported Hillary Clinton in the primaries.

Now it's obviously true that Bill Clinton did not like empty dresses, unless he was the one emptying them, but I don't think that's what Ms. Grimes means by "Clinton Democrat." So what does she mean? When asked, she said that being a Clinton Democrat involves "growing the middle class the right way."

"As we saw under President Clinton's tenure," she explained, "especially when you increase the minimum wage, you actually help to expand the middle class." On another occasion, she said, "We all know what being a Clinton Democrat is all about ... it's about remembering what President Clinton said in his campaign in 1992 -- it's the economy, stupid!"

The only serious response to this has to be, "Huh?"

While it's true that Mr. Clinton raised the minimum wage, few economists would argue it had much to do with the booming economy of the 1990s. More to the point: Mr. Obama has been campaigning relentlessly to increase the minimum wage. (I'd also note that "the economy, stupid" was James Carville's phrase, not Mr. Clinton's).

In fact, when Mr. Obama recently declared that his policies were "on the ballot" in November, he was explicitly referring to a minimum-wage hike.

In other words, Grimes is running against Mr. Obama's policies while supporting Mr. Obama's policies. She just doesn't want to say so because Mr. Obama is unpopular and Hillary Clinton is popular.

And that raises another intriguing question: Is Hillary Clinton a Clinton Democrat? Left-wing writer Joshua Micah Marshall concluded in 2001 that she wasn't when she was in the Senate. Ms. Clinton opposed the DLC agenda on almost every front. And as first lady, it was widely believed that she wasn't a centrist but a voice for the left in her husband's administration.

Indeed, most histories suggest that Bill only reclaimed the center in the mid-'90s because Hillary's health-care scheme (the precursor to Obamacare) was seen as too left-wing. This lent weight to the theory that Bill himself wasn't so much a principled centrist as a shrewd opportunist who went wherever the polls took him. (This was the man, after all, who consulted polls to decide where he would go on vacation.)

So maybe Ms. Grimes really is a Clinton Democrat.

Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and editor-at-large of National Review Online. His email is goldbergcolumn@gmail.com. Twitter: @JonahNRO.