What does a successful Democratic opposition—or a successful Democratic presidency—look like? Patrick Healy, the deputy opinion editor of the New York Times, convened a roundtable of experts to discuss what he thought was that question. “I caught some heat this winter from Democrats when I raised the idea that the party is in deeper trouble with voters than its leaders are admitting,” Healy wrote.
Healy is dedicated to the panel format. He spent election season working on a sort of anti-journalism project for the Times, in which the Opinion section, collaborating with professional political consultants, gathered focus groups of what it took to be regular Americans and encouraged them to express their ignorance, confusion, and secondhand beliefs, so that the newspaper could publish them as if they were facts. For instance:
“They can’t read the Bible in schools, but you can have transgenders come to the schools and read transgender books to our kids.”—Prince, 41, North Carolina, Black, Dem., food runner.
“Vance as vice president would own up to his faults. He’s not like the average politician.”—Ayshah, 21, Iowa, South Asian, student, didn’t vote in 2020.
“I don’t do politics. But when it comes down to it, I’d rather have a businessman have a say in running the dollars of the country if it’s going to help us bring costs down.”—David, 56, white, sales representative, 2020 Trump voter.
This time around, instead of outsiders, Healy was talking to insiders, or at least people who had once been insiders. To talk about what he suggested was the “existential trouble” of the Democratic Party in 2025, he turned to a collection of people who’d been involved in a previous “big reset” by the party: “The rise and victory of Bill Clinton in 1992.” Here was the rundown of the panelists offered by the Times:
Al From is the founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist organization. William A. Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, was a domestic policy adviser to President Clinton. Elaine Kamarck, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and Democratic National Committee member, was an adviser to President Clinton. Will Marshall is president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a moderate Democratic think tank.
And here are some of the things these veterans of the American political process had to say about the most pressing issues for the opposition party today:
“[M]y view is that it’s just wrong to ask the three-fifths of the country that doesn’t have a college degree to pay for the tuition of those who do.”—Al From
“I think a lot of ordinary Americans are asking themselves: Do the Democrats know how to draw lines anymore, or are they just pushed into extremes? You saw one of those issues figure pretty centrally in the 2024 election, when Republicans said Kamala Harris is for ‘they/them’ and Donald Trump is for you.”—William Galston
“The country was being overrun and the interest groups—who did not have the backing of their members—were saying something that was easily translatable into open borders. So Democrats have to get right on immigration.”—Elaine Kamarck
The panel of credentialed political professionals, that is, expressed itself in exactly the same sort of vacant shibboleths as the panels of low-information marginal voters. An active member of the Democratic National Committee stated, as fact, that the “country was being overrun” by immigrants. A senior leader of a think-tank said trans rights were a problem because he’d seen so many TV commercials from the Trump campaign attacking trans rights.
One clear flaw with the exercise was that—to analyze a party whose most obvious political mistake in 2024 was trying to stick with an 81-year-old incumbent president too decrepit to advocate for his own record in public—the Times had gathered a group of people who were all born before the dawn of commercial jet aviation, to reminisce about how the Democrats had won an election more than three decades ago. Their answers were suitably fossilized. Going into 1992, From told Healy, “Democrats stood for weakness at home and in the world, big government and special interest groups, special pleadings.” Then Bill Clinton, running on the slogan that he would “end welfare as we know it,” overcame what Kamarck called the problem of “hypersensitivity” among members of his party, and showed the American public he was willing to reject, as Marshall put it, “the politics of entitlement.”
That story has an undeniable emotional appeal to a certain segment of the Democratic Party and the political press, and not just its oldest members. The same day the Times presented its roundtable of elders, Politico published an account of what the newly installed 48-year-old junior senator from Michigan, the former CIA analyst Elissa Slotkin, has chosen as her message to the party:
In the first of a series of speeches about the Democratic Party’s path out of the wilderness, the Michigan senator said she will span everything from strategy to tactics and tone, acknowledging public perception of the party as “weak and woke” needs to change. She is urging Democrats to “fucking retake the flag” with appeals to voters’ sense of patriotism, to adopt “the goddamn Alpha energy” of Detroit Lions coach Dan Campbell and to embrace an “airing out” of potential 2028 presidential candidates in a broadly contested primary.
In this model or mythology of things, the first enemy the Democratic Party always must subdue is the Democratic Party. The American public naturally prefers Republicans, because Republicans are strong and decisive and sensibly mainstream, while Democrats are stuck pandering to an assortment of unappealing, if not offensive, special constituencies and propping up a regime of meddlesome, wasteful government bureaucrats.
This was the story of how the sunny and virile Ronald Reagan chased the morose and wishy-washy Jimmy Carter out of the White House, which was in turn the story of how Richard Nixon roused the Silent Majority against the dirty, America-hating hippies. It took a charismatic and ruthlessly value-shifting Bill Clinton to change that story by telling his own version of it, speaking out against big government and Sister Souljah, reassuring regular Americans that he was on their side—a reassurance that needs to be renewed every four years, to hold off the threat of another Reagan landslide.
But Ronald Reagan has been dead for more than 20 years. Republicans have won the popular vote only twice in the nine presidential elections since he left office, and have only won an outright majority once. The party of Donald Trump is not trying to crush its opponents at the polls; it’s just trying to crush its opponents.
What were the Clinton-era strategists arguing for, when they declared that the Democrats needed to change on the issues? On student loans, the Trump position is that instead of expanding forgiveness, the government will start garnishing wages and seizing tax refunds from people who aren’t able to pay. On trans rights, the Trump position is that trans people should be forced out of the military, denied care, and outed on their passports. On immigration, Trump is deporting U.S. citizen children who have cancer.
There is neither virtue nor tactical advantage in chasing after Trump, in search of some normal and popular territory he supposedly occupies. While the Clinton veteran at the Brookings institution is admonishing Times readers that the Democrats need to acknowledge the power of the “Kamala Harris is for they/them” attack, Bill Kristol is tweeting “Stand with trans Americans.” While the Democratic National Committee member is reminiscing about how “in eight years we cut 426,000 jobs from the federal government,” services that keep hundreds of thousands of people alive, or millions, are collapsing because of Elon Musk’s extralegal mass purge of the federal workforce.
And while Politico reported that Slotkin was mounting an argument that “Democrats should stop using the term ‘oligarchy,’ a phrase she said doesn’t resonate beyond coastal institutions,” Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been pulling crowds of tens of thousands around the interior West on their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour. Maybe, with all due respect to the legacy of Clintonian accommodation, the term that matters is “fighting”?
But how much respect does the Clinton legacy really deserve, anyway? The Trump mythology wasn’t the only mythology the old Clinton advisors were mistaking for fact. They were also caught up in the legends about their own accomplishments, a story in which what mattered about Bill Clinton was that by breaking with standard Democratic liberalism, he broke a twelve-year Republican stranglehold on the White House.
From another angle, though, the story of Clinton and of Clintonism is that he beat an unpopular George H.W. Bush for the presidency while only getting 43 percent of the vote, in a race in which 18.9 percent of voters decided they preferred a third-party candidate. He failed spectacularly to pass his promised signature healthcare reform initiative, immediately saw his party lose the House and Senate to a hard-right Republican surge in the midterms, got himself impeached, and left the White House in the hands of another Bush for eight more years.
Galston tried to acknowledge that Clinton has produced something less than an FDR-style realignment in American politics. “We gained, at best, an incomplete victory,” he said. “After Bill Clinton, it became clear that the party had accepted only some of the change that he stood for.” Even that was much too flattering. What did the Clintonian rebuke to the Democratic Party’s old preferences produce? His embrace of welfare reform—signing a bill produced by the Republican Congress—did nothing to stop the American right from working itself into a frenzy about Obama phones. His promise to reinvent government added more contractors and middlemen to the provision of public services, but the crusade for privatization, deregulation, and reduced government capacity, unsatisfied, kept going all the way to DOGE.
Marshall added “national service” and “public school choice” to the list; DOGE is currently trying to gut AmeriCorps, and Republican legislators are looting state budgets to spend public money on private schools. Thirty-three years ago, when the panelists made their reputations, it seemed possible that the gap between the parties could be closed with a bit of canny brand management. To believe the old Clinton approach would work now is to believe that the Trump movement is nothing more than some sort of extended Willie Horton commercial, and that you could still co-opt it, if you could just figure out the right number of people to kill.