Clintonism R.I.P.

Hillary Clinton's defeat in Iowa, with - if recent polling data is to be believed - another soon to come in New Hampshire (as even Sen. Hillary Clinton appears ready to acknowledge), is a pleasant non-surprise to those of us who looked upon the Clinton era with equal parts loathing and disgust. But Hillary's impending defeat in the Granite State portends more than the undoing of a carefully stage-crafted campaign. Surely, we are witnessing a sea change in the fortunes of America's (former) premier political couple.

Matt Bai of the New York Times Magazine correctly divined the likelihood of Ms. Clinton being able to launch a viable run for the White House when he correlated her success with public perception of her husband's record as president. In his piece, Bai points out how the nascent split between Bill Clinton's triangulating centrism and the more confrontational tactics embraced by the netroots endangered Hillary's campaign almost from the start.

Even before they knew for sure that she was running for the presidency, Hillary Clinton's top aides had to figure out how best to handle the growing tumult inside their own party. As a senator, Clinton had been, if anything, more centrist than her husband... There is no reason to think such stances on the issues didn't accurately reflect Hillary's convictions, but they had the added bonus of positioning her as eminently moderate and "electable" — both in New York State, where she won 67 percent of the vote in her 2006 re-election, and in the rest of the country.

The party, however, seemed to be moving in a different direction. Liberal activists online and in the states, in the wake of [Howard] Dean's losing campaign, were noisily demanding more confrontation and less Clintonian compromise from their Washington leaders... Some Clinton supporters in Washington thought they could see an ominous train coming down the track, and they wondered if the candidate didn't need to get some distance between herself and her husband's legacy, to position herself as a more partisan Democrat before it was too late.

Mark Penn steadfastly disagreed. Penn, who was Bill Clinton's chief pollster during the '90s, also emerged as Hillary's most influential strategist. Penn had argued for years, going back to the Clinton White House, that Democrats won when they occupied the bipartisan, common-sense center of the political spectrum. And even in a primary campaign, Penn said he believed that Democrats had such personal loyalty toward the Clintons that they would forgive a few ideological differences they might have with the senator, especially if they thought those differences made her palatable to a wide swath of independent voters. When I suggested to Penn, back in 2005, that there might be a strong backlash emerging against the notion of Clintonism, he waved me away. "Strong backlash?" Penn scoffed, reminding me that the former president had a 70 percent approval rating in the country as a whole. "In this environment, that is a notion I would have to laugh at."

I suspect that Mark Penn finds little about which to laugh these days. While the netrooots have not been able to deliver on much politically - as they have shown themselves to be more of a threat to Democrats whom they deem to be insufficiently progressive than to Republicans - the "money guys, bloggers, MoveOn.org" coalesced after the 2000 election to exert an outsized influence on Democrat politics, causing the party to list more to port than in the 1990s. Hillary's electoral misfortunes represent the further cresting of a tsunami of revolt against the Democratic establishment.

To be sure, a similar sort of tidal wave is roiling in microcosm amongst black Democrats. With a preponderance of the African American political elite - many of whom sensing a debt of gratitude more so to the Clintons than to the black proletariat - placing their hopes on Sen. Clinton (to include Reps. John Lewis and Sheila Jackson Lee, former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young and Jesse Jackson's wife Jacqueline), it has been interesting to watch black leadership struggle to maintain credibility with the petit bourgeois who have largely been endorsing Barack Obama. (H/T: The Wall Street Journal)

In some black organizations and churches there are signs that Mr. Obama's surge is creating divisions between political leaders and their supporters. Lucille Whipper, a Clinton supporter and current leader of South Carolina's Woman's Baptist Educational and Missionary Convention, said she worried that it will be "difficult for me to keep the influence I have and not affect my validity in all the other areas that I work. We have to be very careful that we don't develop in the minds of others that we are not for youth, we are not for change."

With the Clinton campaign in tatters, it is evident that we are witnessing the continued slide of civil rights leaders into further irrelevance and that we are in the post-Clinton era. While we have yet to unwind all of the nettlesomeness of the Clinton presidency, we are at sufficient remove for all but the most irretrievably biased observers to conclude that Bill Clinton's presidency was little more than history standing still. Sadly, history did anything but stand still while Clinton played a southern-fried Nero and the world burned. Perhaps Hillary's worst miscalculation was to assume that her "experience" as Bill's Lady Macbeth would come without the price of guilt by association.