Hillary’s Other Bill Problem By William McGurn
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hillarys-other-bill-problem-1433805031
Progressivism is the fear that someone, somewhere might be making a profit.
Did Bill de Blasio hear the cock crow Sunday?
There was a day Hillary Clinton counted Mr. de Blasio among her most ardent disciples. Back in 2000, long before he was elected mayor, he even managed her successful campaign for the U.S. Senate.
Now he’s busy denying Mrs. Clinton his support in the most humiliating way he can: on national television. He did it this past weekend on CBS ’s “Face the Nation,” when he confirmed he’s still waiting to hear her plans for addressing income inequality. In May he did it on “Morning Joe.” Back in April he did it on NBC’s “Meet the Press”—hours before Mrs. Clinton officially launched her campaign.
In between the mayor has also made campaign-like stops in Iowa and Wisconsin, released a 13-point “Progressive Agenda” for the nation and co-written (with Massachusetts Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren) a Washington Post op-ed on how to “revive the American Dream.” In all but name, Mr. de Blasio is making his own run for the White House.
Is he serious? The pundit class points out that no sitting mayor has ever been elected president. True enough, but Mr. de Blasio’s real Achilles’ heel is progressivism itself. It just doesn’t work.
Oh, it can claim its victories, here making it more expensive for employers to hire workers, there enshrining some race or gender grievance into law, here again imposing some new tax on millionaires. As a governing philosophy, however, progressive cures tend to leave the people the movement claims to want to help most—the poor and the working class—in worse shape.
This leaves progressive leaders with few examples of thriving progressive states and cities to point to. It also helps explain the nature of the candidates now challenging Mrs. Clinton. The ideal progressive turns out to be someone who has never run anything and so has no executive record that can be held against her.
Hence the pining for Sen. Warren. Hence too the affection for Bernie Sanders, the Vermonter whose socialism seems quaint only because it is safely confined to the Senate floor. Meanwhile, former Rhode Island governor (and former Republican) Lincoln Chafee has entered the race, running on the progressive theme of . . . getting America to adopt the metric system.
What about Martin O’Malley? Yes, he ran Baltimore as mayor and Maryland as governor. But Baltimore is not exactly a winning legacy these days. Back in November, moreover, this bluest of blue states voted in a Republican governor who campaigned largely on a vow to undo everything Mr. O’Malley did during his eight years in Annapolis.
That leaves Mr. de Blasio. Some say it’s too soon for him to run for president. After all, he’s only been mayor of New York for a year-and-a-half.
Mr. de Blasio knows better. These days he continues to bask in the mandate he won in the 2013 election, when he trounced his GOP rival by 49 points and became the first Democrat elected mayor of New York in two decades. In another four years, however, when the full impact of de Blasio progressivism—especially on crime—is on view, he might look more like all those other Democratic mayors presiding over failing cities.
One reason Mr. de Blasio looks viable is that his predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, did a good job on the big issues, including helping to get an economy devastated by 9/11 back on its feet. Not only was he elected three times, he did so while making clear to the public that he was himself an unabashed progressive, at least on issues from the environment and public health to abortion and same-sex marriage.
Even in more-controversial areas, Mr. Bloomberg might well argue he’s been the true progressive. On crime, for example, the chief beneficiaries of the reduction in shootings and murders during the Bloomberg years are the thousands of young black men who would otherwise not be walking around today. And if you think of stop-and-frisk as gun control for criminals, that’s a progressive success too.
Likewise Mr. Bloomberg’s championing of charter schools. These charters have given thousands of poor and minority children the same shot at a decent education that, say, Mr. de Blasio’s children have enjoyed from the elite public schools they attended. It speaks to the sorry state of progressivism that these achievements are counted against Mr. Bloomberg instead of for him.
In the end, of course, the lack of progressive love for Mr. Bloomberg stems from the same factor behind the progressive disenchantment with Hillary: Each is thought simply to have too much money and too many rich friends. Especially Mr. Bloomberg, because he’s earned his billions. Thus does Bill de Blasio’s campaign for the White House point to the real definition of modern American progressivism:
To paraphrase Mencken, the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be making a profit.
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