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Will the Clintons Now Start Trashing Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Mr. and Mrs. Clinton [1]Good move, or bad move, Barack Obama knows where to attack the Clinton’s in the massive, and over inflated, egos.   B.J. Clinton is riled over Obama’s Reagan comments, Ezra Klein, American Prospect [2]:

Bill Clinton’s take on this was that Obama “said President Reagan was the engine of innovation and did more, had a more lasting impact on America than I did. And then the next day he said, ‘In the 90s the good ideas came out from the Republicans. Which it’ll be costly maybe down the road for him because it’s factually not accurate.” Check out the “I” in there. As the argument is presented, this is about him, not her. Obama’s implication was that Clinton was a managerial, rather than transformative, president. Clinton, stung, is slightly shifting the language, asserting that he had “a more lasting impact” on America than Reagan did. But what’s the evidence for that? Reagan’s changes to the tax code, his massive amnesty, and his struggles and negotiations with the Soviet Union, were pretty meaningful, and we hear their echoes today. He’s also commonly credited with pushing the country far to the right, though whether he instigated that change or simply profited from an existent shift in our politics is, I think, an open question

Well look who else thought the republicans were the party of ideas, Greg Sargent, TPM [3]:

In 1981 Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan uttered a startling pronouncement: “The Republicans,” he declared, “are now the party of ideas.” Moynihan was and is a moderate Democrat. He once served in the Nixon administration, and he earned the ire of many 1960s liberals both by his willingness to talk about the disintegration of black families and by his authorship of a leaked memo suggesting that the race issue be treated with “benign neglect.” By 1980, however, the rightward shift of American politics had put Moynihan’s positions well to the left of center, so this was a self-punishing admission

So how long before the Clintons feel obliigated to attack Moynihan?    For what it is worth, Moynihan was my senator and I considered him to have a great mind.   Sadly for Moynhian, he belonged on a university campus and not in Congress.

Hat Tip:  Memorandum.