Alan Greenblatt, a staff writer for Governing, is a former reporter for NPR and CQ.

The biggest irony of the 2016 campaign is Hillary Clinton running as the sort of liberal Bill Clinton once ran against. The Democratic party has moved too far left to accept the former president, or at least the version of Bill Clinton that dominated Democratic politics back in the 1990s.

The overarching project of his political career was to pull the party back toward the center. Barney Frank recalls, while Clinton was in office, getting no response to a letter he'd sent to "The Democratic President of the United States" because the post office classified it as "addressee unknown." Within a few years of Clinton's reign, politicians such as Paul Wellstone and Howard Dean began to refer to themselves as representatives of the "Democratic wing" of the Democratic Party.


To succeed today, Hillary Clinton—like any national Democrat—must win over that wing. But doing so will encourage Republicans to paint her as too beholden to the party's liberal, urban, heavily minority base. If those attacks succeed and she loses, it will be back to the future for the GOP. That line of attack is why Bill Clinton self-consciously sought to ditch the losing liberal policies of the party's previous presidential nominees, such as Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale. Democrats lost five out of the six presidential elections between 1968 and 1988, going 0-for-3 by the time Clinton ran in 1992. There was a lot of talk at the time about the GOP holding a "lock" on the Electoral College. Clinton and other so-called New Democrats thought they could regain voter trust by taking a tougher line on social and spending issues. Hillary Clinton is doing the opposite.

She is being dragged left by younger voters and minority groups, who make up essential elements of today's Democratic coalition and tend to favor federal solutions more readily, according to polls, than older, whiter voters. The party's votes now overwhelmingly come from big cities, territory in which Democratic mayors such as Bill De Blasio in New York and Eric Garcetti in Los Angeles have made addressing income inequality central to their mission through measures such as lifting the minimum wage and building more affordable housing. President Obama, having grown convinced that Republicans intend to give him nothing, responded to the GOP's big victory last fall by making deals with Cuba and Iran and moving left on issues such as immigration, free community college and paid family leave. (Unpaid family leave was one of President Clinton's earliest legislative accomplishments.)

It all shows how far the party, and the Clintons, have come. The most resonant phrases from Bill Clinton's day—aside from the sex stuff—were the exact opposite of any progressive call to arms, such as "end welfare as we know it" and "the era of big government is over." But the era of big government being over—if that chime ever indeed did sound—is long since done. Put aside the expansions of federal programs that took place under Obama and George W. Bush. Although Obama and some other Democrats were willing to entertain thoughts a few years ago of trimming Social Security as part of a bigger budget deal, pledging to preserve or even expand the program has once again become a litmus test for party officials.

As president, Bill Clinton not only signed the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act (an act for which he has since repented). He also signed a welfare law that cut off immigrants from receiving many benefits. Legal immigrants. Imagine any national Democrat agreeing to either of those things today. "They've moved left partly because they've won," says Lara Brown, a political scientist at George Washington University. "Parties typically go as far toward their core ideology as they can, as long as they keep winning."

President Clinton did champion many progressive causes, including universal health care (a botched effort run by Hillary Clinton), gun control and expansion of the earned-income tax credit, an anti-poverty program Clinton himself wished had a zippier brand name. But Clinton also argued that by melding liberal principles and conservative ideas, voters who had written off the Democratic Party would again listen to its message, which remained broadly populist on economic matters. Clinton believed Democrats had to shed any lingering hippie image and talk tough on crime. When still the governor of Arkansas, Clinton left the campaign trail in 1992 to preside over the execution of a cop killer who was mentally impaired. He also went out of his way to distance himself from civil rights leader Jesse Jackson—his "Sister Souljah moment."

Triangulation (remember that?) wasn't just about Clinton positioning himself to the left of old-line liberals. He picked the Republicans' pockets on their most popular issues, forcing them out alone on a limb to defend their most extreme positions. "Back when he ran in 1992, my party, the Democratic Party, had lost three consecutive elections, one of them in which we carried only one state," says Evan Bayh, a former governor and senator from Indiana who, like Clinton, enjoyed success in the 1990s by seeking the center. "Any time a party has lost three consecutive elections, it becomes a bit more willing to explore the notion of principled compromise so it's able to pursue some of its objectives."

Barney Frank, the liberal former congressman from Massachusetts, makes this point explicitly in his recent memoir. "At the time, many on the left believed he was 'too moderate,'" Frank writes. "In the political climate of the times, I continued to believe that Bill Clinton was the most liberal electable president."

Most Democrats came to accept Clinton's political calculations, particularly after Republicans took over control of Congress in 1994, ending long years of Democratic dominance on the Hill. After Clinton won reelection in 1996, House Democratic leader Richard Gephardt declared, "We're all New Democrats now." Clinton had offered a new path that turned out to be a winning one. "Clinton moved the Democratic Party past things it had to get beyond, such as welfare," says political historian Lewis Gould. "When Democrats essentially eliminated the deficit, a major Republican talking point was eliminated."

It's a testament to Clinton's success, Gould argues, that Democrats today have been able to move farther to the left on a whole range of issues, including immigration policy and same-sex marriage. Democrats are relying much more on minority support, while receiving a lot less love from the white working-class voters who were a major source of Clinton's strength. Clinton also showed the party how to pick the GOP's electoral lock. Big states that had voted for Republicans prior to Clinton, such as California, Illinois and New York, are now beyond the GOP's reach. A major part of Clinton's appeal back then was the fact that he was a Southern governor. In those days, it seemed like winning parts of the South was a necessary part of the Democratic strategy, since only the southerners Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson had won in what was then recent memory. Now, the South is irrelevant.

And it's no longer Bill Clinton's party. By the time Obama took office, former Democratic Leadership Council stalwarts who went to work in his administration, such as Tom Vilsack, Janet Napolitano and Kathleen Sebelius, "pretty much shunned that moderate DLC affiliation," notes Brown. Times change, but that only shows how Clinton's agenda has lost relevance for Democrats today.

Hillary Clinton may refer fondly to her husband's time of peace and prosperity, but she's not paying much homage to his actual policies (some of which she disagreed with at the time, if we can believe the White House memoirs from that era). She is now marching to Obama's left on certain issues and is being pushed to go even farther by figures such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Right now, she's being pushed to disparage the same style of free-trade agreement her husband backed as president. "Following two successful presidential elections, people think they can have it all," Bayh says. "There's no need to compromise. You can govern and not make any concession on what the policy should be."

If he were running today, Bill Clinton could be counted on to find ways to appeal to the progressives that once again dominate his party, rather than trying to take on a more moderate tint. In a more polarized era, it makes sense for both parties to appeal strongly to their core supporters. Although the number of voters calling themselves independent continues to climb, there doesn't appear to be a lot of ground to be gained these days by searching for the center. "There is little tolerance in the Democratic Party electorate for conservative stances," says George Edwards, an expert on the presidency at Texas A&M University. "Moreover, Democrats can win the White House without winning the most conservative states in the South."

Clinton has become a beloved paterfamilias for Democrats, but it shouldn't come as a surprise that a president first elected more than 20 years ago no longer appears to possess the key to solving the political problems of the day. There's one way in which old school Bill Clinton will continue to serve as a model, however. If Democrats do lose the presidency next year, they'll doubtless seek to adapt and change their message. Being shut out of the White House and control of both chambers of Congress, Democrats will have little base left beyond the big cities. There are currently more than 20 states in which the party lacks even a single statewide elected official. A Clintonian move to the center is something Democrats would have to consider.

Perhaps it's even more certain that a losing Republican Party in 2016 will look to follow Bill Clinton's lead. If the GOP loses next year, that's three in a row. They'll have lost the popular vote in six out of the last seven presidential elections and people will be talking about the GOP's obsolescence, in much the same way pundits had written off the Democratic Party before Bill Clinton came along. "When a party loses three times in a row," George Mason University public policy Prof. William Schneider says, "it's forced to reach a simple conclusion: We can't go on like this."