Here is where our story takes its remarkable turn: slowly but relentlessly, these different loser reform traditions came together, and as they did, the Democratic Party became a success. Bad ideas plus bad ideas turned out, in this case, to yield electoral victory. The exact point where these trajectories intersected was occupied by one Bill Clinton, governor of Arkansas, a Rhodes Scholar and a McGovern campaign worker who had grown up to become the chairman of the DLC. He led the idealistic Sixties generation and he warred with the teachers’ union; he smoked dope and he never got high; he
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