CNN Frets Bill Clinton Was Too Conservative
Christine Romans, CNN American Morning | NewsBusters.orgThursday’s edition of CNN’s “American Morning” featured a “fact checking” segment on the claims former President Bill Clinton made about his accomplishments as president during his speech to the Democratic National Convention. The segment wasn’t much of a “fact check” as CNN Business Correspondent Christine Romans mostly reminisced about the “glory days” of the ‘90’s. But what she did find was that the worst part of Clinton’s presidency was one of his more conservative actions: “He also signed into law a historic deregulation of the financial system, dismantling laws from the Great Depression that many say would have protected us against the current mortgage crisis.”
Other problems the correspondent found with Clinton’s presidency include: “the go-go days of the ‘90s also gave us the dotcom boom. And when that went bust, Allan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve lowered the interest rates to ease the pain. Dropping them so low, many now see the roots of the current housing mess way back in the dotcom boom. Plus, the ‘90s gave us this obsession with record home ownership with Clinton as a principal cheerleader.”
Romans, of course, included praise of Clinton in her report, saying “Well, you know, Bill Clinton is and rightfully credited with being the president who resided over the longest economic expansion in American history.” She also reminisced about the “incredible” ‘90’s, claiming, “But you can’t really argue with some of these job creation and poverty numbers from the ‘90s. It was an incredible period.”
However, Romans failed to investigate Clinton’s statements about the current Bush administration in which he argued, “They took us from record surpluses to an exploding debt. From over 22 million new jobs to just five million. From increasing working families’ incomes to nearly $7,500 a year to a decline of more than $2,000 a year. For almost eight million Americans lifted out of poverty to more than 5.5 million driven into poverty and millions more losing their health insurance.” It is possible to argue that a good number of the more than 5 million people “driven into poverty” Clinton noted are actually illegal immigrants who have entered the country in the past eight years.
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To me, the funniest part of this is the unconscious association with prosperity as “conservative”(even though Clinton’s prosperity was illusory, to some extent).
I also thought the phrase “obsessed with home ownership” was very revealing.
