Clinton: Uncommonly Good

CAP yesterday hosted a conference on the Common Good. Bill Clinton gave a big speech that took the pragmatic "what is good is what works" approach of his administration to new levels.

The problem with ideology is, if you’ve got an ideology, you’ve already got your mind made up. You know all the answers, and that makes evidence irrelevant and argument a waste of time, so you tend to govern by assertion and attack. The problem with that is: that discourages thinking and gives you bad results.

When does not being ideological become an ideology? Who knows? It doesn't stop him making a few, on target pot shots about the state of the Economy straight out of the NDN playbook.

As far as I can determine, these last five years have been the first time since economists have been keeping the figures when we’ve had five years of economic growth, five years of productivity increase in the workforce, a 40-year high in corporate profits, CEO executive pay averaging 369 times the pay of people in the companies, and average wages are flat or declining. Last year, 2005, for the top one percent of Americans, income increased 12.5 percent; for the bottom 99 percent, 1.5 percent, which means for the bottom half it was flat or negative. Now, I don’t think that’s very good. I don’t think that’s a common-good policy. And I believe that we can do better than that, and we should.

Quite so. Still, the overall discription of "common good" in the speech is a little disconcerting. Clinton's type of "common good politics" - basically, what Clinton did in the 90s with an emphasis on community, opportunity and responsibility - is quite different from the radical common good approach proposed by Michael Tomasky and others. This type of approach, a sort of reheated communitarianism, always sounds attractive until people realize the implications it has for a range of progressive issues, from a woman's right to choose to minority rights and other forms of legal protection. Still, even if progressives can't agree on what we mean by the phrase, we can all agree that we like Bill Clinton. Perhaps pragmatism works best after all.