Penn and Wolfson: Bill Clinton's Ideas Were Democratic Ideas

The Clinton campaign has excoriated Barack Obama for his remarks to a Reno paper's conservative editorial board that Republican party was the "party of ideas" over the last 16 years. But it has been long thought that Bill Clinton appropriated ideas usually identified with the Republican Party during his years in office—like deficit reduction, free trade, law enforcement, and welfare reform.

I asked Howard Wolfson and Mark Penn about this in a conference call with reporters yesterday, and here is what they said:

"As someone who was a Congressional aide during the 90's," said Wolfson, "The idea that law enforcement was a Republican idea, I just think is a rewriting of history. What President Clinton enacted during the 90's was the best of Democratic ideas, the best of progressive ideas." Wolfson went on to say he was proud as a "young person to be working in Congress, on the Hill, for Democratic members. We enacted so many of the policies that the President put forth. And so I reject the notion that law enforcement was a Republican idea, or that the right kind of welfare reform was a Republican idea. These were good, Democratic ideas. And they were done the right way, and they significantly benefited our country.

Penn added the following:

"I just think that when President Clinton got elected, it was a time of tremendous change in outlook," he said. "I apologize if my memory's not correct, but I believe President, the previous President Bush had been vetoing the Family Medical Leave Act. He put together a series of progressive and important ideas, that, again, if you go through them, whether it was from the Family Medical Leave Act, he was the first president to really push an agenda on global warming, the first president to really try to get universal health care. Not every idea that, you know, the President fought for then had to, had to be done. They are still very much the dominant ideas that people, that people are looking for."

Penn added that Clinton "ran very much a campaign of new ideas. He put together a 'Putting People First' booklet. And those ideas that he put together, and again, merely saying crime or the economy or, you know, or welfare, didn't the Republicans have something to say about that? He really had the, the ideas, the winning ideas, that changed the country from a dismal economic state, from a state where so many of the social indicators, like crime, were going negative. Take the idea of community policing and a hundred thousand cops. Those were ideas that President Bush, that, you know, fought bitterly when he got into office. Many of those ideas are ideas that have been, you know, roundly opposed by the Republicans once they got back into office. And so, it would be ironic to credit them with ideas that they have in fact opposed and you know, and, stripped out. I mean, right now you even have President Bush for a time vetoing children's health care."