Maybe so, but then the Bush argument would have been 'did I not just defeat Communism and win a great victory in Iraq? Your labor provincialism would snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.'
Being a resident of California I think the country would have been better off with Jerry Brown, but his expression of support for Jesse Jackson at the wrong time put paid to that.
I've got to say as a Euro that while I support that sort of pro-labor welfare state agenda on a policy level, I feel Democrats in the have a bad habit of overestimating its popularity at the strategic level where elections are won. There large currents of irrationality and historical animus at play in the American electorate that the Republicans have been better at leveraging into electoral results even though those same factors are a disadvantage in governance.
This discussion is sort of getting into the weeds and I have other stuff I want to do today, but I'd be delighted to follow up if you wanted to drop me a note via gmail.
I don't disagree with either part of that (heck, I voted for Brown in the primary), but really the Democratic candidate pool was really weak in 1992 because Bush seemed strong until too late for anyone to credibly enter the primary race; Clinton managed not to lose while fumbling on Bush's biggest weakness, but he crippled the Democratic Party nationally for at least a generation in the process.
> I've got to say as a Euro that while I support that sort of pro-labor welfare state agenda on a policy level, I feel Democrats in the have a bad habit of overestimating its popularity at the strategic level where elections are won.
I don't think they are; quite the opposite, they usually fail to campaign on it, and when they push it in policy they fatally compromise it out of the gate (not as part of a negotiation to win votes from the other side) to serve corporate and moneyed interests, both of which are signs that they don't trust it electorally. This is even the case for things like public-paid universal healthcare, which had majority support in polling for years before Clinton was elected (and much of the time after, including through the passage of the ACA, though not always recently), where both Clinton and Obama pushed for complex, private-insurer-dependent programs that were harder for people to understand and much easier political targets for opponents.
The Third Way has been bad for Democrats as a party in government (whatever short term electoral benefit it can be argued, IMO unconvincingly, to have had in 1992 specifically) and worse for the policy interests Democrats (before and after it) claim to support, because it radically shifted the Overton window to the right.
Sure, it made some sense in “I want my party to have this office today” terms, it just was tremendously destructive to the long-term prospects of the party and it's relationship to the grassroots base, and to the key policy interest that distinguished the party from the other major party.
> My memory of the 1992 election is that Clinton managed to exploit general dissatisfaction with a relatively minor recession and conservative disenchantment (and consequent core voter apathy) with Bush's pragmatic decision to hike taxes, along with the split vote on the right created by Ross Perot's candidacy.
Perot's candidacy was almost entirely anti-NAFTA, split the anti-Bush vote, and was fueled by the major-party candidate consensus on NAFTA. With an anti-globalist Democratic candidate, there would have been be no substantial Perot support. Clinton didn't leverage Perot splitting conservative votes, he fueled Perot taking anti-NAFTA votes that had no major party candidate to go to.
> I absolutely understand why the progressive left felt betrayed by the Clinton-Carville machine, but as an outside observer I think the notion that the Democrats would have got anywhere with a Eugene Debs style democratic socialist in 1992 (or any of many similar pipe dreams) is delusional.
The alternatives to Clinton in 1992 weren't Debs-style socialist, they were pre-Third Way pro-labor welfare state Democrats like the vast majority of the party's then-current Congressional delegation.