Bipolar biipartisanship

I'm not sure what Bill Clinton was intending to do with his odd op-ed today. Was it a subtle effort to support Lieberman and his vaunted ability to reach across the aisle? I doubt it, but whatever it was, it was a rosy view of the history of his administration and its relationship with a hostile Congress. Ezra usefully reminds us.

Celebrating welfare reform's better-than-expected results, he generously concludes that "[r]egarding the politics of welfare reform, there is a great lesson to be learned, particularly in today’s hyper-partisan environment, where the Republican leadership forces bills through Congress without even a hint of bipartisanship. Simply put, welfare reform worked because we all worked together. The 1996 Welfare Act shows us how much we can achieve when both parties bring their best ideas to the negotiating table and focus on doing what is best for the country."

Wrong. Clinton vetoed the first two welfare reform bills the Republican Congress sent him for their unimaginable cruelty -- they were punitive programs, focused on punishing, not uplifting, poor blacks. The third bill sparked the most acrimonious and intense negotiations of the Clinton White House, with the president proving unable to decide his course till the eleventh hour and 59th minute. That's because the bill was never meant to be signed.

Take the entire walk down memory lane.