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Chapter 9 – Section 2
Role of Political Parties Today
MALE SPEAKER: Clinton/Gore buttons here. Two dollars each, three for five. Who’s next here? You ain’t wearing, you ain’t caring. Campaign buttons here.
AL GORE: With your help we are going to elect the man. I present to you, the next President of the United States of America, Bill Clinton.
MALE SPEAKER: I think this Democrat is a, as a Democrat that wants to bring a lot of different factions together.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: We are all in this together. We do not have a person to waste.
FEMALE SPEAKER: I was a republican and I am voting for Clinton.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Every one of you will be part of my American family if you will work hard and play by the rules.
MALE SPEAKER: I have never voted for a democrat for President before, but I vote for one this time.
MALE SPEAKER: These are the voices of the new democratic coalition. Northern blacks and southern whites, women, blue collar unionists, suburbanites and Reagan Democrats who, polls suggest are gathering behind the Democratic ticket. While there is no guarantee that this collation will put Bill Clinton over the top, it does explain why he is the first Democrat in sixteen years since Jimmy Carter to be competitive on the eve of a presidential election.
MALE SPEAKER: I think the most amazing thing about this election is that Democrats are Democrats again.
MALE SPEAKER: E.J. Dionne, national political writer for the Washington Post came to Chicago last week to talk to members of the new Clinton coalition first hand.
MALE SPEAKER: I think that a lot of what Clinton has done is brought back together the old democratic parties. That if you looked at this crowd, a lot of it were white working people, black people, some Latinos, but he has done one other thing which I think if he wins will prove to be his most important contribution to political change which is he has brought young people back into the Democratic Party.
FEMALE SPEAKER: If Clinton becomes president what would you like to tell him? What message would you like to give him if he asked you for advice?
MALE SPEAKER: In 1988, Gina Matrovski, cast her first vote for George Bush. Today she has a student at Columbia College and was doing interviews at the rally for a documentary.
MALE SPEAKER: I think that there is a real change in college campuses. And a lot of people that I talk to now that were pro-Republican with me also are changing. We are beginning to, before we were being taken care by our parents, we didn’t have to worry about things like taxes, and making our own living, and paying for our education, and now that we are, we realized, you know, that that is not working. Bush’s deals weren’t working. That wasn’t going to get us anywhere. So I think that there is a big change now back to liberalism back to the Democratic Party.
MALE SPEAKER: We have been what you might call Reagan Democrats for years. You go around Teamster City and in the last three elections, people are talking about Republicans, you don’t see anybody talking about Republicans this time.
MALE SPEAKER: Rory McGinty is political director for the Teamsters in the Chicago area. His million and a half member union worked actively for Reagan and Bush, but this year it’s putting its muscle behind the Clinton/Gore ticket.
MALE SPEAKER: Our people are voting their pocket books. A lot of ‘em are out of work, the rest of them are scared they are going to be out of work for, if we have another four years of this.
MALE SPEAKER: You know, I don’t just see this great wave of love for this guy pouring out of people. It’s a very pragmatic decision
MALE SPEAKER: Bob Greene, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune has been traveling the Midwest this year talking to voters.
MALE SPEAKER: Yes right. They are brought together. It’s almost like a huge marriage of convenience with the fact, if this makes sense, but the fact that it’s really a marriage of inconvenience. People really need somebody to get something done, but if a President Clinton is elected and begins to fail, will this coalition evaporate quickly, boom like that, because it’s not a love affair with a candidate, it’s an expression of need.
MALE SPEAKER: There is no question about the fact that Bill Clinton is a new kind of democrat who speaks for a democratic party in the process of change and reform.
MALE SPEAKER: Professor William Galston, a Political Scientist at the University of Maryland was issues director of the Mondale campaign in 1984.
MALE SPEAKER: In my opinion, the most important strategic success of the Clinton campaign and Bill Clinton is that they have succeeded in projecting the message that because the Democratic Party has itself changed, it can once again be trusted to change the country.
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