Ahh, the apathy of 1996 - it's all coming back to me now

At some point I'll write more about why I've chosen to support Obama, and also the hurdles which for my vote Hillary had to overcome, and which instead she dug a trench beneath. For most of this time, my internal critique of Clintonism has been focused on how I felt around 2000, in the autumn of Clinton 1. At that time I was an alienated Democrat looking seriously at third party politics (at least until I heard Ralph Nader's justification for voting against Gore). But that was once the rightward drift of the Clinton years had driven me to act politically. This Mark Schmitt column (on the "now you don't see him, now she takes his advice" Hillary guru Mark Penn) reminds me how before I got mad about Clinton's triangulation, his first term made politics seem so useless and unappealing:

Clinton's bond with Penn, we're told, goes back to the 1995 to 96 period, when Dick Morris brought in Penn to help with President Clinton's reelection effort. While it was a success for the Clinton family, it was a dreary low point for the nation's politics: Voter turnout dipped below 50 percent for the only time ever in a presidential year, young people were completely disengaged, campaign finance scandals arose in part because politics was so uninspiring that no one would give except in exchange for favors, and the ambitions of the early Clinton years were abandoned for safe, symbolic gestures appealing to the middle-class swing voters -- "soccer moms" -- in a few swing states.

Ah, yes, that's were my goal to be a political science major went. True, I voted in 1996, but there was really nothing cool at all about politics when I was in college and no passion. I had come to college in 1992, passionate and very political, first seen a Democratic victory in Clinton's triumph of the old and very shortly thereafter ...I got nothing in me calling me to join in. Looking back now, what a moribund state of affairs that was. And what a different world it is today.