News Analysis: Hillary Clinton Wins A Different New York Than Her Husband Did

Hillary Clinton took the stage Tuesday night to claim a resounding victory in the New York Primary with her husband and daughter at her side.  The sight of the small family waving victoriously to the crowd recalled a moment in 1992, when Bill Clinton, flanked by Hillary and 13-year old curly-haired Chelsea, took the stage in Madison Square Garden to accept the Democratic nomination. But more than the trio's spatial arrangement has changed.

New York has been, historically, a progressive state.  The home of Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm, Bobby Kennedy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Susan B. Anthony. A state whose political compass has pointed due left.

Even when Reaganism was prevailing across the country, New York elected Governor Mario Cuomo. "Mr. President, you ought to know, that this nation is more a tale of two cities than it is a shining city on a hill," Mario Cuomo thundered in a now-famous speech at the Democratic Convention in San Francisco in 1984.

"Mr. President, maybe if you asked a woman who had been denied the help she needed to feed her children because you said you needed the money for a tax break for a millionaire, or for a missile we couldn’t afford to use," Mario Cuomo said. 

The Democrats lost that presidential race, and they lost the White House again in 1988. By 1992, the White House had belonged to Republicans for 12 years, when Bill Clinton, southerner and centrist, took center stage preaching Democratic values, but also personal responsiblity. He pushed the crime bill, welfare reform,  and Wall Street deregulation.  By 1996, he proclaimed the era of big government over.

"We know big government does not have all the answers," he said in his State of the Union address that year. "We know there’s no program for every problem. We know and we have worked to give the American people a smaller and less bureaucratic government and one that has to live within its means."

In the Clinton years, liberal Democrats became scared to call themselves such. Even in New York, it was seen as a formula for losing. 

By 2010, Mario Cuomo’s son, Andrew, ran for governor with a similar message to Bill Clinton’s: socially liberal, but fiscally cautious. Government should be trimmed, Gov. Andrew Cuomo argued in his 2011 inaugural address.

"This state has no future, if we are going to be the capital of taxation," Cuomo said in what he called a "suitably austere" setting, in Albany. "We have to send that signal this session by sending a property tax cap.  And my friends, we must right-size the state government for today."

Indeed, right away, Cuomo cut taxes, by billions of dollars.

Then Wall Street was occupied. A few dozen people lived in tents in a park in Lower Manhattan, preaching the gospel of the 99%, chanting "Banks got bailed out! We got sold out!" The message caught fire and became a national, then an international movement.

Cuomo soon scrapped some planned tax cuts.  Two years later, Mayor Bill de Blasio won New York, picking up Mario Cuomo’s theme of “a tale of two cities."

Then along came Bernie Sanders, sounding very much like the occupiers. "What we can accomplish is to end this disgrace where the top tenth of one percent owns as much wealth than the bottom 90 percent," Sanders says.

Hillary Clinton started her 2016 campaign in a much more progressive place than she ran in 2008.  From the get-go, she proposed overhauling the criminal justice system and raising the minimum wage. But Bernie Sanders pushed her even farther.

She began talking about raising the minimum wage to $12 an hour nationally, and as much as $15 in a hour in cities like New York and Seattle. She pushed “the tale of two cities” theme in a way her husband never did.  She called for Wall Street regulation, and reversals of key provisions of the welfare bill and the crime bill.

On Tuesday night, the Clinton family again gathered at a stage in midtown New York, again to delirious cheering. Chelsea has a husband now, and is pregnant, yet there were the same three Clintons, embracing. But their positions had shifted. Clinton addressed the pain and dislocation that middle class families feel.  She reeled off a litany of rights.

"Let’s guarantee equal pay for women!" she said as supporters chanted "Madame! President! Madame! President!

"We’re going to defend our rights, civil rights, workers rights, LGBT rights, and rights for people with disabilities!" Clinton vowed. "Those are after all, New York values and they are American values!"

Facing a New York primary she had to win, Hillary Clinton won it. Not by espousing centrism, as her husband once did, but by embracing the progressive values New York has long been known for.