Introduction

Summary

On 19 October 2015, Bill Clinton took the floor at a fundraiser in Potomac, Maryland. A few months earlier, his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, had launched her campaign to become the Democratic Party's candidate for the 2016 US presidential election. At first, the erstwhile senator and secretary of state was the clear favourite in the primary race. Polls showed that she consistently commanded the support of more than 60 per cent of potential voters. The Democratic establishment, including both prominent elected politicians and major donors, overwhelmingly backed her candidacy. And yet by that day in mid-October – somewhat chilly for the time of year – her lead had begun to slip away, eroded by the challenge of Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist who offered a radical break with the economic consensus of the recent past.

Addressing attendees at that fundraiser in Maryland, the former president was dismissive of Sanders’ campaign. Bracketing the veteran Vermont senator with the ex-communists of Greece's Syriza and the hard-left leader of the UK’s Labour Party, Clinton described all these political outsiders as “reflective of” the fact that, “when people feel they’ve been shafted and they don't expect anything to happen anyway, they just want the maddest person in the room to represent them”. According to Clinton, Sanders was a symptom of economic discontent, but he was not the solution to America's problems. In place of Sanders’ radical agenda, the former president offered his own alternative plan for the people and places that had been bypassed by prosperity:

If we had universal, affordable broadband, it would do more than anything else to help growth to return to areas that have been left out and left behind … So if all those people in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia and southwest Ohio and southwest Pennsylvania had universal broadband, you could give people incentives to invest there and they’d actually be able to hook on to the global economy and sell what they’re doing.

This argument was reminiscent of Bill Clinton's own presidential bid more than two decades earlier: a campaign that was built around a similar kind of outward-looking, technology-enabled approach to growth.