Yeah, Bill did nothing for the middle class, did he?

Slumlord (still can't respond to you directly-- what's up with that?),

We can debate the nineties another time, if you like (and whose record is Hillary running on again?). I'm just bemused by the fact that the same woman making a plea that "lobbyists are people too" in late-2007 would be rebranding herself as a fiery type populist in 2008.

But since you went there:

I don't think anyone would confuse the former head of the DLC--Mr. "The Era of Big Government is Over"/"End of Welfare as We Know It"--for a populist. Unless we're judging populism by the standards of how folksy you sound or how much you like barbecue.

Clinton's expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit was a legitimately wonderful progressive act and helped working people, but any gains from that were more than counteracted by his neoliberal anti-union trade policy. Oh, and did I mention that the Clintons set the cause of national health care back by a decade-and-a-half?

Anyway, economist Robert Pollin has a pretty fair assessment of who really benefited during the nineties. I'll paste it for you here:

"In fact, unless we are examining this period from the perspective of the U.S. stock market’s biggest winners, it is simply not the case—indeed nowhere near to being true—that the 1990s was the world's most prosperous decade. Rather, considering the U.S. economy only, average GDP growth during the Clinton presidency (3.7 percent) was roughly comparable to that of the Carter administration (3.4 percent), even though the Carter term in office has been widely disparaged as a period of economic malaise. Meanwhile, even by the end of Clinton's term of office, wages for the average worker remained 10 percent below where they were when Nixon stepped down in 1973, while the long-term trend of widening inequality grew more severe. The deterioration of economic conditions throughout most of the developing world was more serious still. Average GDP growth shifted downward dramatically relative to the 1960s and 1970s, and inequality deepened."

http://www.peri.umass.edu/Robert-Pollin-on.342.0.html