President Clinton famously told us “The era of big government is over.” The Baltimore tragedy is trying to tell us, if we didn’t already know, that the era of (Bill) Clinton liberalism is over — just when his wife has her best shot at becoming president. In the wake of the Baltimore unrest, a stunning 96 percent of Americans polled by NBC News say they expect more urban riots this summer. Yet there’s little visible urgency around preventing that outcome.

A post-Clinton Democratic domestic agenda is essential – even if the Democratic frontrunner is named Clinton.  Intentionally or not, Hillary Clinton echoed her husband’s trademark verdict on “big government” last week when she called for “an end to the era of mass incarceration,” in a speech on criminal justice that symbolized a break from policies championed in the last Clinton administration. Whether post-Clinton politics can be pioneered by someone named Clinton will be an interesting test for Democrats in the months and years to come.

My goal is not to bash either Clinton, as we look at what did and didn’t work in the 1990s Democratic domestic agenda. (I also think it’s unfair to automatically credit or blame Hillary Clinton for the policies of her husband.) Bill Clinton was a gifted politician who cared about civil rights and poverty. He saw the way Republicans had used both issues against Democrats since the 1960s and he tried to fight it, even if he had to wade into the swamp of white backlash politics to fashion a new Democratic approach to crime, poverty and race.

His notorious “Sister Souljah” moment during the 1992 campaign; his crime and welfare reform policies; his railing against “big government;” all were tailored to reassure white people that Democrats had heard their concerns about the excesses of the war on poverty, and would incorporate the politics of personal responsibility into future efforts to promote equality. But his goal wasn’t perpetuating poverty, inequality and racism; it was forging a winning political coalition to take up a new fight against them, informed by the lessons of the 1960s and ’70s. You can disagree with his tactics, but it’s indisputable that was his intent.

Eight years after Clinton left the White House, Barack Obama tweaked but didn’t reject his Democratic predecessor’s overall approach to urban poverty. Obama included a heavy dose of respectability politics in his pitch to become the nation’s first black president. It worked politically; he won twice. Yet on Obama’s watch, we’ve come up hard on the limits of the ’90s approach to race, crime and inequality, not just in Baltimore but in Ferguson, Cleveland, Staten Island, Oakland and Sanford, Florida; in inner cities all across the country.

Tough sentencing laws and “zero tolerance” policing, we’ve seen, helped reduce violence, but they didn’t bring jobs back to the cities, and they also separated millions of black men from their families and trapped them in the criminal justice system. Draconian welfare reform slashed the welfare rolls, we’ve learned, but the number of households headed by single mothers has steadily climbed, among all races, while poverty among children persists. In fact welfare reform helped create a poverty trap, in which more than a quarter of people who work make so little they receive some form of welfare.

On the race relations front, our first black president continues to preach the importance of personal responsibility in improving black lives, even as police murder black men on camera. His opponents don’t care: they continue to stereotype Obama as a lazy, criminal-coddling, poverty pimp of old, whose policies brought about the chaos in Baltimore.

And while the Democrats updated their approach to crime and poverty, Republicans continue to scapegoat them as tolerating lawlessness and propagating suffering with a family-eroding welfare state. House Speaker John Boehner blamed Democrats for Baltimore’s troubles on “Meet the Press” Sunday. Clinton’s centrist moves didn’t help his party politically on these issues in any lasting way.

Ironically for Hillary Clinton, it’s not her but former Baltimore mayor Martin O’Malley who’s on the hot seat after Baltimore, for the approach to urban crime that her husband helped pioneer. On “Meet the Press,” O’Malley, who is hoping to challenge Clinton for the nomination, was confronted by one of his campaign statements from 1999:  “As much as we’d like to think poverty is the cause of crime, crime is also the cause of poverty.” A visibly pained O’Malley refused to take the blame for his city’s unrest. “We didn’t get it wrong then,” he told Chuck Todd, “but we have yet to get it entirely right.”

So far, Democrats will have two veterans of the ’90s, Clinton and O’Malley, plus democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, vying to get it right. They, and we, have to learn from the past.

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Post-Baltimore, there’s a vibrant debate about whether riots advance the cause of social progress or retard it, and I’ll leave that aside for now. We do know that time and again, riots serve to concentrate the nation’s attention on urban poverty. America “rediscovered” the issue last week with the Baltimore riots — after rediscovering it when Ferguson exploded last year. As well as in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina 10 years ago. Let’s be honest: It was the overblown reports of looting and lawlessness in New Orleans that focused the nation on the tragedy there, more than the hurricane itself.

But our first “rediscovery” of urban poverty, after we abandoned the issue in the 1960s, came 23 years ago, with the Los Angeles riots. Like virtually every outbreak of urban violence in the last 50 years, from Watts in 1965 to Baltimore in 2015, the 1992 Los Angeles troubles began over an issue of policing: in that case, the on-camera beating of Rodney King, a black man, and the acquittal of the four white cops who did it.

The Los Angeles unrest gave candidate Bill Clinton the perfect platform on which to showcase his new Democrat approach to issues of race, poverty and crime. Suddenly, the nation had been thrown back to Watts, literally and figuratively, the place where white backlash politics found its winning narrative in 1965. It provided Clinton with a chance to rewrite the Democrats’ story.

Watts exploded just five days after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, and Republicans began blaming liberal do-gooders for the wave of urban riots that continued throughout the decade. Notorious Los Angeles police commissioner William Parker put responsibility for the Watts riot at the feet of civil rights advocates, claiming that violence was the predictable result when “you keep telling people they are unfairly treated.” The problem, in the right’s telling, wasn’t the unfair treatment, it was the rabble-rousers “telling people they’re unfairly treated.”