This is a two part series. Read part one here.

If the 1992 Los Angeles riots opened the era of (Bill) Clinton liberalism, the Baltimore unrest marked its close. Los Angeles gave Clinton his famous “Sister Souljah” moment, which told white voters that his party would no longer merely blame racism for the troubles of the African-American poor. Getting tough on crime; pushing through welfare reform; calling for “a new conversation on race”; Clinton believed he could update the idealism of the 1960s with the lessons of 1980s Reaganism, and do well politically while also doing good.

The Baltimore riots 23 years later show us the stark limits of that approach. The 2016 Democratic presidential primary offers the party a chance to debate a post-Clinton agenda, even if the front-runner is named Clinton, while Republicans cling to a warmed-over Reaganism that blames poor people for their poverty.

Look no further than the fact that the moderate establishment “front-runner,” Jeb Bush, lazily cited author Charles Murray as his go-to read on the issue of poverty just last week, as Baltimore continued to boil. Murray, you’ll recall, was the faux-intellectual guru of Reaganism, the “scholar” who justified Reagan’s persuasive lie that “we fought a war on poverty, and poverty won.”

Later, in “The Bell Curve,” Murray added another reason that government programs couldn’t cure poverty or eradicate racial inequality: because non-whites are genetically inferior to whites. That’s the man the leading GOP candidate credits with informing his thinking about poverty.

So while one party grapples openly with the limits to the legacy of their most influential politician, Bill Clinton, the other refuses to acknowledge that the man who shaped their domestic agenda, Ronald Reagan, is long dead, and a lot of his ideas should have died with him. 2016 will offer the nation a starker choice on these issues than any election in recent memory, and that can only be good for the country.

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Luckily, perhaps, for Hillary Clinton, the Baltimore unrest became a political headache less for her than for a potential rival, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who served as Baltimore mayor from 1999 to 2007 and has found himself blamed for the over-criminalization of black men thanks to his zero tolerance approach to policing. The number of arrests in Baltimore soared to over 100,000 in 2005 – it was 40,000 last year – and the city was sued by the NAACP and the ACLU for throwing thousands in jail without warrants, only to release a lot of them without any charges.

But O’Malley wasn’t alone; all across the country, mayors were touting their tough on crime approach in the ’90s and early 2000s. And for a time, they were able to say, as O’Malley did, that they were responding to the desperation of their black constituents. It’s important to remember that ’90s liberals weren’t just opportunistically channeling white backlash politics when they got tough on crime; they defended it as looking out for the poor, who are most often the victims of urban crime.

It wasn’t just whites who were disturbed by the excesses of crime and disorder in the ’70s and ’80s, it was African-Americans too. Clinton and other reformers of the era could walk through any inner city neighborhood and find people who applauded what came to be called the “broken windows” approach to policing: Why should poor black people put up with vandalism, garbage, graffiti and petty crime that a white middle class neighborhood would never tolerate? It was framed as a matter of fairness. That was O’Malley’s pitch when he ran for Baltimore mayor in 1999, and he won 91 percent of the vote.

I’d walked the streets of West Oakland with Jerry Brown the year before and watched as he was embraced by its low-income black residents as well. Brown would become a convert to police strategies Bill Bratton pioneered under Rudy Giuliani in New York, especially his CompStat emphasis on data. Nobody could see then that the effort it took to prevent “broken windows” would ensnare more black men in the prison system – and cost some their lives at the hands of police. Liberal wonks like O’Malley and Brown believed their focus on numbers promised “transparency;” it turned out we couldn’t see into the back of a police van, where Freddie Gray suffered fatal injuries at the hands of Baltimore police.

The new “zero tolerance” strategies did help bring down violent crime; O’Malley estimates 1,000 Baltimore black men are alive who would have been murder victims if not for his crackdown. Violent crime in Baltimore fell more than in any other city on O’Malley’s watch. But this approach, which ironically focused on “quality of life” crimes, did not improve the quality of life of many of these men, who are now under the control of the criminal justice system – even if it kept them alive. As Hillary Clinton and O’Malley both observed last week, it’s time for a new approach to urban policing, but they’ve yet to lay out what it is.

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But the chaos in Baltimore didn’t merely show the limits of ’90s approaches to crime. It reminded us that Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform effort didn’t do a lot of what it was intended to, either: It failed to stop the ever-rising incidence of single-parent families, among whites as well as blacks, and it didn’t reduce child poverty in a lasting way. Welfare rolls fell by half between 1996 and 2000, when Clinton left office, and for a while, child poverty rates fell, too, largely as a result of the booming economy. But poverty among children has increased ever since, and the rate is higher now than it was when welfare reform passed.

On a Web site that touts the accomplishments of the Clinton administration, I found a strange boast: “People on welfare [in 2000] are five times more likely to be working than in 1992,” when Clinton took office. Welfare reform served to push poor women into the low-wage labor force, where they’re buoyed by food stamps, Medicaid, child care aid and the expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, which has been expanded by every president since Gerald Ford signed it into law. Yet they still live in poverty, or just over its border – and taxpayers are footing a lot of the bill while employers enjoy their underpriced labor.

Today a quarter of people who work make so little they also receive some form of welfare – including 52 percent of families headed by fast-food workers. More than 60 percent of adult food-stamp recipients have jobs. Obama’s Council on Economic Advisors chair Jason Furman famously lauded this development in a 2005 paper: “Walmart: A Progressive Success Story,” which praised Bill Clinton for presiding over “the transformation of our social safety net from a support for the indigent to a system to that makes work pay…” and lauded Walmart’s commitment to low prices as a boon for the working poor. (Hillary Clinton, you’ll recall, served on Arkansas-based Walmart’s board.)