What Clinton should do

...But on the most charitable interpretation, the "electronic town-hall" would not give citizens a voice or dignity, and at best, Perot's scheme would make citizens more effective consumers of public policy...

...WILSON CAREY McWILLIAMS Wilson Carey McWilliams teaches political science at Rutgers University...

...Voters, especially in years like this one, listen for a measure of political poetry...

...Since Democrats will need money for social programs, Clinton is surely right to propose higher taxes for higher incomes and to advocate limits to the corporate de-ductibility of executive salaries...

...white-collar workers, witnessing layoffs, worry about the economic future, and even some conservatives speak, uneasily, about the tendency toward a "two-tier" society...

...They want candidates who champion their decencies and dignities, link their memories with their hopes, articulate their angers and anxieties, and in general, make sense out of the jumble of political experience...

...It is, after all, a world economy in which the condition of American workers will depend on that of workers overseas...

...And behind the snorting and stomping, Ross Perot sounds like more of the same, voodoo economics revisited...

...The Reagan and Bush administrations, of course, have forced the localities to take up responsibilities the federal government abandoned, but they also decreased federal assistance...

...Clinton, by contrast, has been urging something like the genuine article, promising to thin the federal bureaucracy, while granting greater resources and discretion to state and local regimes...

...A few years ago, citizen Perot argued that higher taxes would be a necessary part of any effort to conquer the deficit...

...Even Clinton's strength, his mastery of the details and complexities of government, is bound up with a Democratic weakness...

...He can claim to be something more valuable, the safe candidate of change, an outsider who knows the traps in the corridors of power and can lead us through the maze...

...Without compromising his own internationalism, Clinton can make human rights the centerpiece of his international economic policy...

...Tax policy, generous to the well-to-do, has burdened the middle class through increases in the Social Security tax, and poor and middle-income Americans know or suspect that they have been paying too much of the bill for too few of the benefits...

...Clinton can also talk about other programs designed to help workers, like extended unemployment benefits...

...When it was pointed out that cutting $20 billion from Social Security, as Perot has proposed, would actually cut off benefits well down into the middle class (all incomes over $50,000, by one estimate), Perot bobbed and weaved and said he had meant only to call for a voluntary surrender of benefits...

...The American electorate, after all, created the "gridlock" in Washington by giving Congress and the presidency to different parties, the rule now for almost a quarter century...

...Taylor's description of the British Tories in being prone to see history as the story not of ideas, but of administration...

...As those "mediating structures" have grown weaker, citizens have confronted a national government and national media that are hard to know and harder to hold to account...

...Citizenship itself is a stern office, with at least as many obligations as rights...

...To win that role, however, Clinton has to emphasize his goals for America and the fact that he is tough enough to take us there, articulating a Clinton administration's promise of the first steps toward a new democratic covenant...

...It is also significant that Clinton has at least as much experience of leadership in democratic institutions as President Bush, and infinitely more than Mr...

...Asking states and local governments to do more with less, their policy comes down to voodoo decentralization...

...And sometimes, in Clinton's talk, the trees are almost as hard to see as the forest, obscured by analyses of leaf form, ramification, and the problem of the bark beetle...

...But most generally, Clinton should be arguing for a contemporary version of labor internationalism...

...As the party of the state, Democrats resemble A.J.P...

...Bill Clinton is not an outsider and should not pretend to be...

...His approach opens the door to a modern Jeffersonianism, in which the federal government protects our rights—no need to tell a Southerner of Clinton's age that local governments can be oppressive—while otherwise transferring resources and authority to the local level...

...Early on, Clinton argued that fairness, not growth and not reducing the deficit, ought to be the first item on the economic agenda, and that proposition has more staying power than the middle-class tax cut he was then promoting...

...For example, Clinton's running mate, in addition to being "presidential" and endowed with "star quality," should be someone who reassures uneasy elements of the old coalition: General Colin Powell would be nonpareil although he is not likely to be interested, and there is a good case to be made for Bill Gray, Andrew Young, or Mrs...

...He has already been critical of the administration's economic concessions to China, and it is no great step to the argument that the United States should not extend trade benefits to any country in which trade unions are not free and autonomous...

...Of course, Perot has attracted considerable blue-collar support—despite an economic program Steven Holmes describes as "starkly pro-business"—by taking a hard line on foreign trade and by opposing the agreement with Mexico...

...Perot have been more or less indifferent to the problem, trusting that, given a healthy economy, distribution will take care of itself, a version of the old "trickle down" theory that ought to stir Democratic memories...

...the Clinton campaign needs only to return to the theme of its most successful moments, the appeal to class across the barriers of race and ethnicity...

...And on these points, they can and should be hard as nails...

...From now on, Democrats have to get it right, and that, beyond technical proficiency, challenges the party to rediscover its soul, the common ground of its past and future...

...He can, however, emphasize his support for a ban on the permanent hiring of strike-breakers, a sine qua non for organized labor, and since it is a fair bet that Perot is opposed, Democrats should hound him to say where he stands...

...Now of course, Bill Clinton did his own soft shoe often enough in the primaries, but even early on, Clinton was willing to pay the political price of his support for the free-trade agreement treaty with Mexico, and such evidences have been multiplying...

...Hard on the poor, the Reagan-Bush era has also begun to thin out the middle sectors...

...Renewing that emphasis on economic justice would highlight the difference between Clinton and his opponents: both President Bush and Mr...

...Even those Americans who go to the polls have been increasingly inclined to limit their political commitments (and this year, the cold war no longer supplies its negative reason for supporting the national government...

...And a growing number of Americans have come to the implicit conclusion that staying on the sidelines is the only way to salvage dignity from the wreckage of mass politics...

...Perhaps, in 1992, Governor Clinton and the Democrats can begin to live up to that echoing legacy...

...CAMPAIGN '92 WHAT CLINTON SHOULD DO LET DEMOCRATS BE DEMOCRATS he Democrats still have a chance in 1992, but this year's production of their quadrennial follies has already used its quota of pratfalls and missed cues...

...Bringing some of the government closer to home, Clinton's policy might prompt a general effort to rebuild communities, parties, and associations, or, more modestly, to repair at least a few cracks in the political foundations of the republic...

...In these terms, while Democrats should try to win over defectors and independents, their first priority in the presidential contest of 1992 is not Reagan Democrats, but Mondale Democrats, and Governor Clinton should try to strengthen his claims on the party's old guard...

...By itself, Clinton's knowledgeability only emphasizes how baffling government is for most of us...

...The old coalition, uncertain even in this year's peculiar circumstances, will certainly be inadequate in elections after 1992...

...In fact, while there may not be many votes in it for Clinton and the Democrats, the most important issue of 1992 is not the economy, but the growing moral crisis of American democracy...

...John Kennedy, who drew Clinton into politics, urged us to ask what we could do for our country, but very little of that standard found its way into political practice...

...The quality of consent, the foundation of public authority, is becoming dangerously thin...

...Clinton and the Democrats should be pledging that they will not ask American workers to compete with oppressed labor in foreign countries (or at home, for that matter), and that they will not make American consumers accomplices in repression...

...Governor Clinton has humor, a grace, but he has been prosy most of the time, and his polite smile and Southern modulations remind too many voters of Jimmy Carter's perceived inefficacy, despite the great differences between the two men...

...Democracy is at home in small places where citizens are more likely to matter and to have voices, and for most of our history, citizens were linked to national life by local govern4.17 July 1992 Commonweal ments, parties, and associations...

...Clinton, averse to protectionism, can't hope to match Perot on these terms...

...King, to say nothing of more orthodox possibilities...

...Emphatically a partisan of big government, Perot also advocates a dominant role for the executive, informed by a direct, technologically-assisted relation to the people...

...Given the fact that any solutions for America are bound to involve discomfort and sacrifice, Clinton does offer better prospects for leadership than either of his rivals...

...Perot's adult life has been lived in authoritarian institutions—the Navy, briefly, and private business— and his comment that the United States government is fundamentally a "business" seems to reflect his failure to grasp the goals or the practice of democratic life...

...Recent Democratic candidates have shared a fatal inclination to identify policy statements with political speech...

...Still, the real electoral payoff for the Democrats lies in asserting their honored role as the party of the "little guy," the advocate of civic equality...

...Americans are at least half-willing to make sacrifices for public goals, but they are not willing to be victimized: even more than tax cuts, they want fair shares...

...Commonweal 17July 1992: 5...

...President George Bush, seen as able and even admirable in foreign affairs, has been a washout in domestic politics, his administration largely paralyzed by caution and the desire not to offend opinion as reflected in the most recent poll...

...Democrats need new ways of singing their old songs, and part of their problem in 1992 is that, while Clinton has found some of the words, his rhetoric so far needs a bit more fire and much more melody...

...Bill Clinton continues to talk about broadening the party's base, but in the short term, the electoral arithmetic seems to go the other way...

...Perot...

...Ross Perot is more symptom than solution...

...Beyond such specifics, however, Clinton is the only candidate to make economic justice an issue...

...Clinton's criticism of Sister Souljah, inevitably, got the most media coverage, but it is more important that Clinton is arguing in favor of higher taxes on upper-income Americans and warning that all of us will have to make contributions for the common good...

...A party of civic equality needs to be vertebral, and not only because it will be opposed by all the inequalities of private power...

...Yet traditional Democrats are a stormy family: committed to "choice" by conviction and calculation, Clinton cannot afford to forget those party loyalists who oppose abortion on demand...

...It is to Governor Clinton's credit that he speaks that language from time to time, finding a good word for the principle of national service and insisting that along with honorable work and equal treatment, decency and civility are among the things we owe to each other...

...candidate Perot now says it can be done without raising taxes or even "raising a sweat" through a package of budget cuts that are vague, implausible, or inaccurate...

...Ross Perot's support may decline, but he will remain a major factor in the campaign, and in a three-way race, 40 percent of the vote—even a vote in the high 30s—can easily be enough to win, outright or in the House...

...all but a handful of citizens are limited to listening and to voting as trifling parts of a mass public...

...Even Michael Dukakis eventually learned to say, "I'm on your side...

...National politics has always been a problem in a republic as large as the United States...