The Democratic candidates

...The Democrats as the giveaway party, the anti-business party, the corporate bashing party: all that will end," he told the Logicraft workers...

...It's a balance that's mirrored by the heterogeneity of his advisers— ranging from centrists of the Democratic Leadership Council, who view Clinton as the best shot to rescue the party from the follies of social liberalism, to such avowed liberals as Robert Reich and Derek Shearer, who see Clinton as the best shot to rescue the party from the minimalist economics of neoliberalism...

...The Tsongas plan begins in the corporate boardroom—and reaches all the way down to the chairman's office...

...Tsongas is still doing well in Republican districts —New Hampshire is GOP terrain to begin with, and he prevailed there in its wealthier precincts...

...But as recent Democratic party history, this is wildly inaccurate...

...It's an interesting split: AFSCME and the AFT can afford to place less emphasis on questions of trade (where Harkin stood out as the one clear opponent of the pending Mexican Free Trade Agreement) and even of labor law reform (as public sector unions, they tend to suffer less from union-busting management) than the major industrial unions, which supported Harkin...

...By the same token, though, he calls for a range of retraining, child care, labor market and employer-of-last-resort works programs that would provide a more genuine alternative to welfare than the nation has ever known...

...If firms like this one multiply, I don't worry about much else...

...quite another to recommend them to aerospace scientists and engineers who are an integral part of their electoral base and who are facing the prospect of an economy that can't re-employ them...

...Republicans can no longer reflate the economy through the military Keynesianism of arms spending, the strategy they employed for decades to bolster the economy of the Sunbelt in particular...

...government programs are back on the political map, albeit balanced by notions of corollary personal responsibility...

...Tsongas's eighty-seven-page economic manifesto focuses single-mindedly on restoring American manufacturing through a carefully targeted capital gains tax cut...

...This first post–cold war election takes place amid a recession...

...I'm not Santa Claus...

...None of them proposed any governmental program that would benefit or attract the vast majority of voters—no national health care or affordable housing...

...work force— following the influence of Robert Reich, who argues that only a world-class work force can ensure a revival of American prosperity in an increasingly open world market...

...He also flays the inegalitarianism of the American workplace in contrast to its European counterparts, and was the figure primarily responsible for injecting the limitation on CEO salaries into the year's political discourse...

...Tsongas is the candidate of yuppie virtue...

...This was the Buchanan right—an uneasy mix of shiny-faced free marketeers and downcast social conservatives whom the market is clobbering...

...Clinton has a dismal record on labor questions, workplace safety, and kindred matters in 136 • DISSENT Arkansas...

...Accordingly, Clinton targets the lion's share of the peace dividend to educational and retraining programs—unlike Harkin, whose emphasis tilts more toward upgrading the economy through a public works programs that rebuilds our decayed infrastructure...

...As Tsongas sees it, all this makes him the ultimate Democratic heretic...

...He is, for instance, the only Democratic candidate to oppose pending legislation that would forbid corporations from hiring "permanent replacements" for strikers...

...Tsongonomics follows Reaganomics in directing wealth and power to the wealthy and powerful...

...I attended a Buchanan rally a few nights before he sprung his New Hampshire surprise on the Bush White House—and even the pageantry seemed calculated to cover over the divisions among his supporters...

...California Democrats, who hitherto had regarded domestic content suitable (if at all) only for such fossilized economies as Michigan's, are now preaching the gospel of hometown manufacturing—which renders them competitive in several historically Republican congressional districts where unemployed or fearful defense industry workers are looking for plausible plans for converting their factories and talents to civilian uses...

...If you're writing about this new breed of Democrat," he said, "I'm your guy...

...to the contrary, he is the one SPRING • 1992 137 candidate in the field who most perpetuates the party's dismal past...

...This," he proclaimed, gesturing toward both the computers and the employees, "is what my campaign is all about...

...These were all endeavors to which Paul Tsongas is opposed...

...Bob Borosage, chief policy adviser to Jesse Jackson in the 1988 campaign, was right when he told the Washington Post that the 1992 Democratic crop of candidates was clearly to the left of their 1988 counterparts (Jackson excepted...

...But on the basis of Pat Buchanan's presidential campaign, at least through New Hampshire, they're going to have trouble keeping those factions together...

...When Buchanan moved on to Georgia he became an NEA-basher, a side of him that New Hampshire never saw...

...Tsongas's New Hampshire success was primarily the result of his support from the upscale precincts of an upscale state...

...Of course, he said this before the emergence of Paul Tsongas...

...By last fall, almost all the presidential candidates had embraced some kind of industrial policy—at least, a civilian-oriented research and development program and federal funding for electric cars and high-speed trains (one of Mike Harrington's "utopian" preoccupations, suddenly practical...

...Charity begins at home...

...Standing atop some lofty vantage point that enables him to see nations but none of their subgroups, Tsongas proclaims that we—all of us, not just the wealthiest 10 percent—have been consuming too much and investing too little for the past two decades...

...It's his politics...

...The politics of the eighties is long gone: the relation between growth and equality is increasingly viewed as complementary, not oppositional...

...Tsongas is a supply-side Democrat: the notion that wages and benefits must be high enough to support a sufficient level of aggregate demand is strikingly absent from his manifesto...

...During the Reagan ascendency, the GOP MARCH 1, 1992 managed to bridge the fault line between libertarian yuppies and less affluent moral traditionalists...

...Export-Import Bank to make loans to American SPRING • 1992 • 135 businesses seeking to relocate to Mexico...

...while among voters whose family income exceeded $50,000, Tsongas beat Clinton handily, 43 to 35 percent...

...It required a simultaneous series of government contracts with foreign corporations to build highspeed trains for the Democrats to awaken to the politics of industrial policy, domestic content, and economic conversion...

...Whatever the ultimate outcome of the 1992 presidential campaign, the terrain on which the campaign is being conducted differs greatly from that of any recent election—and in ways that should favor the Democrats...

...As for other forms of economic stimulation — well, that's all, folks...

...Clintonomics focuses chiefly on upgrading the U.S...

...Among voters with annual family incomes of $30,000 or less, Clinton beat Tsongas, 29 percent to 24 percent...

...Not much room for pure laissez-faire there, and Buchanan has complained to the Boston Globe that his ideology sometimes stands athwart positions that his supporters would like him to take...

...Walter Mondale campaigned on a pledge to close the deficit...

...But compared to Paul Tsongas, Clinton is a virtual working-class hero...

...The Friday before primary day found him addressing the entirely white-collar workforce of Logicraft, a Nashua-based computer software company...

...Above all, by pressing the claims of class and deemphasizing those of race, they were figuring out a way to reunite middle class, working class, and poor against the speculator elite of the Reagan Age—prying apart the Republicans' race-based coalition that has dominated presidential politics since 1968...

...Tom Harkin would dwell on the job loss here, Bill Clinton on the required policy shifts (ending tax subsidies for relocation...

...Even so, the post–cold war deindustrialization wasn't enough to shake the Democrats from their own laissez-faire lethargy...

...The federation's reluctance stemmed not merely from its doubts about Harkin's ability to stay in the race but also from the fact that Clinton had won the support of several major internationals—chiefly, AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) and the AFT (American Federation of Teachers...

...Clinton has attempted to jettison the stigmas that government programs bear by imposing "personal responsibility" criteria on welfare recipients...

...The proposal differs from the Bush version by singling out only long-term investment in new or expanding businesses, while Bush would extend his to just about any investment imaginable—race horses and baseball cards...

...In the mid-seventies, political analyst William Schneider was working on a study of the newly elected Democratic Congresspeople of 1974—the large number of Democrats elected in the wake of Watergate from historically Republican suburban districts...

...While liberal on social issues like civil and women's and gay rights and the environment, they tended to reflect their districts' conservatism on economic questions...

...Clinton attacks the stewards of the Reagan age for failing to have an economic strategy, as they do in what he calls "serious countries" —Germany and the nations of northern Europe in particular...

...In Tsongonomics, funds directed away from private sector manufacturing are funds misspent—so much so that he's suggested that Congress consider reducing annual Social Security adjustments to 1 percent below the cost of living...

...Until Tsongas's New Hampshire surge—and he was more the beneficiary of Clinton's troubles than of the popularity of his own ideas—the Democrats were evolving a politics that linked growth and equity...

...Although Tsongas is not alone in questioning the efficacy of the middle-class tax cut, he is quite alone in opposing any major public works projects to end the recession...

...he bellows...

...The "middle-class squeeze" issue has enabled the Democrats—with one crucial exception—to move beyond the neoliberal politics of austerity that has dominated the party since the Carter administration...

...Tsongas is precisely the kind of candidate the Democrats seemed finally to have gotten beyond in 1992...

...Friends [this is President Buchanan addressing European defense ministers], you are not going to bring down the aircraft companies that built the planes that kept you free...

...His second biggest applause line at the rally was a pledge of activism abroad to serve economic needs at home...

...One day, Tsongas— a freshman Congressman elected from one of the only two GOP districts in Massachusetts—called Schneider...

...Class" is not a word in the Tsongas lexicon...

...A Times-Mirror/Gallup poll from January, for instance, found that the percentage of Buchanan supporters who favor national health insurance (50) exceeds the percentage of Bush supporters who favor it (37...

...Whether that's a useful virtue in the politics of 1992 (or even a virtue at all) is highly doubtful...

...Alone among the Democratic candidates, Tsongas perpetuates the most elitist aspects of the post-sixties Democratic party...

...Never mind that the discretionary income of most Americans is a dim memory at best, or that we are being out-invested by nations whose allocation of wealth is far more egalitarian—"we," the vast, undifferentiated "we," are consuming too much...

...As the band blared the "Colonel Bogey March" and the super-spruced young men who staff his campaign bustled about, Buchanan strode in to the young men's white-bread rap—a recording of "We Will Rock You" —followed by the band's rendition of George M. Cohan classics ("Yankee Doodle Dandy," "Grand Old Flag") for the Irishmen...

...The conservatives' disorientation is most profound at the level of ideology: without the communist threat to oppose, what do they believe in...

...communism gone...

...In the flush of New Hampshire, the full political marginality, not to mention the dubious economics, of this perspective has yet to be exposed...

...He is the only figure in American politics who can make Michael Dukakis seem populist by comparison...

...It differs chiefly in more carefully targeting its preferred stratum of wealth: where Reagan favored the takeover gomff, Tsongas prefers "unshackling a progressive CEO...

...But there's a hole in Clinton's economic thought, based so heavily on upgrading the work force, and it corresponds to the place that unions should occupy...

...whether that's more reflective of Arkansas or of Clinton remains to be seen...

...Buchanan has become the tribune for the xenophobic reaction to our plunge into the world market—and is attempting to reconstruct American conservatism by substituting a range of discrete foreign menaces for a vanished communist empire...

...But it's not just the end of the cold war that has thrown conservatives off their stride and given liberalism and the Democrats an opportunity to reconstruct themselves...

...Just when the Democrats seem to have overcome such self-inflicted marginality, Tsongas, for a time at least, has resurrected neoliberalism...

...The Buchanan solution is to espouse a post–cold war economic nationalism in the most belligerent way possible...

...As to how to deal with the thousands of U.S.-based corporations that have relocated to Mexico without the benefit of the Export-Import Bank, Buchanan is uncharacteristically mute...

...National health insurance, universally available college loans, affordable housing programs, expanded job retraining for the unemployed—these have become staples of Democratic fare in 1992...

...prosperity is vanishing...

...Jimmy Carter ran the first modern austerity administration...

...Nonetheless, the AFL-CIO, as of this writing, has been unable to endorse Tom Harkin, clearly the more pro-labor candidate...

...The most extensively articulated vision of reinvented government—and the one that is likely to be most viable politically—is that of Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton...

...Tsongas believes in directed—not laissez-faire—trickle down...

...His biggest applause line—a careful mix of abhorrence of government with a cry for governmental muscle—was directed at a proposal of the U.S...

...A driving snowstorm had ensured that attendance was limited to true believers—but Buchanan's challenge is that they believe different things...

...Conservatives are at a particular disadvantage in responding to the diminution of the arms industry...

...The problem isn't (or isn't simply) his lack of charisma—his wit is both sly and charming—nor the lingering doubts about his health (though no one has swum so portentously since Chairman Mao...

...For all his bluster, though, Buchanan espouses a conservatism that lacks the economic punch of the earlier, cold war version, which also produced jobs in the military sector...

...More than that, the breakup of the Soviet Union precludes a traditional Republican recovery a la Reagan 1982...

...Tsongas doesn't represent a break with the party's past...

...That's a dangerous combination for George Bush: not since the thirties have voters placed so little emphasis on the "commander-in-chief " aspect of the presidency...

...More critically, this is the first post-prosperity election, the first election since 1948 in which the well-being of the American middle class is not a given, the first in which the declining condition of all but the wealthiest tenth has registered as a political concern...

...There's little evidence that he does worry about much else...

...A Clinton speech is a calculated affront to American insularity—filled with references to the nation's decline in wages, economic equality, and educational standards when compared to our European and Japanese competitors...

...Instead of advocating a scaled-down government for the few—in which a regressive tax system has been seen as supporting means-tested and race-based programs— the party has resurrected the idea and policies of universal government...

...Michael Dukakis refused to attack the GOP's obeisance to wealth...

...But on the 1992 campaign trail, even Tom Harkin, who was tagged inaccurately as the candidate of 1960s liberalism (he was more the last William Jennings Bryan populist), has taken pains to express his support for jobs programs as distinct from meanstested welfare...

...It's one thing to advocate laissez-faire economics for inner-city blacks...

...These are preconditions not only for a Democratic victory but a Democratic restoration—if they can find the right candidate...

...Buchanan dwells on nation: "What about our country...