Bill Clinton and the election

...424 • DISSENT...

...both spoke for bolstering the movements of the nineties...

...It has also killed Republican Keynesianism...

...Clinton's call for a "better organized" economy omits any reference to increasing unionization...

...There's abundant evidence to the contrary...

...His models of governance were resolutely anti-political...

...More than virtually any leading figure in American politics—certainly more than any other electable presidential contender—Clinton looks to the socio-economic arrangements of continental capitalism for ways to fix the U.S...

...Dionne, Jr., whose strategic conclusions both mirror and anticipate Clinton's own...

...For the Democrats' rightward drift dates not from this summer but from the mid-seventies...

...Odd that this anti-political jihad should have aided Clinton, but that's exactly what it ended up doing...

...With mass mobilization largely a thing of the past, American politics has transformed itself into a system that works without popular participation...

...His administration would be staffed by "the best people...

...The collapse of aerospace is behind such stunning developments as Clinton's lead in Orange County...

...All that remains of GOP divide-and-conquer politics is gay-baiting...

...But the relative ascendancy of Jack Kemp within Republican ranks should not be mistaken for a sign of vitality...

...Most of the time, though, it was fueled by a rage at politics itself...

...Bill Clinton had planned some remarks for the evening of Neil Kinnock's anticipated victory in the British elections this spring—doubtless something about the global rejection of Thatcherism and Reaganism...

...No longer can the Republicans pump up the economy through military spending, as they have for the past quarter century, particularly in their Sunbelt electoral base...

...According to Walker, what Clinton said was, "I guess the Brighton program [Kinnock's attempt to recenter Labour] didn't go as far as Bad Godesberg [the German Social Democrats' very successful 1959 effort to redefine themselves...

...One of the most heartening things about Clinton's campaign is that the deficit-reduction crew at the Brookings Institute, which did so much to paralyze Jimmy Carter, is clearly not part of his circle...

...If the Democrats can deliver...

...There's no evidence that even a significant minority of the American public thinks George Bush is up to the task...

...Clinton and the Democrats are running hard on this issue—here in California, building the majority of his events around these themes...

...In a word, Germany...

...We may well be facing an election that will put an end to the conservative era that began in 1968...

...His campaign went boldly where no organization had gone before...

...The line dramatized the real power of the generational challenge that the Clinton-Gore ticket poses...

...Now, with the cold war and communism both interred, it's no longer creeping socialism to plan new industries...

...Though himself an activist in the antiwar movement of Vietnam days, Clinton never speaks of bolstering movements...

...corporations believe that "After twelve years of laissez-faire economic policies, the government needs to take a more active role in stimulating jobs and investment...

...Consistently, he commends instead the policies of those nations whose economies he calls "better organized" — which means, characterized by industrial policy, an emphasis on work force skills, and a priority on manufacturing...

...Perot support was highest in the Sunbelt, the suburbs, the West, and among independents...

...economy...

...As I write, the party is about to go through yet one more round of the deficit-reducers against the tax-cutters...

...Step aside, Mr...

...Less noticed has been Dionne's critique of Carter (who failed in his estimation because he didn't deliver on national health insurance and other broad-based social programs) and his recommendation of such programs to today's party...

...Yes, Clinton's embraced the DLC's attack on welfare, some of its distance from unions, and the appearance of its social conservatism...

...But there were virtually no objections when Perot went to the mountaintop alone to formulate his platform without input from his volunteers...

...The Clinton stump speech is a calculated affront to American insularity—a litany of the nations we've fallen behind in wages and living standards, with FALL • 1992 • 421 side trips into comparative economic policy (lately, "We're the only nation that would throw defense workers onto the streets without any industrial policy to reemploy them...

...But neither camp's program will do anything to promote the necessary investments or sufficiently bolster purchasing power...

...The End of the Conservative Era I write in the summer of the Democrats' unaccustomed content—on the eve of the Republican convention, with Clinton's post-Democratic convention lead essentially undiminished, and with Congressional Democrats having opened a sizable lead over their Republican counterparts in the polls of the past two weeks...

...Since Clinton is the first child of the sixties to be a presidential nominee, the actual substance of his cultural politics is a good deal more complex...

...Here in California, elections have become so capital-intensive that some campaigns have trouble finding work for the stray volunteer who arrives on the doorstep...

...Foremost among them is the mass recognition of America's long-term economic decline...

...Clinton's affinity for Bad Godesberg, then, isn't confined to moving the Democrats away from the marginal politics of cultural liberalism and narrowly targeted (i.e., race-based) economic remedies...

...At its best, the Perot campaign exploited a justifiable rage at the professionalization of politics...

...It's just keeping up with the Germans and the Japanese...

...or that Clinton's fatal attraction to pleasing everyone precludes them...

...Like the Germans of 1959, he has repositioned his party, though not in the manner commonly surmised...

...For Clinton, the laissez-faire economics of Anglo-American capitalism has led chiefly to speculation and industrial flight...

...Who, if not unions, does Clinton think will provide the core support for industrial policy, worker retraining, the creation of upscale durable-goods manufacturing...

...It's a stunning reversal...

...It's not that it's the baby boomers' turn: generations don't necessarily get turns...

...It was a rage that Perot himself stoked...

...his stump speech mantra on building "high-wage, high-skill jobs" does not acknowledge the role that unions have played in creating them in the nations to which he alludes...

...and yes, reapportionment has given the Republicans a leg up in legislative races...

...The late Lee Atwater once told political writer Thomas Edsall that the conservative ascendancy which began in 1968 had depended on the invention of a new elite...

...His economic program, released in June, favored increasing public sector investment over retiring the deficit...

...The end of the cold war—and communism—has radically transformed American politics...

...But the factors that favor the Democrats are more profound...

...that the current weakness of labor discourages them...

...Whatever the reason, the politics that emerge seems, oddly incomplete: social democracy without a base...

...The candidates who did— Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis—articulated a kind of collective retreat from New Deal and Great Society liberalism...

...But anyone attempting to define Clinton more fully would do well to look at Why Americans Hate Politics, the 1991 book by Washington Post reporter E.J...

...Clinton and Dionne are stealth social democrats, applauded or reviled for backing off certain cultural/political positions, while the larger achievement to which they have contributed —ratcheting American liberalism into a new-age version of Roosevelt-Truman economics—has gone substantially unnoticed...

...But we have a promise from co-editor Bogdan Denitch, who spent the summer in Yugoslavia, that he will write a full report on the struggle in Bosnia for our Winter 1993 issue, and we hope to have a similar report on Somalia...

...The Perot campaign was strongest precisely in those sectors of American life least likely to have an organized political life...

...At various points along the campaign trail, Clinton has volunteered that he agreed with everything in Dionne's book...

...It may be that a career spent in Arkansas inters all such thoughts...

...Traditional populism was arrayed against the rich, Atwater said, but the target of contemporary right-wing populist resentment was a new elite of intrusive government bureaucrats (George Wallace's pointy-heads) and the shiftless clientele it created and served (Ronald Reagan's welfare queens...

...The Kemp response to the crisis of urban America, after all, amounts to misapplied Thatcherism—encouraging the very poor to take their housing projects private—or to the beggar-thy-neighbor game of enterprise zones, which Peter Dreier has characterized as robbing St...

...Bush is the last of a line of presidents, going back to Truman, elected to steer America's course against Soviet communism...

...And by the time he folded his tent and noisily stole away, Perot had peeled millions of voters away from Bush...

...422 • DISSENT The Revolt of the De-Aligned Ironically, the key to Clinton's success has been the rise, fall and mass migration of the Perot campaign into his column...

...The Democrats were already a neo-liberal party long before Bill Clinton came along—and it's neo-liberal politics that Clinton has overturned...

...Other factors include: • A maldistribution of wealth that has so diminished purchasing power and so increased debt for the majority of Americans that the recovery is forever delayed...

...His early reaction to the Free Trade Agreement with Mexico (I write before his complete response has been delivered) suggests he's siding with those of his advisers (in particular, Ira Magaziner and Derek Shearer) who argue against an unmitigated version of free trade, maintaining that America needs not only a better trained work force but a globalization of the mixed economy...

...Input would have required organization and—well, politics...

...Only, the attacks were launched at Perot...

...It's that a new national project is now upon us, and that Bush is defined and limited, as Clinton and Gore are not, by his stewardship (such as it's been) of the old...

...At the height of sixties prosperity, the Democrats conceived a policy of taxing broadly to spend narrowly, remedially, on the Other America...

...More problematically, both espouse a social democracy without social democrats...

...And yet, Clinton's summertime rise in the polls coincided with his moving steadily if discreetly leftward on economics...

...You've had your parade...

...The intellectual exhaustion not merely of the Bush administration but of conservatism generally...

...In part, that has meant repudiating some of the party's social liberalism, such as opposition to the death penalty...

...he promised a direct line between the leader and the led that would bypass such traditional impediments as parties, interest groups, organizations...

...Bush," Cuomo concluded...

...After deciding at a late date to run outside the two-party system, Perot needed bodies beyond even his capacity to hire them...

...Advocacy between campaigns has been reduced to using funds raised through direct mail to pay the salaries of professional lobbyists...

...Petersburg to pay St...

...Neither pays much heed to the decline of unions...

...Even more, it's meant repudiating the party's image of social liberalism, which led to Clinton's convention-time bashing of Jesse Jackson and Jerry Brown...

...that the repositioning of the Democratic party requires silencing them...

...It's at his direction, for instance, that the Democrats have quietly but unmistakably embraced gay and lesbian rights...

...Churchill ran up against this when he was voted out of power one month after the Nazis' defeat...

...But the Clintonization of the Democrats is anything but a simple rightward lurch...

...And I've long thought that one element of Lincoln's and Roosevelt's greatness is that both had the good fortune to die with their wars...

...To be sure, Bush is likely to wage a campaign of sleaze and international adventurism that may take its toll on Clinton...

...Clinton, the most consummate of pols, the champion of organization, has been aided by a war against politics waged by the unorganized...

...he would seek "consensus" rather than a mere factional majority...

...It also enables the Democrats to talk about economic conversion, planning, industrial policy...

...Which is to say, to identify Clinton simply by linking him to the Democratic Leadership Council— the corporate-funded collection of neos, con and lib, that he helped found—fails to adequately describe his politics...

...The abortion issue, once a wedge to split the Democrats, now splits the Republicans deeper...

...But with the cold war over and the nation in decline, a new national project now faces us: the reconstruction of the American economy...

...I cite the comment not only because a social democratic quarterly should take some notice when a presidential front-runner actually knows something about European social democracy, but also because Clinton is a bit of a Bad Godesberg Democrat himself...

...Warring on politics rather than the imbalance of power, Perot's people were heroic one moment, supine the next...

...Many of them rightly resisted the military martinets whom Perot sent out to coordinate their efforts...

...Paul...

...By contrast, a Louis Harris poll in the August 24 issue of Business Week shows that by a 51 to 47 percent margin, 401 executives drawn from Business Week's list of the 1,000 largest U.S...

...It's worth remembering that there never has been a FALL • 1992 • 423 Bush agenda—that just a few short weeks into office, Chief of Staff John Sununu was asking Republican legislators what they thought the administration's agenda should be...

...The race card—after the Willie Horton saga and this year's L.A...

...His campaign may well be seen in hindsight as a kind of halfway house for millions of Reagan Democrats, independents, even some Republicans, the midpoint of a journey into (for many, back into) Democratic ranks...

...The Stealth Social Democrat...

...Like Clinton (and like University of Chicago sociologist William Julius Wilson, whose defense of universal over race-based remedial programs has also had a profound effect on Clinton's thinking), Dionne has wrongly been placed in the "neo" column for urging the Democrats to refrain from refighting the cultural civil wars of the sixties with the Republicans (a fight the Democrats can't win...

...He never delivered that speech, of course, but his private, unplanned remarks, as reported by Martin Walker, Washington bureau chief for the Guardian, were revealing enough...

...riots—is much harder to play...

...For the first time since 1948, America is having an election in which prosperity is not a given, and it is that fact, and Clinton's understanding of it, that creates the possibility of realignment this November...

...Yugoslavia and Somalia The limitations of quarterly publication and a long "lead time" make it impossible for us to say anything about the tragic events in Yugoslavia and Somalia that will not be dated by the time this issue appears...

...There are also a number of California Congressional districts designed for Republicans where Democrats are campaigning on these themes as well—and may win...

...He needed volunteers...

...True, all three were liberal on noneconomic issues...

...But all of Clinton's repositioning, this entire rhumba of left and right, would be of limited use to the Democrats were it not for the long-term stagnation of the economy...

...The contrast in these matters between Clinton's position and those of Jesse Jackson and Jerry Brown could not be greater...

...In their speeches to the Democratic convention, both Jackson and Brown spoke of the symbiotic role that the movements of the thirties and sixties had had with the New Deal and the Great Society...

...But Perot's legions were arrayed against a third elite: the political class...

...The late Joseph Rauh, longtime doyen of the ADA (Americans for Democratic Action), was voicing the prevailing liberal view when he told the New York Times of his disappointment that "the spectrum of my party has moved so far to the right...

...It removes the one element that united all the little tents — moralists, libertarians, Brahmins, Yahoos—under one big tent...

...By now, it's clear that most of the conventional wisdom about 1992 no longer obtains: that the Gulf War made Bush unchallengeable, that the recovery was in the mail, that the Democrats would be incapable of getting their act together...

...At a time when Clinton had little credibility, Perot crystallized the nation's disgust with George Bush...

...Like Sartre's hell, politics is other people...

...To be sure, Bill Clinton is not a Ted Kennedy liberal or Jesse Jackson lefty—but Kennedy and Jackson never won the party's nomination...

...At a time when Clinton was extremely vulnerable to attack, it was Perot who drew Bush's fire—dragging down both target and assailant...

...When the corporate elite is willing to relegate Republican economics to the realm of pure theology, the party has a relevance problem...

...But Carter was locked by inflation into policies of fiscal conservatism, Dukakis eschewed post-Reagan populism for the elusive appeal of Brookline technocracy, and although Mondale, by virtue of his closeness to unions, civil rights groups and other Democratic organizations, may have seemed the last living New Dealer, his battle cry—deficit reduction through higher taxes—was so conservative and glum that both Bob Dole and Paul Tsongas could happily have run on it...

...That's why the key line in the Democratic convention was Mario Cuomo's, when he turned from recalling the ceremonies for troops returning from the Persian Gulf to his vivid depiction of an imagined victory parade in America's next war—the war for prosperity and social solidarity...

...As recently as last year, most California Democratic leaders scorned industrial policy as something for Michigan, for a fossil economy...

...In part, the Perot phenomenon followed reasonably enough from the under-organization of America and the corresponding professionalization of its politics...

...Problem was, the boom years shuddered to a halt in 1973, and it took the Democrats nearly two decades to realize that the nation had regressed sharply toward a pre-New Deal distribution of wealth that enabled them to return to policies they had espoused before the postwar boom: taxing narrowly (that is, the rich) to spend broadly...

...One Clinton aide told Los Angeles Times reporter Ron Brownstein that the campaign feared "being strangled in its cradle" by Bush campaign attacks during the grim period following the New York primary...

...But Clinton's turn away from eighties Democratic positions has also meant moving leftward on economic policy, toward the kind of universal programs that the Democrats have not espoused in decades: vastly expanded college loans, apprenticeships for non-college-bound high school graduates, a major public works program and, however fuzzy its contours, national health insurance...

...Stay tuned!—EDS...

...The brilliance of the Perot campaign was that it needed people...

...Finally, the end of the cold war means the end of the national project of the past forty-five years...

...Somewhere in between politics and mass psychology, there's an intuitive popular understanding, I think, that the leaders of the last war are probably not suited to be the leaders of the next...