Clinton at an Impasse

...It's the small business and insurance agent lobbies that are crippling health insurance...

...On this last particular, he was probably right: one of the few states where Clinton's popularity held up the longest is California, where the earthquake permitted him to unleash his one big-ticket stimulus program...

...Lloyd Bentsen was one of the last purebred Bourbon Democrats...

...This goes way beyond a normal case of political balancing...

...As the constituency that had anchored liberalism to a broad-based economic agenda grew steadily weaker, the movement fractured into a series of movements pressing the claims of particular groups...

...The point's not that the leadership is getting nicer...

...Even if it does, the gulf between the zeitgeist and the polling suggests a virtual collapse of institutions crucial to a functioning democracy...

...It's still a strategy that Clinton has pursued more than is commonly realized...

...Winning not only over George Bush but over the bond market and small business requires powerful institutions as committed to Clinton's investment and health care policies as the bond market and small business, respectively, are opposed...

...As far as the nineties are concerned, the Schlesinger thirty-year cyclical theory of American politics is turning out to be about half right...

...456 • DISSENT...

...Second, this was a liberalism that has been unable to wheel into formation in the cause of universally targeted progressive reforms...

...Up until the time that Clinton took office, one could speak of an overarching Clinton strategy, and it still peeks out now and then from behind the achievements and the debris of his first two years...

...He believed that investment would be a good part of his legacy—and, with his political consultants, he also believed it would broaden his base...

...Dionne, Jr., it goes something like this: the Democrats have forfeited the trust of the public by flouting its values while neglecting to advance its basic interests...

...One moment he wanted more costly investments," Woodward quotes Stephanopoulos as saying, "the next moment, more cuts...

...Still, the rage that Woodward recounts is altogether credible...

...Clinton surely felt that the relegitimation of public investment was one of the signal achievements of his campaign...

...The national Democratic leaders like Johnson, who could sway the votes of his fellow members through his ability to funnel funds into their campaigns, have been washed away by the flood of political money available to incumbents...

...The district organizations, both FALL • 1994 • 453 patronage-based and amateur, that could pressure a wayward congressperson are long gone...

...His failures, finally, are less a function of his own inability to choose than of his countrymen's inability to organize...

...The polls also show this to be a constituency capable of raging against the corporate establishment (understandably, since it's borne much of the brunt of downsizing and deindustrialization...

...The White House that Woodward depicts is a house divided against itself...

...It's something of a chicken-and-egg conundrum: if labor were stronger, Clinton wouldn't need to flit around trying to assemble disparate coalitions on different issues...

...On one level, it means that the administration hasn't made many high-level progressive hires...

...in Kennedy's and Johnson's, the linchpin of the Great Society coalition, particularly in matters of congressional lobbying...

...It's hard to say how much more successful Clinton would be if Clintonism were a less self-subverting set of doctrines and strategies...

...Others (McLarty and Gergen) seem intent on forging a new governing coalition that runs from David Boren and the Democratic Leadership Council on the left to Bob Dole and occasionally even Newt Gingrich (who, after all, teamed up with the White House on the NAFTA fight) on the right...

...But polls and mandates are likely not enough to push through universal health coverage in 1994—just as polls and mandates were not enough to push through Clinton's equally popular public investment program in 1993...

...Liberalism: The decline of unions has had a particularly disastrous effect on the liberal movement...

...In one camp are the politicos and the liberals—consultants James Carville, Paul Begala, and Stan Greenberg, Labor Secretary Robert Reich, and consigliere George Stephanopoulos are the key players—who look to a series of universal programs and fairer taxes to unite the Democrats' base with swing voters in search of more economic security...

...In the single most important public policy debate in a generation, every institution required to translate public opinion into public policy has proved wanting...

...Throughout much of what passes for American news coverage, the personal has not just become the political...

...Precisely...

...During the first three months of this year, according to the Tyndall Report on network news, the nightly newscasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC devoted three times the coverage to Whitewater that they accorded health care...

...As in the thirties and the sixties, a mildly progressive Democrat occupies the White House...

...Indeed, the organized labor movement appears nowhere in The Agenda, an omission that cannot be totally written off to Woodward's own blind spots...

...The politics of cultural marginality, it turns out, wasn't all that stood between the Democrats and their enduring re-creation of a vibrant center...

...It's not as if the supporters of the progressive side of Clinton's agenda aren't out there, though...

...The strategy hasn't proved wrong, exactly: it was surely a prerequisite for winning the election...

...Dick Gephardt, the model legislative leader of the nineties, is famed for his ability to listen to his colleagues...

...Indeed, Clinton emerges from The Agenda as oddly dissociated from the consequences of his own choices...

...And that was before O.J...

...Clinton's victory in 1992 was a signal achievement—reorienting Democratic doctrine to rehabilitate an activist state, actually creating the prospect of a popular, activist government...

...There's something breathtakingly counterintuitive about all this—except that, on economic questions that pit the broad public interest against an array of business lobbies, we have reached the point where mass sentiment is too demobilized to merit serious consideration...

...Presiding over both these strategies is Clinton himself, who doesn't so much synthesize them as pursue them to cross-purposes...

...There was also the power of capital—key sectors of which are fiercely opposed to Clinton's agenda, and remarkably indifferent to his cultural mainstreaming...

...Mid-summer polling showed that between 75 percent and 80 percent of Americans favored governmentguaranteed universal health coverage, and that, depending on how the question is phrased, support for making employers pick up the tab ranged from 50 percent (when small business was specifically mentioned) to the low seventies (when it wasn't...

...it has all but supplanted it...

...It may be, of course, that by the time you read this, the administration will have figured out how to stir up enough support for health care to have squeezed a serious bill through Congress...

...If I do too little investment," Woodward quotes a frustrated Clinton, "then some other candidate won the election, not me...

...As articulated by Clinton and Begala and most fully and cogently by columnist E.J...

...But Leon Panetta was an Eisenhower Republican who joined the Democrats when the Goldwaterization of the GOP grew too much for him...

...Unlike the thirties and the sixties, there is no mass progressive movement anywhere in sight to push the Congress and the president to the left...

...And yet, as I write in mid-July, universal coverage and employer mandates are both viewed by the political-media establishment as marginal, almost quaint, policy options, about as likely to emerge from the legislative process as, say, collective farms...

...Without a John L. Lewis, he cannot become a Roosevelt...

...The Agenda, Bob Woodward's account of the 1993 White House economic wars, tells a tale of infanticide: of how the most popular programs of Clinton's presidential campaign— universal college loans, national service, a national apprenticeship program, the postwar retooling of American industry and the rebuild454 • DISSENT ing of the national infrastructure—were strangled in their cribs...

...In the spring of 1993, the activists swarmed over Capitol Hill in defense of gays in the military and Lani Guinier —not on behalf of higher corporate tax rates or an effective stimulus program...

...The chief difference between the two battles is that health care emerged relatively intact from the White House to be savaged in Congress, while the investment program of 1993 succumbed to the elite consensus on reducing the deficit even before the administration sent it to the Hill...

...Does he really believe he can mobilize the McLarty coalition (on NAFTA) and the Stephanopoulos coalition (on health care) sequentially, or even simultaneously...

...His most crucial appointments, Supreme Court justices in particular, have been dutifully centrist...

...What does it mean that the champions of economic populism within a Democratic adFALL • 1994 • 455 ministration are its political consultants and pollster...

...it's that power—absent parties and unions—is more diffused...

...It was the bond market (or the mystique of the bond market, or both) that killed Clinton's investment agenda...

...Small wonder that one poll ,showed that fewer Americans understood the contents of the Clinton plan in March 1994 than in September 1993, when he unveiled it...

...Simpson...

...When the omission of his investment program from the budget is pointed out to him, he rages that the administration has become "a bunch of Eisenhower Republicans...

...During the eighties, liberal activism came to mean activism on behalf of reproductive freedoms, Social Security and Medicare, gay rights, civil liberties, and a range of African-American and Latino concerns...

...In its stead—serving as the administration's usually populist and sometimes progressive consciousness—are Clinton's consultants...

...The party can reclaim the vital center in American politics by subordinating its cultural liberalism and promoting such populist and universal programs as health care and college loans...

...What policies did Clinton expect them to formulate when he appointed them...

...Such institutions do not currently exist, and in an era when the economy has gone global and politics remains ineffectually national, they are not easily summoned into existence...

...Gays-in-themilitary may have been big-time cultural liberalism, but he's tried to balance it off with his rhetorical emphasis on moral regeneration...

...Conversely, his failure to generate any significant public investment to retool defense or aid high tech has cost him support from the one segment of capital he seemed poised in 1992 to claim as his own...

...The many Democratic members of Congress from substantially deunionized districts and states are increasingly more attentive to the arguments and the clout of small business and insurance associations than they are to those of labor...

...But without them, all the recentering in the world will not yield a Democratic realignment...

...As I write, the Democratic leadership in Congress is endeavoring to enhance the prospects for health care's passage by lowering the amounts employers will be made to pay and raising the share required of individuals...

...without a Martin Luther King, Jr., he cannot become a Kennedy or Johnson...

...Johnson, the preeminent legislative leader of the fifties, was famed for his ability to intimidate his colleagues...

...Some of them (Panetta in particular) seem to believe, against all historical evidence to the contrary, that reducing the deficit is so essential to prosperity that it will lock in both Democratic and swing support...

...it's more like assuming that the normal laws of thermodynamics—that actions engender reactions—have been suspended...

...Labor was key to the progressive reforms of the thirties and sixties: in Roosevelt's time, the ascendant and militant force behind (and ahead of) much of the New Deal...

...and on a deeper level that we are in an era where the populist and progressive impulses are no longer effectively expressed by social movements, but have become the stuff of pollsters, disaggregated opinions to be tallied and divined...

...As Woodward recounts it, they were frozen out of the 1993 budget deliberations, leading to what he terms "a near fatal disconnection...

...Clinton, after all, entered office with an agenda for progressive change at least as articulated as Roosevelt's and Kennedy's—in many ways, a good deal more so...

...There was an "unbridgeable chasm," Woodward has Stephanopoulos continuing, between Clinton and Clinton...

...T]he vital link between Bill Clinton and voters was being severed...

...What wasn't immediately clear was that the election was the easy part of the battle...

...By the time Clinton came to power, though, the rate of private-sector unionization had declined to roughly 11 percent—too low for labor to play a decisive role in defining the debate or lobbying the Hill...

...After two decades in staunch defense of minority rights, the increasingly labor-less liberals have not yet devised a way to rally their troops behind a majoritarian program...

...But it hasn't proved sufficient to rebuild support for a government that is not merely in the cultural mainstream but that pursues an economic activism to the benefit of the majority of Americans...

...Their shortcomings are mutually reinforcing, but taking these entities one-by-one we find: • Unions: The weakening of the labor movement is the single greatest factor in the administration's inability to move its core economic agenda...

...But bashing labor on NAFTA hardly enhances its clout when he calls for its help on health care...

...However, the purging of an anticorporate populism from mainstream liberalism has meant not only giving this constituency nothing to cling to in the liberal agenda, but ensuring that it views liberals simply as the enemy—as advocates for its competitors in a shrinking economy...

...First, this was a liberalism that had remarkably little to say to straight white men—the sector, unless all the polls are wrong, that has bounded rightward over the past decade in its rage against the government and the political establishment...

...In the other camp are the business-heads and deficit hawks—and the major players here are Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, National Economic Council capo Robert Rubin, advisers David Gergen and Mack McLarty, and former Office of Management and Budget chief and new chief-of-staff Leon Panetta—who favor deficit reduction over any more Keynesian course...

...Unarguable as many of these causes may have been in themselves, when taken together they formed a liberalism that was stunted in its appeal...

...The Media: Through a combination of tabloidization, radical cynicism, and a pack mentality, the media have managed to disseminate astonishingly little information about the basic policy options confronting the government...

...without a left, the center remains maddeningly beyond his grasp...

...The Democratic Party: Unlike his Democratic predecessors from Roosevelt through Johnson, Clinton has come to power at a time when party discipline has become a virtual oxymoron...

...All of which leaves Clinton with little to fall back on other than the polls and whatever mandate he can claim from his 43-percent victory...