Clinton and the Democrats: The Party of Reluctant Retreat
Meyerson, Harold
It's not just suspense that's missing from this year's elections. It's hope. Oh, there's plenty of hope that the Democrats will win—holding the White House, retaking the Hill, wresting control...
...Minus that compact, the Democrats stand for nothing...
...It was Clinton's misfortune that he always had to opt in these matters, opt between business and working people...
...Like Democratic whip David Bonior, Gephardt represents a largely working-class suburb of a rust-belt metropolis...
...A Clinton campaign speech, particularly during the primaries, typically included a lesson in comparative economics, and if Clinton had a model for where he wanted to take us, it was Germany...
...Forget about that, Dick Morris, his new transpartisan consultant, told him...
...it's the parties of the left throughout Western Europe, watching helplessly or acquiescing in the dismantling of their handiwork...
...If Dick Morris's America is a nation of edge cities and affluent suburbs where voters are prey more to a myriad of social anxieties than to one big economic one, Dick Gephardt's America is centered in inner cities and less affluent suburbs, where the economic angst is palpable...
...This November, though, the Democrats won't have to account to the voters for the continuing slide in wages (and one month's uptick hardly undoes a twenty-year slide...
...It could work with the other major industrial powers to regulate and tax the currency market, which threatens a run on any government that dares reduce its unemployment or shore up its safety net...
...Ascendant in the polls, adrift in its convictions, the current administration defines itself chiefly by the reluctance of its retreat...
...Clinton was not, in his first two years, a down-the-line New Democrat...
...Pat Buchanan aside, this sort of thing still escapes the Republicans...
...they are (or were) the party of government at a moment when government is everywhere in retreat, when a globalized capitalism is busy unmixing the mixed economy that the Democrats created here and the social democrats created in Europe in the decades after World War II...
...we have no idea what to do) is a far cry from the hope that Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign inspired...
...A choice-averse president was heading a party with major constituencies embroiled in a zero-sum game with each other...
...But he lacks a long-term economic program to clinch their support...
...They need that labor movement just to win elections...
...White male union members voted 18 percent more Democratic than their nonunion counterparts in 1994...
...Independent of the administration, Gephardt had planned to push for legislation strengthening workers' right to organize during the 1995-1996 congressional session (a plan he abandoned when the Republicans won control...
...They weren't born for an age like this...
...With some reason, the Democrats can blame the times themselves...
...Clinton has become enough of a law'n'-order centrist to win these voters' consideration...
...but since November 1994, moving right has been both a constant pressure and a tempting opportunity...
...After all, it took the first Progressives something like fifty years—from the 1890s until the 1930s and 1940s—to reform a newly national economy...
...it's all those gubernatorial candidates in 1994 who had nothing to say and were almost to a person defeated...
...The conventional wisdom to the contrary, it was not simply a New Democratic campaign...
...The Republicans are off in space...
...Supporting NAFTA hurt the Democrats with their own voters and with working-class Perot supporters who remain one of the key swing groups in American politics...
...In Truman's party, and Kennedy's, and Johnson's, there were fewer instances of having to choose between business and labor: both supported public works, elements of both supported civil rights...
...We could do worse than emulate their health care program, their work-to-school program, their investment in autobahns and education...
...Dionne's book proclaimed the second coming of the Progressive Era, Democrats of all persuasions have labeled themselves the New Progressives, and none more so than the current occupant of the White House...
...Declining to go after the Business Roundtable when it turned against his health plan in 1994 helped doom Clinton's major legislative initiative...
...And in these matters, the president consistently went where the clout was...
...at some point, they will have to produce some economic gains, some assurance of security for their middle- and working-class supporters...
...Oh, there's plenty of hope that the Democrats will win—holding the White House, retaking the Hill, wresting control of the national agenda from Newt and Trent and Bob...
...at the presidential level, that twelve-point advantage has been roughly unchanged since the sixties...
...If in the century's early years socialism in one country proved impossible, by century's end mere liberalism in one country is proving impossible, too...
...the White House opted to reward goodguy corporations with effusive verbal commendations...
...Where the Republicans fairly gloated at ending welfare, the FALL • 1996 • 35 Clinton and the Democrats Democrats (with all too few honorable exceptions) swallowed hard, bit their lips and went along—the president deputizing Donna Shalala to totter out and defend a policy that plainly sickened her...
...The new progressivism, as Dionne himself asserts, is more option than accomplished fact...
...In the 1992 campaign, Clinton had found a formula that enabled the Democrats to get beyond the zero-sum game of white against black, partly by devising ambitious economic programs targeted not for this subgroup or that, but for the vast majority...
...It could 38 • DISSENT Clinton and the Democrats seek to implement social tariffs against nations that violated those standards...
...At the level of merely national politics, the Clinton-Dick Morris upscale strategy will succeed so long as Gingrich is speaker and Dole the opposition...
...But even as Gingrich's scorched-earth war on government has united the Democrats, Clinton's surgical strikes have divided them...
...A TR or a Wilson might tinker with the new economic order, but the parade of presidential pipsqueaks simply got out of business's way...
...they've gone and abandoned all those suburban boomers, all those neighborhood moms...
...Since E.J...
...and whatever you do, don't raise taxes...
...balance the budget...
...The second camp is headed by one of the DLC's original leaders, who since the late eighties has turned steadily toward a progressive populist politics...
...Democratic House leader Richard Gephardt broke with the administration on both of the issues that most divided Democrats during Clinton's first term: NAFTA and the welfare repeal...
...The single most important lesson should be the necessity for reforming labor law so that workers can again join unions without fear of retribution...
...United by Newt, Divided by Bill Gingrich may have opened the door for the Democrats to move to the center, but Clinton moved in and set up housekeeping...
...But Clinton came to power in a time not of shared but of selective prosperity...
...This year, Reich wanted to create tax incentives for corporations that retrained workers rather than fired them, that shared profits with them and didn't send their jobs to Malaysia...
...He is proposing to do to a newly global economy what the New Deal Democrats did to a newly national economy: reduce the sovereignty of the markets, increase the power of workers, raise living standards in the poorer regions rather than lower them in the wealthier ones...
...Gingrich has seen to that...
...Clinton came to power, of course, vowing to be the hedgehog, not the fox: to focus like a laser on our economic stagnation...
...The killer, in either case, wasn't public opinion: unlike, say, gays-in-themilitary, the progressive side of Clintonomics always polled well...
...Not quite the neoprogressive, more nearly the neopipsqueak...
...And in the 1994 elections, it was working-class voters who deserted the Democrats: the party held its own among college grads, only to see a two-digit drop in its support from voters with less education...
...Federation ads played a key role in intimidating Republican members of Congress into supporting a hike in the minimum wage...
...The Democrats had long been the world's oldest cross-class party, but it became a good deal trickier to hold such a party together when profits were coming at the expense of wages...
...This is fortunate, since in the world following the New Deal Order, as in the world preceding it, business will call the shots, while civil society will do no more than create havens in an otherwise heartless world...
...They weren't just powerless, like the Democrats, to resist the decline in living standards...
...And the nadir of liberalism is, at best, a challenging time for liberals to be in power...
...Gore not only played a leading role in the fight for NAFTA, but headed the faction inside the White House that urged Clinton to sign the Republicans' welfare bill...
...What, in times like these, is a liberal party to do...
...Clinton hasn't abandoned economic equity issues in his second two years: nervous Republicans gave him a minimum-wage bill, and he gladly defended Medicare and education, the popular parts of the welfare state...
...Tax incentives, said Rubin, opened a Pandora's box of governmental meddling with business...
...It's the Democrats in Congress, half of whom voted to end welfare...
...Gephardt turning against NAFTA for precisely that reason, but floating his own proposal for a trade treaty with the European Union—that is, with nations that accord their workers rights and wages in excess of our own...
...a fifteen-point lead—even over poor Bob Dole—would be out of the question...
...During the rise of that economy, most of the presidents— Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland, Harrison, McKinley, Harding, Coolidge, Taft— passed in a blur...
...FALL • 1996 • 39...
...Whether the Democrats acquiesce in the smashing of the social compact or work to build a more global one is largely a function of whatever pressure a class-based left can bring to bear on them...
...They're yours for the taking...
...Now, it's clear enough that government and unions are in decline—but business...
...If there's a theory behind this analysis, it would be called supply-side labor markets: enlarging the supply of well-educated Americans will increase the number of good jobs...
...Of course, it's not just Clinton who's in retreat...
...Right now, despite the stirrings on 16th Street, that's not very much...
...others never made it out of the White House...
...they were actually abetting it...
...If business is unable to offer the kind of stable employment it once provided, that's because business does not wish to offer the kind of stable employment it once provided...
...it's the inability of government and labor to keep up with business that has undone the postwar social contract...
...Suppose nobody worked, but everybody owned stock...
...For now, though, they are all Progressives...
...In the face of "today's dispersals of economic power," they aver, "we can no longer rely on big institutions to take care of us...
...Unless that pressure increases, though, it's hard to see how the party can regain anything like the majority status it held during the years the social compact was in place...
...But such business obeisance has its risks, too...
...Had the Republicans not won Congress in 1994, Clinton would surely have had a primary challenge this year...
...The Clinton administration is already trying to have sanctions against child labor written into World Trade Organization regulations...
...The federation is waging an ambitious campaign for Democratic congressional candidates this fall, with one particularly welcome departure from past practice: it is briefing the candidates up front on labor issues...
...Workers and wages and the welfare state are under assault everywhere in the industrialized world, though nowhere more so than here...
...By threatening massive cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, the Congressional Republicans sought to legislate a reduction in the insurance available to American families...
...The shrinking of unions foretells the shrinking of Democratic votes, just as it foretells the shrinking of wages...
...The inside story of administration economic policy can be seen as a battle of the Bobs: the pattern here is, Reich proposes, Rubin disposes...
...Union members voted 12 percent more Democratic in the 1994 congressional elections than their non-union counterparts...
...W]hat today's Democratic Party offers," proclaims this year's platform, is "the end of the era of big government, a final rejection of the misguided calls to leave our citizens to fend for themselves— and bold leadership into the future...
...But underlying the strategic silence is a more profound silence...
...Like the Republicans, though, the Democrats really don't have much of an idea of what to do about this...
...If the congressional candidates aren't moved by an appeal to democratic principle, they should at least be moved by the appeal to Democratic prospects...
...That allowed Clinton to reclaim the center, announcing he shared the public's anti-statist ideology, while avowing to protect their statist benefits...
...In the budget-slashing days of the Gingrich Congress, Reich outlined a White House war on corporate welfare, but, as John Judis has reported, Rubin hated the phrase, and the war went unwaged...
...The most promising development in America during Clinton's term of office—hell, the only promising development—is the transformation of the AFL-CIO, suddenly awakened from its forty-year nap...
...They will need a Federal Reserve that believes in growth (which becomes more plausible if they move with other nations against the currency markets...
...The story of the Democrats' decline, of the splintering of the party into ethnic camps and camplets, is in many ways the story of the deunionization of America...
...The killer here was business: either the bond market (which killed Clinton's public investment plan) or small business organizations (which nailed health reform) or Robert Rubin, his own treasury secretary, formerly of Goldman-Sachs (who aborted a good deal else...
...Some of Clinton's progressive initiatives died in Congress...
...They know that wages are down (4.6 percent since Clinton took office, in fact) even while the other economic indices— the ones that measure corporate profits and stock dividends and CEO pay—are up (the Dow has risen nearly 75 percent since Clinton took office...
...But there's precious little hope, even among the Democrats themselves, that they have much of an agenda of their own, or that such agendas as they've come up with will really accomplish very much...
...An immodest suggestion: change the times...
...He's grappling, as Clinton and Gore are not, with the Democrats' most fundamental dilemma: they cannot reinvent growth with equity—simply put, they can't raise wages—with unions so feeble and within a laissez-faire global economy that's beyond any government's control...
...Economic power, far from dispersing, is both concentrating and globalizing...
...The White House quickly dismissed this proposal...
...In a "New Progressive Declaration" they released in July, they assert that it's not just the era of big government, but also of big labor and big business that's passed away...
...This fails to account for the drop in incomes of college-educated males over the past decade, or for the fact that a globalized professional services industry can now find accountants and programmers in India and Ireland who have just as much education as their American counterparts, but command just a fraction of their wages...
...Proposals, it seems—at least, the kind of proposals that defined the party for sixty years—are bad politics...
...Gephardt and Gore are both internationalists, but of a very different kind: Gore stumping for a North American free trade agreement without serious labor protections...
...But it could also push to include the kind of minimum wage and human rights standards in trade agreements that were pointedly omitted from NAFTA...
...These were the Macomb County voters, onetime Democratic loyalists, working-class whites who feared and loathed blacks and globetrotting corporations, if not entirely in equal measure...
...Take some of those spongecakes off welfare...
...they can at least identify the problems (well, many of them can...
...And Clinton—champion of family leave (unpaid) and universal health care (unrealized), bringer of NAFTA and ender of welfare as we know it—looks less like a Roosevelt attacking the new order than a Cleveland hastening it along...
...Business is global now but government and unions still largely national—ineffectual all over again...
...They tried proposals of their own in 1993 and 1994, and failed to enact the ones that really addressed the needs of working Americans, health reform in particular...
...That is, Clinton opted...
...What's missing in this picture [of economic recovery]," he recently told the New York Times, "is that not every American has the capacity to take advantage of the opportunities...
...Behind him, extolling in equal measure the rebirth of civil society and the impending demise of government, are Will Marshall, Al From, and their colleagues at the DLC and its think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute...
...This is a party that doesn't know what it believes anymore...
...At the level of transnational politics, there are any number of policies that the United States could pursue to further these ends...
...He is proposing, with no great fanfare, to change the times...
...Minus that compact, it's hard to see why the nation should stand for them...
...As the DLC sees it, though, businesses have "reorganized themselves, flattening hierarchies and developing more participatory forms of decisionmaking...
...The bold leadership assumes particular importance because the other two things the party offers totally negate each other...
...What began as a post-1994 tactical reorientation has become a fully articulated strategy, complete with new core issues and constituencies for the party to cultivate, and buttressed by a partly articulated philosophy...
...Clinton's not been afraid to take risks in the name of decency— he's done it in Haiti, in Bosnia (belat36 • DISSENT Clinton and the Democrats edly), and with affirmative action—but on the policies that matter to the markets, on trade and deficits in particular, he's repeatedly bowed to business...
...In part, the modesty of the Democrats' agenda is simply strategic: they have resurrected themselves not through proposals of their own but largely by opposing Gingrich & Co...
...Still, the Democrats are not the Republicans...
...It's just as well, since Americans are no longer satisfied with "bureaucratic, one-sizefitsall solutions imposed by government...
...The Democrats are fast becoming the party that cancels itself: they giveth welfare, they taketh it away...
...Give 'em some way to control their kids' TV...
...It allowed Clinton to inch—and sometimes lurch—relentlessly rightward without risking liberal support...
...The decline of unions was not quite so inexorable as the setting of the sun: business busted them...
...The first, headed by the vice president, with FALL • 1996 37 Clinton and the Democrats the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) as its resident brain trust, appends to the doctrine of The Era of Big Government Is Over the codicil, And Good Riddance...
...He offers, instead, the choice-averse president's solution to the wage gap: more schooling...
...The Progressive Wanna-bes Which is exactly what makes Gephardt's idea of a trade zone with Europe so radical...
...Labor Secretary Robert Reich was the chief proponent of the public investment program that Rubin insisted had to get in line behind deficit reduction (and which has not been seen since...
...Four years later, we've not become any more like Germany, though Germany—forced to begin scaling back its benefits and paychecks— has become a little more like us...
...But whether that new progressive age has actually begun, much less whether Clinton is its leader, is subject to some skepticism...
...The party that once created old age pensions and unemployment insurance, the WPA and the TVA, the Civil Rights Act and the War on Poverty has shrunk itself into the party of V-chips and school uniforms...
...Clinton did distance himself from a number of traditional liberal positions on racial and cultural issues, but he also laid out a progressive program to arrest the slide of working- and middle-class Americans, something no Democrat had done in decades...
...The Democrats won't always be so fortunate...
...Going Where the Clout Is The gloomy optimism of the Democratic party (we're gonna win...
...They will need a labor movement that bargains contracts for more than 15 percent of the workforce...
...Business was national then but government and unions still largely local—and ineffectual...
...Put some cops on the streets...
...Give 'em some tax breaks to send their kids to college...
...Behind the AntiGingrich United Front, two distinct Democratic camps are staking their claim to the party's future...
...In 1993, Clinton discovered that he had bridged the racial divide only to come upon a chasm of class...
Vol. 43 • September 1996 • No. 4
