The Meaning of Moderation

...Invoking the conservative slogan "family values," he campaigned on a parody of the Great Society in miniature—extending family leave so that parents can visit their children's teachers, proposing two years of college as a universal entitlement, hooking up schools to the Internet...

...He raised taxes early in his first term but, once the campaign was approaching, denounced his own action and reverted to his four-year-old promise of a middle-class tax cut...

...Less than half of those eligible voted at all, the lowest figure since the 1920s...

...Rather than redefine the New Deal/Great Society inheritance for a new era, Democrats had to watch their leader pitch more and more of it overboard...

...In what may be the most important single outcome of the 1996 elections, the California Civil Rights Initiative (banning government hiring and other preferences on the basis of race or sex) passed convincingly in a state where only a third of the voters are white males...

...What the people really wanted, commentators assured them, was compromise and moderation...

...Actually it's not...

...Bob Dole represented no clear direction for the Republicans and will have no ideological influence...

...Both major parties have some adjustments to make as their main constituencies work through disagreements...

...Exit polls showed that, in general terms, a majority of voters want the Federal government to do less, not more...

...Worse still—or maybe better still—the voters were fed up with both parties...

...Negative campaigning, too much mon-ey raised by dubious means, and politicians' concentration on ideology rather than problem-solving were the culprits most often mentioned...

...1 doubt it, but you never know...

...Both parties will survive their conflicts...

...The word has about as definite a meaning as "good government...

...Some Republican leaders responded, though less effusively, by talking about "common ground...

...Unlike 1994, when the Republicans ran on a specific program and then tried to carry it out, both parties' agendas this time were deliberately vague...

...Democrats remain ideologically on the defensive...

...Not only did the Democrats fail to retake either house of Congress, but the Senate, through which the Administration's many new Cabinet appointments and any Supreme Court nominees will have to pass, is more conservative and Republican than it was before...

...One can agree that such reform is overdue while venturing to doubt that it constitutes much of a national agenda...

...Stalemate...

...It'snotjustamatterof numbers in Congress...

...Or, if you like, both had won...

...Despite his 1992 campaign promise, he tried through two vetoes to preserve welfare essentially unchanged until election-year needs made him sign a bill many Congressional Democrats had likewise felt obliged to vote for...

...They would have gone along with the Clinton campaign's early attempt to describe Dole as a Right-wing extremist...

...What changed was not so much Dole's positions as the meaning of the words...

...As for Clinton, his re-election represented the personal victory of a profes-sional survivor, not a new direction for his country or party...

...The media have concentrated for years on the tensions between "moderate" Republicans and the Religious Right...

...We wish they had less money and more taste...

...After all the postelection pieties about cooperation and all those icky interviews where average voters repeat how sick they are of "partisan bickering," you might think the two-party system was in a bad way...

...No wonder Clinton and Daschle are calling for bipartisanship...

...The President fought any commitment to balance the budget until the political price of continued resistance became too high...

...In a time when having an ambitious agenda looks politically dangerous, both parties will revert to their habitual attitudes...

...For anyone who cares about the Democratic Parry's future, it's a great pity...

...The Republicans held onto Congress...

...If there was a mandate," said Senate Minority Leader Thomas Daschle (D-S.D...

...Its biggest positive accomplishment was passing two international trade bills more congenial to Republicans than to Democrats...

...Probably this election will have little lasting effect on them...

...his campaign consisted entirely of the season's conventional wisdom on the subject...

...Where policy questions appeared on the ballot, voters on the whole repudiated liberal positions even in states that voted Democratic...

...For Clinton, running as a liberal would have been suicide...

...This year both Presidential candidates ran as moderates, and Senator Dole was widely described as one by the press...

...A few days after the 1996 election, the conventional wisdom was that both major parties had lost...

...Of course voters—Republicans, Democrats and independents—want moderation as long as they get to define it...

...He made no serious attempt to solve the Democrats' longstanding problems...

...While those tensions are real and lasting, they seem unlikely to destroy the GOP...

...The major news media would have been much harder on him for violating the unwritten law that the most controversial issues should be decided by judges instead of voters...

...Buoyed by a strong economy, a weak opponent and massive support from the AFL-CIO, the greatest campaigner of them all managed to get 49 per cent of the vote...

...The real question is, once the White House and Congress get through compromising on moderate reforms of Medicare and campaign finance, how will they fill up the time till the next election...

...Nothing much is left for him to retreat from except affirmative action, some forms of which will be harder to defend following the success of the California referendum...

...Now he sometimes describes a balanced budget as his highest priority...

...Nor did any of the other minor-party candidates do better than usual...

...it is to govern from the middle and to take things slowly...

...By humbling both parties and placing the powers of the Federal government in exquisite balance, voters had contrived to get what they wanted...

...the only question was how far it would go...

...In a year when everything seemed to favor them, merely holding their own was a setback...

...The Democrats held onto the Presidency...

...Prodded by Ross Perot and news of the Democrats' financial shenanigans near the end of the campaign, nearly everybody now pays lip service to campaign finance reform...

...The ability of each party to function as coalition of diverse interests is what makes it possible for us to have two large parties instead of many small ones...

...President Clinton said much the same thing, appropriating Arthur Schle-singer Jr.'s 1949 phrase "the vital center" (by which Schlesinger originally meant New Deal liberalism...

...Eighteen months ago the idea of balancing the Federal budget by 2002 was generally dismissed as a far-out conservative fantasy...

...Anybody who was really fed up with the two parties had Ross Perot to vote for...

...Term limits won in 10 states and lost in only four...

...between the views on immigration of black voters who have been the party's most faithful constituency, and those of the much more numerous white suburbanites the party fitfully attracts...

...Not long ago he was considered quite conservative...

...In poll after poll they said so...

...The other side's negative campaigning is always a bad thing, especially if it wins them the election, as it so often does...

...The other consensus necessity is staving off bankruptcy for Medicare without risking the political heat the Republicans took for trying to do it last year...

...The fact that he doesn't mean it is less important than the fact that he felt compelled to say it...

...Baloney...

...Through his eventual willingness to jettison anything that would lighten the boat, he managed to stay afloat, but not to convince a majority of voters that he should be President...

...Environmental initiatives lost in Maine and Florida...

...Clinton's philosophical influence on his party has been small because after his first two years the party lost most of its remaining support among those groups that might have been receptive to a more reliable "New Democrat...

...Similarly, we all want our opponents to compromise and work with us...

...soon he will have to endorse a proposal similar to the one he vetoed...

...Two and a half years ago a huge Federal intervention in the healthcare system was regarded as inevitable...

...The "gender gap" is a problem for both, not just for the Republicans...

...One large step on the President's jogging trail to re-election was his assertion last January that "The era of big government is over...

...Those of the Republicans will probably serve them better these days than those of the Democrats...

...Neither has enough power to force its will on the other...

...Some conservative commentators felt that if Dole had made term limits, affirmative action and "partial-birth" abortion central to his campaign, he might have won...

...A year ago ending welfare as we know it—requiring work and dropping the Federal entitlement that dated from the New Deal—was anathema among Democrats...

...The momentum may have slowed, but it stayed with the Republicans...

...The regulation of health maintenance organizations lost in California...

...They want us to work together and cut out the partisanship...

...If everybody who voted against him had voted for the same candidate, Clinton would have lost...

...Perot got only 8 per cent of the vote, less than half his 1992 total...

...Because "moderate" has become the political flavor of the year, changes in the meaning of that word may reveal best what the future has in store...

...The result, after four years, looks like a historic lost opportunity...

...his approach to them was purely rhetorical and opportunistic...

...For all the talk about building a bridge to the 21 st century, the first four years of the Clinton Administration have been a series of mostly unsuccessful rearguard actions in defense of liberal achievements from the 1930s and 1960s...

...Can we find any guide to the future, any real pattern—apart from a holding pattern—in the 1996 general elections...

...No one in the Administration has said a word about reviving major healthcare reform...

...During the campaign itself he and his surrogates demagogically accused Congressional Republicans of voting to slash Medicare...

...Probably, and it's not good news for Democrats...

...Even if all his scandals fade, he may well leave no more of a political legacy than Richard M. Nixon...

...It would be easy to make the case that Dole, like Clinton, actually ran as a candidate more conservative than his record...

...If renewed gridlock results from the continued division of powers, conservatives who believe government should do as little as possible will be happier about it than liberals...

...Attention could usefully be focused on the gap in the Democratic Party between (for example) big-city voters in the North-east, who want more government, and what's left of the party in the South and West, where the world looks different...