The Clintonized Democrats
BROOKS, DAVID
The Clintonized Democrats No amount of GOP wishing will bring back the Carter-Mondale-Dukakis era. by David Brooks Conservatives will always have a soft spot for the eighties. They'll always have...
...Well, it would be nice if it were just a matter of demeanor...
...He's right about that...
...The eighties, alas, are over...
...The AFL-CIO supports strict rules on things like how banks can lend their money...
...The vast majority of his policy proposals come out of the playbook of the Democratic Leadership Council...
...But they aren't talking specifics right now...
...That's why those ads from consultant Arthur Finkelstein—the ones that try to tar Democrats as "liberal, dangerously liberal, embarrassingly liberal"—have been such miserable failures over the past two elections...
...The organization even invited an AFL-CIO apparatchik to address the conference...
...They'll always have a nostalgic longing for the glory days of Reykjavik and Berlin, for the era of yellow ties, Drexel Burnham, Duran Duran, and Madonna-wannabes wearing their underwear on the outside of their clothes...
...Even at the DLC's conference last year, Gore gave an old-fashioned political speech...
...If there were ever signs of a Democratic reversion to Mondale style tax-and-spendism, this was the week for them...
...it is largely a matter as simple as demeanor...
...That was an applause line at the DLC...
...A Democratic establishment that believes in tax credits and balanced budgets is not a paleoliberal establishment...
...The DLC presumably would oppose such intrusive regulations...
...It never presents a clean target for the Left or the Right...
...Now it is a collection of Oprah-ready stories about his growth as a person: his period of disillusionment after his father lost a Senate race, the joys of being a grandfather, his hike up Mount Rainier with his son...
...On October 13, for example, steve Forbes delivered a talk in London in which he attacked "Third Way socialism and statism," as if it were all just one big clump out of Clement Attlee's brain...
...In his speech closing out the conference, Al Gore called for a working group to come up with a solution...
...They are enjoying the happy harmony of fuzziness...
...We need to practice that, to be optimistic," Armey declared...
...No wonder the Democratic Leadership Council's president, Al From, was so triumphalist at the annual DLC meeting in Washington on October 14...
...It's tax credits for urban empowerment zones, tax credits for day care, tax credits for companies that provide worker training, and tax credits to pay for college education...
...On the same day, at the Heritage Foundation, House Majority Leader Dick Armey gave a speech called "The Future of Conservatism," in which he talked mostly about the glories of Ronald Reagan...
...From has a storyline for the past nine years, which he laid out at the conference: At the dreary start of this decade, there were "no New Democrats, no New Democratic movement, no New Labor in Britain . . . no Third Way movement sweeping the globe...
...They know the global economy isn't so great for those who lack their credentials...
...It doesn't care that you don't know how to use a computer...
...Gore remains adamantly pro-trade...
...It would be nice for Republicans if Democrats had learned nothing from the failures of Mondale and Dukakis...
...If you want to be a successful party in the 21st century, you have to be a party of private sector growth," he went on...
...With stands like that, Gore is never going to win a chapter in some future edition of Profiles in Courage...
...Both sides speak vaguely about the need to come up with some sort of rules to regulate the global economy...
...But now, the Third Way is everywhere on the march...
...Tony Blair never really happened...
...And voters, if not many Republicans, know this...
...He talked about his philosophy of government (he chose the unfortunate phrase "practical idealism"), and he outlined the policies he supported...
...Even George W. Bush sounds like a New Democrat, From gloated, teasing that he sounds like he is running for Bill Clinton's third term...
...The new global economy doesn't care about the 6:30 dinner...
...Maybe they don't know themselves...
...If there is a subject on which the post-Clintonian Democrats might be inclined to revert to paleoliberalism, it is economic globalization...
...Gore put on events in Des Moines and Los Angeles that had him hugging every blue-collar clich...
...The Third Way is just old fashioned liberalism in disguise...
...Gore may not talk much about his finest hour, his debate with Ross Perot on NAFTA, but there's no sign he has stepped away from it...
...Gore can be insufferable when he is hectoring about some earnest policy idea...
...But in the past weeks, Gore has transformed his stump speech...
...Bill Bradley has some genuine left-wing elements to his campaign...
...Kissing up to big labor, the two Democratic presidential candidates have been at their most liberal...
...Dick Armey portrayed George W. Bush's compassionate conservatism as an effort to put a happy face on Reaganite conservative policies, a sign that Armey, like From, really doesn't understand George W.) The one issue that causes stuttering and uncomfortable silences in Democratic ranks is trade and globalization...
...As stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation sagely observed last week, Clintonized politicians never tell you where they would ultimately like to take the country...
...And the best part of the eighties was having opponents like Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and, a little later, Michael Dukakis...
...This is not the old-fashioned Democratic create-an-agency, create-a-pro-gram approach...
...Clintonism has transformed the Democratic party, making it less vulnerable (and also less honorable...
...Just as it would be nice for Democrats if people like George W. Bush had learned nothing from the failures of Newt Gingrich...
...On this subject, they show all the signs of liberal guilt...
...The global economy isn't worrying about you at all...
...I am pro-working family and I always will be," he shouted in that megaphone manner of his...
...Clinton is going, but the party will remain Clin-tonian in policy terms...
...But wishing doesn't make it so...
...And for the time being there were even signs of a rapprochement with the paleoliberals...
...DLC types talk instead about "open trade," which sounds like open admissions...
...He never saw a problem he didn't want to throw a tax credit at...
...But this autobiographical montage is reassuring patter...
...For example, over the past two weeks Al Gore and Bill Bradley have been jockeying to win the endorsement of the AFL-CIO (which went for Gore the same day Forbes delivered his speech in London...
...So there is little sign the 2000 election will feature any deliciously Rea-ganite age of clear left-right ideological divides...
...The global economy doesn't feel your pain, thus violating the first rule of Clintonism...
...They never use the phrase "free trade" for example, which sounds like free markets...
...Today's Democratic party is much more difficult to pin down...
...Clin-tonism never really happened...
...The subtext of Armey's remarks was that politics today is waged on the same continuum as it was during the Reagan era— between the believers in freedom and the believers in statism—and that the main thing Republicans need to do is recapture Reagan's way of delivering their message with a smile...
...This year the DLC deserves credit for stepping up to the plate and addressing the socially awkward subject of globalization head on...
...For some, every Democrat is Walter Mondale, if not on the surface then at least deep down...
...While endorsing free trade, Bill Bradley has adopted some liberal rhetoric about that demon, the global economy...
...There's almost no substance to his speech, but it works...
...And yet, the New Democrats are not really pulling back from their free trade values...
...There is an undertone of apology when they talk about globalization...
...Reagan can serve as an inspiration and a policy exemplar, but his political tactics may be of limited use in the age of fuzziness and mush...
...For some conservatives, those days were so wonderful they will never be allowed to end...
...Meanwhile, the Gore people attacked the Bradley health care plan, which is a fraction of HillaryCare, as a grotesque government power grab...
...I am pro-labor, pro-union, pro-collective bargaining...
...In their heart of hearts, the New Democrats know that theirs is a movement made up largely of lawyers, wonks, and graduate-degreed information-age workers...
...As we meet here, we're on a roll . . . the federal government is the smallest since the Kennedy administration...
...If you elect me president, I will veto any anti-union bill that comes across my desk...
...But, if you look beyond the week's pro-union rhetoric, what exactly did the unions get out of their endorsement of the vice president...
...We David Brooks is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard...
...need to learn some skills, to be good natured and entertaining...
...Let us put on a happy face...
...It's the biggest political story of the decade...
...But then that too is a sign of the Clintonized Democratic party...
...When a Washington Post analysis suggested that Gore's health proposal would threaten to unbalance the budget, the Gore campaign scaled back their plan, so scared are they of being tainted with the deficit-spending charge...
...Bill Bradley, meanwhile, outflanked Gore to the left by proposing a massive health care reform plan that Kenneth Thorpe, the man who estimated health plan costs for the Clinton administration, estimated would cost $1.1 trillion over 10 years...
...And more important, Gore has been Clintonized stylistically...
Vol. 5 • October 1999 • No. 6
