The Democrats' Left Turn
BARNES, FRED
The Democrats' Left Turn From Gore and Bradley to Bill and Hillary, the third way is being abandoned in favor of that old time liberal religion. BY FRED BARNES In his 18 years in the Senate, Bill...
...David Broder, the sober-minded political columnist for the Washington Post, was amazed: "Any listener would have to think that either of these men would be a more liberal president than Bill Clinton...
...There's Hillary Rodham Clinton...
...The thought never crossed Gore's mind...
...New Democrats prefer market-based solutions, especially to cope with the soaring costs of Social Security and Medicare...
...One who has is Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times...
...Bradley would require all handguns t be registered...
...So Gore has been forced to distinguish himself from Bush by taking liberal positions...
...Bradley, he huffed, would spend the entire surplus on a new health care plan for uninsured kids and their parents...
...Clinton isn't the only member of his household who's charged to the left...
...Far more than President Clinton, says former White House press secretary Mike McCurry, Gore really believes the "mantra" of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council...
...Perhaps George W. will change all that, but Democrats are gambling he won't...
...Gore even mentioned it in his address to the DLC last month...
...And having seen Republicans fail to stir any grass-roots enthusiasm for cutting taxes, they've decided the tax issue has lost its bite...
...But before submitting his formal proposal to Congress last month, Clinton made one major alteration, jettisoning the investment proposal...
...I will insist on the authority to enforce workers' rights, human rights, and environmental protections in those [trade] agreements," he said...
...It's a long list, and getting longer all the time...
...But this is deceptive...
...In fact, the two have swerved to the left on so many issues that few reporters have bothered to keep track...
...But mostly he was more liberal...
...Bradley, foi example, would let mothers on welfar keep their child support payments withou reducing their welfare stipend...
...Gore would require all handgun owners to be licensed...
...Of course Reagan left office in 1989, but that didn't stop Gore...
...His appearance was billed by his aides as the "new Gore"—more casual in dress and demeanor...
...It's supposed to be an incentive to work, but, in some measure, it's welfare...
...At a Democratic dinner in Des Moines on October 9, Gore gave his best Mondale imitation...
...To pay it, the government already spends $30 billion a year...
...BY FRED BARNES In his 18 years in the Senate, Bill Bradley built a reputation as the rare Democrat who is committed to cutting taxes...
...Return any portion of the surplus to Americans by cutting taxes...
...Yet when Bradley and Gore met in their first presidential campaign debate on October 27, they sounded like Mario Cuomo and Walter Mondale, old-fashioned liberals eager to increase the federal government's role in American life...
...The presidential caucuses and primaries are dominated by the Democratic party's liberal wing of union members, minorities, feminists, and unreconstructFred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...I don't think Reaganomics and supply-side economics was the right direction for this country...
...Rather than tame Medicare, Clinton wants to expand it by adding a generous benefit for prescription drugs...
...Public opinion, still fairly conservative, wouldn't allow that...
...Gore attacks Bradley by linking him to Reagan, just as Mondale zinged his Democratic foe, Senator John Glenn, for backing Reagan's economic program...
...Both would also bar soft money from campaigns...
...At least not the Republicans who for two election cycles now—1996 and 1998—have stumbled to Election Day without making a dent in Democratic arguments...
...If Hillary mimics Cuomo, Gore is the reincarnation of Mondale, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1984 and a paragon of old Democratic liberalism...
...Who can blame them...
...Both Gore and Bradley would expand the Earned Income Tax Credit, geared for the "working poor...
...Clinton made sure that his appointees on the commission killed the plan...
...Freed of the need for fiscal restraint, Democrats instinctively propose new programs...
...He's for a balanced budget...
...Such provisions cannot be tossed off as unenforceable side agreements, but must be integrated into all trade pacts...
...At the DLC's October 13 gala, Clinton boasted of "an enormous modernization of the thinking and direction of the Democratic party...
...The conventional wisdom about pandering for liberal votes in the primaries is partially true for Bradley and Gore...
...And Gore has been pushed left by a non-Democrat, GOP presidential front-runner George W. Bush...
...On most items, Gore's with him...
...That explanation, however, is inadequate...
...Adam Nagourney of the New York Times described her as a throwback...
...He even wrote a book about it...
...This consists, Brownstein says, of "putting his name on a lengthening list of liberal social and economic priorities...
...How come...
...It's not quite a liberal counter-revolution...
...Bradley knew there wasn't fertile Democratic ground to plow on Gore's right...
...Bradley recently unveiled a program of near universal health care coverage...
...But DLC leaders have counseled her extensively and consider her sympathetic to their viewpoint...
...Her "campaign strategy . . . evoked Mario Cuomo's first successful campaign for governor in 1982...
...Both have anti-poverty programs that go well beyond expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit...
...Without it, they figure Republicans will have no popular themes...
...Rather than propose billions in new spending for the poor, Gore often offers up tax credits, still another New Democrat approach...
...ed leftists, and these candidates are merely going where the votes are...
...Instead, he, too, pummels Reagan, noting that at least he didn't vote for Reagan's tax cuts in 1981...
...While Bradley emphasizes mor government-funded day care, Gore has put out a plan for universal access to preschool...
...Gore makes an occasional bow to New Democrat dogma...
...Gore and Clinton still pledge allegiance to Democratic centrism...
...This echoed what is now official Clinton administration policy...
...Bradley voted for Reagan's budget cuts in 1981, devastating social welfare programs, according to Gore...
...That would leave no funds for expanding Medicare, which Gore is anxious to do...
...On another DLC item, free trade, Clinton and Gore have departed from New Democrat thinking, making a strategic concession to liberal protectionists such as organized labor...
...I think it's two things: the budget surplus and the pitiful performance of Republicans...
...You'd never know it, however, from her unannounced campaign for the Senate in New York...
...Both are for the national enforcement of gay rights, though they would use different means...
...True, Bradley and Gore are pandering, but more important, they are part of a broader shift to the left among leading Democrats...
...She's not ordinarily thought of as a New Democrat...
...But none of this explains why and Bill and Hillary are also moving left...
...Roughly twice as many Americans identify themselves as conservatives as liberals...
...This will make negotiating trade treaties far more difficult, if not impossible...
...Unlike Gore, he didn't "stay and fight" against the Reagan legacy...
...Gore has also criticized Bradley for voting, with Reagan, to aid the anti-Communist contras in Nicaragua...
...Gore and Bradley would have it spend billions more...
...But in both rhetoric and policy proposals, it's a rejection of the moderate—or New Democrat, or Third Way—model that Clinton has embodied...
...Gore has his own plan to provide health insurance to children and up to 7 million more adults...
...Bradley says he's for "big ideas...
...Gore, too would increase the amount of child sup port...
...While Bradley opposes welfare reform, Gore defends it...
...This is an incredible stretch—the cuts turned out to be minuscule—but Bradley scarcely defends his vote...
...Their plan, in line with New Democrat thinking, brought some market forces to bear on Medicare...
...He suggested Bradley was a quitter for retiring from Congress in 1996...
...Karl Rove, the top Bush strategist, thinks Gore is alarmed by Bush's appeal to the political center...
...When Newt Gingrich took over Congress [in 1995] and tried to reinforce Reagan-omics, some walked away...
...Last winter, a commission headed by Democratic Senator John Breaux and Republican Representative Bill Thomas announced a Medicare reform scheme that included a more modest benefit for prescriptions...
...Not quite a total rejection, but significant nonetheless...
...So, why have the four most prominent Democrats in America veered to the left (as have many congressional Democrats...
...There's another sign that Hillary has reverted to 1980s-style liberalism: She's obsessed with attacking Ronald Reagan...
...And they will settle for nothing less...
...More Liberal Than You Thought" is the title of an article he wrote about Gore and Bradley in the American Prospect...
...The chief topic of the debate was how to handle the non-Social Security surplus, projected to exceed $1 trillion over the next decade...
...For more than 10 million people, income and Social Security taxes are totally offset, making them eligible for a cash bonus...
...In his plan for making Social Security solvent, unveiled at the beginning of this year, Clinton included one of those solutions, the investment of unspent Social Security trust funds in stocks and bonds...
...We need to make sure that we have someone representing New York who will stand up against any effort to go back, to make a U-turn to the days of trickle-down, supply-side economics," she told a union gathering October 16...
...Gore went on the attack...
...So does Gore...
...But Clinton himself is now retreating from exactly that project...
...It is a refundable tax credit, which means many recipients get reimbursed for money they never actually paid in taxes...
...Gore didn't either...
...She has talked up liberal issues exclusively, endorsing a higher minimum wage, demanding more money but no reform for Social Security and Medicare, denouncing GOP tax cuts, faulting Mayor Rudy Giuliani of New York City, her expected Republican rival, for trying "to dismantle the public school system" with vouchers...
...Gore, he says, "has proposed a more assertive role for the federal government—in areas from education to health care—than President Clinton has risked offering at any point since the Republican congressional takeover in 1994...
...Similarly, Vice President Al Gore has positioned himself as a moderate since the day he was elected to Congress in 1976...
...Nor Bradley's...
...There's a simple explanation for Bradley and Gore's lurch to the left...
...Polls haven't changed...
Vol. 5 • November 1999 • No. 9
