Jewish World Review Oct. 22, 1999 /12 Mar-Cheshvan, 5760
David Brooks
The Clintonized Democrats
http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
CONSERVATIVES WILL ALWAYS HAVE a soft spot for the eighties. They’ll always
have a nostalgic longing for the glory days of ReykjavÌk and Berlin, for the
era of yellow ties, Drexel Burnham, Duran Duran, and
Madonna-wannabes wearing their underwear on the outside of their
clothes. And the best part of the eighties was having opponents like Jimmy
Carter, Walter Mondale, and, a little later, Michael Dukakis.
For some conservatives, those days were so wonderful they will never be
allowed to end. For some, every Democrat is Walter Mondale, if not on
the surface then at least deep down. Clintonism never really happened.
Tony Blair never really happened. The Third Way is just old fashioned
liberalism in disguise. 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.
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. 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. “It is
largely a matter as simple as demeanor. We need to practice that, to be
optimistic,” Armey declared. “We need to learn some skills, to be good
natured and entertaining.Ý.Ý.Ý. Let us put on a happy face.”
Well, it would be nice if it were just a matter of demeanor. It would be
nice for Republicans if Democrats had learned nothing from the failures of
Mondale and Dukakis. Just as it would be nice for Democrats if people
like George W. Bush had learned nothing from the failures of Newt
Gingrich. But wishing doesn’t make it so. Clintonism has transformed the
Democratic party, making it less vulnerable (and also less honorable). And
voters, if not many Republicans, know this. 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.
Today’s Democratic party is much more difficult to pin down. 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). Kissing up to big
labor, the two Democratic presidential candidates have been at their most
liberal. Gore put on events in Des Moines and Los Angeles that had him
hugging every blue-collar cliche. “I am pro-labor, pro-union, pro-collective bargaining. I am pro-working family and I always will be,”
he shouted in that megaphone manner of his. “If you elect me president, I
will veto any anti-union bill that comes across my desk.”
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. If there were ever signs of a Democratic
reversion to Mondale style tax-and-spendism, this was the week for them.
Bill Bradley has some genuine left-wing elements to his campaign. 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? Gore remains
adamantly pro-trade. The vast majority of his policy proposals come out
of the playbook of the Democratic Leadership Council. He never saw a
problem he didn’t want to throw a tax credit at. 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.
This is not the old-fashioned Democratic create-an-agency,
create-a-program approach.
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. Meanwhile, the Gore people attacked the Bradley health care
plan, which is a fraction of HillaryCare, as a grotesque government power
grab. A Democratic establishment that believes in tax credits and balanced
budgets is not a paleoliberal establishment. Clinton is going, but the party
will remain Clintonian in policy terms.
And more important, Gore has been Clintonized stylistically. Even at the
DLC’s conference last year, Gore gave an old-fashioned political speech.
He talked about his philosophy of government (he chose the unfortunate
phrase “practical idealism”), and he outlined the policies he supported. But
in the past weeks, Gore has transformed his stump speech. 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. There’s almost no
substance to his speech, but it works. Gore can be insufferable when he is
hectoring about some earnest policy idea. But this autobiographical
montage is reassuring patter.
So there is little sign the 2000 election will feature any deliciously
Reaganite age of clear left-right ideological divides. No wonder the
Democratic Leadership Council’s president, Al From, was so triumphalist
at the annual DLC meeting in Washington on October 14. 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 BritainÝ.Ý.Ý. no Third Way
movement sweeping the globe.” But now, the Third Way is everywhere
on the march. It’s the biggest political story of the decade. (He’s right
about that.)
“As we meet here, we’re on a roll ... the federal government is the
smallest since the Kennedy administration!” That was an applause line at
the DLC. “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. 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. (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. While endorsing free trade,
Bill Bradley has adopted some liberal rhetoric about that demon, the
global economy. “The new global economy doesn’t care about the 6:30
dinner. It doesn’t care that you don’t know how to use a computer. The
global economy isn’t worrying about you at all.” The global economy
doesn’t feel your pain, thus violating the first rule of Clintonism.
If there is a subject on which the post-Clintonian Democrats might be
inclined to revert to paleoliberalism, it is economic globalization. On this
subject, they show all the signs of liberal guilt. 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. They
know the global economy isn’t so great for those who lack their
credentials. There is an undertone of apology when they talk about
globalization. They never use the phrase “free trade” for example, which
sounds like free markets. DLC types talk instead about “open trade,”
which sounds like open admissions.
And yet, the New Democrats are not really pulling back from their free
trade values. 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. This year the DLC deserves credit for stepping up to the plate and
addressing the socially awkward subject of globalization head on. The
organization even invited an AFL-CIO apparatchik to address the
conference. And for the time being there were even signs of a
rapprochement with the paleoliberals.
Both sides speak vaguely about the need to come up with some sort of
rules to regulate the global economy. The AFL-CIO supports strict rules
on things like how banks can lend their money. The DLC presumably
would oppose such intrusive regulations. But they aren’t talking specifics
right now. They are enjoying the happy harmony of fuzziness. In his
speech closing out the conference, Al Gore called for a working group to
come up with a solution.
With stands like that, Gore is never going to win a chapter in some future
edition of Profiles in Courage. But then that too is a sign of the
Clintonized Democratic party. It never presents a clean target for the Left
or the Right. 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. Maybe they don’t know themselves.
The eighties, alas, are over. 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.
David Brooks is a senior sditor of the Weekly Standard.
Send your comments to him by clicking here.
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