Clintonism Isn't Compromise

Obtuse Triangle

CLINTONISM ISN'T COMPROMISE.

by Andrei Cherny

(Published in The New Republic, May 16, 2005)

Two weeks after Election Day 2004, Democratic Party bigwigs, world leaders, and celebrity-watchers from far and wide gathered on a rainy day in Little Rock, Arkansas, for the opening of President Bill Clinton's presidential library and museum. Looking out on the shivering, huddled masses in the audience--hiding under their flimsy umbrellas and covering up their finery with garish Wal-Mart-donated ponchos--Clinton attempted to describe the ideas that had guided his way through two turbulent terms in the White House. 

Stating that America's "two great dominant strands of political thought"--conservatism and progressivism--both had important value, he went on to say, "It seemed to me that, in 1992, we needed to [both] be more conservative in things like erasing the deficit, and paying down the debt, and preventing crime, and punishing criminals, and protecting and supporting families, and enforcing things like child support laws, and reforming the military to meet the new challenges of the twenty-first century. And we needed to be more progressive in creating good jobs, reducing poverty, increasing the quality of public education, opening the doors of college to all, increasing access to health care ... and working for peace across the world and peace in America across all the lines that divide us."

From under their umbrellas, the audience cheered, but, for a former president not considered burdened by excessive modesty, Clinton had sold himself and his ideas short. He gave credence to those commentators who had always dismissed his policies as the political equivalent of a menu in an old-fashioned Chinese restaurant: one issue from a conservative Column A and another from a more liberal Column B. He bolstered the viewpoint of those on both sides of the political divide--stuck in ideological gang warfare--who always claimed that matters like crime or national security or fiscal responsibility were issues that conservatives owned, and that Democrats who acted on them were straying onto Republican turf. Most of all, he reinforced the notion that his presidency did not have a guiding compass.

The belief is widely held. In the months since November's election loss, the view that "Clintonism" and "triangulation"--the notion of finding a midpoint between political poles--are in fact synonymous has become all-but-accepted wisdom among many Democrats. In an article titled "CLINTONISM R.I.P." in The Atlantic Monthly, the usually incisive Chuck Todd of The Hotline argued that Democrats needed to stop mimicking "Clinton's strategy of centrist triangulation." When, in January, Senator Hillary Clinton remarked that "abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic choice for many, many women," the charge of triangulation surfaced repeatedly. Appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press" in early March, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman decried "the politics of the '90s, when you had Bill Clinton, who was a president who managed to sort of triangulate."

With the Democrats now having experienced two back-to-back elections where they did not offer the country any sense of direction or any larger vision, a debate about Clintonism--about what it meant, about what it was, about whether it worked, and about what it means today--is a debate that Democrats desperately need to have.

Just as Franklin Roosevelt--who was referred to as "a chameleon on plaid" by his political opponents--adopted various, and sometimes contradictory, policies as he barreled down the road to the New Deal, "Slick Willie," despite his reputation for changeability, was unswerving in a set of basic beliefs, even as he chose different avenues to give life to them. Over a 25-year career in Arkansas and as president, Clinton was remarkably consistent in his outlook on the country and approach to government.

Even a cursory examination of some of the actions that Clinton's Democratic critics point to as proving his accommodation to conservative ideology--such as signing a balanced budget, pushing for welfare reform, and declaring an end to the "era of big government"--show something more than a search for the center. Rather, they are the authentic expressions of a worldview Clinton carried not only throughout his presidency but through a quarter-century of public life. Three notions--America's increasing global interdependence, the importance of the bonds of community, and the need to rethink government for a post-bureaucratic age--formed the basis for Clinton's approach to government. They constituted an outlook--Clintonism--that has become rare to the point of extinction among Democrats since he left office. It is a vision Democrats would be wise to revisit.

Global Interdependence. A basic tenet of Clinton's thinking--from the very beginnings of his public career through his last days as president--was that America's increasing global interdependence meant that the nation's entire approach to economic policy had to change radically. For instance, in his 1987 gubernatorial inaugural address, he said that the "highly integrated, highly competitive world economy" that Arkansans were confronting demanded "economic growth and opportunity based on greater investment in people." From his first term as governor, Clinton consistently saw the bedrock issue of jobs not through the lenses of runaway tax incentives or protections that dug moats to defend against competition, but as a matter of education and skills-training for workers. The notion that "human capital" was preeminent in a global economy was central to his economic policies. 

It is true that, when he reached Washington as president, Clinton famously jettisoned his promise of a fulsome investment agenda and instead adopted a policy of fiscal discipline. Under the tutelage of economic advisers like Lloyd Bentsen and Robert Rubin, he was convinced that, while education and skills were important in a global economy, lowering deficits was fundamental. Economic growth could no longer be spurred by big tax cuts or major infusions of government spending, but now required fiscal conditions that gave people around the world the confidence to invest. Yet, crucially, while the policy had changed, the worldview had not. Clinton chose to change course on his proposals but, in terms of his overarching vision, the animating principle--that the United States had to respond to globalization with new thinking--remained the same.

In the years since Clinton left the White House, the basic questions of how the United States responds to the quickening pace of globalization have gone largely unaddressed. Manufacturing jobs are evaporating at a stunning rate. The service jobs that were supposed to be more secure are quickly following them overseas. National investment in research and development is stagnating. Yet, instead of presenting ideas that would respond to the global economy, Democrats spent 2004 decrying "outsourcing" and reached a dead consensus around the self-evident need to enforce old trade agreements. Looking to the Clinton tradition, Democrats should once again focus on preparing Americans to "compete and win in the global economy." This would entail not only a return to fiscal discipline, but also enormous new investments in job-training, a wholesale reform of public education to prepare students for global competition, spurring new innovations and scientific breakthroughs, building our lagging broadband infrastructure, and completely rethinking U.S. trade and international economic policies for a new century. 

Community Matters. IT'S THE ECONOMY, STUPID, read the famed sign in the Clinton campaign war room of 1992, and its dictum has passed into political lore. But, while Democrats had perennially concentrated on economic issues, Clinton--throughout his time in public life--set himself apart by consistently addressing a set of concerns that had nothing to do with dollars and cents. Today, most every Democrat running for national office will include in their stump speech a throwaway line extolling American virtues of "patriotism, responsibility, family, and faith." But, to Clinton, these were not rhetorical boxes to check, but rather animating principles behind the policy decisions he made. 

Just as Clinton's vision of global interdependence animated his economic and foreign policy agendas, his understanding of the bonds of community was a critical part of the vision he presented to the country. He consistently spoke of civil rights as an issue that affected not only minorities, but the entire nation. His national service proposal was not offered as simply a way to help students pay for college, but as a duty that young people owed to their country. He committed enormous amounts of political capital to reforming welfare, providing 100,000 new police to fight crime, and reducing the number of teen pregnancies.

It is useful to recall that the first major speech of Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign--the speech that provided the intellectual basis of his candidacy and presidency--did not address jobs or health care or the environment, but "the responsibilities we owe to ourselves, to one another, and to our nation." Clinton thundered at those "from Wall Street to Main Street to Mean Street" who cut corners, break the rules, and violate basic American values. He said it was time that all Americans--from corporate CEOs to congressional chieftains, from deadbeat dads to welfare moms--were held equally responsible for their actions.

In 1992, it had been a long time since Democrats had conveyed a sense that they were driven by moral principles, such as personal responsibility. Since that time--and since a 1996 campaign that highlighted initiatives like keeping cigarettes from children, community policing, and school uniforms--Democrats have again emphasized economic issues almost exclusively. To be fair, part of the reason Democrats have avoided speaking about values has been a skittishness to discuss the subject in light of Clinton's own affair with Monica Lewinsky. The charge of hypocrisy is potent in politics, but there is little evidence that Americans confuse the private morality of an individual with the public morality of a nation.

The notion peddled by commentators like Tom Frank, the author of What's the Matter with Kansas?--that "dollars matter most" to Americans--has never rung true over the course of the nation's history. Fortunately, from Eliot Spitzer's attack on immorality on Wall Street to the willingness of some Democrats to question the pernicious effects of violent video games on children, recent months have seen Democrats once again speaking to issues that are more often associated with prayer books than pocketbooks.

A New Vision for Government. "For at least a decade, the system we constructed in the Great Depression has been breaking down.... Our challenge today, as Democrats, is to recognize that this is the time of transition and to respond to it ... I honestly believe the issue is not less government and the issue is not more government. The issue is what kind of government we are going to have." This was the challenge that Bill Clinton laid out at the Connecticut Democratic Convention in July of 1980. For the 20 years following, his work in Arkansas and Washington was grounded in transforming government for a very different time. 

From the promise in his second inaugural as governor to provide "a government that will give our people a better chance to fight for themselves" to his second inaugural address as president, when he pledged "a new government ... humble enough not to try to solve all our problems for us, but strong enough to give us the tools to solve our problems for ourselves," Clinton did what Democrats rarely do: He outlined a consistent vision for government and then acted to change not just what government does, but how it does it.

As president, Clinton worked with Vice President Al Gore to "reinvent government" so that it was not just smaller, but more responsive to citizens; fought for initiatives like the V-Chip, which used government's power to give parents more control over the TV images viewed by their children; and promoted charter schools, which provided choices in an education system that had been "one-size-fits-all."

As a 28-year-old candidate for Congress, Clinton asserted that "the people want a hand up, not a handout," and throughout his service in both state and federal government, his decisions made clear his preference for empowerment over bureaucracy and basic reform over merely throwing money at failing systems. In famously proclaiming that "the era of big government" was over, Clinton was speaking less about government's size than about its character. The time of transformation that Clinton spoke of in Connecticut a quarter of a century ago was reached during his time in the White House. But, though the era of big government closed on his watch, little has been done to determine what comes next.

In a nation where technology has completely changed the way businesses operate by giving people more choices and personal decision-making power, government still runs on a model built during the New Deal. Continuing the work Clinton began would mean completely rethinking the way government works to make it more empowering and customized and less paternalistic and hierarchical. From public schools to a failing health care system to, yes, Americans' retirement savings, Democrats need to offer a new vision of government that will put individual Americans--rather than the bureaucrats of either big government or big corporations--in the driver's seat.

The question for Democrats now is whether they will continue down the road Clinton charted, whether they will turn back to an earlier conception of Democratic action, or whether they will continue as they have since Clinton left the White House: stalled and pulled over on the shoulder, arguing amongst themselves about what went wrong, and never noticing that the future of U.S. politics is passing them by.

The historical analogy to Clinton's legacy in this respect is that of Theodore Roosevelt. In fact, in a 1999 interview, Clinton acknowledged that T.R.'s presidency "was a similar point in the history of America, where we were transforming ourselves from, then, an agricultural to an industrial society, now from an industrial to an information technology-based society." While Clinton and Roosevelt certainly differed in personality and background, both governed at times of relative peace, great prosperity, and enormous transformation. Both fought the powerful interests of their party on some issues and found accommodation on others. But, most of all, both called into question accepted assumptions about the role of government and prepared Americans for the idea that their government would have to shift if it were to become relevant again. Neither Roosevelt nor Clinton mapped out that change, but both laid the groundwork for the task ahead. 

But it is worth remembering as well that, in the years after the Republican Rough Rider left office, the greatest strides in furthering his legacy and ideas occurred among Democrats like Woodrow Wilson, Louis Brandeis, and T.R.'s cousin Franklin. Republicans celebrated Teddy Roosevelt's ebullient personality but either scorned or ignored his policies. And thus, Democrats became the majority party and Republicans spent a half-century in the wilderness, carping about progressive missteps and overreaches.

With this in mind, Democrats should beware. In the late '90s, when the United States, under Clinton's leadership, went to war in Kosovo to give "confidence to the friends of freedom," he was opposed by many Republican leaders who preached a doctrine of neo-isolationism. Today, President Bush is the most prominent spokesperson for the notion that the United States has a role to play in advancing democracy and liberty around the world. And, in 2004, one presidential candidate had this to say: "Government should never try to control or dominate the lives of our citizens. Yet government can and should help citizens gain the tools to make their own choices and to improve their own lives." It was Bush, singing straight from the Clinton hymnal. This is not to say that "we are all Clintonites now," nor to confuse Bush's words with actions that fall far short of the challenges we face. But, if they are to avoid the fate of the GOP a century ago, Democrats themselves need to think hard about the legacies and lessons of Clintonism.

In the '80s, Democrats made a mistake in assuming that only Reagan's charisma and dramatic flair were responsible for Republican wins. Today, many Democrats perpetuate the myth that it was Clinton's easy charm or Southern drawl that was primarily responsible for his success, and that a candidate who resembles him in these ways can be "the next Bill Clinton." This minimizes Clinton's vision and misses the point of what he accomplished. Moreover, it is a recipe for the same sort of setbacks Republicans experienced in the last century when they failed to follow the path laid out by Teddy Roosevelt.

The next Bill Clinton will be a leader who brings not only a twinkle in the eye, but a vision for the future. Because, if there is one central tenet of Clintonism, it is that we live in a fast-changing world, and we must forever be changing with it. Clinton's vision was meant for his time, not for all time, but, until Democrats come to terms with Clintonism as it really was, they will not be able to move forward.