While working in the White House residence on his 1998 State of the Union Address, President Clinton reportedly turned to Michael Waldman, his chief speechwriter, and remarked, "FDR's mission was to save capitalism from its excesses. Our mission has been to save government from its own excesses so it can again be a progressive force."
It is perhaps unsurprising that Clinton would be ruminating over his legacy while working on one of his last State of the Union speeches. It is equally unsurprising that when his thoughts turned to how historians would judge him, Clinton would focus on how the New Democrat movement he helped found shifted the Democratic Party's philosophy and approach to governance during his presidency.
The interpretation of Clinton's achievements in office is directly relevant to any upcoming struggles to define the Democratic Party once he leaves office. If scholars, politicians, and others generally agree that those successes were due in large measure to his New Democrat philosophy, then the argument for Democrats to stay the course will be strengthened.
Have Clinton and his allies in the Democratic Leadership Council succeeded in changing the philosophy of the Democratic Party into a New Democratic one? To the New Democrats, the answer seems clear. To them, not only is the era of big government over, but, in the words
of the DLC's chairman, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), "the era of the party of big government is also over."
But is it really? Has the Democratic Party been fundamentally transformed, or will it return to its old ways once Clinton has left the stage?
There are many measures of success for a political organization such as the DLC, including such mundane but consequential ones as securing the spoils of public office. But for an organization created specifically to change the Democratic Party's philosophy, there is no
escaping that second question. In addressing it, a perspective on how one faction can consciously change the philosophy of an American political party begins to take shape. From there, one can speculate about the future of the Democratic Party-- and of the New Democrats within it.
The personal scandal that engulfed Clinton in 1998 especially affected the DLC and the New Democrats. On one level, it directly threatened the viability of their most powerful supporter and of the DLC's strategy of remaking the party top-down through the presidency. On another
level, it indirectly risked overshadowing Clinton's efforts to recast the Democratic Party in his New Democrat image. This was not only a matter of survival for the DLC. It also was a concern of the President's, as the changes he had undertaken in the party stood to the most substantive alternative to his legacy of impeachment. As Clinton told the DLC at its annual conference
in 1998, "the real test of our ideas is whether they outlive this presidency; whether they are bigger than any candidate, any speech, any campaign, and debate."
In 1998, New Democrats began to look beyond the impeachment scandal -- and even the Clinton presidency. They focused on ensuring that their philosophy, and the politics and policies implicit in it, outlasted Clinton's second term. For instance, the New Democrat Network (a
political action committee independent of the DLC) and the New Democrat Coalition (the DLC-allied bloc in the House) intensified their activities to elect New Democrats to Congress. Looking toward the 2000 elections, the DLC in September 1998 launched Blueprint, a quarterly
journal designed to elucidate core New Democratic beliefs, new policy prescriptions, and political approaches for the next election. The DLC even looked beyond the country's shores to add meaning and gravity to the New Democrat philosophy. Beginning in earnest with the
election of Tony Blair and his New Labour government in Great Britain in May 1997, the DLC began advancing its philosophy as the core of a worldwide "Third Way" revolution
in center-left politics.
Liberals, as expected, dismissed the Third Way as an empty phrase used to describe an electoral tactic. "New Labour's third way is opportunism with a human face," argued
New York University's Tony Judt in The New York Times. Nevertheless, the DLC's Third Way activities boosted its profile and importance as the success of Third Way politicians -- especially
Blair -- validated the DLC's approach to politics and policy. Also, by casting itself as the pioneer of a worldwide movement, the DLC helped ensure its own legacy. Said differently, the organization was no longer exclusively tied to the fortunes of a president or a party; it was part of
something much larger and more durable.
Of course, the plaudits of European policy wonks and intellectuals meant little to the practical success of the New Democrats. The real test of the efficacy of their philosophy
was simple: Could it win elections?
The DLC argued that it had done just that in 1992 and 1996. And in 1998, to the surprise of many, it was able to make this claim again. For the first time since 1934, the party of the president in power did not lose any seats in Congress. In fact, the Democrats picked up six seats in the House, giving the Republicans the smallest congressional majority since 1953. Democrats also defeated incumbent Republican senators in New York and North Carolina to maintain the 55-to-45 split in the Senate. In the states, they took the governorships of Alabama,
South Carolina, and California from the GOP, and won control of five legislative chambers.
In victory, the Democrats not only carried their base of blacks, labor, and Hispanics. They also won strong support from groups targeted by the New Democrats. From 1994, the Democrats gained 9 percentage points among moderates to win 54 percent of their support, and they
jumped an equal amount among families that made over $75,000 a year to win 47 percent of their vote. Democratic candidates increased their support among Catholics and suburbanites as well. As political analyst Bill Schneider noted, the Democrats also won the support of an emerging
constituency that he called the "new rich" and that the DLC often describes as "wired workers." These educated, computer-savvy, suburban, middle-class citizens
constituted one-quarter of all voters and were the ones who had benefited most from the growing economy under Clinton.
Democrats were able to construct this coalition of wired workers, plus the base of blacks and union house-holds, because many of them copied Clinton's New Democrat approach.
Consider Lieut. Gov. Gray Davis of California, who won his state's governorship. A longtime liberal who had once served as chief of staff to Jerry Brown, Davis recast himself as a moderate who was tough on crime and dedicated to improving education. With this combination, he won
as much as half of his state's moderate Republican vote and cruised to a crushing victory.
For New Democrats themselves, 1998 was a success. All 41 members of the NDC were re-elected, and 26 of the 34 candidates that the NDN backed won. In this, its biggest victories were in the Senate, where New Democrats Evan Bayh of Indiana and Blanche Lambert Lincoln of Arkansas won open seats.
In addition to these victories, the DLC reveled in what it saw at its 1998 annual conference, the first show-case of Democratic presidential hopefuls for 2000. There, not one of the prospective candidates at that time -- including House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt--
deviated much from the New Democratic line. Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts spoke about his proposal to overhaul public education by lambasting its bloated bureaucracy, urging more accountability for results, and calling for an end to value-free schools. Sen. Bob Kerrey
of Nebraska outlined his strategy to reform Social Security by augmenting it with private savings accounts. And Vice President Al Gore called for an embrace of "practical idealism," a concept that echoed Clinton's Third Way.
To many political analysts, the uniformity of these candidates' New Democratic appeals was unsurprising. Beginning on the eve of the 1996 elections and intensifying after the 1998 elections, a range of pundits observed that the Democratic Party had in fact been transformed
into a New Democrat party. For example, Carl Cannon of the National Journal opined that Clinton had placed the Democratic Party "on the same page as ordinary Americans on issues such as crime control and welfare reform" and had brought it into the "cultural mainstream." Journalist Jacob Weisberg argued that Clinton's most significant achievement was that "he restored the feeling that domestic government could work" and did
so to such a degree that "Clinton's political formula is now almost universally regarded as a winning one for Democrats." Indeed, surveying the state of the DLC, Bill Schneider wrote that the elected officials who founded the organization "could hardly have imagined, back in those dark days, that 14 years later, the DLC would succeed in changing the country's governing philosophy. But it has." As Frank Watkins, a close political aide of Jesse Jackson, lamented about the Democratic Party, "The DLC has taken it over."
On one level, Watkins is right. Since 1992, the Democratic Party has ratified two quintessentially New Democratic platforms at its quadrennial national convention. Until
recently, the party's general chairman was former Colorado Gov. Roy Romer, who is also vice-chairman of the DLC, and the party's national chairman, Joe Andrew, was a founder of the Indiana chapter of the DLC. A Democratic president has signed into law a welfare reform
package that places time limits on aid, a free-trade agreement with Mexico and Canada, a balanced-budget agreement, and a crime bill that mandates a life sentence for someone who commits three felonies. He also has cut the number of federal government employees to its lowest level since the Kennedy presidency -- and boasts about it. Moreover, the same Democratic president won re-election while garnering impressive support among moderates, Catholics, and suburbanites. In turn, candidates seeking to copy Clinton's success have won elections in swing or traditionally Republican areas by running as New Democrats.
But on another level, it appears that the national Democratic Party has not changed at all. Environmental, civil rights, and labor groups that oppose the New Democrat philosophy are still the heart of the Democratic base, providing candidates with money, volunteers, and crucial endorsements. The AFL-CIO played a large role in the 1998 elections, spending $20 million on
392 field organizers, 9.5 million pieces of mail, 5.5 million phone calls, and television ads to help Democratic candidates. In early 1999, the labor federation approved spending $46 million over the next two years -- the first time the group had not dismantled its political operations
at the end of an election cycle-- in order to help Democrats take back the House.
In addition, members and supporters of liberal constituency groups still constitute the vast bulk of Democratic Party activists. According to a New York Times/CBS News poll of delegates to the 1996 Democratic National Convention, three-quarters felt that government should do more to solve the nation's problems, whereas only about half of Democratic voters and one-third of all voters felt this way. Delegates were far more likely to support affirmative action policies than were other Democratic voters. About 33 percent were members of a labor union, compared with 13 percent of Democratic voters; 69 percent were college graduates, compared with 17 percent of Democratic voters. Interestingly, the delegates recognized the differences between themselves and Clinton: 43 percent described themselves as liberal, while only 8 percent described Clinton that way. Clinton's own pollsters found that the electorate also agreed with this assessment, with voters viewing the President as more fiscally responsible and more values oriented than the
party as a whole-- and, in general, viewing him more favorably than they did the party as a whole.
Finally, the party's liberal faction continues to be a dominating force among elected officials, especially in Congress. Clinton signed a welfare reform bill and a free-trade agreement over the opposition of most of the Democratic congressional delegation. In 1997, his effort to secure an extension of fast-track negotiating authority was killed by his fellow Democrats as well. Despite having more than 60 members, making it one of the largest caucuses in the House, the New Democrat Coalition's impact has been limited. The House leadership still does not have a recognized New Democrat in its ranks.
The challenge in interpreting the progress of the DLC is that all this evidence is preliminary. It is too soon -- even entering the final year of the Clinton presidency -- to know what eventually will become of the New Democrats.
Simply, the mere election of a president does not automatically transform his or her party's philosophy. Indeed, such a sudden change can occur only when there is a major national crisis, a critical election, and a massive voter realignment. However, the history of the DLC suggests that the election of a president can initiate a change in a party's philosophy, provided that the proposed alternative meets two criteria.
First, it must be operationally effective. That is, the philosophy must adequately address pressing societal problems and do so in a way that is in line with the core values of the country. Second, a philosophy must be politically effective. It must enable a party to win elections
and keep political power.
Of course, a philosophy can be operationally effective but politically ineffective. The emergence of a new issue concern (especially one that traditionally works to the advantage of the other party), a scandal, or just a sense that the other party's standard-bearer would be better at
running the country could lead to political defeat no matter how objectively successful a philosophy may be.
New Democrats can make a strong case that their philosophy has been an operational success. As the Clinton presidency draws to a close, the country has enjoyed the longest peacetime expansion of the economy in history, 20 million new jobs have been created, unemployment is at its lowest sustained peacetime rate in 41 years, the inflation rate is the lowest it has been since the 1950s, and the federal budget is in surplus. One poll found that 89 percent of those surveyed rated the economic conditions of the country as very or somewhat good. The crime rate is at its lowest in 25 years, and the number of welfare recipients has been more than halved. In foreign affairs, America is the lone, undisputed world superpower.
Despite all this, an electoral defeat sustained for any reason would aid the New Democrats' rivals in arguing that the party's philosophy must be abandoned, just as the defeats of the Democratic ticket in 1972, 1980, 1984, and 1988 lent credence to the New Democrat argument
that the party's liberal philosophy had failed and needed to be replaced.
The DLC and the New Democrats are vulnerable to such a defeat, since they are attempting to change a public philosophy without the benefit of a realigning event and without a mass or activist base. From the makeup of the delegates to the nominating conventions to the main
sources of campaign volunteers and funds, it is clear that the liberal faction and its constituent groups continue to predominate within the party. The liberals are still an important, if not vital, component in winning the party's nomination for office from congressman to president.
And with their dominance of the congressional party, they are also critical actors in constructing a governing coalition. Lacking this base within the party itself, New Democrats -- or a faction in either party attempting to change their party's philosophy -- require a sustained period of political success in order to truly remake their party and wed new groups to their coalition. No matter
how successful their philosophy may be, the party still matters. In the end, the New Democrats must embark on a "long march through the institutions."
The first step for New Democrats in this process is continuing their hold on the presidency. As the single most influential embodiment of the party, the president can use the "bully pulpit" to champion the new philosophy, attract new constituencies to the party's coalition, and recast the popular perception of the party. Similarly, politically ambitious Democrats could reasonably be tempted to imitate the successful president and begin to identify themselves with this ascendant point of view. As one commentator explained it, "If Walter Mondale
had won, everybody would look like Walter Mondale. But Bill Clinton won, and politicians go with what wins." Moreover, the president, as chief arbiter of the party agenda, dominates the process of defining problems and devising solutions. This control diminishes the market for policy ideas that diverge from the presidential paradigm, and would-be policymakers act accordingly. Even opponents of aspects of the new philosophy would have to address specific problems within the bounds set by these underlying beliefs.
Yet as already seen in the Clinton presidency, relying on one president or on retaining a hold on one branch of government is a risky proposition. Any number of factors could lead a president to stray from a stated course or could discredit a philosophy even if he did not. Furthermore, competing power centers held by the opposition faction could hurt the president's effort to redefine the party in the minds of voters. On one level, these power centers can make legitimate demands for political appointments and policy concessions. On another level, any disputes over these issues can make the party seem fractious and thus detract from the political, and even
operational, effectiveness of the philosophy.
Thus, a faction determined to change a party's philosophy must take the next step and enlist adherents to run for public office at the national, state, and local levels After winning the "head" of the party, a faction needs to shift its focus to transforming the parts that make up the "body" of the party, such as the activist base and elected officials. It must combine stable success at the top with mounting advances among the party's grassroots, activists, and elected officials.
The New Democrats apparently have begun this long march. The DLC has made training of a new generation of New Democrat leaders one of its primary objectives, continuing its efforts to work with and influence up-and-coming state and local officials. The New Democrat Network
has grown quickly, increasing its ability to fund New Democrat candidates for federal office, including those running in primary contests. Tied to NDN's success, the New Democrat Coalition in Congress has attracted many new members, turning it into a potential New Democrat beachhead in the House.
At the same time, the DLC's liberal rivals are not the only ones monitoring its success in transforming the Democratic Party's philosophy. Republicans who believe their party has grown out of touch with the general electorate and even with the Republican rank and file are eager to duplicate the DLC's success. Indeed, a group of Republican elected officials and benefactors has established the Republican Leadership Council to recapture the GOP's agenda from its right wing and replace it with a more mainstream platform in order to better the Republicans' odds in 2000 and beyond. Like the DLC, these "New Republicans" have impressive support among prominent elected officials (such as Govs. Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey and George Pataki of New York) and donors, but little representation in the House and virtually none at the party's grassroots. They hope that a New Republican-- or a "compassionate conservative" -- wins the GOP presidential nomination soon and saves a party that has lost the presidency twice and has seen its newly won hold on Congress weaken.
This parallel and eerily similar development in the Republican Party speaks to the efficacy of the DLC's efforts. It is an unintended endorsement from another faction shut out of party affairs of the New Democrats' attempt to change the public philosophy of the Democratic Party
through the presidency. But more than that, it points to a strategy for party factions to reassert and even challenge the hold that issue activists have had on American political parties for the last quarter of the 20th century. In this, the success of moderate groups in changing the public
philosophies of both their parties represents a counter-re-formation in American politics. After decades in which the parties have been unrepresentative of the views of their rank and file and of the general electorate and in which more and more Americans have ceased to identify with either party, the resurgence of factions eager to place their parties within the mainstream represents a step toward more responsible parties and a healthier democracy. It is an encouraging development in the ongoing American struggle to cure "the mischiefs of faction."
After 15 years, the New Democratic project has succeeded to the degree that one defeat will not destroy it. Capitalizing on political defeat and emerging socioeconomic trends, the DLC and the New Democrats have offered the most durable and sustained effort to oppose the dominant liberal faction of their party. Establishing themselves outside of the party, guided by able policy
entrepreneurs, and following a strategy that played to their faction's strengths, they have united the groups in the Democratic Party that disagreed with the party's dominant liberal philosophy into a potent intra-party force. Outside of the party, the New Democrat philosophy and policy agenda are now major factors in national debates on issues ranging from entitlement reform to
law enforcement to education. Moreover, the DLC's philosophy can attract swing voters in competitive districts and states, the key to any hope the party has for recapturing the House and Senate.
Ultimately, it is success in winning such offices, plus a continuing hold on the presidency, that will institutionalize the New Democrat philosophy further. And with each victory, it will be harder and harder to return to the liberalism that preceded it.
