Table of Contents

As campaign 2000 unfolded, it was widely assumed that Vice President Al Gore would run the third straight presidential race on the New Democrat themes that he and Bill Clinton rode to victory in 1992 and 1996. But the Gore campaign often looked and sounded like a throwback to the doomed Democratic campaigns of the 1980s, replete with vintage class warfare themes and narrowly tailored appeals to constituency groups. This backsliding from reform-minded centrism to interest group liberalism was a key factor in turning a race Gore should have won handily into a virtual tie.

To be sure, Gore voiced some key New Democrat themes: preserving fiscal discipline by paying down the national debt, support (though heavily qualified) for expanding trade, and a commitment to vigorous U.S. global leadership backed by a strong military. By last September, however, those themes had been overshadowed by Gore's business-bashing "populism" and a laundry list of poll-tested programs and promises aimed at specific slices of the electorate. Often these proposals had merit; seniors really do need a prescription drug benefit. But the campaign's inability to articulate any sense of public purpose larger than the expansion of government for the benefit of favored groups also reinforced George W. Bush's charge that Gore was really a big spending liberal -- "Mondale with a surplus," in the tart description of one observer.

Where Clinton had spoken to broad middle-class aspirations and values, Gore framed his appeals to particular group interests. The Gore campaign Web site invited visitors to select from a list of interest or identity group affiliations, so that they could be steered quickly to custom-tailored proposals for that group. Campaign scheduling also reinforced the interest-group oriented message. Gore's unmodulated performance on the stump fed the damaging public perception that he "would say anything" to get elected.

The point here is not that Gore should have shunned the party's most loyal constituencies. No Democrat can win without their support, and no one can argue they did not do their job in 2000. But in an era of political parity, Democrats cannot build electoral majorities by narrow appeals to traditional constituency groups. To build a new progressive majority, Democrats must appeal both to their base and to new constituencies -- wired workers, Gen Xers, suburban women and independents -- on the basis of crosscutting ideas and values.

When the Gore campaign finally hit upon an overarching theme, "fighting for the people, not the powerful," it had a contrived feel. It's the sort of line campaign consultants love because it gets a strong response in focus groups. It didn't appear to grow naturally out of Gore's political biography or a considered analysis of the structural inequities of American capitalism. Indeed, Gore's combative "populism" was jarringly out of sync with a population basically satisfied with the country's direction and heartily sick of partisan warfare. It was also confusing: When an incumbent with a strong record adopts the rhetoric of an insurgent, he gives the impression of running against himself. "The biggest problem," lamented one Gore campaign aide, "was that our message didn't fit our policy."

After all, the strongest argument for a Gore presidency was the one that most voters already agreed with: America had made great progress on the Clinton-Gore watch and continued to move in the right direction. Gore was instrumental in shaping the policies that helped restore fiscal discipline, spur the emergence of an explosively inventive New Economy, produce the longest and strongest economic expansion in memory, reduce violent crime and welfare dependency, and create a relatively stable international environment in which American interests and values have rarely been more secure. In the end, the strength of these fundamentals came achingly close to overcoming an ill-conceived and ill-executed presidential campaign. But not close enough -- and Democrats who wonder how victory slipped from their hands must now assess the costs of that failure.

In exchanging a winning New Democrat message for a faux populism and narrow appeals to interest groups, the Gore campaign lost the political ground his party had gained during the last decade along five critical philosophical dimensions: the role of government, economic opportunity, civic responsibility, mainstream values, and security.

Big Government vs. Enabling Government

Bush's success in hanging the albatross of "big government" around Gore's neck set back efforts by New Democrats over the last decade to identify their party with a less centralized and bureaucratic model for public activism. Clinton famously declared that "the era of big government is over," and Gore himself led the administration's "reinventing government" initiative that produced the smallest federal bureaucracy since the early 1960s.

On the campaign trail, however, the vice president offered few new ideas for reforming government and plenty of proposals for expanding it. Take education, a top public concern in 2000. Voters are dissatisfied with the quality of public education and strongly support national tests, ending social promotion, and other measures to raise student performance. While Democrats usually dominate the issue, exit polls showed the party had only a modest 52 percent to 44 percent edge over the GOP on improving education. Bush gained ground by blurring differences: He too called for more federal aid to schools, although considerably less than Gore. Crucially, however, he stressed holding schools accountable for lifting students to higher standards and narrowing the achievement gap between poor and middle-class students.

Of course, many of Gore's spending proposals were popular. And voters gave him the advantage on most of the individual issues they deemed important, from preserving Social Security to debt reduction to prescription drug benefits. But the cumulative impact of the Gore message was to lend credence to Bush's criticism of the vice president as both a big spender and a defender of the status quo in government.

Social Security offers a case in point. Since Social Security has traditionally been a "third rail" for politicians -- touch it and you die -- Bush took a considerable gamble in proposing that workers be allowed to use part of their payroll tax to create private savings accounts they control and own. The vice president rightly took Bush to task for failing to tell voters how we would make up the Social Security revenue diverted to private accounts. But Gore's attempts to paint "privatization" as a mortal threat to Social Security proved less persuasive. Voters favored private accounts by a solid 57 percent to 39 percent margin, prompting pollster John Zogby to remark that "the third rail has been broken."

When asked which candidate would demand more accountability from government as well as more personal responsibility, voters picked Bush. Among Bush voters, 41 percent cited his philosophy of smaller, better government as the main reason for voting for him. Voters believed Gore held the more traditionally liberal view that the government's role is to protect people and solve problems for them rather than the New Democrat view that government should equip people with the tools to tackle their own problems.

In the end, Bush's anti-government populism trumped Gore's anti-corporate populism. For Democrats, the lesson is clear: More spending may please the party's pro-government constituencies, but the broader public also expects structural reforms to improve government's performance. To restore public confidence in progressive government, progressives must be unrelenting in their determination to revive government's capacity to solve problems.

Class Warfare vs. Economic Growth

The Democrats' biggest political achievement of the past decade was restoring their reputation as the party of economic growth and expanding opportunity. After a decades-long detour into the politics of wealth redistribution in the name of "fairness," Democrats finally rebuilt their credibility as the party of sound fiscal and economic management and general prosperity.

Yet Gore failed to frame the 2000 debate as a referendum on the nation's remarkable economic progress. And he undermined his own comparative advantage on economic issues by reverting to old class warfare themes that villainized U.S. corporations and cast working families as victims. One problem with this strategy is that most Americans don't feel like victims. According to Penn's Poll, 79 percent of the public thinks the economy is headed in the right direction and a solid majority says they are better off now than they were eight years ago.

The limits of class warfare were evident in the Gore campaign's attack on the centerpiece of Bush's economic plan, a $1.3 trillion tax cut over 10 years. The vice president rightly pointed out that the Bush plan would perversely redistribute wealth up the income scale. But Democrats should have been equally concerned with the plan's likely economic impact. Prominent economists from Alan Greenspan on down warned that a massive tax cut could promote consumption rather than investment, overheat the economy, fuel pressure for interest rate hikes, leave America saddled with large debt servicing costs, and gobble up most if not all of the projected fiscal surplus -- in short, put screeching brakes on the long-booming economy and hit the middle class right in its wallet.

In the end, Gore's "fighting for you" populism may have thrilled upscale liberals, but it failed to sway the voters to whom it was primarily aimed: white working-class men and women. According to liberal political analyst Ruy Teixera, Bush won white working-class households with incomes of less than $75,000 a year by 13 points, and noncollege whites by 17 points. Gore also lost among the "wired workers" who now make up fully a quarter of the electorate and who are decidedly more upbeat about the nation's economic prospects.

The emergence of the New Economy has been the biggest story in America in recent years. But it was conspicuously absent in the campaign debate. It is especially surprising that Gore shied away from the subject, since no national leader has peered deeper into how technology is reshaping our economic lives and the social implications of these changes. New Democrats should embrace the New Economy, which has generated strong productivity and wage gains in the last five years and is beginning to reverse the two-decade trend toward growing economic inequality. To build electoral majorities in the future, the party must appeal to New Economy entrepreneurs and knowledge workers who have little use for the old left-right debate and are looking for a political home.

Entitlement vs. Civic Responsibility

Civic responsibility was another key New Democratic theme that went absent without leave in 2000. In the late 1980s, New Democrats called for a new balance between citizen rights and responsibilities and advanced national service as a way to revive the slumbering spirit of civic obligation. Clinton carried the theme into the 1992 election, promising an end to government policies that offered "something for nothing" and challenging citizens who receive public benefits to give something back to the community.

The politics of civic reciprocity -- of expanding opportunity while also demanding more personal responsibility -- shaped not only Clinton's AmeriCorps national service plan, but also his plan to "end welfare as we know it." It said that public assistance should not be a permanent entitlement but an earned benefit conditioned on peoples' willingness to work and contribute to the common pot. This shift from welfare paternalism to mutual responsibility helped to realign Democrats with most Americans' understanding of the social bargain. It also helped Clinton win the presidency twice.

In the 2000 race, however, Gore seldom invoked the ethic of civic responsibility or challenged Americans to do anything but receive new blessings from government. An emblematic moment came during a presidential debate, when a single, 34-year-old woman asked the candidates what their campaign proposals would do for her. Gore responded with a lucid litany of new programs from which the questioner might benefit -- though no one thought to ask why she needed government's help in the first place.

Looking ahead, Democrats must recapture the themes of civic reciprocity and self-reliant citizenship. One way is to call for a dramatic expansion of national service, so that more young Americans can be exposed to opportunities to serve their communities in return for college aid. Another is to focus more on the contributions that civic and faith-based institutions can make in solving our social problems -- a theme Gore broached in a thoughtful speech last June but seldom returned to in the general campaign.

Mainstream Values vs. Cultural Relativism

From Richard Nixon in 1968 to the elder George Bush's 1988 campaign, Republicans practiced a brutally effective wedge politics that divided the New Deal coalition, pitting working middle-class voters against liberal elites and minorities on such issues as crime, affirmative action, family breakdown, welfare dependency, and sexual permissiveness.

New Democrats set out to realign their party with mainstream social and cultural values. Styling himself a "different kind of Democrat," Clinton in 1992 called for replacing welfare with work, stemming the tide of teen pregnancy and out-of-wedlock births, and reinforcing the police in their "unequal struggle" against crime. He backed abortion rights but disappointed pro-choice absolutists by saying that abortions should be "safe, legal, and rare." On the inflammable issue of race, Clinton also struck a moderate tone. While championing diversity, he dispensed with the old language of racial victimization. Speaking in black churches in Memphis in 1993, Clinton memorably argued that society's moral obligation to help poor minority communities "from the outside in" must be matched by a revival of personal responsibility and moral leadership from "the inside out." He spoke more candidly than liberal politicians about the scourge of juvenile crime and family breakdown in black communities. Acknowledging that racial and gender preferences sometimes go too far, he promised in 1995 to "mend, not end" affirmative action. The shifts on crime, race, and other polarizing issues, along with New Democrats' stress on personal responsibility, helped to realign the party with mainstream moral sentiments. By 1996, Bob Dole's attempts to resurrect the old hot button issues fell flat.

In 2000, however, Gore's rhetoric often evoked the stark divisions of the past. Where Clinton had a fine ear for nuance and acknowledged voters' ambivalence on issues like group preferences, abortion, gay marriage, and gun control, Gore tended to draw bright lines and deploy "us vs. them" invective. Gore's social liberalism may have helped him with some voters but appears to have hurt him with white men, whom he lost by 24 points compared to Clinton's 11-point loss in 1996. Voters also saw Gore more as a liberal than a moderate; in fact, he was seen as more liberal than the Democratic Party itself. Gore's positions on social and cultural issues probably cost him dearly in the 11 states that he lost in 2000 but that Clinton won in 1996, including West Virginia, Arkansas, and his own home state of Tennessee.

Rather than take sides in the cultural wars, Democrats should seek common ground based on shared civic values. Rejecting both the right's coercive moralism and the left's relativism and identity groupthink, the party should embrace what scholar William Galston has called a "tolerant traditionalism" that respects differences while honoring mainstream values of work, family, individual responsibility, and self-reliance.

Personal and National Security

Finally, there were two notable exceptions to the Democrats' advantage on specific issues: crime and national security. In fairness to Team Gore, the Republicans seem to have begun the 2000 campaign with a built-in advantage on these concerns, the legacy of decades of GOP "get tough" rhetoric on crime and support for high levels of defense spending, as well as Clinton's uneasy relationship with the military. Although crime and defense were less salient in 2000 than in previous elections, the GOP's lock on white men is no doubt linked to its image of strength on these prototypically "masculine" issues.

Nonetheless, the Gore campaign could have made a stronger case that New Democrat innovations aimed at preventing crime have been more effective than the GOP's traditional fixation on punishment after the fact. The Clinton-Gore administration's "100,000 cops" initiative not only put more police on the streets, it also carved out an important new role for Washington as a catalyst for innovative law enforcement strategies such as community-oriented policing. By combining a no-nonsense approach to criminals with commonsense efforts to foster cooperation between the police and communities to tackle conditions that breed crime, the New Democrat approach helped break the political deadlock between "root cause" liberals and "lock 'em up" conservatives.

While Republicans can no longer credibly accuse Democrats of being "soft on defense," they evidently enjoy lingering if unearned credibility on questions of national strength and resolve. After all, it was Gore, not Bush, who possessed sterling credentials and wide experience in Clinton-Gore diplomacy and the great national security debates of the past two decades. Yet Gore declined to exploit his huge comparative advantage, rarely addressing international issues on the stump to the consternation of his foreign policy team.

Democrats must avoid the trap of treating national security as a natural GOP issue and the military itself as a Republican interest group. That would only deepen an already wide chasm between the mores of the professional military and the society it defends. Moreover, GOP military policy since 1994 has been an unwholesome mix of pork barrel politics and "go-it-alone" unilateralism that demands huge investments in unproven national missile defense systems and opposes international efforts, like the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, to stem the proliferation of nuclear weapons and missiles. In contrast to the GOP's cramped and insular nationalism, Democrats should embrace a progressive internationalism that combines energetic U.S. global leadership with unequivocal support for a strong military capable of projecting power around the world.

Generating Ideas for a New Progressive Majority

Government's role, economic progress, civic responsibility, mainstream values, and personal and national security -- in these five areas Gore failed to build on New Democrats' success in modernizing the party's governing agenda and occupying the "vital center." Instead, Democrats seemed to revert to type -- and lost an election they should have won.

Above all, Democrats need to take two lessons away from the fumbled opportunity of 2000. First, the party must not return to the micro-politics of the 1970s and 1980s, in which it subdivided its message to woo a myriad of cause-oriented activists and interest groups. Second, to be competitive in today's evenly divided politics, Democrats must remain intellectually dynamic. They must be the party of new ideas to equip Americans for the challenges of the New Economy, not guardians of the old economic order.

This of course will cause friction with traditional constituencies that fear economic and political change. But, as the Clinton-Gore success showed, those frictions are manageable. It's better for the party to have an honest and respectful debate than to unify behind worn-out ideologies, obsolete programs, failing public systems, and interest group litmus tests. New Democrats' task after 2000 is the same as it was before 1992: generating new ideas for advancing the party's enduring values -- ideas for a new progressive majority.

Will Marshall is president of the Progressive Policy Institute.