Verbatim transcript from tape:
MR. AL FROM: We're going to see in a minute if we really have the magic of high technology, because otherwise Penn and I aren't going to be very interesting today. But let me before or as we're getting this technology set up, just thank all of you for being here at this national conversation. This is our sixth annual conversation. It is by far our biggest ever. And I want to particularly thank Harold Schaitberger of the International Association of Firefighters. You're going to hear from him in a few minute. But he has been chairman of the -- he's chairman of this national conversation and I just really want to thank him again for all his terrific work.
(Applause.)
We're getting closer, believe it or not. You know, this national conversation comes at a really fascinating time for us because it is a time when our public responsibility to be a loyal opposition, and our political interests really coincide. As Mark will show you in his poll and as I'll show you in this analysis, we have really -- this is a time where the United States, the country, demands leadership. And if we give it that kind of leadership that we can, the country and the Democratic Party will both benefit.
So this is a really unique time for us and it's very important as we meet over the next two days that we focus on our mission. Because not only -- you're going to hear a lot obviously about -- you're going to hear a lot obviously, and you have already, about the Bush record, and we'll give you some more. But it's also really important that we focus on our mission, which is to make sure we lay out a clear alternative. We tell people what we're for, not just want we're against.
Just one second, we're actually going to get this hauled up. Wow, look at that.
(Applause.)
Okay, now here's what I want to do. I'm going to call this security, opportunity, responsibility, a New Democrat formula for 2002 and 2004. Very quickly, I'm going to set a context. Mark is going to talk. We'll build on that and talk about a new poll that we just included last week.
Okay, what are we going to talk about? I'm going to talk about three things. First that we need to constantly modernize our policy ideas to keep pace with the rapidly changing electoral. Secondly, Republican policies have put America on the wrong track. That's our political opportunity. The third, and this is very important, Democrats need to look ahead and not back as we talk -- as we lay our agenda for 2002 and 2004. America is changing.
How has our country changed over the last two decades? It's more affluent. In the year 2000, there were more voters with family incomes over $75,000 than under $30,000. In using constant dollars, if we'd done that in 1980 it would have been six to one the other way. It's more educated, it's more suburban. After this redistricting, a postal majority -- there are already 160 super suburban districts in America, even before this redistricting. At least 60 percent suburbanized. My guess is after this redistricting we'll probably have a majority of suburban districts in America. It's more diverse.
When Ronald Reagan was elected, the country was 90 percent white, 10 percent black. There weren't even enough Latinos voting to make it onto the exit polls. Our projections are that in 50 years the country will be 52 percent white, 25 percent Latino, 13 or 14 percent African-America, 8 percent Asian. This is a different America, it's more wired.
Sixty-five percent, 64 percent of the people who voted last year -- or in 2000, regularly use the Internet. The patterns of work has changed. Most families now have two parents, both parents working. There are more non-factory jobs. My friend Mark Penn always likes to talk about we started the 1990s with 18 million factory jobs, we ended the 1990s with 18 million new factory jobs. We created 22 and a half million new jobs on our watch.
Those people are working somewhere. If you want to visit workers today you have to not only visit factory gates but you really have to visit suburban office parks. There's more job churning. Most people will have six or seven jobs in their lifetime, that's a great difference than when I grew up. It's getting older. In the 20th century alone, for those of you who were in New Orleans and heard Ken Dychtwald, we've increased life expectancy by 30 years. We hope we can continue at that pace. But the fact is America is much older.
But what we also have to understand, as America is getting older it is also undergoing generational change. And the New Deal era is dying out. That has enormous political consequences because the generations that are replacing it in the electorate, the baby boomers, the Gen-Xers have had very difficult political experiences. The New Deal era is an anomaly in American history because it's the only time in American history when people have looked to a strong federal government to solve their problems, and that's because the problems deserved federal response: a depression, a world war and at the end of the New Deal era, a civil rights movement.
But what have been the experiences, political experiences that have framed the political life of baby boomers? It's been Watergate, Vietnam. The most important economic experience was double digit inflation, all of which make you more skeptical of government. That's' why we have to constantly modernize it. And finally, politically what it means is the country is more moderate and more independent.
As Mark will show you -- you know, I always accuse him of bias, saying the questions on party identification to get more Democrats than Republicans, but no matter how much we bias it that way, it always comes out with more Independents.
Now, just a couple of quick demographics coming out of the 2000 electorate. When people were asked what economic class they were, 50 percent more said upper middle class than working class. That is a stunning conclusion. You say, well, what does it matter, it might not even be true. But the fact is, that is their perception and that's the way they think when they go into their voting booths. Seventy-four percent of the people who voted in 2000 had more than a high school education. Forty-two percent of them had either a college degree or postgraduate degree. As I said, 64 percent used Internet, 70 percent owned stock.
Harold Schaitberger will tell you if you go into a fire station now you're just as likely to see firemen watching the stock prices on CNBC as you are to see them watching the sports scores on ESPN. It is a different America. In the industrial era, working class voters dominated the voting. In the information age, what we call a rising learning class who's more educated, more affluent, more suburban voters, are the dominant force.
Now, what's our approach? New Democrats are the modernizers of the Democratic Party. What we do is take the grand traditions and the enduring values of our party and offer new and innovative ideas to further them. What are the traditions we honor? We honor Jefferson's belief in individual liberty and the capacity for self government. We honor Jackson's credo of equal opportunity for all, special privilege for non. We honor Roosevelt's first renovation and Kennedy's summons to civic duty, and finally we honor Clinton's insistence upon new means to achieve progressive ends.
We've broken that down into five core principles and most of you have heard these, but for those who haven't. We have to understand what we believe so we can move forward. We believe that opportunity is our first principle, and the way to have opportunity and to be an -- is to have a growing private economy. We believe our policies have to reflect the values that most Americans believe in, work and family and responsibility and freedom and faith and tolerance and inclusion.
We believe in John Kennedy's ethic of civic responsibility. Our social compact is grounded in mutual responsibility. The government has an obligation to help create opportunity for citizens, citizens have an obligation to give something back to the Commonwealth. We believe in the historic Democratic position of being for expanded trade and internationalism. You know, Smoot and Hawley were Republicans. Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley treaty.
It was Franklin Roosevelt who reinstated the free trade system to bring America and the world out of depression. Every Democratic president since Roosevelt, including Clinton, has moved for new rounds of trade. And finally we believe in government, we believe in activist government, we believe government should be modern for the information age, an empowering government that equips people with the tools to solve their own problems in their own communities.
We are Progressives. We are not Populists and we are not Corporatists. We believe, as we said in the Hyde Park Declaration, in free enterprise to stimulate economic innovation and growth, and in public activism to ensure that everyone can share in American prosperity.
Now, what has George Bush done? He has put America on the wrong track. He's stalled the job machine. As you can see, through the Clinton years we added jobs every year. We were up to -- jobs every year of 2.65 million. In one year George Bush took us down a million-and-a-half. Now he's changed the unemployment pattern.
As you can see, we started out at 7.3 percent in the Clinton administration. In January 2001 it was 4.2 percent. George Bush has gotten it up 5.9 percent. He can raise something but it wasn't the Dow, because as you see here, when Bill Clinton left office the Dow was almost at 11,000. Now I'm glad to hear, Bruce, that it's gone up 300 points today. There's nothing that I hope more than at the end of the year the Dow goes up so all of your investments do better, but it was down as of this morning to 8264.
And look what he's done to the deficit. When Bill Clinton took office we had a deficit of $290 billion. In 2000, his last full year in office, the last full Clinton budget, we had a surplus of $236 billion. In the year that was partially Clinton and partially Bush, Bush only had the last six months or eight months to reverse it -- he got it down to $127 billion but in his first full year of office, his first full Fiscal Year, the OMB -- this is his projection, not even the CBO's which will be higher -- is that we'll have a budget deficit of $165 million.
But it's not just the economy that he's done well at, that he can get up. He's got the crime rate up too. If you can look -- it doesn't matter which category of crime, overall, violent, murder, robbery, burglary -- under the Clinton years, every year crime went down. As you can see under the Bush year -- first year of Bush in office, crime went up.
Now, here's my little quick checklist of what's happened on their watch. Employment: Clinton up, Bush down. Stock prices: Clinton up, Bush down. Unemployment: Clinton down, Bush up. Budget deficits: Clinton down, Bush up. Crime: Clinton down, Bush up.
You know, this administration came in with the purpose of reversing Bill Clinton's policies, and they've done a damn good job.
(Laughter, applause.)
Now, it's not surprising that when you ask voters what their perception of the economy is, you saw in 1992 only 20 percent of the voters said that the economy was good or excellent. Well, we turned that into 85 percent of the voters when we left office who thought the economy was good or excellent. George Bush got it down to 49 percent. And, as Mark will tell you, the longer we go, the lower that perception is. Now, Mark will give you more on this but I just wanted to give you a sense of how much he's reversed the people's perception of the direction the country's gone. As you could see, back in 1994, people thought the country was going in the wrong direction and we paid for that in the election. But by the time Bill Clinton left office, by 65-31, people thought America was going in the right direction. It's only taken 18 months but we're back down to now more people -- and even with September 11th after which we had this great rush of patriotism that made people -- that I think have inflated the right track/wrong track numbers. But even after September 11th we're down now to where more people in March last poll, 46-40, believe that the country's on the wrong track than on the right track.
Now, I just have this up here because I think that -- and don't pay any attention to the specific numbers because Mark will give you the right ones, but this was just an interesting chart because what it shows is why Bush's approval ratings are inflated and soft, because if you can look at this what you'll see when they're very high it's because he gets high ratings from Democrats and Independents. Much higher ratings than he would ever get in an election, than his vote would be. And so his approval ratings are really inflated.
Now, what should Democrats do? The first thing is we can't go back. We have to follow a New Democrat course. You know, some I think would say we're past that. We've sort of redefined our party a little bit which is in big trouble. We can do things the way we always did. Well, you know, I'm not one who believes that. As we deal with things like this corporate scandal, we have to be tough and hard, but we also have to remember that people don't like government any more than they like big business. One of the big conclusions after September 11th is that finally we've changed the numbers on the confidence in government. That was frankly due to the work of the firefighters and the rescue workers and the police officers --
(Applause.)
-- and not really due to any government policy. And as you can see, in fact there is less confidence that the government will do the right thing most of the time now than there was when Bill Clinton left office. We had begun to reverse it, as you can see on this chart, down from 70 percent down to 56 percent who didn't have confidence in the government at the end of the Clinton term. Those are the exit poll numbers. But now, once again, after George Bush being in office, those numbers of distrust in government are going up.
And one of the things that has been constant and this is a thing that we pointed out consistently, is even as people's attitudes temporarily changed toward government, there was never a desire for larger government. And you can look at this chart, and it's really stunning because since 1996 there has not been a change, it's only varied one point one way or the other in every major survey, exit poll survey and current surveys -- I think these are New York Times numbers in the current numbers -- in terms of the size of government.
Now, one of the things that concerns me as we go into this year, and Senator Kerry just talked about how important it is for us to talk about national security. He is right. The images of the Democratic Party have started to revert to the pre-Clinton images of our being the mommy party, their being the daddy party, where on all the toughness to government issues, they have an advantage. On all the compassion to care issues, we have an advantage, and right now the deficit and education are sort of in the mix. But there's no reason, for example, and I hope this perception will change, that they should have an advantage on the economy but in all the polls during at least the first part of the year, they built that up. This is a bad formula for us.
It may not hurt us very much in the fall election because people frankly look to the Congress to be the institution that comforts, but it doesn't help you be a part of your national leadership to win the presidency. And in Mark's surveys we see a reflection of that. When you ask generic head to heads, they win the presidency, we win the Congress, we win governors. That's not a good bargain in the end if you want to be a national party.
And the final reason you can't go back is because -- if you look at the map. The red states obviously are the states that the Republicans have won in each of the last three elections. The blue states are the states that Clinton won twice and Gore won once. Those are the party bases. The green states are the states that are in play. And it's very hard to see how going back to the old ways, the old ways of our party would win any one of those states.
So what's the road ahead? Here's the New Democrat winning coalition for a New Democratic majority. It's the Democratic base and beyond. We've got to expand our bases. Mark will tell you, we just don't have enough Democrats if that's all we get. We have to win beyond our base. It's got to be men and women. You hear a lot about the gender gap and we sure want to win every women's vote we did -- we can't. But in 2000 Al Gore lost white women by a vote. We still had a gender gap, the problem is we just did so much worse among men. We can't afford to have the bottom fall out among men. We've got to win men and women.
This is a diverse country and we have to win with multi-racial and multi-ethnic coalitions. For a long time the Republicans could win the White House by only getting white votes. They're going to find that harder and harder to do, but we've never been under that illusion. We have to have multi-racial, multi-ethnic coalitions. We have to win both in the urban areas and in the suburban areas. As far back as 1992, this whole pattern changed when, in 1992 only 9 percent of the voters lived in cities over 500,000 population. We have to win moderates as well as liberals. This is not a matter of ideology, it's a matter of arithmetic. There are three conservatives for every two liberals in America. If they win the conservatives and we win the liberals we have to win 60 percent of the moderates just to tie.
And finally we have to build on that working class base of our party and win members of the rising learning class, and Mark Penn will tell you how to do that better than anybody can.
Now, as we look to 2002 and particularly to 2004, what does a Democrat have to do? You've got to cross the national and domestic defense threshold. That may not have been important before September 11th, but after September 11th the American people are not going to vote for a party for national leadership that they don't think will keep this country safe.
We have to close the culture gap. I haven't talked about this today because that was the focus last year. But we can't lose everybody who owns a gun, we can't lose every cultural conservative because there are too many of them. That doesn't mean we should in any way compromise our positions but we have to be tolerant of people who differ with us on cultural issues. We have to avoid reverting to those pre-Clinton perceptions. To me the most important thing in doing that is having a strong, growth oriented economic program.
We have to bridge racial divisions. In some of the urban elections this year we've seen a split between the -- including here -- the Latino and the black communities or minority white splits. We can't afford that because, as I said, we need multi-racial, multi-ethnic coalitions. And finally we have to win those critical independent and swing voters.
Now, what New Democrat message will do that? It's the message we've been talking about here today. Support a strong national and domestic defense. Promote growth and opportunity, not redistribution. And as we deal with this corporate crisis, as we come down as hard as we can on the corporate wrongdoers, on the corporate criminals, we need to understand that we still have to be about growing the economy because that's the key to opportunity in our country.
We have to save capitalism from its excesses. I told President Clinton last night Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt saved capitalism from its excesses in the depression and we all benefited because of that. I think President Clinton, in his modernization of government, saved progressive government from its excesses. Well, now we've got to save capitalism from its excesses again.
We've got to promote an ethic of mutual responsibility. We have to emphasize New Democrat positions on cultural issues like crime and welfare that cut so strongly for us. We have to stand for big ideas and not big government. We don't have to be big and bureaucratic in our government but we have to be big in our purposes and our ideas.
And finally we have to support family friendly policies -- this is actually not finally -- we have to support family friendly policies that help parents raise kids. I don't know how much Mark will talk about this today but, you know, when President Clinton was ridiculed in 1996 for talking about what a lot of people in the press called small bore ideas like family leave and curfews and V-chip and no smoking in schools, he was the only Democrat in the last quarter century to win married people with kids. And finally on cultural issues, and Mark Warner will talk about this tomorrow, we have to avoid polarizing those issues, polarizing language. So what's the formulae in brief? It's leadership in the natural interest, security, opportunity, responsibility. And you know what, that's the theme of our conference.
Thank you very much.
[...]
MR. MARK PENN: Let me thank you very much and let me just say that I'm really totally in sync with Al From in terms of what the message has to be. And I think -- what I want to do is take you back a little bit here to the 1996 election and then bring you up to 2002, because it really is a continuum in terms of how DLC message principles have been successful and what we need to do for the future.
First of all, I always like to remind people that in November of 1994, Clinton favorable was at 35 percent, so that's how far Clinton came back through 1995 and through the State of the Union in 1996. And then from then on, on his favorable, he leveled off and his job rating also leveled off. But a lot of people wonder what were some of the key things that really were important in the repositioning from November of '94 to 96. And the key principles were pretty straightforward.
Economic optimism was number one. We have the strongest economy in 35 years. When he said that in the State of the Union no one believed it, and then everyone went to check and they said, yes, we did. We put in a values orientation. Not only opportunity, responsibility and community, but protecting our children and honoring our parents became critical values that families could see that the president stood for. And he went back to a willingness to tackle issues that helped elect him in '92, tax cuts, welfare reform, crime, balance budget.
And he adopted the idea that some of the bite-size changes like family and medical leave, whether school uniforms or the war on -- or school uniforms and many of the other individual, educational and children-oriented programs really showed that as we moved one step at a time towards these great goals, people understood the kinds of changes he was putting through. In the end he created more jobs than the entire new deal, but he did it step-by-step.
We expressed public values through policies. When they'd look at something like the family and medical leave, it essentially enumerated the policies and values behind it that valued families, and a strong end to class-warfare rhetoric. This was critical in letting middle and upper middle class people put their guard down about both the president and Democrats in general. And so at the time, we went back and we divided the electorate into what we called swing 1 and swing 2 voters.
Swing 1 voters favored new programs for aging parents, Patients' Bill of Rights, raising the minimum wage, strengthening the family leave, banning smoking and advertising for kids, protecting Social Security, Medicare and education. Those were all policies that particularly swing 1 voters really favored by 80 and 90 percent. We also found that there was another category of voters right after that that favored all of these things too but they also wanted to see a balanced budget, tough crime measures, welfare reform and tougher trade policy with Japan when we were polling at that time.
And we said, you know, the way we're going to win this election, we're not going to get every swing 1 voter, we're going to get probably two out of three. And if they also understand our policies on some of these issues that is not only about expanding education, it's also about balancing the budget at the same time and getting our values and priorities just right, then in fact we could get one out of three of the swing 2 voters, and so that's how the messaging really worked in the '96 campaign to produce the kind of results that you saw.
And the swing 1 voters were really the soccer moms that you heard about, typically suburban women, socially progressive, strongly pro-choice, family centered, not as sensitive to fiscal issues, really concerned about what the president was going to do for the economy and the family. Swing 2 voters were typically their husbands, fiscally conservative. We had another subgroup, grumpy old men or seniors that we decided that in the end of the day I should remove them from the chart because they were unreachable in many ways.
But we went after the border states middle income, practical, responsibility?oriented voters and we were successful in that at the end of the day of achieving our target of two-thirds of the swing 1 voters and a third of the swing 2 voters in order be across the finish line by a large margin.
I think if you look at 2000, the first thing it says is when you go back and you think about the campaign rhetoric, they really limited the appeal to swing 1 voters. They took another strategy and said, well, if we could get 100 percent of the swing 1 voters maybe we'll win that way, and I think in that sense that's how we got more votes than we needed, not necessarily over the line in a lot of the right places. Key centrist issues took a backseat to the populous rhetoric and won enough votes, more than enough votes to win the election, but lost key border states that Clinton won in '96.
So when you look back at it, we kept the soccer moms. If you go back, we built in the soccer moms that when we polled in '95 we were losing by 15 or 20 points, we kept them in '96, we kept them in '98, we kept them in 2000. But the office park dads went the other way. By two to one in the last month of the election, office park dads essentially broke for Bush in that last month of the election, while their spouses were breaking for Gore, resulting in the dead heat that we came out with instead of an overwhelming electoral victory.
So the first thing I have to say is, well, take a look again at the office park dads. They broke for Bush, they're about 15 percent of the electorate, they tend to live in suburbs, to be independent, to be 25 to 15 on union, they own stock, they're in two career capitals, their ideology's moderate, and they're very concerned about fiscal responsibility and pocketbook issues. They're extremely concerned today about their 401(k)s, about their corporate leadership, about their futures. So if you can appeal to this group in a non-populous way, in an opportunity way, you can go from a dead even country, 49/49, to back to having a seven or eight point edge, both in politics across the country. And there's more opportunity to go after these voters I think than ever before.
In fact, when you look at 2000 and beyond, first I think as Al pointed out, we're seeing massive lifestyle and demographic changes. When you're looking at candidates for president you say do they understand the America of today? Did the last presidential debates really talk about stem cells, terrorism, corporate fraud? Did they really understand the issues that were likely to be important or were they really talking about the older issues? I think any successful presidential candidate has got to say hey, what is happening, what kind of lives are people living? We've also seen in the last six months 180 degree change in voter mood. We've gone from the satisfied voter to the anxious reform-minded voter, and that's a fundamental seachange from where voters were in 2000 where frankly more are saying would have been their number one choice. And we have a president who's like an Internet stock just before the bubble burst: high ratings but no earnings.
(Laughter.)
And over time here, they're going to focus on the earnings and say where are they. But winning will take more than wishing for a Bush fall. It takes seizing the future and targeting the fastest growing electoral segments. I won't go through again all the changes that Al said, but a couple of changes worth nothing that you've seen in the last 10 years -- more voters own stock now than have a full time job. Sixty-six percent own stock, 53 percent have a full time job. So whereas attitudes towards the economy were always 100 percent created by the unemployment rate, today the stock market has a real and measurable impact on how people view politics.
We've got the best educated generation in American history. More than half now go to college. It's the majority expectation that my children should go to college. Voters are increasingly knowledge workers, almost no growth in manufacturing jobs. Most working households have two jobs and the majority of families with kids have both spouses working. And this has resulted then in substantially more affluence within most households. Better educated, two career couples pushing the median income to $60K for families with kids. We can't be talking with families with kids just to the $35K households, we have to look at what's really going on here.
And seniors, they're not FDR seniors any more. They're Reagan seniors. Most of the seniors see Reagan as the president who is their archetype now and not FDR. And as Al pointed out, the Reagan seniors are living longer than ever. We've got new diversity and the Hispanic vote has grown from 2 to 7 percent and the biggest party is essentially no party.
Now, these changes bring opportunities. Speaking to downscale manufacturing, non-college educated workers and FDR voters is the past. It can't possibly put together a majority coalition in this country as these changes grind on. In addition, you've got to talk to the fastest growing segments: soccer moms, office park dads, and success oriented Hispanics is critical. Hispanics are an aspiration group and have no political history, by and large they've never voted for anyone anywhere. And recognizing at the same time the renewed desire for reform and change that are brewing in the last 18 months.
So let's take a look at a few of the numbers. As you notice, essentially on September 11th 71 percent thought the country was on a right track. Today that's down 40 percent. If we were sitting in the White House looking at these numbers -- as I said we'd be looking at our high ratings and we'd be worrying that now more people think the country is going in the wrong direction while the president is the leader than think it's going in the right direction.
Now, when you look at the economy, it's seesawed back and forth but it's nowhere near the 66 percent it was when Clinton left office. It's now at 58 percent wrong track and only 35 percent right track. The Bush job approval has remained at 76 percent. But as I said, right now it's artificially high, driven by an experience where they value what he did on 9/11 but where they're beginning to question what is he doing on everything else. Most important problems: economy and jobs, fighting terrorism. We're substantially losing the vote that considers fighting terrorism number one. We're about even in the vote right now that considers economy and jobs as the number one issue.
Interestingly their concern about the economy now, and it gives you some insight into their increased feeling of security, is not about losing jobs number one. It's about availability and cost of health care number one and their retirement or their stock market funds. It's a whole different language from when President Clinton ran on the economy and it was jobs, jobs, jobs. Today it's all about economic security, health care and retirement and secondarily they're looking for jobs but they think they're a lot more confident now that they can find a job, the question is: is that job going to really provide the tools that they need to make their families succeed?
As a result, the congressional horserace, despite some of these changes, is still almost dead even at 40-38. There's a very large number of voters sitting out there that are undecided and the Democrats right now are hanging essentially evenly with the Republicans. One of the reasons why is that there is more fear of the Democratic Party as trying to raise taxes. Fifty-one percent would say, "Do you think Democrats want to raise taxes or not?" Thirty-five percent say no. And there's less fear that Republicans want to starve the federal government of the resources it needs for Social Security and Medicare.
So President Bush has been out there helping to improve the image of the Republican Party because only 32 percent think they want to starve the government and 59 percent no long see the kinds of things in the Republican Party that they saw in Newt Gingrich: starving Medicare and Social Security. That's why this race, despite 35 percent saying the economy is on the right track, is still dead even.
If you look at some of the key voter groups, Catholics, right now we're up 10. Soccer moms, we're up 9. White women generally we're up 7. If you look down at the bottom, among the Hispanic vote we're down 9 in the congressional generic. Now, we have a small sample but consistently now we have it even or even down a little bit saying that a lot more work needs to be done with that fast growing segment. And down at the office park dads, well, they're where the soccer moms were when we started in 1994. They don't feel that they're really included in terms of opportunity and growth.
Despite all the high ratings, a powerful question we have, and it's getting more powerful, is do you want your representative in Congress to be someone who'll be a check on Bush or someone who'll vote right down the line with Bush? Despite those 76 percent ratings, by over 2:1 they want to check on Bush. It's the only way that they think that they're getting a corporate responsibility bill or an education bill or any other kind of decent bill out of Congress is because we have a Democratic majority in the Senate or other houses. They see that -- and this could be a powerful argument coming down the pike here of what would happen to this country if in fact it was an all Republican Congress with Bush in the White House and what he would sign.
We see in the party perceptions that we're very strong on the environment, on health care, on Medicare, on strengthening Social Security. The core issues remain our core issues. Getting the economy growing again despite some of these economic problems, we're still at a negative 12. Strengthening the military a negative 39 and a negative 40 on fighting terrorism. Which is why, as Al From just said, if you don't cross the bar of being strong enough on how you're going to fight terrorism and national security, you're not in the game.
If you look at our office park dads as an example, they're with the Democrats as I told you before on the environment, on access to health care, on Medicare. Where they drop off is on responsibility, giving something back to the country, taking people from welfare to work and on getting the economy growing again. Exactly those swing 2 issues that were a vital part of the Clinton message that are dropped out of the Democratic Party message. And so as you evaluate each speaker you've got to say have they reached over to appeal to the same kinds of voters as President Clinton did?
Now, if you look at we then traded off Democrats in Congress versus Bush, and again the Democrats win on these issues of the environment, of quality access to health care and Social Security but, boy, they lose by 40 points when you get the office park dads on welfare to work and getting the economy growing again and maintaining fiscal discipline. So even though he has resulted in enormous deficits, we still haven't crossed the line into a message that these voters hear as essentially security, opportunity and responsibility. In fact, when you look at the messages of opportunity we have a plus 28 over on opportunity, a plus 21 on community and a negative 20 on responsibility. And it's critical for us to win not just one or two of these values but all three of these values.
Now, what's the opportunity for someone running for office today to reverse these trends both on the issues and values? Well, it's because America has fundamentally changed in the last couple of months. They want some reform. They want to see reform in corporate America, they want to see renewed reform in health care, they want to see an overhaul of the tax system, they want to see reform in security and intelligence. Do you think that the new economy -- workers of the new economy are getting the kind of protections they need or are these protections inadequate? Seventy-three percent say they're inadequate. Because it's no longer about the 40 hour work week, it's about the 401(k). It's about the right rules for new workers and having a sense of who's going to provide them in their office park right now is where it's at.
And frankly, they see a lot of return to greed. Do you think recent problems in corporate America stem from a lack of morals and greed or bad oversight? Corporate greed, 74 percent, 18 percent lack of oversight. They also want tax reform. What we've allowed to happen here is the debate on taxes has been there for cutting them, Democrats are for raising them. That's really not the debate we should be having. The next presidential candidate, again as President Clinton did in '92, needs to have a middle class tax reform program, needs to be talking about reforming the code and changing the system, not just raising or lowering them.
And if you thought that America was satisfied with where we are in the FBI and the CIA, 70 percent say we need a major reform in the FBI, the CIA, the INS. It's not a matter of creating new initials, it's about making all of these initials work effectively to protect America. There are real and growing doubts here. And there's even a disconnect, and Bruce has done some extensive work on this issue, between the FBI and the CIA fighting a war on terrorism and not using the local police forces, which are essentially what Americans see as really the everyday defenders in their homeland.
When it comes to healthcare, 56 percent now say that everybody has to have access with reasonable fees. They're not for universal access without responsibility but they are for universal access with responsibility and they are for keeping the growing costs of healthcare down and for preventing a situation where people who lose their retirement savings find that they also lose their healthcare.
So all this comes to kind of where we are in message principles. We're entering the time where you can expect the party to be more aggressive, where Bush has got some real vulnerabilities. We have to caution not to turn against class-warfare and the old issues but to move forward with a message about the future. We ran for the first time a message on Bush that the more they see of President Bush, the more they have doubts. The economy and stock market are sliding, no clear strategy on the war on terrorism. The administration doesn't have the moral authority to take on the problem of CEOs.
Now, for the first time we have a message that 55 percent are now less likely to vote for Bush as a result of the message, and we even got a fair number of the office park dads with a negative message on Bush for the first time, indicating his underlying vulnerabilities. We also tested a series of positive messages. We took the current Democratic message, we took the message advocated by other segments of the Democratic Party, and frankly none of those messages did anywhere nearly as well as this message that would focus this party on the future, a party that -- a country that needs new approaches to make sure that America remains peaceful and prosperous. That opportunity is available with a strong defense in creating opportunity for college and skills and training and investing in research and technology.
Now, we ran a lot of messages, more than I have time to review here but will hand out. But very few Democrats are really talking about the future, the way John Kennedy did, versus the past and the older issues. And really what this says is that the person who's going to take on Bush and win is going to be the person who can understand and talk about the future. So the conclusion, we need to reach out to the two new swing -- basically we have to reach out to swing 2 voters, the office park dads.
We have to appeal to growing, not just shrinking segments of the electorate, and that essentially means reaching out to the learning class, as Al says, and to the growing voter block of Hispanic voters who are not safely in the Democratic column by any means, and are looking to see how their families are going to go to college and succeed in this economy. We've got to once again tackle basic issues, security, taxes, ongoing welfare reform. If you don't hear a candidate talking about all of these issues, including crime, then he's -- and they're only talking about traditional Democratic issues, they're not going to reach over to the other half of the electorate that has stood firm the last few times they've gone to the polls.
And finally, Bush and the Republicans are increasingly vulnerable. But to win, they need a message that not just takes them on, that isn't just negative, but that really starts to build in the substantial program of reform that for the first time again since, I think, 1992, Americans are really looking for. So that's the public mood and where the electorate's going.
Thank you very much.
Blueprint Keywords: Extra New Majority
