I like Peter Beinart. I have a few problems with this column (hello, school uniforms was a strong moral stance!???), but overall, I think he makes some good points.
I know some here scoffed at me when I merely mentioned the existence of a "Lefty blogosphere", but since they have been getting a lot of press the past few days with the national conference they held, I feel redeemed.
The Democrats need to be careful with the "net-roots" folks. Just b/c you found a way to talk doesn't mean you shoulds be heard all the time, but I think the Left's ever improving ability to raise local cash will make it harder to turn these people away (Mark Warner, a moderate, spent like $75,000 to get these folks a chocolate fountain made out like a computer at their conference).
Anyway, should the Dems. return to "Clintonism", or is it Left is best from here on out???
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060619&s=trb061906
Good Old Boy
by Peter Beinart
Post date: 06.10.06
Issue date: 06.19.06
"Clinton's third way failed miserably. It ... delivered nothing." So wrote Markos Moulitsas, the most influential online activist in the Democratic Party, in the May 7 Washington Post. It's not an unusual view. In his wildly successful book, What's the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank says that, in the 1990s, Democrats committed "suicide." Among liberal activists today, the claim that Clintonism represents a failed model--which contemporary Democrats must reject--has virtually become conventional wisdom.
The case against Clintonism comes in two parts: one moral and intellectual, the other political. I'll tackle the first this week; the second next week. What unites them is a deep amnesia about the party--and the country--that Bill Clinton inherited. The attack on Clinton founders on one simple question: compared with what?
The moral and intellectual critique starts with the assertion that Clinton stood for little other than his own political survival. By draining the party of its core convictions, the critics allege, he left Democrats in the intellectual wasteland in which they find themselves today.
The charge ignores two small things: the 1970s and the 1980s. In reality, the Democratic Party didn't lose the confidence of its convictions when Clinton became president; it lost them when he was in graduate school. From Harry Truman through Lyndon Johnson, Democrats stood for three basic things: enlightened anti-communism, an expanding welfare state, and racial integration. Between 1968 and 1972, under pressure from Vietnam and racial conflict, two of those three collapsed. By 1972, George McGovern was urging the virtual abandonment of anticommunism and advocating racial quotas. Then, in 1976, Democrats nominated a relative economic conservative, Jimmy Carter, who showed little interest in extending Johnson's Great Society largesse. And, poof--there went principle number three.
From 1976 to 1992, each Democratic presidential nominee tried to put Humpty Dumpty back together, and each failed, until Clinton. Carter ran on character--as a decent, capable man who embodied the small-town virtues forsaken by Richard Nixon. And it worked--until economic recession and the hostage crisis stripped him of his reputation for competence and left him ideologically naked.
In 1984, the Democrats nominated Carter's vice president, Walter Mondale, who looked like a prisoner of the party's fractious, multicultural factions. While serving numerous parochial interests, his campaign never defined any broader national one. As one Mondale speechwriter admitted, "We had a hell of a time putting down on paper what this campaign was going to be all about."
In 1988, Michael Dukakis barely even tried. "This election is not about ideology," he declared. "It's about competence." And, when Lee Atwater shrewdly invoked cultural issues like crime and the Pledge of Allegiance, which required not merely technocratic solutions, but statements of belief, he crumbled.
This, like it or not, is the history that preceded Clinton. He did not create liberalism's crisis of faith; he inherited it. And, in 1992, he became the first candidate in two decades to offer a coherent response. His adviser Bill Galston called it the "politics of reciprocal responsibility." Government would provide opportunity, but it would demand responsibility in return; it would not give something for nothing. This idea--manifested in Clinton's pledge to "end welfare as we know it"--angered some liberals. But it told blue-collar whites that Democrats would distinguish between people who "played by the rules" and those who didn't. (Clinton's tough stance on crime sent the same message.) By the time Clinton signed welfare reform in 1996, the public's image of government was changing. When people thought of the beneficiaries of government help, they were more likely to think of people like themselves.
If Clinton convinced Americans that government action could be moral, he also convinced them that it could be responsible. By reducing the budget deficit, he helped restore the Democratic Party's reputation for economic stewardship, which had been gravely damaged under Carter. And, by using market mechanisms to achieve traditional liberal goals, he found ways to fight poverty in an environment where large new programs were politically impossible.
To be sure, Clinton sometimes bobbed and weaved. But these two principles--the willingness to make moral judgments (think of school uniforms or the V-Chip) and the recognition that social justice does not always require new programs (think of Al Gore's reinventing government)--were the most important intellectual innovations in the Democratic Party in two decades.
And they worked. Clinton's 1993 decision to cut the budget deficit rather than propose substantial new spending helped lay the groundwork for an extraordinary economic boom. And, unlike the boom of the '80s, Clinton's genuinely benefited the poorest Americans. Under Ronald Reagan, 50,000 children escaped poverty; under Clinton, more than 4 million did. During Clinton's tenure, income rose faster for blacks and Latinos than for whites, and faster for single mothers than for two-parent families. By 2000, black and Latino poverty were at their lowest levels ever recorded.
And it wasn't only the economic boom. Clinton raised the minimum wage, he created schip, which offered health insurance to children of the working poor, and he dramatically expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit (eitc). These initiatives rewarded work, and none required large new government bureaucracies. But, on the ground, they changed lives. When Clinton left office, the poverty rate was 11 percent. But, as Ronald Brownstein has noted, when you factor in government policies, especially the larger eitc, it dropped to 9 percent. During Clinton's presidency, the percentage of Americans living in poverty fell by one-quarter. And, without particular policies based on a particular vision of government, that would not have happened. Morally and intellectually, Clintonism wasn't a miserable failure; it was a success.
The same is true politically. But that's for next week.
Peter Beinart is editor-at-large at The New Republic.
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