Clinton Rewrote Democrats’ Agenda, but Will He Put Business to the Test?

Maybe the second term that President Clinton begins today will be defined by debilitating scandal. Or a historic rapprochement with China. Or a breakthrough agreement with Republicans to balance the budget and reform entitlement programs.

But whatever happens in the next 48 months, in one important respect Clinton’s legacy is already set. In his two presidential campaigns, he has modernized the message of a Democratic Party that had lost its ability to effectively compete for the presidency. After a quarter-century of Republican dominance, Clinton has put the Democrats back on the field in national politics by steering the party beyond indulgent cultural positions forged in the 1960s and a reflexive defense of government rooted in the 1930s. That struggle to free the Democrats from outdated thinking has demanded more political courage than Clinton is usually credited with.

But confronting your own party is not the only definition of courage. Nor was it the only kind of courage Clinton promised when he first sought the White House.

To build a party that stood with “people who worked hard and played by the rules,” Clinton in 1992 pledged to challenge not only the Democratic elite but also the economic elite. As much as he promised to demand personal responsibility from the poor, Clinton in his first campaign also pledged to enforce corporate responsibility in the penthouse.

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On that front, Clinton has almost entirely lost his voice. Today in talking to business, he is more likely to exhort or encourage than demand or censure. Having muted his critique of the market, he’s allowed the political debate to collapse into alternative visions of reforming government. That’s a necessary discussion. But not one sufficient to produce the kind of society--an America “growing together instead of apart”--that Clinton says he wants for the new century. Unless he recaptures his broader vision of responsibility, Clinton may find many of his goals out of reach.

The fading of Clinton’s challenge to business stands out even more starkly against the intensification of his challenge to the Democratic base since 1994. On such issues as welfare reform, balanced-budget efforts and the tension between fighting crime and protecting civil liberties, Clinton has risked confrontations more pointed than he dared in his initial campaign.

Democrats are bound to spend much of the next four years arguing about whether Clinton has conceded too much ground to Republican priorities--or, conversely, as some centrists believe, has been too timid in reforming government. Both sides can find cause for their indictments; Clinton has been too protean to entirely satisfy either. But it’s difficult to dispute that, overall, Clinton has broadened the appeal of a Democratic agenda that had grown dangerously marginalized on many issues. On crime, welfare, identification with mainstream cultural values and management of the public’s money, Clinton has led the party out of the prisons it constructed for itself in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the 25 years before Clinton’s nomination, the GOP not only won five of six presidential elections, but averaged more than 416 electoral votes and swept up millions of the working- and middle-class voters Democrats claimed to represent. As Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg wrote in a recent paper, “The Democratic Party forged during the 1960s” was “marginalized during the 1980s . . . as a big-spending and big-taxing party, indulgent with criminals and welfare cheats, and indifferent to the needs of the hard-working middle class.”

Clinton wasn’t the only Democrat who understood that problem, but he was the one who broke through to capture the nomination on a platform of confronting it. It is easy to forget how much resistance Clinton’s initial New Democrat agenda--with its calls for welfare reform conditioned on work, expanded free trade and enforcement of the death penalty--provoked from liberal forces. At a January 1992 meeting of the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, audience members even questioned whether Clinton’s identification with “the forgotten middle class” was a code word for racism.

For all his compromises and contradictions, Clinton has made a historic contribution to his party by shouldering past those misguided concerns to again identify Democrats with basic cultural values like work, personal responsibility, the primacy of the two-parent family and common standards--ideas that resound across lines of race and class.

The political payoff was evident in last fall’s election, when Clinton not only suppressed Democratic defection to minimal levels but reclaimed voters across the entire middle class. That showing underscores Greenberg’s conclusion that “the Clinton presidency has laid to rest many of the lingering doubts of the ‘60s.”

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That, however, was only one of his goals four years ago. In his 1992 campaign, Clinton offered a panoramic critique of American society: He promised to defend the middle class not only against a government elite that didn’t share its values, but an economic elite that didn’t value its interests. In his October 1991 speech announcing his candidacy, he pointed his message of responsibility both up and down the income ladder: “It’s important to remember that the most irresponsible people of all in the 1980s were those at the top.”

When was the last time Bill Clinton said anything like that? From the outset of the administration, Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin and other advisors discouraged such populist language, and after business opposition overwhelmed his health care plan, Clinton’s attitude has largely been to let sleeping dragons lie.

It may be, as Rubin thought, inappropriate for a president to use such divisive language about any group. But in more measured tones it’s entirely appropriate for Clinton to apply the same standards of responsibility to the corporate elite as he does to the needy.

Clinton doesn’t entirely give business a free ride. But he picks his targets very carefully--tobacco companies or insurers who force new mothers out of the hospital too quickly. And on most fronts he’s more likely now to urge voluntary improvement than to demand change--an option, one could note, not offered to time-limited welfare recipients.

With little money available for direct federal action, Clinton’s reluctance to confront business denies him opportunities to advance his goals. Clinton is trying to encourage employers to hire welfare recipients through tax breaks and subsidies. But he could pump much more money into inner-city neighborhoods by expanding the Community Reinvestment Act--which requires banks to invest in communities where they operate--to include insurance companies, mutual funds and other financial institutions now exempt from its provisions.

On health care, Clinton’s hope of mandating that all businesses insure their employees proved a bridge too far. But, as House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) has proposed, Clinton could encourage broader health (and pension) coverage by offering legislation to limit large federal contracts to firms that provide such benefits.

Even more immediately, as Princeton University sociologist Paul Starr suggests, Clinton could help millions of health care consumers by pushing a health-maintenance organization bill of rights that would require greater disclosure of financial incentives and more freedom to use doctors outside the plans. Likewise, Clinton could buy himself more money to pursue his “public investment” agenda by targeting corporate subsidies and tax breaks.

Clinton couldn’t win all of these fights; but even if he only opens a dialogue, that could furrow ground other politicians (Vice President Al Gore, for one) might later harvest. Even amid skepticism about government, polls show substantial support for an agenda that demands more responsibility from business. The real question is Clinton’s willingness to shoulder the risk.

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There’s plenty of reason for skepticism: Clinton was always cozy with the Arkansas oligopoly, and as the last campaign demonstrated, he remains entirely comfortable collaring huge sums of money from powerful interests. But no one has ever accused Clinton of lacking agility in revising his course. And he couldn’t find a better way to dig out from the suspicions about that avalanche of campaign money--and to broaden a political debate now too narrowly focused on the deficiencies of government--than to once again challenge the boardrooms as forcefully as he has confronted the baronies of his own party.

The Washington Outlook column appears here every Monday.