Values Matter Most

How Republicans, or Democrats, or a Third Party Can Win and Renew the American Way of Life

Ben J. Wattenberg

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781439138427
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Published in tandem with his upcoming PBS special of the same name, the eminent political commentator argues that the parties' stands on social issues such as crime, welfare, and morality will decide future elections. 25,000 first printing.

VERIFICATION

WHY CLINTON AND
THE DEMOCRATS ALMOST
BLEW IT, OR DID

So that was the state of play with respect to the social issues—the most important issues we face—when the Democrats, with the best of intentions, began their presidential transition after the 1992 election.

For the first time in sixteen years the Democrats had pulled off the political hat trick: a Democratic president, a Democratic House of Representatives, and a Democratic Senate. In addition, a majority of governorships were in Democratic hands, as well as a huge majority of the big-city mayors, and an apparently permanent majority of state legislators and state legislatures. Other than the fizzled Carter term in the late 1970s, it was the first all-Democratic moment since Lyndon Johnson left office in early 1969, almost a quarter of a century earlier.

Democrats were ecstatic. Gridlock was broken! Finally, things would get done! Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a distinguished historian of Democratic persuasion, saw a new Democratic cycle of activist government. Some seers even knew the details of how this activist progression would work out: eight years for Clinton, eight years for Gore, eight years for Hillary.

And why not? Clinton had just amassed 370 electoral votes to George Bush’s 168 and Ross Perot’s zero. Clinton had captured 43 percent of the popular vote, a nice six-point margin over Bush’s 37 percent, with Perot getting 19 percent. Exit polls showed that if Perot had not run, Clinton would have picked up about half the Perot vote, thereby maintaining his margin. Shortly after the election, Clinton’s approval rating was in the neighborhood of 62 percent.

Then something happened. As had been noted before, and will be noted again, Democrats were devastated. What happened? Such a dramatic electoral turnaround would usually be associated with a suddenly tough time in the economic realm or perhaps an unpopular war. But the nation was at peace in 1994. The economy had improved markedly since Clinton took office.*

The good economy during the 1994 election cycle tends to verify what has been said here several times: Economics isn’t the only game in town, and it may not be the most important one, either tactically or substantively. The economy was healthy, yet the in-party got trounced.

Some verifying evidence about the primacy of the values issues in 1994 has been presented earlier, in chapter 6 and in the Indicators preceding that chapter. Consider now the work of Fred Steeper, a veteran Republican pollster who analyzed the only two national exit polls taken on November 8, 1994, one by Voter News Service and a second by Mitofsky International. Steeper writes:

[The results] … strongly suggest that the old paradigm of the parties as aggregations of economic interest groups has been eclipsed by the politics of shared cultural values. Many, if not most, of the cutting issues of today defy an interpretation based on economic self-interest.

Accordingly, Steeper sees the formation of a new Republican party based on noneconomic factors:

When a new party system emerged in our past, it was because a new set of unresolved concerns came to the fore, commanding at least as much voter attention as the older issues. Violent crime, a permanent welfare population, and lagging student performance have led many to conclude there has been a breakdown in important traditional values such as personal and family responsibility, self-reliance, individual merit, and religious principles. Specific cultural issues such as capital punishment, school prayer, abortion, illegal immigration, gay rights, and affirmative action, together, form a new continuum in our politics.*

In the fall of 1994 pollster Lance Tarrance asked respondents: “What is the biggest issue facing the middle class?” The number one response was “declining moral values.” Republicans were seen as much stronger than Democrats in promoting morality (42 percent to 26 percent) and individual responsibility in society (43 percent to 29 percent).

If values mattered most in the election of 1994 and the Republicans won big in 1994, then it is plausible that the Democrats must have done something wrong about values from 1992 to 1994, or the Republicans done something right, or both.

The Democrats certainly had first crack at the issue. President Clinton campaigned on that no-more-something-for-nothing platform. He could have pursued the high goal of “Nixon-to-China,” that is, the presidential art of gently convincing his own party, that it has been wrong on an issue. Clinton could have been Nixon-to-China on social issues. He could have been Clinton-to-Crime, showing Democrats that thugs must be incapacitated by means of long sentences. He could have been Clinton-to-Welfare, showing Democrats why it was necessary to break down the incentives for out-of-wedlock birth. He could have been Clinton-to-Education, showing Democrats how to devalue the funny money in education and go to standards-tests-consequences. He could have been-maybe-Clinton-to-Affirmative Action.

Clinton and the Democrats could have shown America how to break up the something-for-nothing state. Did he? Did they? They had control of government; they are the ones who can be judged. (Republicans may well get their turn in the dock soon.)

I have neither the space, nor the inclination, nor the knowledge, to write a plenary history of the first two years of the Clinton presidency, from election day 1992 to election day 1994.* I propose here to explain what happened in the values realm, and what happened regarding some important items that touch on that realm. Put that way, it’s still not plenary, but it turns out to be plenty.

The most important of those items related to a values agenda concerns personnel. A president’s first acts are ones of appointment. The question to think about is: Who will run the government? After all, in the high reaches of the executive branch of government, only Clinton and Albert Gore were elected. Just about all the rest were appointed, by Clinton.

It is a truism of life in Washington that there is always “a battle for the mind of the president.” Less attention is paid to the idea that victory in the battle of ideas often depends on the political and ideological nature of the battlers. Liberal advisers give liberal advice. Hence it is true, as the saying goes, “Personnel is policy.”

A president does not sit in splendid isolation making decisions by checking the “yes” or “no” box on a memo. Nor is it as simple as having honest brokers presenting policy menus with three or four neat options. Who are the brokers? What do they believe about how the world works? Who calls them on the phone? Whose phone calls do they answer? Whom do they call for guidance? Most specifically in this context: Are they “New Democrats” or “Old Democrats”?

Party warfare, party warriors. New Democrats? Old Democrats? For almost three decades it has been said that there was “a war for the soul of the Democratic party.” That intramural combat in the Democratic party did not end with Clinton’s election.

The labels describing the feuding factions have changed over the years, in an often amusing and convoluted way. The Democratic split goes back at least to 1968, when the terms of polar disendearment were elemental, if not precise. There were many highly publicized “antiwar” Democrats, a few publicly professed “prowar” Democrats, but lots of “anti-antiwar Democrats.” There were “pro-Johnson” Democrats and “dump Johnson” Democrats. After LBJ decided not to run, there were “pro-Humphrey” Democrats and “dump the Hump” Democrats. There were “Bobby” Democrats and “Clean for Gene” Democrats (for Senator Robert Kennedy and Senator Eugene McCarthy). There were, somewhere, a significant number of “John Connally Democrats,” but they were mostly unreported on by the national press. There were also lots of unreported-on “George Wallace Democrats” or “George Wallace ex-Democrats.”

There were also garden variety liberal, moderate, and conservative Democrats. But with President Johnson vigorously engaged in Vietnam and vigorously pro-civil rights, even those simple labels could get confusing.

Gradually a term entered the vocabulary that seemed to capture the spirit of the fray: the New Politics. Who supported the New Politics? Most were Democrats of the left who had signed on to most of the liberal guilt-peddling. Typically, they hailed from the cause movements of the time: antiwar, civil rights, environmentalist, consumerist, and feminist.* (Gay rights activists openly came on board somewhat later.)

Who, within the Democratic party, opposed the energetic New Politics left wing? There were many players with many gradations of views. Most vigorously, the labor unions were “anti-New Politics” and “anti-McGovernite.” Indeed, the AFL-CIO, under the leadership of the late George Meany, did not endorse George McGovern’s 1972 presidential bid against Richard Nixon. Given the tight linkage of labor with the Democratic party, that was a remarkable political repudiation.

A “Scoop Jackson wing” of the party formed, allied in many ways with the anti-New Politics and anticommunist views of the labor movement. I am familiar with this part of the political spectrum due principally to a small organization that I co-founded and later chaired, the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM), which started up in late 1972 after McGovern’s defeat. (And drifted out of existence in the mid-1980s.)

Among the principal political personages during the early life of CDM were Senators Henry Jackson, Hubert Humphrey, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Representative Thomas Foley, a former Jackson staffer and then a young congressman from the state of Washington.*

To follow the label game, it is interesting now to recall that CDM sought to help shape the climate of ideas in favor of what were then called “Traditional Democrats.” But the New Politics liberal Democrats became ever more powerful within the party. Young Vietnam-era activists matured and sought public office. Some won. After a while some of them, not us, were being called traditional Democrats. In the Democratic party parlance, “traditional” had become “liberal.” Thus, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, once a leading exemplar of the New Politics, is now often cited an exemplar of a traditional labor-liberal Democrat, which Republicans would call a “big government liberal.”

The struggle for the soul of the party has continued over the decades, but the labels seem to migrate like geese in winter. Liberals continued to gain influence in the party, but they lost national elections because voters didn’t like what liberalism had come to stand for. Attacking the “L word” became standard Republican practice. So, in camouflage mode, liberals began calling themselves progressives. That, for example, was the word associated with the 1976 presidential candidacy of Representative Morris Udall, a liberal Then in 1984 and 1988 the P word was used by the Reverend Jesse Jackson to describe his own very-left spot on the spectrum.

And now what? Well, the newest incarnation of those who reject—yes, reject—the New Politics Democrats are called—believe it or not—“New Democrats”! That makes it “New” versus “New.” It’s a little silly, but that’s the way it is. The central clearinghouse for the new New Democrats is the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). Its related think tank is called, ironically enough, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI). That also makes it “progressive” versus “progressive.”

Enough of labels. The point is this: There has been a fight, the labels change, the fight goes on. It has not been an idle or sterile fight. The stakes have been huge: influence within the oldest and (until 1994, at least) the most powerful political party in the world, in the oldest and most powerful democracy in the world, the only true superpower in the world, whose culture, including its political culture, is a model for the rest of the world.

To keep things simple here, I shall, following the most familiar contemporary label usage, call the two arguing teams “New Democrats” (the right wing of the left-leaning party) and “liberals” (the left wing of the left-leaning party). Occasionally, liberals will be called “Old Democrats.”

The DLC was set into motion during the 1984 Democratic convention in a San Francisco hotel suite at a meeting of New Democrats. It was clear to most of the participants that although the brass bands were playing for Walter Mondale in the Moscone Arena, he and his party were seen as too liberal to be elected.

The DLC was formed to change that sort of politics. The group was soon attacked by liberals, who denigrated it as the “southern white boys’ caucus.” But it grew and evolved, and it developed a coherent set of beliefs. The DLC stressed the themes of opportunity, community, and responsibility. It called for “empowering” citizens, not “entitling” them. It looked for market-oriented solutions not governmentally based ones. It sought to “reinvent” government, and sometimes to cut it. It promulgated the idea of a “third way,” to succeed liberalism and conservatism, which was necessary because, as candidate Clinton said on the stump, both parties were “brain dead.” The DLC did not shrink from defining itself by its adversaries; DLC president Al From often calls his Democratic opponents “liberal fundamentalists” or occasionally even “liberal Ayatollahs.”

In terms of a list used earlier in this book, the DLC understands what happens when a party is perceived to be in favor of vagrancy, murderers, crime, promiscuity, drugs, pornography, and quotas and perceived to be against the neighborhood school, single-family homes, work, prayer, merit, and Christmas.

The DLC is an interesting group. Most of its members who are elected officials are moderates or right of center in the Democratic party. Some elected officials, however, who joined the DLC were from the mildly liberal side of the spectrum (apparently seeking political cover from a straight L-word affiliation).

An early member of the DLC, and later its chairman, was Governor Bill Clinton. He helped shape the DLC philosophy, and in turn was shaped by it, ran on it, and won on it. So it came to pass that the DLC became the measuring rod of whether President Clinton was governing as a New Democrat or whether he was reverting to traditional New Politics special interest liberalism.

I repeat two thoughts: (1) the fight within the Democratic party is old, ongoing, and sometimes bitter, and (2) personnel is policy. If Clinton had hired and properly employed his DLC shock troops to reinvent the Democratic party then the idea of Nixon-to-China, Clinton-to-Liberals would have been off to a good start.

He didn’t.

What went on regarding personnel in the first part of the Clinton administration was no case-by-case accident nor easily remediated after the fact. Those early appointees shaped the policy that was to come and will probably continue to shape it, although perhaps to a somewhat lesser extent.

Under the rubric of picking an administration that would “look like America,” a remarkably rigid demographic quota system to fill jobs was quickly established. Blacks, Latinos, and women were hired for preordained slots, even when apparently better-qualified white males sought appointment. It got tough, and nasty. Within the administration, jobs were described as earmarked for “a skirt.” There was infighting among the quotees. “Non-Hispanic white females” complained they were losing out to “twofers,” that is, black or Latino women.

Apparently, in some instances the quota mentality extended to sexual preference as well. There was this story:

When the head of one of the transition teams that shaped policy for Bill Clinton asked the White House recently why it had not offered him a job in the new administration, the reply was baffling.

“Your transition team had no OGs and this is considered unacceptable,” he was told. Translated, the message was clear: because his team included no openly gay men, he was judged unwilling to encourage diversity in government.*

At one point Clinton angrily denounced the “bean counters” who were pushing him. In fact, his administration was handing out beans by the bushel. President Clinton gave an excellent imitation of President Quota.

At first glance, quota mongering may not sound like a policy initiative or an ideological thrust beyond the realm of group preference itself. But it is. Of course, there are women who are liberals or moderates or conservatives. Of course, there are blacks who are liberals or moderates or conservatives. So too with Hispanics. But when, in the Democratic party, people are picked because they are women, blacks, or Latinos, they are much more than likely to be swinging from the activist liberal side of the plate. (Insofar as there is a gay quota, the same idea applies.)

Alas, there were no quotas for moderate Democrats, or conservative Democrats. Appointees chosen because they look like America do not think like America.

Why did this happen? A major player in the Clinton White House was Hillary Rodham Clinton. She was not only the main enforcer of proportional picking i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• CONTENTS
• FROM THEN TO NOT QUITE NOW
• WHAT IT’S NOT
• WHY THESE VALUES MATTER MOST
• VERIFICATION
• HOW TO WIN AND WHY
• EPILOGUE
• Appendix “WHY I’M FOR CLINTON”
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INDEX