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(Via Centerfield) How Can the Democrats Win?

Whether one agrees or disagrees with the analysis that Rick Perlstein puts forth here, this is a good read, just for the amount of coverage he provides to a central point in need of debate. That point being a healthy debate over the longterm future and meaning of the Democratic Party.

When social scientists render conclusions at odds with their own data, it is reasonable to wonder why. Again, one reason may be generational. Dissenters who do call for a bolder Democratic Party - one thinks of Robert Borosage of the Campaign for America's Future - are sometimes dismissed as throwbacks to the '60s. Well, I can't be dismissed as a throwback. The '60s ended when I was less than three months old. The traumas that shaped the world view of a Teixeira, a Greenberg, a Judis were the post-'60s backfirings of left-of-center boldness. The same goes for Al From, whose formative political experience, he has told me, was McGovern's loss in 1972. The traumas of my own political generation, conversely, were the backfirings of left-of-center timidity.

Allow me to state what I think is obvious: sometimes it is possible to retrace the steps of those before you in making the same mistakes one wishes us to make today. On that note, Rick Perlstein is, indeed, a throwback to the sixties.

Why?

Perlstein's analysis is that voters have rewards us, at least at the Presidential level, in spite of our move to the center, not because of it.

Why? Apparently by misreading the history of Presidential elections from 1984 to 1992:

When Al From sent out the memo to potential members announcing the formation of the Democratic Leadership Council in 1985 he blamed the Democrats? decline on "consistent pursuit of wrongheaded, losing strategies" such as Walter Mondale's "making blatant appeals to liberal and minority interest groups in the hopes of building a winning coalition where a majority, under normal circumstances, simply does not exist.? As a historian, I looked up the record. And what I learned was that Walter Mondale's grand strategy for his general election campaign was a promise to cut the deficit by two thirds in his first term through $92 billion of spending cuts and a tax hike. He also promised $30 billion in spending to restore some of Ronald Reagan's cuts in social services - the money coming from other cuts elsewhere.

Now I'm not sure what kind of strategy it would have taken to beat Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" in 1984. But deficit reduction surely was not it. Deficit reduction was also not a direct appeal to liberal and minority interest groups.

Cut to 1988 and the Dukakis campaign, the inspiration for the famous 1989 DLC monograph by William Galston and Elaine Kamarck The Politics of Evasion: Democrats and the Presidency, which argued that the Democrats had degenerated into "liberal fundamentalism." But the closer I studied the actual content of that campaign, the more I trusted the assessment of Sidney Blumenthal in his book on the 1988 election, Pledging Allegiance: "Dukakis's very inability to offer any definition of liberalism was taken as perhaps his most encouraging trait' by Democrats that year, he writes. "It was seen as an enormous shrewdness, a form of wisdom. Dukakis's politics of lowered expectations, his career of slashing budgets and tax cuts, made him seem a new kind of Democrat, a man of his time." Thus, under the slogan "This election is not about ideology, it's about competence," did Dukakis, incompetently, run. I'll buy anyone a steak dinner who can, without a trip online or to the library, come up with a single "liberal fundamentalist" program that Dukakis advocated that year.

And what about Bill Clinton in 1992? I once interviewed a liberal political activist who explained to me that the DLC loses every election but always manages to win the battle to interpret every election. It's an exaggeration with more than a grain of truth. "Bill Clinton would not have been able to win the election if he had not run as a New Democrat, addressing the problems of cultural breakdown, the perceived practical failures of government, and public doubts about the welfare state," the New Democrat historian and loyalist Kenneth Baer writes. As for cultural breakdown, any American who read a newspaper in 1992 knew that Bill Clinton had tried marijuana, violated the sanctity of his marriage vows, and dodged the draft. They voted for him anyway. And anyone who heard Bill Clinton speak during the 1992 general election season knows that a constant refrain was a promise of $50 billion a year in new investments in cities and $50 billion a year in new funding for education - and, what's more, a first hundred days to rival FDR's, culminating in the passage of a plan to deliver health care to every American. He also, of course, made noises about his toughness on crime, his commitment to beat down government bloat, his (vague) pledge to "end welfare as we know it." He made rhetorical flourishes about issues like school choice. But the argument that DLC talking points won him the election cannot be sustained. It would also be wrong to argue that nobody-shoots-Santa-Claus-style liberalism did it. It was Ross Perot who won the election for Clinton, taking away many votes that ordinarily would have gone to Bush. Bush, with the economy as it was, had the lowest approval rating of any president seeking reelection in history. My little mutt Buster could have beaten George H.W. Bush in 1992.

Where to begin here? I've got to go straight to that steak dinner bet and suggest to Rick that by standing passively by in his stronger abdication of the death penalty than in defense of his own wife (albeit in a theoretical situation), Mike Dukakis did, indeed, come across as a throwback himself. Its worth noting that, in many ways, Duke was a rather sufficient bridge to the New Democratic movement as it was borne out by Clinton, but being a bonafide Massachusetts liberal (he did, after all, admit to being a liberal late in the campaign) hurt him moreso than his timidity in accepting the label. Duke was the classic timid liberal, who sought to make the election about "competence, not ideology." The charge that he would have won (or that A Democrat would have won) had they not been so timid, was the very premise Kamarck and Galston levelled in their monograph.

Back to 1984. Anyone who remembers that election knows that Walter Mondale was not depicted as a "deficit reducer." He was exposed by Gary Hart in a primary debate when he could not think of a single difference he had with big labor, as a candidate of the special interests. When the famous line of his at the convention rolled off his lips, he was doomed as "just another tax & spend liberal." If Perlstein thinks that's a winning narrative, I've got history books to lend him.

I'll give him credit for reading Ken Baer's wonderful history of the DLC, however. But still ... damned if Rick doesn't find a way to misinterpret history. True, Bill Clinton's own involvement and representations of the countercultural 60s were a charge that those on the right felt were more of a representation than those on the center-left. But a closer reading of history will show such memorable policy stops on the campaign as his Sister Souljah moment in front of Jesse Jackson, taking a day off of the campaign trail to see to it that a mental retard was fried on the chair back in Arkansas and telling a working-class audience in New Hampshire that government wasn't the final answer to their problems and that free trade was not the enemy of their well-being. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure those aren't too far removed from the DLC playbook. There's also this TV ad that's worth noting if there's any doubt.

Whenever there's as much historical revision as Perlstein engages in, one must ask themselves "what does this guy know that everyone else doesn't." Sometimes, that's an answerable question. Unfortunately for Perlstein, this is not one of them. His central premise is as follows:

Let me clear the decks, and let me do it bluntly. There is a more elegant explanation for why the Democrats succeeded in every election of the 1990s but one. It is, simply, that the core Democratic message of economic populism appeals to people - despite, not because of, the Democrats' retreat from that selfsame message. And that the old '60s bugaboos no longer keep people from voting for Democrats because so many voters are too young to remember, or care.

Look, I'll agree with one point here ... with more and more voters coming of age after the 60s revolution (like Perlstein himself), there's an ounce of truth that some of "the old '60s bugaboos" may not work over the American voter psyche like they once did. Case in point: gay marriage. Not hard to imagine in the old days that a collective reaction would be to cast this issue in the mold of typical special interest politics. But voters today favor neither gay marriage (a stance from the far left) nor a constitutional amendment to bar it (a stance from the far right). Voters tend to have an innate sense of fairness and that typically drives them to the middle of most policy issues. This is no different. Civil unions have typically garnered substantial, even majority support. Gay marriage, still, has not.

But the truth that Perlstein seems to miss is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Voters (and other well-reasoned moderates/conservatives) still distrust anything that places more power (and/or money) in the hands of government. That's not a 60s bugaboo, that's a truism. When a problem is so apalling or monumental, we can suck up enough to shell out for it: war and extreme economic recovery, for example. But even during FDR's New Deal, people rebelled against the overreaching attempts on FDR's part.

Perlstein goes on to misread history by adding:

Now to point this out is to grant part of the DLC's point: that this is testament to Clinton's success in making the Democratic Party worthy of these people's trust again. But I'd like to call a witness on my behalf. His name is . . . Bill Clinton. "The more they believe that you're careful with tax money and responsible in the way you run the programs and require responsibility from citizens," the former president told The American Prospect in an important interview last fall, "the more the public in general is willing to be liberal in the expenditure of tax money .... The Democrats ought to all pocket some of the gains I made." To believe deep down that white, blue-collar voters might somehow slip back into an atavistic pining for George Wallace is to insult these voters and traduce Bill Clinton's accomplishment. The Democrats need to start trusting that their 1990s gains were real, and that people vote for Democrats bcause they're attracted to economic populism, not repelled by it.

OK, this is to the point where I'm inclined to give up believing Perlstein has any semblence of a point now. The notion that the DLC movement is to make the party closer to George Wallace-style rule is absurd (even after his apology). Perlstein obviously grazes over the concept of "being careful with tax dollars" in his haste to get to the "being liberal in the expenditure of said money." For one thing, it was a sloppy quote on Clinton's part given that in the past, he's stated something more clearly, such that people want to know that you can be a good steward of their tax dollars before you enact progressive policies with it (there's an exact quote in My Life which I may yet be motivated to relocate). Difference being that "willing to be liberal in the expenditure of tax money" is a poor definition of "enact progressive policies." Unfortunately for Perlstein, any attempt to steer the party to being liberal in expenditure of tax money will be met with bitter disappointment at the polls. Perhaps he should commisserate with Max Sawicky. Both seem to have grossly misidentified the role of the Democratic Party.

Perlstein's numbskull-simple grand theory:

So what's the alternative? What should the Democrats' consistent, long-term message consist of? I will avoid prescribing what it should be, other than to note that for reasons of history and structure it must tend to the work of economic equality. There are really two reasons to stay away from details. First, they would distract from the real point of this essay, which is not about programs but about structure. Second, there are lots of possibilities for programs, and it would be misleading to focus on some favored set. It could be universal single-payer health care. It could be free college education or universal pre-kindergarten or both. It could be a program to make the government the employer of last resort, putting the underemployed to work rebuilding infrastructure. It is not the work of a day, a month, or even a year to settle on what the course should be. I argue here only that there must be a course.

Why must these programs tend to the work of economic equality? One reason is structural (or "path-dependent," as the social scientists say): the modern Democratic Party's strongest store of cultural identity, of value built over time - its "brand identity," as the marketers put it - is in its work to producing economic equality. Abandoning it makes as much sense as McDonald's deciding to drop the hamburgers and remake itself into a chain of pancake joints.

Another reason is more simple - numbskull simple. Any marketing executive will tell you that you can't build a brand out of stuff the people say they don't want. And what do Americans say they want? According to the pollsters, exactly what the Democratic Party was once famous for giving them: economic populism.

I'm really at a loss for words after reading this part.

Look, the grand failure of the conservative movement has been that despite years of running the White House, after finally overtaking Dems in Congress, after so effectively shaping public opinion for many of the last 30 years, they're left with a public that still favors progressive means on issues that *ought* to work to the favor of Democrats. But the grand failure on the part of Democrats has been uncertainty on how to acheive those means. By the time that both I and Perlstein watch elected officials that we would both otherwise think as wise and sage spokespeople, the tendency is to view them as timid. Same view from two different perspectives.

And it doesn't help much when the people who should be carrying the torch for my perspective have yet to locate a messenger who can effectively communicate to a broader audience than merely the moderates themselves. Also doesn't help much when the beacon of the coherent left died in a plane crash in Minnesota.

Missed entirely in Perlstein peice is a worthwhile point noting that part of Clinton's success (if not all of it) was in his synthesis of the populist and moderate wings into a single compelling narrative, and hence ... candidacy. One of the things that works to John Edwards' benefit is that he hits the right notes to manage much the same feat. Lesson being that populism, to the extent that it divides us, rarely works ... but to the extent that it is a uniting message, it often works.

Perlstein proves for once and for all that one can have the right idea yet have the wrongest of answers. Guess it shouldn't be a shock that he writes for The Nation, then.