Values Statism: How Clinton is reviving liberalism - Republicans accuse President Clinton of returning to the era of big government

National Review, Feb 22, 1999 by Ramesh Ponnuru

President Clinton's latest State of the Union address has inspired two reactions among Republicans. The first is to accuse him once again of stealing their ideas (the latest loot being missile defense). The second, more prevalent, is to accuse him of returning to the era of big government (whose end he proclaimed in his 1996 address). These accusations are, one hopes, contradictory. And neither is likely to cause Clinton much trouble.

Clinton has not returned to big government for the simple reason that he never left it in the first place, except rhetorically. A review of Clinton's 1998 address-the state of the union was "strong" then too, by the way-gives the lie to the notion that he has suddenly lurched left to keep his base from abandoning him to the impeachers. Last year he called for expanding Medicare to cover 55-to-64-year-olds. This year he repeated that demand. Child-care subsidies? In both speeches. Ditto for the minimum-wage hike, the health-care "bill of rights," the linkage of free trade to international regulation, school construction, campaign- finance reform, and so on.

Spending hundreds of billions of dollars to retire the national debt may not be a good way of "saving Social Security," but it is a liberal policy only in that it keeps taxes from being cut (and, by reducing interest payments, allows for more spending on programs). Again, though, Clinton first used Social Security as a ruse to stop tax cuts last year. The only big new government power-grab-and it is, admittedly, really big-is Clinton's dead-on-arrival proposal for the government, rather than individuals, to invest a portion of the Social Security surplus in the private sector. The rest of his agenda, by comparison, was small change, e.g., a domestic version of OPIC, the international corporate- welfare program.

The salient difference between Clinton's agenda of 1998 and that of 1999 is that last year Monica Lewinsky kept him from promoting it effectively: His throat was stuck, for a change. Fending off all of his petty advances-his lots of little government-will be harder this year.

Take his five-point proposal for an Education Accountability Act. Clinton condemned "social promotion," the practice of promoting failing students to keep them with their peers and bolster their self-esteem. He said that poorly performing schools had to be turned around or shut down. Teachers should learn the subjects they teach (and implicitly not just education theory). "We must empower parents with more information and more choices," he said. And school districts "must both adopt and implement sensible discipline policies." To listen to this year's State of the Union address is to be reminded how conservative, really, this country still is.

Yes, Clinton is stealing Republican ideas; abolishing social promotion was a third of George W. Bush's platform last fall. But even more, he is stealing conservative themes. Using federal subsidies to cajole local districts and states into changing their ways is not a traditionally conservative policy.

But the public's conservatism is a conservatism of values, and it is heedless of which institutions implement it. If conservatives argue that no education policy, however sensible in itself, should be imposed on all schools by the federal government, the public will probably tune them out. Nor will they make much headway with the argument that any attempt to do so will be hijacked by interest groups and ultimately subvert conservative values.

Clintonism is often described as economic conservatism combined with social liberalism-William Kristol recently described it as "Wall Street economics and left-wing identity politics"-but the truth is closer to the reverse. As a matter of coalition-building, fealty to Wall Street on Federal Reserve, currency, and trade policy is easily the most dispensable element of Clintonism. The major advantage of these policies, besides their popularity with big campaign donors, is that they work. For the public, the results are more popular than the means. Nor has Clinton been a particularly ardent practitioner of identity politics: He opposed same-sex marriage and defended racial preferences mainly on integrationist rather than multicultural grounds.

Clinton's real innovation has been to marry a soft social conservatism with an expansive view of the role of government. Unlike Republicans, he starts by identifying a popular value-stability, work, family, etc.-and then devises a policy that seems to embody it. Here's a perfect example of values-statism from his speech: "Finally, on the matter of work, parents should never have to face discrimination in the workplace. So I want to ask Congress to prohibit companies from refusing to hire or promote workers simply because they have children." Mom-and-apple-pie meets EEOC caseworker.

Republicans tend to attribute Bill Clinton's success to his personal skills and not to this political formula. But it is quite possible that Clintonian politics can succeed without the Clintonian persona. It worked in California last year for Gray Davis, who became the state's first Democratic governor in 16 years. Republicans are saying that California no longer sets national political trends, but this too may be a delusion. The GOP's candidate, Dan Lungren, was considered strong because of personal attributes (as is Gov. Bush today). But Lungren campaigned on yesterday's issues, as if Davis were a soft-on-crime cultural liberal like Jerry Brown-which is like campaigning against Bill Clinton as if he were George McGovern.