What now, little man? Second chance: Republicans hope President Clinton will veer drastically Left in his second term. But it's not going to be so easy - Cover Story

National Review, Nov 25, 1996 by Rich Lowry

The signal accomplishment of the 104th Congress was welfare reform. The bill's passage demonstrated that the country has moved irrevocably right and that even the Democrats have had to move along with it -- President Clinton, after all, acquiesced in ending the entitlement to AFDC! Or so GOP optimists have argued in an otherwise dreary election year. The problem is that the grand edifice of welfare reform sits on ground so soft it could gradually sink and be swallowed up, never to be seen again. A memo floating around the Clinton Administration from the Education Department demonstrates the bill's vulnerability to an array of administrative actions that are unlikely to garner headlines or stoke popular outrage but that could easily steal away the premier GOP accomplishment of the last two years.

The Education Department memo deals with what seems mind-numbing minutiae -- a provision in the welfare bill that allows states to count some vocational training as "work." The intent was to allow up to 20 per cent of those fulfilling the bill's work requirement to be in vocational training or, in the case of teenage mothers, in General Educational Development classes in high school. But the memo proposes a radically different interpretation: that up to 20 per cent of the entire welfare caseload can be in training or classes and still take credit for working. This would mean that states could fill the bill's work requirement without anyone's leaving welfare for actual work programs. Such an interpretation would gut the work requirement, and hence welfare reform, all with just a few tweaks of the regulatory machinery.

This is the kind of policy offensive Republicans expect from a second Clinton Administration: stealthy and small-scale, but consequential nonetheless. Republicans after November 5, no matter how many losses they sustain, will argue they have won what's most important, "the debate." Perhaps. But it may not matter. The Clinton White House, alongside its raft of tiny policy proposals, has one project that is grandiose: forcing a tectonic shift in American politics equal to Richard Nixon's energizing the "Silent Majority." Like Nixon, Clinton is operating in an era where he has to cede ground to his ideological opponents to survive. Like Nixon, he seeks to create a new governing majority from the center. If he succeeds, his legacy will be the "Clinton Republican" and a public that has enough confidence in government action that even "the debate" begins to slip away from the GOP.

In a year in which Clinton has said "me too" more often than an ingratiating little brother, his most important rhetorical shift was on the culture. Perhaps the defining event of the second half of Clinton's first term came when he phoned Ben Wattenberg, who had just written the book Values Matter Most, and admitted he had been wrong to stray from the social moderation of his 1992 campaign. With this, Clinton had made the first, crucial step to his comeback. Democrats lost in 1988 on the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance, and Willie Horton. In 1994, they lost on "gays, guns, and God." Clinton wasn't going to get beaten on these types of issues again. He reinforced his social moderation in ways big (signing the welfare bill) and small (endorsing the V-chip, school uniforms, and curfews).

Clinton won't be abandoning this -- mostly symbolic and usually hypocritical -- cultural conservatism any time soon. Nor is he likely to throw overboard his support of the balanced budget and his targeted tax cuts. These are the parameters established by the conservative victory in the intellectual debate: politicians have to be vague social conservatives, endorse a balanced budget, and oppose broad tax increases. That still leaves plenty of wiggle room, and Clinton maneuvers brilliantly within it. Republicans, on the other hand, accustomed to arguments over the big, framing issues, seem ill equipped to fight over the details. "We have to come to terms with the fact that he has learned to flourish in a political and intellectual environment that is largely hostile," says a high-level Republican official. "We've still got to learn to function in the same environment, ironically."

What does this mean for his second term? No one can say for sure. Much obviously depends on who controls Congress. And Clinton himself, if his first term is any guide, probably isn't sure what exact direction he wants to take yet -- a major push on education, a package for the inner cities, who knows? Huge staff turnover at the White House will contribute further to the uncertainty. But whether the Democrats retake Congress or not, pressures on Clinton from the Left will be considerable; labor unions, feminist groups, and the environmentalists have invested tens of millions in Clinton and the Democrats. The GOP hopes that some combination of their strong-arming and the "true" convictions of the Clintons will produce easily attacked liberal proposals from the Administration. Don't bet on it.