Clinton in clover

National Review, Dec 14, 1992 by Daniel Wattenberg

WASHINGTON, D.C.

IS BILL CLINTON going to govern as a New Democrat after all? It's still too soon to tell, but moderate, DLC-type Democrats like what they've seen so far. Naivete? Remember that in 1976, Scoop Jackson Democrats, the immediate ideological ancestors of the New Democrats, had high hopes that Jimmy Carter's hawkish campaign rhetoric would translate into some key appointments. What did they get? As Elliott Abrams memorably put it, "One ambassadorship. Not Indonesia. Not Polynesia. But Micronesia."

In the spring of 1991, I interviewed Bill Clinton (chairman of the DLC at the time) in Baton Rouge, where he and DLC President Al From were opening a Louisiana chapter of the organization, Eastern Europe had been liberated, Gorbachev was still in power, and Clinton was contemplating a run for the presidential nomination. I asked him whether he believed that Ronald Reagan's security policies--the military build-up, the Reagan Doctrine, the anti-Communist rhetoric-- deserved credit for the collapse of the Soviet bloc. And he said: "I think it had something to do with it . . . The kind of system they tried to have in Eastern Europe just doesn't work very well in the world we're living in, and as soon as the people found out just how terrible it was and what their alternatives were, it was more or less doomed. But I think precedent to that you had to have the willingness of the Soviet Union to let it happen in Eastern Europe, which I think was at least in part a function of their own internal problems, but those internal problems were certainly aggravated by the enormous stresses we put on them because of the military build-up. They had to match what we did .... And also the rhetoric of rolling back Communist regimes, changing the preconceived notion that once you go Communist you can never turn it back, which Reagan had something to do with, played a contributing role ... Reagan's policies ... certainly accelerated the trend."

He gave Reagan more credit, I remember thinking, than George Bush had up to that time. For a guy flirting with a Democratic presidential campaign it was pretty gutsy talk. And it's worth keeping in mind in evaluating centrist Democrats' optimism about the way the early transition is unfolding.

It is still very early, and announcements of the ten or so people who will head up department and agency reviews will make things much clearer. When Mickey Kantor was busted by a coalition of Clinton campaign staffers as broadly trans-ideological as the anti-Saddam coalition, his elaborate pre-election plans for a transition that would start naming people almost the day after the election were discarded. As a result, the transition clock was wound back by about two weeks. Now, Clinton is running his own transition, and there are noises out of Little Rock that he intends to decide what his policies are first and then pick people to carry them out. If true, this could mean that Clinton is serious about ideological renewal and sensitive to the danger of mechanically filling slots with job-hungry members of Washington's liberal establishment.

Moderates are very encouraged by Clinton's choice of Al From as the transition's domestic-policy director. After making the party platform a manifesto of Clintonism as the nominee's representative on the platform commission, Mr. From had seemed to be locked up in a meat freezer throughout the campaign. A source called the appointment "very important and rather surprising, because there was a lot of antagonism toward the DLC in some quarters of the campaign." Al From's deputy for domestic policy is Bruce Reed, a policy director of the DLC before joining the Clinton campaign as issues director.

Another key appointment was that of former South Carolina Governor Richard Riley to supervise personnel selection below the Cabinet level. "Dick is a definite DLC moderate Democrat and he'll be in charge of making sure that all these sub-Cabinet appointees in fact reflect Clinton's desires," said one source. "There couldn't be a better choice." Earlier, Jan Piercey, a "search advisor" for the highly liberal MacArthur Foundation, had been named as director of personnel for the transition. The Riley appointment could mean that Piercey will be effectively put out of commission, perhaps relegated to loading the forty thousand unsolicited resumes the campaign has received into a data bank.

In 1976, the only contact that Scoop Jackson Democrats had in the Carter transition was Matt Coffey, with whom a couple of them had worked back in the Johnson Administration. When a delegation went to see Coffey, someone casually referred to then AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Lane Kirkland as one of "our guys" on foreign policy. The Jackson Democrats were not reassured when Coffey replied, "Oh. Does the AFL-CIO have an interest in foreign policy?" The vibes are better this time.

Samuel "Sandy" Berger and Anthony Lake, Director of Policy Planning in the Carter State Department, head the transition's national-security "duster goup." A recovered McGovernito, Berger is credited with reaching out to bring foreign-policy neo-conservatives like Richard Schiftor, Joshua Muravchik, and Penn Kemble back to the Democratic fold during the campaign. A source says that the foreign-policy transition will be heavily influenced not so much by Democrats who were hard-line anti-Communists during the cold war as by people who come from "the groups that were involved in the pro-democracy activities --the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute, and that sort of thing." He adds: "It's going to be a pretty decent group."