New Democrat blues - Editorial

National Review, Dec 19, 1994

CASTING about for a hopeful portent, Democrats have found one: Bill Clinton. He did them in; if they dump him in 1996, all may be well again. Thus Jack Newfield, in a front-page column in the New York Post: "Bill Clinton is a lead weight around the ankles of Democrats. Voters have made a negative judgment about his character ... about evading the draft, womanizing, Whitewater, and pot-smoking. Even [George] Pataki and [Newt] Gingrich admit they inhaled." The New Yorker has tapped his replacement: Al Gore. Al From, president of the Democratic Leadership Council, ticks off the debacles Mr. Gore has not been associated with, and concludes that he is "untainted by the stuff that has made Clinton the most vulnerable."

The Clinton-bashers and the Gore-boosters ignore the possibility that Bill Clinton's greatest personal weakness is, at bottom, political. What most damages him in voters' eyes is his irresolution and duplicity; yet how else could a man of his principles behave? Bill Clinton ran and won as a New Democrat (he is a past president of Mr. From's DLC). New Democrats say they want to accomplish the goals of liberalism with a government that is more efficient and entrepreneurial, but that is like being slightly pregnant. Liberalism exists to serve its constituencies. Once that is conceded, there are no intellectual or rhetorical barriers to serving them whatever the cost. The New Democrat, whether he is Bill Clinton or Al Gore, will thus be tom between gratifying his supporters and living up to his campaign slogans.

Al Gore, for example, while he has no bimbos or land deals in his closet, has plenty of baggage of the sort that trips New Democrats up. His own particular constituents are greens, whom he addressed in his wacky manifesto, Earth in the Balance, which compared pollution to Kristallnacht and the Holocaust. His voting record as a senator was tiredly liberal; his foreign-policy instincts run to multinationalism and UN management. Where politics is concerned, Gore is his own Hillary, and could be counted on to betray New Democrat campaign rhetotic even more speedily than President Clinton.

New Democrats have been cropping up for twenty years, since the aftermath of the McGovern disaster: Jerry Brown and Michael Dukakis (in their first incarnations as governors), Jimmy Carter, Gary Hart. They can win the White House by accident, but once voters figure them out, they are gone. Bill Clinton may be bad news, but he is the only news Democrats have.