Is there a future for New Dems?

Insight on the News, Oct 12, 1998 by Michael Rust

The centrist Democratic Leadership Council has struggled to remake its party. After so much success, one-time standard-bearer Al Gore may have deserted to the left.

Long ago and far away, before Earth hung in the balance and when "controlling legal authority" barely was a twinkle in the eye of TV pundits, Sen. Al Gore had a political persona that today seems, well, hard to remember. During his 1988 campaign for the presidency, Gore was regarded as the leading young light of Democratic moderation, the standard-bearer for centrist Democrats unhappy with the leftward drift of their party.

Following Walter Mondale's defeat in 1984, moderate and right-of-center Democrats organized around the principle that their party's traditional big-government agenda no longer was relevant to American political life. They formed the Democratic Leadership Council, or DLC, labeled themselves "New Democrats" and set about the difficult task of remaking their party and country.

While the centrist Democrats who had followed Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson of Washington state in the 1970s had opposed what they saw as a foreign policy too accommodating toward the Soviet Union, the New Democrats who came together in the late 1980s focused on domestic policy. They called for a balanced budget, elimination of wasteful federal programs and agencies and argued that economic policy should emphasize expanding opportunity and "empowerment" of the poor through education and job training.

The young Gore -- 40 years old when he made his 1988 presidential bid as a New Democrat -- entered the race, ironically enough, after then-governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas declined to launch a campaign. Clinton, who soon would become chairman of the DLC, had been something of a presumptive favorite among both moderates and Southerners, and in his absence Gore saw a Southern-strategy opportunity in the "Super Tuesday" primaries.

It paid off, temporarily. Gore won several Southern primaries and earned a feature profile in Vanity Fair before his momentum was dissipated in New York. The eventual nominee, Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, attempted to portray himself as a pro-business technocrat who would prove more adept at managing government than the GOP. Following the overwhelming victory of George Bush, who successfully depicted Dukakis as a "liberal" -- which Bush turned into an epithet -- the DLC began to organize Democratic centrists around the country.

As they did so, desperate Democratic strategists, chafed by 12 years out of the White House, turned to the last refuge of politicians: ideas. Political journalist Peter Brown's Minority Party: Why Democrats Face Defeat in 1992 and Beyond told them they had squandered their political capital courting the poor, who more often than not don't vote, and the liberal intelligentsia, more often than not loathed by everyone else. Significantly, Brown thought the only national Democrat with a serious chance of breaking this pattern in 1992 was Clinton. The Ar-kansas governor took up the challenge, and with running-mate Gore was swept into office.

Ah, but what a difference a decade makes. Gore's willingness to support U.S. defense interests was for a while enough to make him a symbol of the relative right in Democratic politics. As late as 1992, "Gore stood for the center of the party with an emphasis on technological stuff, and put aside his environmental issues," says historian Ronald Radosh, author of Divided They Fell: The Demise of the Democratic Party, 1964-1996. "He was very much a man of the center, associated with the DLC." But while a centrist posture helped launch him and Clinton on the national stage, that association now may serve as a speed bump in Gore's journey as presumptive front-runner for the 2000 Democratic presidential nomination.

The vice president simultaneously must attract a Democratic base of organized labor and minority groups, while at the same time appealing for money to the high-tech mavens of Silicon Valley. And there are other concerns. In 1996, members of Congress created a New Democrat Coalition, which now has around 40 members, and the New Democratic Network, a political-action committee to recruit and raise money for centrist Democrats. Their manifesto calls for "a renewed sense of citizenship, faith and family," hardly conducive to embracing Clinton-Gore at the moment. At a Capitol Hill conference this summer, New Democrat Roy Afflerbach, running for Congress in Pennsylvania, called for "old-fashioned values" in education. And when it comes to family values, all the V-chips and school uniforms in the world pale next to the steamy details in the Starr report.

Some, however, argue that the New Democrats aren't vulnerable because of the president's Oval Office misbehavior. "New Democrat ideas aren't just the figment of someone's fertile imagination" former Clinton adviser Bill Galston tells Insight. Galston, now a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institute, says that New Democrat policy proposals "represent responses, many of them imperfect at this point, to the real unavoidable policy challenges of the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st."