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natural resources with the demands of a modern economy; you either supported
unchecked development, drilling, strip-mining, and the like, or you supported
stifling bureaucracy and red tape that choked off growth. In politics, if not
in policy, simplicity was a virtue.
Sometimes I suspect that even the Republican leaders who immediately
followed Reagan werenÆt entirely comfortable with the direction politics had
taken. In the mouths of men like George H. W. Bush and Bob Dole, the
polarizing rhetoric and the politics of resentment always seemed forced, a way
of peeling off voters from the Democratic base and not necessarily a recipe
for governing.
But for a younger generation of conservative operatives who would soon rise
to power, for Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove and Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed,
the fiery rhetoric was more than a matter of campaign strategy. They were true
believers who meant what they said, whether it was ôNo new taxesö or ôWe are a
Christian nation.ö In fact, with their rigid doctrines, slash-and-burn style,
and exaggerated sense of having been aggrieved, this new conservative
leadership was eerily reminiscent of some of the New LeftÆs leaders during the
sixties. As with their left-wing counterparts, this new vanguard of the right
viewed politics as a contest not just between competing policy visions, but
between good and evil. Activists in both parties began developing litmus
tests, checklists of orthodoxy, leaving a Democrat who questioned abortion
increasingly lonely, any Republican who championed gun control effectively
marooned. In this Manichean struggle, compromise came to look like weakness,
to be punished or purged. You were with us or against us. You had to choose
sides.
It was Bill ClintonÆs singular contribution that he tried to transcend this
ideological deadlock, recognizing not only that what had come to be meant by
the labels of ôconservativeö and ôliberalö played to Republican advantage, but
that the categories were inadequate to address the problems we faced. At times
during his first campaign, his gestures toward disaffected Reagan Democrats
could seem clumsy and transparent (what ever happened to Sister Souljah?) or
frighteningly coldhearted (allowing the execution of a mentally retarded death
row inmate to go forward on the eve of an important primary). In the first two
years of his presidency, he would be forced to abandon some core elements of
his platform-universal health care, aggressive investment in education and
training-that might have more decisively reversed the long-term trends that
were undermining the position of working families in the new economy.
Still, he instinctively understood the falseness of the choices being
presented to the American people. He saw that government spending and
regulation could, if properly designed, serve as vital ingredients and not
inhibitors to economic growth, and how markets and fiscal discipline could
help promote social justice. He recognized that not only societal
responsibility but personal responsibility was needed to combat poverty. In
his platform-if not always in his day-to-day politics-ClintonÆs Third Way went
beyond splitting the difference. It tapped into the pragmatic, nonideological
attitude of the majority of Americans.
Indeed, by the end of his presidency, ClintonÆs policies-recognizably
progressive if modest in their goals-enjoyed broad public support.
Politically, he had wrung out of the Democratic Party some of the excesses
that had kept it from winning elections. That he failed, despite a booming
economy, to translate popular policies into anything resembling a governing
coalition said something about the demographic difficulties Democrats were
facing (in particular, the shift in population growth to an increasingly solid
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Republican South) and the structural advantages the Republicans enjoyed in the
Senate, where the votes of two Republican senators from Wyoming, population
493,782, equaled the votes of two Democratic senators from California,
population 33,871,648.
But that failure also testified to the skill with which Gingrich, Rove,
Norquist, and the like were able to consolidate and institutionalize the
conservative movement. They tapped the unlimited resources of corporate
sponsors and wealthy donors to create a network of think tanks and media
outlets. They brought state-of-the-art technology to the task of mobilizing
their base, and centralized power in the House of Representatives in order to
enhance party discipline.
And they understood the threat Clinton posed to their vision of a long-term
conservative majority, which helps explain the vehemence with which they went
after him. It also explains why they invested so much time attacking ClintonÆs
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