Democrats Have to Reach Common Ground Before They Can Go Places

It has been another week in paradise for the Democratic Party. In Texas, a group of 23 lifelong Democrats--led by Rep. Greg Laughlin--jumped to the GOP, claiming that the party had drifted too far to the left. In Washington, Jesse Jackson escalated his threats of launching an independent campaign for the presidency next year, claiming that Bill Clinton is steering the party too far to the right. Meanwhile, every congressional Republican except one voted for the GOP’s sweeping plan to eliminate the federal budget deficit in seven years. “The discipline is remarkable,” sighed one awed Democratic strategist.

Republicans may not enjoy such complete agreement on the details of implementing their plan. Already Senate Republicans are bitterly divided over just one aspect: reforming the welfare system. Sharp disagreements on social issues, particularly abortion and gun control, also loom ahead for the Republicans.

But every successful political coalition in American history has been divided on some issues. The United States is so large and diverse that, by definition, any coalition large enough to encompass an absolute national majority is in some respects incoherent. The real question is not whether a political coalition can achieve unanimity but whether it can subsume its differences beneath a unifying idea. At the moment, Republicans have such a unifying idea, and Democrats do not.

The organizing principle for the new Republican coalition is limiting the scope and size of the federal government. Rural gun enthusiasts, small-business owners, Christian conservatives, white-collar suburbanites and Fortune 500 chief executives might not want to spend a weekend at the beach together, but in their eagerness to constrain the federal government they happily converge. “Is that enough to hold the coalition together?” asks GOP pollster Ed Goeas, who co-authored a study for U.S. News & World Report last week on the strains in the electorate. “The answer is yes.”

Democrats have no comparable common ground. For decades, the party united, despite all its differences, around the New Deal vision of the government as a source of opportunity and a safety net against economic reversal. Now that the New Deal vision can no longer attract a majority in national politics, Democrats are profoundly divided on where to go next.

The force that has split the Democrats is the collapse of public confidence in government. Only about one in five Americans says that government in Washington can be trusted to do what is right most of the time. As the party identified with government, Democrats have inevitably been dragged down in that undertow.

Two schools contend on how to respond. One side, represented by Walter F. Mondale in the 1980s and primarily by the House congressional leadership in the 1990s, has argued for hunkering down and rallying the New Deal coalition of seniors, minorities and labor unions in defense of the existing programs, particularly social programs such as Medicare and aid for the poor.

The other side, represented by Gary Hart in the 1980s and by Clinton on his New Democrat days, argues for rolling with the wave rather than resisting it. Government, they say, should be reformed (by cutting bureaucracy or demanding personal responsibility from recipients of its aid) and, in many instances, reduced--but maintain the goal of expanding economic opportunity for average Americans.

That’s the impulse evident in the budget plan Clinton released last month, which accepts the inevitability of large cuts in many domestic programs but attempts to protect priorities such as Head Start, college grants and vouchers for job training that can leverage upward mobility.

Jackson and other liberals say that in laying out his own plan for balancing the budget, Clinton has accepted the Republican premise about shrinking government and abandoned the party. To an extent they have a point: By releasing his plan, Clinton conceded the likelihood of large cuts in many social programs dear to Democratic constituencies.

But Clinton hardly sounded like someone who had given up on government in an under-noticed speech he delivered Wednesday night to the Democratic National Committee. Quite the opposite: Clinton condemned the minimalist Republican view of government with great gusto.

In the process, he articulated a definition of government’s role that both asserts its relevance and redirects its focus. “There will never be a time when government can do anything for people they won’t do for themselves,” the President said. But, he added, “I believe the role of government is to help people make the most of their own lives.” Clinton’s new direction points toward a government that trims back its guarantees of economic security and concentrates its remaining energy on helping all Americans increase their opportunity to provide for themselves.

Even in an era of profound skepticism about government, that’s a point on which Democrats could defensibly stand. But the furor that has greeted Clinton’s budget plan, especially from Democrats in the House, suggests that he may be standing there almost alone.

Clinton has a structural problem: On the central question of government’s role, he is moving to the center in a party whose center is collapsing. Ironically the Democrats who have suffered most from the nation’s souring on government are those who have been most attuned to the change. In the 1994 congressional election, the biggest losers were not liberal Democrats, who mostly run in safely partisan districts all but immune to the national trends. The big losers were moderates elected from the swing districts that move with national currents.

Some of them represented Northern suburban districts, but the sharpest reversals came in the South. In the 1994 congressional elections, Republicans won 3.5 million more votes in the South than they did in the 1990 midterm. Over that same period, the Democratic vote total in the region fell by over 800,000, according to a study released last week by the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate.

That breathtaking change in allegiance allowed Republicans to win a majority of congressional seats in the region--for the first time since Reconstruction. And there is no sign the wave has crested. “Most of those seats Democrats have lost will not be recaptured, and there is the likelihood of losing more, as well as further switches,” says Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate.

Throughout his presidency, Clinton has been woefully inconstant about seeking the center. But whenever he has--on welfare reform, crime or in the new budget package--he has faced intense opposition from House liberals. Now, with the decline of the Southern moderates, the Democratic caucus in the House is tilting farther to the left, ironically increasing the resistance to the centrist policies that might save some of those swing seats. “It is a paradox,” acknowledges Al From, president of the Democratic Leadership Council.

By fall, Clinton and the congressional Democrats may once again find common ground in opposition to the GOP budget plan. (Since issuing his own proposal, Clinton has stepped up his fire on the Republicans’ blueprint.) But Clinton can never hope to regain control of the agenda unless he can sell a vision of government’s role that unites his party and commands a national majority. Clinton’s dilemma is that the same political forces that make it imperative for him to redefine government activism are systematically depleting the number of congressional allies he has in the effort.

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Southern Shift

The realignment of the South is depleting the ranks of the moderate Democrats in the House. Over the past 40 years, the South has transformed from the bulwark of Democratic control in the House to the foundation of the new Republican majority.

THE CHANGING NUMBERS

House membership in the South (states highlighted in the map):

Democrats GOP 1955 110 10 1965 101 18 1975 92 29 1985 83 47 1995 62 75

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Alabama Arkansas Florida Georgia Kentucky Louisiana Mississippi North Carolina Oklahoma South Carolina Tennessee Texas Virginia Source: Congressional Quarterly