Monday, July 27, 1998

Democrats search for themes

By Morton Kondracke

Closing out the "unity" meeting of liberal and centrist policy wonks she hosted July 8, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed the hope that congressional Democrats would develop a message this fall that appeals to swing voters.

She raised a good point. Democrats still seem to be casting about for a reason why voters should return them to majority status in the House. So far, they've been relying on negatives: "Republicans won't pass campaign finance reform." "Big Tobacco owns the GOP." "This is a do-nothing Congress."

Polls don't indicate that any of these themes are selling, and even the HMO-regulation issue may be less than a sure winner if Republicans pass a plausible reform package and argue that too much regulation would hike insurance costs and swell the ranks of the uninsured.

In the last few days, House Speaker Newt Gingrich's, R-Ga., $1 trillion tax-cut proposal may have given Democrats the chance to wave the bloody shirt of Social Security one last time, charging that the GOP wants to give away the hard-won budget surplus to rich people before securing the retirement of baby boomers. But this still is a negative argument.

The White House unity gathering actually produced some themes Democrats might fashion into a compelling positive message for 1998 -- notably that the fruits of current prosperity be invested in people.

The best slogan repeated at the gathering came from Al From, president of the Democratic Leadership Council, who suggested that Democrats advocate policies that will "expand the winners' circle" that the booming economy has produced.

Meanwhile, a liberal attendee, Ruy Teixeira of the Economic Policy Institute, has the right idea about the swing voting group to whom the message especially needs to be directed: non-union white males who haven't finished college. They represent more than a quarter of the entire electorate, and their support for the Democratic party has dropped from 56.7 percent in the early 1960s to 36.4 percent in the 1990s.

Lower-middle-income voters -- "the strugglers," Teixeira calls them -- are finally experiencing income gains in the current economic boom, but their hold on long-term economic security is tenuous.

The unity gathering, as was first reported by Richard Berke in the New York Times last Sunday, was put together by White House aide Sid Blumenthal as an attempt to establish a dialogue among often-warring traditional liberals and "New Democrat" centrists.

Held in the White House Map Room, the session was attended by about 30 policy experts, including liberals such as Teixeira and Richard Rothstein from the EPI, economist Barry Bluestone of the University of Massachusetts and Paul Starr, editor of American Prospect magazine. Moderates included From and Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute.

Present and former White House aides at the meeting, besides Blumenthal, included chief domestic policy aide Bruce Reed, communications director Ann Lewis, vice presidential adviser Morley Winograd, ex-domestic adviser Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck, a former aide to Vice President Al Gore.

The meeting was viewed by one top aide to Gore's possible 2000 presidential rival, House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., as "an obvious effort to co-opt the wonks for Al Gore," but Gephardt adviser Bluestone said he concluded that President Clinton and the First Lady genuinely want to leave a united party as their legacy.

This is not going to be easy. Liberal groups backed by the labor movement remain wedded to protectionism, teacher-union control of the schools and government management of Social Security.

Meantime, New Democrats back free trade, wider parental choice in public schools and partial privatization of entitlement programs.

They also want to use vouchers and private contractors as the delivery vehicles for services that liberals still think that government employees should provide.

Moreover, Galston and Kamarck are preparing an analysis of the electorate showing that the fastest-growing group up for grabs consists of upper-middle-income college-educated workers "wired" to the Internet, not the "strugglers."

Still, thanks to President Clinton, liberals have come to accept centrist ideas on welfare reform, balanced budgets, crime and charter schools.

In the next two years, he could do the same on Social Security, although the Democratic party's stance on trade probably will have to be fought out in the 2000 primaries.

This year, there is unity in the Democratic party. There aren't any fights between Gephardt and Gore or between the White House and Congressional Democrats. They are together on the message that Republicans are bad.

The problem is, they have yet to crystallize a message that voting Democratic is good.

They could do worse than to consult their policy wonks.

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