Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (19 page)

For conservatives, losing badly was a political trauma. After a series of elections that seemed to promise them a long run in power, conservatives watched with alarm and disdain as their standard bearer was reduced to a share of the vote not seen since William Howard Taft in 1912, Herbert Hoover in 1932, and Alf Landon in 1936. A large number of conservatives treated Clinton’s election as less than legitimate, not only because of his minority share of the popular vote but also because in the face of his victory, Republicans had gained seats in the House of Representatives. The Republican gains were taken on the right as the true measure of the country’s continuing conservatism. Moreover, details of Clinton’s irregular personal life had already been aired during the campaign. He was the first president to reach maturity in the 1960s and controversies over his approach to his marriage, to the draft during
the Vietnam era, and to marijuana use (“I didn’t inhale”) were all central to the right’s view of who he was.
“Not only did he epitomize to many conservatives the things they found distasteful about how the country had changed since the 1960s,” Joshua Freeman wrote in his history of the period, “but even more importantly his ascent broke what many conservatives had come to see as their rightful control over the reins of power.”

Political oppositions, of course, are by definition opposed to whoever holds office. And charging liberal administrations with being less than fully “American” is by no means a new habit on the right. As far back as 1944, even a progressive Republican like Thomas E. Dewey had linked Franklin Roosevelt to communism.
John Bricker, his running mate that year, was more explicit. “First the New Deal took over the Democratic Party and destroyed its very foundation,” Bricker had said in a speech in Boston shortly before the election. “Now, these Communist forces have taken over the New Deal and will destroy the very foundations of the republic.” McCarthyism had its precedents.

But the Clinton years would establish a new template for the right. Democratic presidents would not simply be opposed. They would face an unprecedented degree of challenge to their authority. This pattern began not with Obama but with Clinton. As Freeman wrote: “From the moment he took office,
Clinton faced a well-funded conservative effort to weaken or destroy his presidency by uncovering and publicizing his personal transgressions.” No one in 1993 imagined how far it would all go.

The wall of legislative opposition formed early. From the start there would be no Republican votes for Clinton’s balanced budget deal, which included, as he had promised during the campaign, a substantial tax increase on the best-off Americans. If Bush had bumped up the top income tax rate to 31 percent, Clinton raised it all the way to 39.5 percent. For the supply-side conservatives, this was both an outrage and a menace.
“I believe this program is going to make the economy weak,” declared Senator Phil Gramm, who as a conservative Texas Democrat had been a lead sponsor of the Reagan economic program and then became a Republican. “I believe hundreds of thousands of people are going to lose their jobs. I believe Bill Clinton will be one of those people.”

“Clearly this is a job killer in the short run,” declared Representative Dick Armey, who would later become the Republican majority leader. “The revenues forecast for this budget will not materialize; the costs of this budget will be greater than what is forecast. The deficit will be worse, and it is not a good omen for the American economy.”

Once again, conservatives placed their biggest bet on the tax issue. Clinton’s plan passed with only Democratic votes. The economy soared through the rest of the decade. The Republicans’ economic predictions proved flatly wrong. But in the short run, they were rewarded politically.

For the budget as enacted was a less populist document than the design Clinton had promised during the campaign. Shortly before Clinton took office, Bush disclosed that the deficit had grown by $60 billion. Clinton’s advisers of centrist inclinations and Wall Street roots insisted that he make cutting the deficit his highest priority. Only lower interest rates could spur the economy, and cutting the deficit was essential to reassuring the bond market to get those rates down. No wonder James Carville was heard to say that if he were reincarnated, “I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate anybody.”

In his determination to stand with the budget balancers, Clinton made three tactical errors that served to strengthen his conservative foes. Having failed to get a larger increase in energy taxes in the hope of promoting conservation—it was foiled by the opposition of oil-state senators in his own party—he should have punted on the small four-and-a-half-cent gas tax increase he eventually agreed to. This added a regressive element to an otherwise wholly progressive tax package without raising much money. The move made it easier for Republicans to attack the Clinton plan for hitting all taxpayers, even though its levies were overwhelmingly on the best-off.

Second, Clinton failed to include at least a nod to the promise of a middle-class tax cut he had made in the 1992 campaign. As Bush could testify, voters remember pledges on taxes. Reconfiguring his budget package to include at least a down payment on this tax cut would have served Clinton well in the long run.

Third, he failed to include enough money in his budget to finance a more generous welfare reform. The key to welfare reform was always to combine a work
requirement (a worthy goal in itself and a political counter to conservative charges that the welfare state encouraged sloth) with far more generous assistance to the poor. With some liberals already balking, a shortage of funds made it impossible for Democrats to enact a welfare bill—and the measure that finally did pass after Republicans took over Congress was far less generous than Clinton’s original design envisioned.

All the measures that went by the wayside had been a direct response to the rise of the right, an effort to defang the “race, rights, and taxes” issues.
They fit the Napoleonic axiom that Karl Rove would often cite: “The whole art of war consists in a well-reasoned and circumspect defensive followed by rapid and audacious attack.” Clinton temporarily gave up on major components of his well-reasoned defensive.

The battle over the deficit and the influence of financial industry stars like Robert Rubin, Clinton’s top economic adviser who later became Treasury secretary, revealed Clintonism’s deep tensions. It wasn’t simply a matter of “new” and “old” Democrats. There were also overlapping stresses between a working-class strategy and a financial industry strategy; between a desire to appeal to Washington’s middle-of-the-road elites and a will to stand as a proud outsider; between a campaigning Clinton and a governing Clinton; between his obligations as a deficit scourge and his aspirations as a policy innovator; and between business-friendliness and support for labor.

During the 1992 campaign, Clinton could fudge some of these choices. He waited until a month before the election to endorse the North American Free Trade Agreement, and his speech announcing his stand was so full of warnings about the damage the treaty could cause without broader policy changes that it barely sounded like an endorsement at all. He called for “supplemental agreements” with Mexico and Canada on environmental and worker safety issues, and for legislation to assist workers and farmers who might be hurt by the treaty. But once he was president, it was an up-or-down matter, despite the side agreements. The fight over NAFTA badly split his party, alienated labor, and delayed the legislative battle over his health care law.

Underlying all the tensions was an uncertainty about whether the Clinton project was primarily reactive or forward-looking—even if Clinton, following Rove’s motto about war, would argue that defense and offense went hand in
hand. Clinton certainly saw his overall purpose as blazing a new trail, and his aspirations to a Third Way between “the brain dead politics of both parties” had an international aspect. In alliance with British prime minister Tony Blair and moderate social democrats in Europe, Clinton hoped to create a new politics that accepted the dynamism of the market but saw a critical role for government in investing in education, health care, job training, and other public goods while providing social insurance to sustain those whom the market would temporarily leave behind. Blair and Clinton were unrepentant about thinking Big Thoughts and partisans of their approach often referred to their dreams and plans as simply “The Project.” When Clinton’s friends spoke the words, you could always hear that the
T
in the word
The
was capitalized. It denoted that what they were up to was, to use a favorite Clinton phrase, “a big deal.”

But those less enamored of The Project—to its left as well as its right—saw Clinton and Blair as engaged in a holding action that effectively ratified the new conservative era that Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had inaugurated. Critics saw Clinton and Blair as more engaged in making concessions than in breaking new ground. Above all, they seemed to accept the pro-market intellectual and policy revolution that writers like Gilder and Novak had announced, and did little to undo the go-go spirit among the rich that took hold in the 1980s.
Peter Mandelson, one of the central architects of British New Labor, captured the spirit of the time (at least in the eyes of his left-of-center critics) when he declared in 1998 that he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich.” In good Third Way fashion, he had appended “as long as they pay their taxes.” In the United States, the rich did pay more in taxes—but they still got richer.

Clinton himself may have been the shrewdest judge of how the American political world was realigning. As Republicans moved right, Democrats occupied more and more of the center ground. Seen one way, the Democrats had made a wise and necessary political adjustment. But it came at a cost as Clinton surveyed his own work, with some frustration, in April 1993. He told his advisers, unhappily: “I hope you’re all aware we’re Eisenhower Republicans here,” he said. “We’re Eisenhower Republicans fighting the Reagan Republicans. We stand for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market.” Clinton’s
remark was a rather precise description of what would happen to the country’s electoral politics in the course of his time in office as the moderate Republican vote in the Northeast and Midwest moved out of the Republican Party. These GOP moderates saw a kindred spirit in Clinton, recognizing the Eisenhower Republicanism in his program, even if they liked this orientation rather more than Clinton did.

Clinton, for his part, saw at least one big thing he could do for those who had elected him and on whose behalf he had intended to govern—a big, traditionally
Democratic
thing. After his confession to becoming an Eisenhower for the 1990s, he had added: “At least we’ll have health care to give them, if we can’t give them anything else.”

But in the end, he couldn’t give them health care. Clinton’s health care reform effort failed for a complex of reasons, including splits among Democrats over how market-oriented the system should be, fights over how it would be paid for, and a much stronger coincidence of interest among opponents of reform than among its potential supporters. The long-term decline in confidence in government that fed the Reagan Revolution and was then pushed along by it meant that the balance between fear and hope titled toward fear: many Americans worried they had more to lose than gain from a new approach to health care. And Clinton ran into the problem Obama would face later: how intricate any new system must be if it tries simultaneously to use government to expand coverage while keeping some semblance of the private health insurance market intact. As the first mover, Clinton did not have the experience of defeat that Obama would learn from. The Clinton plan was actually more ambitious in scope than Obamacare proved to be. Obama gave more ground—and settled for something less than universal coverage—partly because of the lesson many took from Clinton’s failure: when it came to dealing with all the interests involved in the health care system, a great deal of compromise was necessary to get anything done.

But for the purposes of understanding the trajectory of conservatism, a memo written by William Kristol in December 1993 may be the most revealing part of the episode. It baldly laid out the political stakes in
all
battles over government-guaranteed universal coverage. It explained why conservatives have consistently resisted efforts to have the United States follow every other industrialized
country in establishing such a guarantee. Nearly two decades before the fact, it showed why Republicans resisted the Affordable Care Act, and have continued to make its repeal one of their highest political priorities.

While Kristol nodded to various policy objections to the Clinton plan, the thrust of his argument was unapologetically political and ideological. In a sense, he paid Clinton the highest possible compliment from a political activist, calling the president’s health plan “a serious political threat to the Republican Party.”

Why? Because it would upend the core commitments of conservative ideology. “It will relegitimize middle-class dependence for ‘security’ on government spending and regulation,” Kristol explained. “It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.”

For this reason, Kristol condemned Republicans who were seriously considering negotiating with the administration to get a compromise plan through. He didn’t name them, but he was clearly thinking of moderates such as Senator John Chafee and legislative warhorses like Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole, a conservative who was also a legislator of the old school. Kristol wrote:

Any Republican urge to negotiate a “least bad” compromise with the Democrats, and thereby gain momentary public credit for helping the president “do something” about health care, should also be resisted. Passage of the Clinton health care plan, in any form, would guarantee and likely make permanent an unprecedented federal intrusion into and disruption of the American economy—and the establishment of the largest federal entitlement program since Social Security. Its success would signal a rebirth of centralized welfare-state policy at the very moment we have begun rolling back that idea in other areas.