The Soul of the New Democrats : Platform: Clinton transformed the party to a degree that Neil Kinnock never achieved with Britain’s Labor Party. Now they’re electable.

On that April night when Neil Kinnock’s new model Labor Party confounded the pundits and opinion polls and lost the British election, Bill Clinton tore up the speech of triumph he was planning to deliver.

The speech was to have been about “a wind of change sweeping across the Atlantic,” just as Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979, had paved the way for the Reagan Revolution the following year, so, once again, the political fortunes of the Anglo-Saxon world were moving in step. But when Labor lost, Clinton recovered fast.

“It’s not enough just to say you have moved to the center, trust us,” Clinton mused that night. “You have to lay out a rationale that convinces the voter, that says, “This time, you can trust us.” It’s the difference between Bad Godesberg and Brighton.”

One of the few Americans who keeps a close watch on the politics of Western Europe, Clinton was stressing the distinction between Labor’s assertions of moderation at its party conference at Brighton, and the historic shift West Germany’s Social Democrats had made 35 years ago at the small spa town by the Rhine.

At Bad Godesberg, the SDP formally renounced Marxism and embraced the new doctrine of the social market. The Social Democrats became electable again with a new social bargain, liberating the German entrepreneurs to create the wealth that would build the welfare state and the education system which still turns out the world’s best-trained and most productive work force outside Japan.

At the Democratic Party convention in New York last week, Clinton imposed his own Bad Godesberg solution, and laid out his own new political rationale. Clinton not only defeated the Jerry Brown wing of the left, and co-opted Jesse Jackson into grudging support; he explained why the party had to do so, and how they could get the voters to believe it.

Party platforms are mostly tedious, verbose and mendacious documents for policy wonks. This new Democratic manifesto contains a quiet revolution. Take the Republicans’ chosen battle ground of family values.

The 1988 Democratic platform of Michael S. Dukakis was based on the old religion: “We believe the strength of our families is enhanced by (government) programs to prevent abuse and malnutrition among children, crime, dropouts and pregnancy among teen-agers.”

Now look at this year’s model: “Governments don’t raise children, people do . . . . People who bring children into this world have a responsibility to care for them, and give them values, motivation and discipline.”

Or compare the difference on defense policies. In 1988, the Democrats said, “We believe our national defense has ben sapped by a defense Establishment wasting money on duplicative and dubious new weapons.”

This year, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf could run on the Democrat ticket: “America is the world’s strongest military power and must remain so . . . . The U.S. must be prepared to use military force decisively when necessary to defend our vital interests.”

Go back to the Democratic platform of 1972, when Sen. George McGovern’s angry young legions, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, took the party on its Long March into the jargon of the left. “We must restructure the social, political and economic relationship throughout the entire society in order to ensure the equitable distribution of wealth and power,” it said. “Direct expenditures by the federal government which can be budgeted are better than tax preferences as the means for achieving public objectives.”

The 1992 version could be written by Vice President Dan Quayle, “We honor business as a noble endeavor . . . . An expanding, entrepreneurial economy of high-skill, high-wage jobs is the most important family policy, urban policy, labor policy, minority policy and foreign policy America can have’.

You can see why Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. and his radicals refused to swallow this, and why Jackson was so reluctant to rally to Clinton’s New Covenant. But Jackson came around, and so did the custodians of the New Deal tradition in Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Gov. Mario M. Cuomo of New York, because Clinton offered them Bad Godesberg, not Brighton.

Clinton’s New Covenant contains the most ambitious program of public investment and and expanded state services that the United States has yet seen. Free college education or an industrial training apprenticeship for any American who wants one. It is, as the Republicans will say, a tax-and-spend program. But they omit one vital word--Clinton’s New Covenant also “collects.”

In return for college education, the New Covenant requires two years of public service--in the police, in schools or in health or social work. In return for the welfare check, the unemployed get education and job training and child care, but they have to take whatever job they are given within two years The two new principles are: “No one who is able to work can stay on poverty forever, and no one who works should live in poverty.”

So when Clinton speaks of “shutting the door on the something-for-nothing decade,” he is not only talking of higher taxes on the richest 2% of Americans who did so well in the 1980s. He is also enforcing the new social bargain on the poor who got poorer. For every right that flows from the government, the new Democratic platform “insists upon greater individual responsibility in return.”

Clinton’s new economic strategy depends on a return to growth to help pay for all this. But it is growth based on two classic principles of German social democracy. The first is a nationalist Keynesian strategy: Unlike tax cuts which get spent on Japanese cars and French wines, money invested in roads and public works and infrastructure is money that will be spent overwhelmingly on goods made in America, for America.

The second principle is to redefine the nature of the deficit, on the common-sense argument that not all borrowing is bad. There is the current spending deficit, borrowing money to pay today’s wage bill, which is foolish and must be reduced. And there is the public-investment deficit, which will show a financial return in the economy. This is borrowing money to build tomorrow’s roads and airports, and should be increased.

Clinton could get his New Covenant through the Democratic Convention because he won the primaries so thoroughly, winning 32 states and more primary votes than any previous candidate, Republican or Democrat, in history. And this year’s convention delegates, with 68% of them earning over $50,000 a year and 44% with post-graduate educations, are the sleekest, most suburban slew of Democratic activists ever assembled.

Clinton’s new Democrats look, to the European eye, more like Bad Godesberg’s Germans than the British Labor Party. But that, of course, is the point. When the people move from the coal mine to the computer lab, from the inner cities to the suburbs, then the Peoples’ Party has to move with them. Auf wiedersehen, Jesse and Jerry.