Changing the Tune : New Social Policy--Price Is Right: Free

The abortion gag rule will be rescinded. A Freedom of Choice Act can be signed. Parents of sick children will be entitled to family leave. The National Endowment for the Arts will be given back to the artists. Gays won’t be hounded out of the military because of their sexual orientation. An AIDS czar will be appointed. Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun can retire. The Reagan-Bush years are over.

Tuesday’s election was not a referendum on the social agenda of the last 12 years; the economy was by far the dominant force. Even so, the first changes, and the easiest ones, will come in the rejection of the hard edges of Republican conservatism. For the first time in 12 years, we have a President who owes nothing to the organized religious right. For the first time in history, we have a President who grew up with feminism, married a feminist, utters the words “gay and lesbianism” without flinching, relied on his wife’s job as well as his own to make ends right.

President-elect Bill Clinton has promised he is a different kind of Democrat. No one is exactly sure what that means. A decade ago, different kinds of Democrats were bemoaning the party’s drift to the left, defined in domestic-policy terms by issues like feminism, abortion and gay rights. Today, those are mainstream concerns for Clinton’s Democratic Party. Indeed, dealing with feminists and gay-rights organizations may prove easier for the new President than dealing with more traditionally accepted members of the Democratic family--on the left and the right.

It has been a long 12 years for Democrats, all of whom feel a stake in this new presidency, and many of whom feel they showed admirable restraint during the campaign, to allow others to believe the Democratic Party had changed. Notwithstanding Clinton’s comments, all the old, not-so-different liberal Democrats remain in place in the nation’s capital, armed with agendas and programs that they’ve been nurturing for 12 years.

Many have a great deal of merit, indeed, were endorsed by Clinton sometime during his campaign. The cities do need help; college students need loans; small children need immunizations and school lunches and Head Start programs; women need mammograms; AIDS and breast cancer need research and cures; seniors need long-term care; schools need support; small businesses needs start-up loans. And the federal government needs money. Executive orders to enforce gay rights and legislation to secure abortion rights don’t cost any money. Almost everything else does.

The reality is that if the Clinton Administration is to fulfill its most basic promise--the promise to get the economy moving--it can only do so by saying “no” to almost everyone else who wants money. If fiscal stimulus isn’t coupled with deficit reduction, you face problems with the financial markets. If it is, you face problems with your friends on the left. The good news is that you hardly have to pick and choose. You can give enlightened policy to everyone, and new program dollars to almost no one.

It isn’t just from the left that the demands come. Beyond the economy and jobs, the issue that seemed to hold highest priority in the Clinton campaign, and among voters, was health care. The Clinton campaign health plan was more of a statement of principles than a plan. The standard questions asked about it--how much would it cost and how would we pay--are two of many to be resolved.

But this much is clear: For Clinton’s plan to work, he will have to take on the insurance companies, hospitals, doctors and trial lawyers--all of whom stand to lose something if Clinton’s principles are translated into a legislative package. Make no mistake: They have more forceful representation in Washington, and on Capitol Hill, than all the noisy liberals combined. The question is not only whether Clinton will stand up to his own friends, but whether he will stand up to the close friends of his partners down Pennsylvania Avenue, the lobbyists and PACS who helped insure that 94% of the incumbent congressmen who ran on Tuesday got reelected.

Ultimately, the challenge for Clinton is to persuade all the interest groups waiting for his arrival that a good job, and better still a good job that provides health care, is the bedrock of the progressive agenda. That is as true for this different kind of Democrat as it was for his predecessors. It is the reason the Democrats are back in power. It must be the first and, for a time at least, the sole spending priority of this Administration.

If Washington doesn’t accept that, then Clinton can always follow his campaign strategy of going around the leadership to appeal directly to the people: of speaking respectfully to black voters, while giving shirt shrift to Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition; of appealing to working people, and cutting back on union conventions; of courting liberals more than liberal organizations.

Those who have waited patiently inside the Beltway for someone in power to support their programs, enduring abuse for the last 12 years, may have to wait a little longer. In the meantime, they can take solace in the fact that the Justice Department will enforce the civil-rights laws; the President can appoint more women and minorities; Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) will no longer call the shots on arts policy, and Roe vs. Wade still be the law.