A HARD SELL : CLINTON IS PUSHING CHANGE, WILL THE NATION BUY IT? : Offering a New Deal for America’s Middle Third

Bill Clinton has just launched a clever scheme that could divide suburbia economically and politically and lock its less affluent $35,000- to $50,000-a-year precincts into a new urbanoid Democratic presidential majority. Meanwhile, upper-bracket suburbia--the curved-drive way and redwood-mailbox crowd--will get to pick up the check. Yet this won’t work unless the Democrats learn to do something they’ve never done before: reduce and control a huge federal budget deficit and somehow, at the same time, create millions and millions of new jobs.

Last November’s election saw the Democrats break through in middle-class territory from Maine to California, carrying places like New York’s Nassau County, seat of the country’s most powerful GOP suburban machine, and conservative San Diego County, which last went Democratic when Franklin D. Roosevelt carried it in 1944.

Clinton got lots of support from high-income suburbanites appalled by George Bush’s poor economic management. But Clinton knows better than most Democrats that his party’s future--in an era when a majority of the nation’s population lives in suburbia--doesn’t lie in the well-manicured townships, where busy executives place their stockbroker orders from Lexus car phones. On the contrary, the Democrats’ future lies in the anonymous suburbs of subdivisions and townhouses at the end of 90-minute commutes along crowded freeways.

These are the middle-class voters most frazzled by the relative stagnation of the 1980s and the real decline of median household prosperity during the early 1990s recession. These are also the middle-class voters to whom Clinton is addressing his economic pitch, even while he offends six-digit households in the business and professional classes. He was speaking especially to these $40,000- or $50,000-a-year families when he promised to end the soak-the-middle approach of the 1980s--when so many found the small benefits of federal income-tax cuts canceled (or outweighed) by sharp increases in Social Security levels and rising state and local taxes. It was to this squeezed middle class that he talked about having gotten poorer government service for more money even as the upper-brackets fine-tuned their lifestyles with the help of magazines like Gourmet, Yachting and Architectural Digest.

Clinton’s latter-day New Deal for the hard-pressed economic middle third of America is plausible. Excluding the burden of $300 or $400 more a year in energy taxes, they’re untouched by the income-tax and Medicare-tax increases he’s loading on the upper-middle class. Politically, moreover, it’s a strategic repayment for their electoral support last November and a wise calculation of where he will need to enlist swing voters in 1996.

A major key to Clinton’s success on Election Day was that the GOP’s suburban majorities virtually collapsed, especially in the states with the most severe recessions--New England, the Middle Atlantic, Illinois-Missouri and California. Twenty-five years ago, in “The Emerging Republican Majority,” I projected the GOP would dominate the next cycle of U.S. presidential politics, with a new middle-class coalition based in suburbia and the Sun Belt. From 1968 to 1992, that coalition controlled the White House for 20 of 24 years. But the alignment seems to have collapsed in 1992--not simply with Bush’s defeat but because of a major new blurring of political loyalties in the middle-class subdivisions and malls.

My new book, “Boiling Point,” details how the early 1990s decline of middle-class prosperity--especially in the $35,000 to $50,000 range of median and average family incomes--has put huge chunks of suburbia up for grabs.

What happened last November is both too little understood and hard to overstate. The notion of suburbia as a political “white noose” around the cities crumbled in state after state, as Republican suburban majorities shriveled to a point of being overwhelmed by massive Democratic totals from urban centers prematurely written off as yesterday’s electoral demography.

In New York, for example, the towering suburban GOP majorities of the Reagan era collapsed in 1992, and the huge Democratic vote in New York City swept the field. In Illinois, the Cook County suburbs voted Democratic for President for the first time in recent memory, enabling the massive Democratic flood of ballots from Chicago to roll across the state like a tidal wave. In Pennsylvania, a tightly divided suburban vote around Philadelphia yielded to the lopsided city totals for a similar result.

The result in pivotal California was slightly different but equally fascinating--and in the long run, perhaps the most important. Back in 1984, the largely suburban Southern California counties surrounding and below Los Angeles--Ventura, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside and San Diego--had delivered a Republican majority of nearly a million votes that overwhelmed the roughly 70,000-vote Democratic margin produced in Northern California’s Silicon Valley and San Francisco Bay-area counties. By 1988, the imbalance was much closer. Then, in 1992, an extraordinary turnabout occurred. The Republican edge in the five Southern California counties shrank to a meager 86,000 and the Democratic margin in the San Francisco Bay-Silicon Valley counties ballooned to more than 700,000, helping Clinton sweep the state.

What could be taking shape, in California and elsewhere, is a new alignment in which the cities, allied with the less-affluent suburbs, regain a significant policy-making role. Like the potential electoral upheaval, it would be a powerful change.

Ross Perot did, indeed, play a critical role in all this--diverting voters who had long been a part of the Republican coalition. More than the votes he won on Nov. 3, Perot also, earlier in the year, focused anti-Bush sentiment among middle-class and suburban voters whose loyalties were then loosened. Indeed, polls in California and elsewhere show that the actual Perot vote would have split evenly between Clinton and Bush--which means the Democrats would have done very well in suburbia in November, even without the populist billionaire on the ballot.

It is this breakthrough potential that Clinton must hope to consolidate with his pitch to the pivotal, less-affluent half of the American middle class. The die is hardly cast, because if he can’t restore the economy--and if he’s forced to start hiking taxes on these brackets--then the potential opportunity of 1993 could be the lost opportunity of 1996. But in the meantime, it’s clear that Clinton’s controversial economic blueprint is also an ambitious political plan.