Clinton’s Dream of Realignment Derailed by Reality : Most days he’s still caught in the same shouting matches that have polarized Washington for years.

Once Clintonites dreamed of realignment. Now they are scrambling for survival.

Under siege from Whitewater, Cattlegate and Paula Jones, his poll numbers sagging, his health care plan struggling for air, it is difficult to remember that Clinton once seemed to many Democrats their best hope for realigning national politics.

That was the essential rationale of his candidacy: Bill Clinton began 1992 as the choice of those Democrats who believed the party couldn’t win back the White House unless it reclaimed the middle-class voters who had deserted it over the past quarter-century. As a Southerner acceptable to Northerners, a government activist who pledged to demand personal responsibility, Bill Clinton’s promise was that he could inspire a lasting new Democratic majority in national politics--and join presidents like William McKinley, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon who had precipitated a fundamental shift, or realignment, in voter loyalties.

Does anybody think of Bill Clinton that way today?

As a candidate, Clinton managed only 43% of the vote--almost exactly the average for Democrats in the past six presidential elections. As President, his political imperative was to expand that base with voters from the center, especially independents and moderate Republicans who backed Ross Perot.

So far, he’s almost entirely failed. Contrary to some Republican arguments, Clinton is holding his base from the campaign. When Democratic pollster Peter Hart recently asked voters how they feel about Clinton personally and how they rate his job performance, about 40% responded positively on both counts. That means his core of support hasn’t eroded since November, 1992.

But he has not expanded his base with Republicans or independents. Almost 45% of Perot voters viewed Clinton negatively on both counts in Hart’s survey--which means they essentially have written him off.

Clinton’s initial struggles over gays in the military and taxes in the budget alienated Republican partisans, and he’s never recovered: Fewer than 1 in 4 gave him positive job ratings in the most recent Gallup Poll. “That group in the middle that takes him from 43% to 50%,” said Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who worked for Perot in 1992. “He has not moved one iota.”

Just as revealing as the poll numbers is the listless and predictable climate of debate in Washington. As a candidate, Clinton pledged to break gridlock with “third way” ideas that could bridge the differences between liberals and conservatives. On crime, welfare, national service and a few other issues, he’s made some progress. But most days he’s still caught in the same shouting matches that have polarized Washington for years: punishment or prevention, more government or less, taxes or spending cuts. Floyd Ciruli, a Democratic pollster, doesn’t see any signs that Clinton is precipitating an intellectual realignment. “The effort to reframe this hasn’t made it. To a large extent, the debate we’re having in Washington we could have had 20 years ago.”

Forces larger than Clinton explain much of this. The power of interest groups to frighten Congress and frustrate change remains on powerful display in the grinding trench warfare over health care. Clinton’s third-way approach assumed that liberals and conservatives would display a minimum level of goodwill about reaching compromise; but both left and right often have behaved like a couple who fear that if they stop arguing, they won’t have anything to talk about. The intensity of the Republican denunciation of Clinton’s recently released welfare plan, for instance, was absurdly disproportionate to their actual level of disagreement.

But Clinton compounded these inherent problems. He got off on the wrong foot by abandoning his campaign promises to include Republicans and independents in key positions as a way of symbolizing inclusion and diversifying his advice. (Shrewder presidents, like John F. Kennedy and Roosevelt, had appointed Republican Cabinet officers to bolster their credibility with key constituencies and widen splits in the GOP coalition.)

Instead, Clinton patched together a government that reflected only the traditional Democratic coalition. That ensured internal resistance to the centrist message he ran on. One example: One of the most politically difficult decisions Clinton made in his welfare reform proposal was to allow states--in an effort to discourage out-of-wedlock births--to deny additional benefits to women who have children while already on welfare. This is the way Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala defended that decision in a meeting with reporters the day after the proposal was released: “I happen to think the politics on that is changing,” said Shalala, who is close to the liberal social welfare organizations that oppose the policy most fervently. “And we may have (in the states) an overwhelming politics not to do it.”

And: “I have not pretended that I personally think it’s going to make any difference, that small amount of money” in discouraging illegitimacy.

That’s a bit like General Motors sending out a vice president to explain that car buyers were rejecting its new brake system, which was a good thing, because it doesn’t work anyway.

Clinton’s approach to appointments guaranteed a second problem: uncertainty about his governing strategy. Tugged by conflicting advice, Clinton has vacillated between attempting to govern with a bipartisan, centrist legislative coalition (crime, the North American Free Trade Agreement) and a left-leaning alliance of Democrats (the budget last year, health care so far). On many issues, even aides say he has been too willing to let the Democratic congressional leadership define the parameters of the possible. The unsurprising result has been changed much more incrementally than Clinton’s millennial campaign rhetoric promised.

Other problems have further diluted his energy for change. His hesitancy and uncertainty on foreign policy has left him a bit like, say, Bosnia itself: subject to attack from all sides, often simultaneously. And the endless rain of personal accusations has sapped his momentum and contributed to the sense that he is spinning his wheels.

“I believe it is the drizzle, the constant light pelting in Washington . . . that undermines his credibility and makes him look like just another Washington character,” Ciruli said.

Against this gray backdrop, Clinton’s potential for realigning American politics may have already washed away. Given his particular problems in the South and West, many Democrats consider it likely that even if Clinton does win reelection, he will win fewer electoral votes than he captured in 1992, especially if Perot does not run again. It’s always possible that the Republicans will serve up Clinton a nominee entirely unacceptable to the American public; but absent that, the prospect of the President cementing Perot voters and disaffected Republicans into a new Democratic majority in 1996 now seems even to ardent supporters fancifully remote.

“If he is going to build a coalition, a Democratic majority, it is the work of a second term, not the first,” said Democratic consultant Tad Devine, an expert on electoral coalitions. “What he’s got to do now is figure how to survive this electoral environment.”

Survival is an ambition far less grand than those Clinton carried into office. But unless he can overcome his problems and hold the White House, it may be a long time before any other Democratic President gets the chance to worry about building a lasting new national coalition.

Turning Points

Realignments are the hinges of American political history. Political scientists define realignments as elections that precipitate a sharp and lasting shift in public allegience between the two political parties. The five realignments since the modern party system solidified in the early 19th Century*.

1828-1860 / Era’s 1st President: Andrew Jackson

Years party controlled White House Democrats: 24 Whigs: 8

1860-1896 / Era’s 1st President: Abraham Lincoln Years party controlled White House GOP: 28 Dem: 8

1896-1932 / Era’s 1st President: William McKinley Years party controlled White House GOP: 28 Dem: 8

1932-1968 / Era’s 1st President: Franklin Roosevelt Years party controlled White House Dem: 28 GOP: 8

1968-1992 / Era’s 1st President: Richard Nixon Years party controlled White House GOP: 20 Dem: 4

Clinton’s Chances

Bill Clinton’s victory had much in common with the election that triggered the last realignment--Richard Nixon’s 43% win in 1968. But Nixon consolidated his win with a clear majority four years later. It remains uncertain if Clinton can replicate Nixon’s success or whether his victory represents merely a temporary interruption in the realignment that began under Nixon.