Young Doesn’t See Political Move to Right

Former U.N. ambassador and Atlanta mayor Andrew Young on Thursday dismissed oft-repeated suggestions that the political difficulties facing President Clinton and his party stem from a growing conservatism in the nation.

Rather, Young said, the GOP takeover of Congress is the result of the Democratic Party’s failure to communicate with its most likely supporters and is not a judgment against its or Clinton’s policies.

“Organized labor didn’t feel any allegiance to Clinton or anybody else (Democratic) running because they felt like they’d been betrayed” by White House and party support for the North American Free Trade Agreement and GATT, Young said during an interview with reporters and editors at The Times’ Washington bureau.

“Blacks were confused (about Democratic policies in general) and because they haven’t known how to read what’s going on. . . . So they didn’t rally around anyone,” Young said.

The net effect was “a loss of energy” that caused low voter turnout among Democrats and higher turnout among Republicans, who Young said borrowed the organizing tactics of civil rights activists to rally conservative white voters.

“I don’t see this as any dramatic move to the right” on the part of the nation, he said. “I see it as part of the confusion of the time.”

“Newt Gingrich ran an old-fashioned labor union, Democratic campaign,” Young said of the incoming Republican House Speaker. “He took these kids on college campuses, just like we used to do in the civil rights movement, and he invited them off to weekend retreats. They rallied around and they learned how to crunch numbers and how to organize precincts and how to conduct campaigns. Then they picked the districts they were going to work in and they ran good campaigns.”

The disarray within the Democratic Party provides an opening for Gingrich, whom Young described as a “demagogue.”

The Republicans want to create more confusion and polarize the public into thinking that the federal government can do nothing right, he said, and that was the purpose of its “contract with America”--a set of political reforms that many Republicans signed and promised to enact if they won congressional seats.

“They basically want to use this as a steppingstone to take the White House in 1996, so they would like to see (Democratic) failure,” he said.