Gephardt Presents Risky Challenge to Clinton’s Global Economic Vision

All the speculation over House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt’s intentions in 1996 shines the searchlight in the wrong corner. Gephardt (D-Mo.) is such a creature of party and institution, and so personally methodical, that it’s difficult to imagine him rolling the dice on a high-risk primary assault against President Clinton next year.

But whatever his plans for the presidency, Gephardt is already challenging Clinton as the leader of the Democratic opposition. With increasing boldness, Gephardt is presenting a vision for the party that veers decisively from Clinton’s. In a series of speeches since the election, Gephardt has rejected the core of Clinton’s economic vision--just as he resisted the essence of Clinton’s social policy agenda in his legislative decisions over the past two years.

In his economic agenda, Clinton represents the Democrats’ internationalist wing. Influenced by thinkers like Robert B. Reich, now the secretary of labor, Clinton argues for a strategy of adapting to the globalization of the economy rather than resisting it. Clinton maintains that no one can stop the migration of low-skill jobs to low-wage countries like Mexico and China. Rather, he says, government’s role should be to train Americans to move into higher-skill jobs--and to open new markets abroad for high-value American products through trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Gephardt champions the party’s competing economic nationalist wing. In a speech earlier this month to the Economic Policy Institute--the intellectual center of that camp--Gephardt repudiated both pillars of Clinton’s vision. Gephardt, who opposed NAFTA, ridiculed the idea that “new skills and training and education alone will help us weather the storm” and condemned “new trade relationships . . . (that) have thrown us into roller-coaster competition with . . . nations with rock-bottom wages.”

Instead, Gephardt argued, the United States should enter into trade agreements only with nations that will commit to raising domestic living standards and guaranteeing worker rights--hurdles that would significantly slow, if not entirely derail, Clinton’s push for free-trade zones across Latin America and Asia. And Gephardt called for a new corporate “code of conduct” that would push American companies to share profits and power with their workers.

This latest manifesto followed two earlier Gephardt declarations: He upstaged the President last December by announcing his own middle-class tax cut just two days before Clinton was scheduled to unveil his “middle-class bill of rights.” And in January, he turned heads by endorsing an alternative version of the flat-tax idea being pushed by House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Tex.).

What links Gephardt’s agenda is the conviction that Democrats can rebuild their political majority through muscular economic populism, while sublimating social issues that divide the party along racial lines. Gephardt has made clear his skepticism about Clinton’s effort to rethink traditional liberal approaches on the interconnected issues of crime, welfare and family breakdown.

Like the rest of the House Democratic leadership, Gephardt consistently advised the White House last year to delay welfare reform--so as to avoid alienating liberal and African American legislators whose votes were considered crucial for health care. And, on the same grounds, he counseled the White House not to make a strong stand against the Racial Justice Act--the poison pill that House liberals inserted into the crime bill last spring.

On both of those issues, Gephardt’s advice was spectacularly wrong, and it illuminates the hole in his vision of the Democratic future. On both economic and social issues, Gephardt is speaking primarily to Democratic loyalists--a core too narrow with which to win elections or govern.

In both the crime and welfare debates last year, Gephardt ultimately concluded that appeasing the Democratic base was more important than Clinton’s priority of identifying the party with individual responsibility. Likewise, Gephardt’s economic nationalism is primarily targeted at people already likely to consider themselves Democrats, such as older union members.

The whiff of protectionism in Gephardt’s approach repels independent, college-educated voters. Theoretically, Gephardtism offers a bridge to another swing constituency: the working-class conservatives attracted to Ross Perot and Patrick J. Buchanan. But in practice, those links would be difficult to forge.

While sharing Gephardt’s skepticism of foreign trade, Perot and Buchanan supporters are also intensely hostile toward government spending, welfare, affirmative action, immigration--the entire array of liberal social priorities that Gephardt has been so reluctant to rethink. Gephardt puts more bite into his economic populism than Walter F. Mondale or Michael S. Dukakis, but not enough to void the lesson of their doomed presidential campaigns: Democrats don’t even get to argue economics if they can’t convince Americans that they honor mainstream social values like individual accountability, the primacy of work and common standards.

Gephardt raises some promising avenues for Democrats--like pressuring companies to share the benefits of rising productivity with their workers. But in his basic assumptions, Gephardt moves the party backward from the advances that Clinton offered--at least as a candidate in 1992.

Unlike Gephardt and his fellow House Democrats, Clinton understands that middle-class voters will support government help for the less fortunate only if it is conditioned on personal responsibility, such as demanding work from welfare recipients. And Clinton’s economic approach acknowledges that no one can restore the world of 1955, when a young man could step from high school onto the line at Chrysler or General Motors and not walk away until retirement.

That nostalgia is the fatal flaw in Gephardt’s agenda. It posits a world that no longer exists: one in which government can assure steadily rising living standards, and where a full lunch pail can salve all social frictions. It overstates both government’s power to guarantee economic security and the power of a growing economy to reverse cultural regressions like rising illegitimacy and juvenile violence. On one front, Gephardt asks too much of government; on the other, too much of the market.

It’s reasonable for Democrats to question whether Clinton is the man to pull them out of the ditch. Over the past two years, he fatally diluted his reform message with a series of policy and personal blunders. Today, the President’s timidity in responding to the Newt world order is inviting the intellectual (and perhaps ultimately electoral) challenge he faces from Gephardt and other Democrats noisily asserting their independence.

But Democrats who blame all of their troubles on the President are delusional. Gephardt and former Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) contributed at least as much to last fall’s debacle by refusing to shake House Democrats out of their comfortable stupor on issues such as crime, welfare and political reform.

The critique of the traditional Democratic agenda that Clinton leveled as a candidate still offers the most persuasive analysis of the party’s travails. His failures in implementing an alternative agenda underscore the difficulty of remaking the party. But that experience does not suggest--as Gephardt’s message too often does--that Democrats should abandon the effort.