Let Someone Else Try on the ’96 Ticket : True Democrats feel betrayed by Clinton’s compromising and abdication of futurist issues.

These are tough times for progressive Democrats. Soundly beaten at the polls, we shudder at the daily news, wondering how much compassion, indeed how much constitutional law, will survive the Republican attack. Conservatives love to complain about a liberal bias in the media, but it is increasingly difficult for liberals to listen to radio or watch television without hearing their goals and values savagely ridiculed. Even more disheartening than the gloating of our opponents is the lackluster resistance being put up by national leaders of the Democratic Party.

For those who do not assume that the spiritual life of our nation can be correlated with the Dow Jones industrial average, for those who had hoped that the end of the Cold War would allow for greater spending on environmental protection and restoration, for those who feel sickened by a rich nation’s tolerance of poverty and despair, for those who still long for universal health insurance, Newt Gingrich’s 100 days are a kind of torture. Lacking an effective politics, we can nevertheless see that, when the smoke clears and the Republicans are done dealing out of their three-card monte deck, the interests of large corporations will have been advanced at the expense of basic decency.

Nor does it help to have both the President and Democrats in Congress vying for the political center. If we cannot wield power, progressives want at least what every constituency deserves: effective representation.

Our problem with this Administration began long before the past election. Even when he had a working majority in Congress, President Clinton avoided controversy by sidestepping crucial fights, choosing to cave or compromise. We felt the sands shifting early over the issue of gays in the military; we groaned with Lani Guinier, then with Joycelyn Elders and now with Henry Foster. We had hoped that electing Clinton and Gore might lead to environmental activism, because thinking about tomorrow would require aggressive action to preserve biodiversity, limit global warming and reduce the production of toxins. The debate, if that’s what it was, over health-care reform was especially painful, as the practical single-payer plan was prerejected in favor of compromises almost no one liked.

The sad truth for progressives is that this is a presidency marked by free-trade treaties and deficit reduction--with the shadow of Alan Greenspan darkening Clinton’s unimpressive record.

On the theory that we cannot get what we want unless we start to talk about it, progressive Democrats should start demanding that Clinton take himself out of the 1996 presidential race. Then, instead of the inevitable mud-wrestling over his fuzzy record and personal history, we might have a debate on the left that would parallel the debate already under way in the Republican Party. Central to this debate would be the science of the global environment crisis, the deterioration of our inner cities, the economics of health-care trends and the need for new priorities in crime prevention. Let’s face it: After all the mockery--much of it, sadly, both unfair and effective--the President lacks the credibility to define and defend a progressive program for America.

A different candidate, convinced that human rights are more important than property rights, could appeal to the best in us by insisting that maintaining the quality of the biosphere is our greatest challenge and responsibility, by making the case for a true conversion of military funding and by persuading us to shift resources out of the wasteful drug war (lost long ago) into domestic spending on health, education and, yes, even welfare.

The Democratic candidate who emerged from this debate could offer a clear alternative to the rising tide of selfishness, irresponsibility and xenophobia. The campaign’s song might be Bob Marley’s “One Love,” with its refrain repeated as a mantra: “Let’s get together and feel all right.” The ticket might lose--as indeed Clinton/Gore probably will--but it would at the very least wage a fight worth the resources that would go into it.

Clinton has the ability to win the nomination even if he is challenged from the left or right. But by making the ineffective record of his Administration the focus of the next national election, the President guarantees that issues that matter to progressive Democrats will be shunted aside. Indeed, if Bill Clinton insists on running, the Democratic Party will spend the next two years entertaining the likes of Rush Limbaugh, who would probably be as disappointed to see the President take himself out of the race as Jay Leno was to see Dan Quayle withdraw.