Too Little, Too Late : How did the professional spinners let this case of bad timing slip by? : MIDDLE CLASS DREAMS: Building the New American Majority, <i> By Stanley B. Greenberg (Times Books: $25; 320 pp.)</i>

Timing, they say, is everything in show business and politics, but it also matters in book publishing. If Stanley Greenberg had offered this treatise two years ago, it might have been greatly admired for insightful analysis, trenchant observations and the other cliches reviewers employ when they wish to sound sagacious. Alas, Greenberg missed his window. Published now, the book is kind of embarrassing.

Stanley Greenberg is a Washington political pollster of the Democratic persuasion, and his book is centered in the story of how he and the other campaign wizards helped Bill Clinton to become President. To move beyond the “stale orthodoxies” that have burdened his party. To reconnect with the “neglected middle class.” To “put people first.” Why does this sound so sodden?

Because the Republican sweep of the 1994 elections, as well as Clinton’s muddled two years in offices, have revealed how ephemeral this supposed restoration of the Democratic Party really was. The vision thing, Clinton’s agenda for governing, was really not much more than a concoction of slogans patched together by people like Stanley Greenberg--resonant phrases and poll-tested buzzwords that succeeded in winning an election but melted into formless mush once these guys had attained power.

Greenberg does not tell the story of Democratic meltdown. He did not see it coming. Nor does he try to explain why President Clinton diverged so blatantly from his own campaign rhetoric and governed on behalf of many of the same economic interests that he had assailed as a candidate. Instead, Greenberg savors the moment--1992--that is now quite stale.

This book was written before the big wipeout last November in which Republicans captured control of Congress, and the text was awkwardly adjusted after-the-fact to acknowledge the calamity. As an author myself, I can sympathize with the fix he was in--a freshly-written book that is preempted by reality before it even hits the bookstores. As a reader, I found my sympathy souring into something else as the evasions accumulated.

A political scientist before he became a polling professional, Greenberg expends many pages reviewing the historical formation of party majorities, from McKinley to Reagan. This discussion leads to a major insight about the present: Neither political party has a hold on things. Republicans crash, Democrats crash, everybody crashes.

The instability of party politics explains the great challenge that Clinton faced and overcame in 1992. With a little rejiggering to his text, Greenberg lamely uses it to explain away what has happened to Clinton’s presidency.

Greenberg’s basic formulation for fixing the Democratic Party is not new, but follows a familiar line offered by various right-of-center political books in recent years: Democrats need to get some distance from black people and the poor, so the angry white guys will like them again. Naturally, he does not put it quite that crassly.

His prose is a model of well-crafted euphemisms: “The plight of the poor and the unfinished business of civil rights are no longer the first principles of Democratic politics. Instead, Bill Clinton is seeking to reassociate his party with the American dream. That idea itself is a first principle that could potentially unite the poor and the middle class and change the face of politics in the United States.”

The American dream, that’s the ticket. Why didn’t Democrats think of this before? Everybody on board for his “broad bottom-up vision,” a political party that unites cities and suburbs and restores the American dream. If you want to ride, don’t mention black people or poverty.

As an adviser to out-of-power Democrats in the 1980s, Greenberg’s major contribution was the discovery of Macomb County, Mich., the blue-collar suburbs of Detroit where the discontented white voters are natural-born Democrats by class interests, but resent the party’s special attention to blacks and other minorities. The pollster developed some language for how Democrats might talk to these alienated voters who were once the vital core of their party. His book details that research.

But, like previous authors of this line, Greenberg offers a high-minded rationale for a retreat from principle: Finessing the explosive issue of race, he argues, is the only way to assemble a stable political majority that can tackle the big economic issues that working people, white and black, really care about. If blacks and Hispanics will just cool it (maybe women too, though Greenberg doesn’t really address their claims), then the Democratic Party can get back to the lunch-bucket political agenda that once made it great.

OK, then what? Greenberg is remarkably vague about what Democrats would actually stand for, in the improbable event that they defused America’s racial tensions and revived a working majority to deal with hard-core economic issues. Would the party confront the destructive aspects of unregulated global finance or the offloading of manufacturing by American multinational corporations? Would Democrats propose tangible solutions for the vast, unmeasured joblessness that afflicts both poor and middle-class families? Would the party commit itself to restoring an equitable (that is, progressive) tax system that shifts tax burdens from labor to capital?

Macomb County would certainly cheer these ideas, but we already know they are way too radical for Clinton and his party. Bankers and CEOs are among the major friends of Bill, not to mention the major campaign contributors. Some are in his Cabinet.

Instead, Greenberg describes the thin reformist program that Clinton has earnestly promoted--early childhood education, job training, health care, tax credits for the working poor and such. It does not sound like the future. Alongside the country’s deepening economic and social deterioration, it sounds like warmed-over Great Society.

The real problem of the Democratic Party, and especially Clinton, is that they have no convincing answer to the question of “then what?” Racial antagonism is not about to disappear from American politics (Republicans will make sure of that), and our history teaches that the only way to overcome the poisonous politics of race is to change the subject to larger matters that might unify disparate groups--a substantive governing agenda that aggrieved voters of all colors may recognize as real for them.

Clinton failed to do that and a lot of voters have decided that he is all slogan, little substance. After 10 years of voting for Reaganism, Macomb County nearly went for Clinton in 1992. Then it swung Republican again in 1994. But, curiously, Macomb’s white voters keep reelecting their humane and liberal Democratic congressman, Rep. David Bonior, who does not retreat on race or anything else. Bonior, minority whip in the House, speaks with a critical working-class perspective on the economic issues and expresses an intelligent skepticism of corporate power that makes Clinton sound positively Republican.

Quite unintentionally, Greenberg’s book does reveal something about what’s wrong with American politics. It is the emptiness of the woolly slogans. Clever word games that gull the electorate may be enough to win elections, but they are detached from the coherent principles needed for governing. Voters do care more about the substance than the slogans, at least they care more than Greenberg’s profession does.

The book’s narrative high point is Greenberg’s account of a May, 1992, meeting when he and other campaign advisers hammered out a brilliant synthesis of Clinton’s various themes, a composite word-picture for simple-minded citizens that combined a whole bunch of Clinton ideas: “Move people from welfare to work.” “Begin to work together.” “Eliminate tax breaks for corporations that ship our jobs overseas.” “Devote ourselves to educating our people.” Attack “the special interests that dominate Washington.”

Greenberg modestly describes his own epiphany: “It was so simple. Why not combine the message of anti-politics and reinventing government with the message of investment in people?” His fellow gurus were excited when he told them. “We knew we were on the verge of a breakthrough,” he writes.

Their seminal work, which they dubbed “the people-first profile,” was immediately tested in a national poll of 1,000 citizens.

“We need a government that puts people first again.”

They loved it!

Now, Clinton and his advisers, a bit anxious themselves, are around the table again, field-testing new material for the next campaign, shuffling themes and catch-phrases and trying them out on focus groups. I propose this slogan: “We need a government that really, really, really puts people first.”