Clinton’s Reversion to Old Tactics Doesn’t Bode Well for Democrats

It’s beginning to look as if George Stephanopoulos bailed out too soon. Not that he needed a grueling year of defending President Clinton from Monica revelations and impeachment. But at the end of that harrowing road, Clinton is moving back toward the strategy of deferring to congressional Democrats that Stephanopoulos always supported--with disastrous results.

Not that you’d get much sense of that from Stephanopoulos’ alternately engaging and superficial memoir, “All Too Human.” Gracefully written, frequently self-critical and mostly generous in spirit, the book is extremely insightful about the strain of working in the modern White House. It’s moderately insightful about Clinton’s personality. (For all the furor about the author’s alleged betrayal of Oval Office secrets, the president remains a surprisingly distant figure, possibly because by mid-1993 Stephanopoulos already felt exiled from his inner circle.)

But the book is virtually without insight about which of Clinton’s policy and political choices worked--and which didn’t. Which is too bad, because Clinton is drifting again into the fundamental mistakes that derailed his first two years--when he followed the advice of old-line Democrats like Stephanopoulos.

Although he never owns up in the book, Stephanopoulos was a principal advocate of the legislative strategy that Clinton employed when he arrived in Washington. Convinced that Jimmy Carter had failed because he didn’t court his party’s congressional leaders, Stephanopoulos and like-minded advisors pressed Clinton to accommodate rather than challenge Capitol Hill Democrats.

The problem was that the congressional Democratic leadership--especially in the House--wasn’t ready for the centrist reforms that Clinton promised in his 1992 campaign. House Democratic leaders--usually supported by Stephanopoulos and other White House liberals--resisted spending cuts in Clinton’s initial budget (which pushed him to raise taxes more than he otherwise might); shelved campaign finance reform proposals that they thought would dilute their financial advantage; discouraged him from pursuing welfare reform (for fear of dividing Democrats); and accepted liberal amendments that poisoned Clinton’s crime bill. All these decisions alienated swing voters--and fueled the GOP landslide in 1994.

Clinton contributed to the disaster with his own missteps (gays in the military, an overreaching health care plan and shifting signals on taxes during the 1993 budget fight). But the president at least recognized the need to change course after 1994. Whether through conviction--or a primal desire for survival manipulated by his rumpled Svengali, Dick Morris--Clinton learned a critical lesson after the deluge: If Democrats didn’t take the lead on reforming government, they would leave open the door for Republicans to pursue much more sweeping reductions in Washington’s role.

As the book makes clear, Stephanopoulos never accepted that lesson. He staunchly opposed Clinton’s call for a balanced budget in 1995--even though that decision allowed Clinton to shift the debate from whether to eliminate the deficit to how to eliminate it, and proved the turning point in his presidency. (At least, in the book, Stephanopoulos acknowledges that Clinton had a point.) More tellingly, Stephanopoulos criticizes Clinton for signing the GOP-drafted welfare reform bill in 1996--without ever acknowledging that if he and other liberals had supported reform while Democrats controlled Congress, they could have drafted a bill much more to their liking.

Ironically, even as Stephanopoulos is rehashing the left’s case against Clinton, the president is now reverting to old habits. As if Stephanopoulos was still whispering into his ear, Clinton is once again worrying more about mollifying his party than identifying it with the cause of reform.

The picture, as always with Clinton, isn’t entirely black and white. The president is still challenging Democratic orthodoxy with an education reform package that demands tough accountability measures on local school districts--such as new teacher testing and an end to social promotion.

But on Social Security and Medicare, his biggest decisions, he’s ducking. Clinton has proposed to devote three-fourths of the federal budget surplus to Social Security and Medicare without demanding any specific cost-cutting reforms in return; to the contrary, last week Clinton pulled the rug out from under centrist Sen. John B. Breaux (D-La.), who was trying to push a reform plan through his bipartisan Medicare advisory committee.

Breaux’s plan to subject Medicare to greater market competition needs more work, but it offered a reasonable starting point for debate. Instead, his commission collapsed in deadlock, and the prospects for Medicare reform before 2000 are flickering.

Short-run, this party-first political strategy keeps Clinton on the right side of Democratic legislators cool to entitlement reform and still unhappy about having to defend him from impeachment. It’s also helping Vice President Al Gore minimize opposition on the left for his presidential bid in 2000--as symbolized by the endorsement he received last week from House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.).

Yet one overarching lesson of Clinton’s presidency is that he cannot reinvigorate his party unless he’s willing to accept internal conflict. For Clinton and Gore, resisting entitlement reform poses at least some political danger--in that it might help Republicans portray them in 2000 as big-spending defenders of an untenable status quo. The larger risk is the one that Stephanopoulos and his allies missed on welfare: that if Democrats don’t reform these programs today, they could cede the initiative for redesigning them to the GOP tomorrow.

In the book, Stephanopoulos says he left the White House partly because he believed Clinton’s second term would be “complacent.” In many ways (even leaving aside the obvious turmoil of impeachment) he was wrong. Working with congressional Democrats, Clinton has been able to pack more activism (on initiatives such as expanding health care for uninsured children) into a balanced budget than the left expected. The complacency that threatens Clinton isn’t the lack of new spending that Stephanopoulos feared; it’s the reluctance to modernize core pillars of the welfare state that his former advisor would probably cheer.

Ronald Brownstein’s column appears in this space every Monday.

See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site

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