Gore Strives to Blend Old, New Democrat

In substance, Al Gore’s campaign agenda departs little from the centrist direction Bill Clinton has charted through most of his presidency. But in style, Gore has set a very different tone for his party.

Gore is betting he can fuse Clinton’s “new Democrat” policy approach with a political message that relies more on old Democratic themes--particularly a polarizing populism that frames the presidential election as a choice between “the people and the powerful.”

Clinton, though critical of Republicans, matched his centrist agenda with a political language that emphasized bipartisanship and new approaches; in his 1992 campaign, he ran against “brain-dead politics in both parties.”

Gore, by contrast, speaks in far more partisan terms even as he advances moderate policy ideas--such as paying off the national debt or demanding more responsibility from absent fathers. At times, it seems as though Gore is trying to combine inheritances from his father--Sen. Albert Gore Sr., a Tennessee populist first elected to Congress during the New Deal--and Clinton, the vice president’s most important political patron.

Gore’s effort to blend these old and new Democratic approaches raises significant questions for his campaign and a potential presidency.

As a candidate, the risk is that the old liberal music will drown out the more moderate new words, hurting Gore among swing voters.

“It creates a confusing message because people are not quite sure whether Gore is an attack liberal or a centrist Democrat,” said Leon E. Panetta, Clinton’s former White House chief of staff.

Leaning Farther to Left Than Clinton

As a president, the question is whether Gore’s greater comfort with his party’s liberal traditions would make him more reluctant than Clinton to challenge Democratic interest groups still resistant to elements of the centrist agenda.

“Substantively, there is much more continuity than change in Gore’s approach,” says one leading centrist Democrat who asked not to be identified by name. “But politically it’s a different message. Gore is much more orthodox politically than Clinton, much more willing to pay homage to the agendas of the traditional interest groups, much less interested in seeking occasions to dramatize his independence from those groups, and much less willing to entertain bold new proposals that may discomfit them.” Indeed, Gore has not signaled his independence from party interests nearly as dramatically as Clinton did in 1992, when he appeared at a conference sponsored by the Rev. Jesse Jackson and criticized Sister Souljah, a young rap singer who had made incendiary racial comments.

“Gore has not taken any issue and really advanced from where Clinton was,” says Pete Wehner, policy director at the conservative think tank Empower America. “Clinton was willing to take a chance with the liberal base to try to salvage his party. Gore in a way is less gutsy, less willing to confront his base.”

Where Gore has broken from Clinton, it’s been mostly to embrace more traditionally liberal positions on such issues as trade and gay rights. And Gore has been more firm than Clinton in rejecting reform proposals to constrain the costs of Social Security and Medicare.

Those differences are real, but they are only part of the story. The vast majority of Gore’s agenda reconfirms rather than redirects the changes Clinton has imposed on his party--a conclusion underscored by Gore’s selection as his running mate of moderate Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut. “I don’t think there is any light between Clinton and Gore at all,” says former Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich, who’s become a leading liberal critic of the administration.

Many key Gore proposals are literally extensions of Clinton initiatives, such as his call for federal subsidies to hire 50,000 more police officers beyond the thousands the administration has already funded. To provide health insurance for working-poor adults, Gore simply wants to make them eligible for the Children’s Health Insurance Program that Clinton signed into law in 1997.

But the Clinton framework guides Gore in a more basic sense. Clinton has argued that Democrats can juxtapose fiscal responsibility with government activism, as shown by his support of both a balanced federal budget and new spending in areas such as education. At the same time, he has insisted social policy must balance opportunity and responsibility--through programs such as welfare reform that invest in job training and child care but then demand work from those receiving public assistance.

Gore’s domestic agenda revolves around these ideas. As the next stage in welfare reform, he’s proposed to require work from absent fathers behind in their child support. He wants to require all prisoners on parole to face regular drug tests--and face a return to prison if they flunk. He’s backed a series of tough-on-crime measures and never wavered in his support for the death penalty, despite a rising liberal clamor against it this spring.

On the opportunity side of the ledger, Gore has advanced an ambitious series of ideas around the theme of making work pay. Among other things, he wants to increase the minimum wage, expand the earned income tax credit for working-poor families and make the tax credit for child care expenses available as a refund to families too poor to pay any federal income tax.

Seeing Washington as a Catalyst

Gore follows Clinton in another centrist direction by seeking to change the way the federal government pursues its goals. Like Clinton, Gore argues that, rather than delivering services itself, Washington should operate mostly as a catalyst, facilitating action from local governments or private groups like religious charities.

Apart from the proposal to add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare, almost all of Gore’s key domestic initiatives are structured either as tax credits or, more commonly, grant programs to states. His initiatives to provide universal preschool, hire more police officers, expand health care for working-poor adults and reduce class sizes are all grants that allow local governments to design their own programs.

Where Gore differs from Clinton is in his willingness to tie more strings to the money. As a former governor, Clinton was relatively reluctant to saddle states with strict mandates. Gore displays less deference. He has proposed to cut education funding for states that don’t improve student performance, and he is demanding substantial reforms in hiring and tenure policy for cities that accept grants he is offering to increase teacher pay. “Gore will go a little further in holding states to a high standard,” said Bruce Reed, the top White House domestic policy advisor.

Even as Gore proposes new spending, he follows Clinton’s lead in calling for fiscal discipline. Gore has promised to keep the budget in balance every year of his presidency; he’s also pledged to pay off the national debt by 2012.

That focus on debt reduction inspires grumbling from some on the left who think it precludes a spending agenda adequate for needed improvements in education or health care.

But such criticism has grown more faint in the last few years. The reason: The bountiful surplus estimates have allowed Clinton, and now Gore, to propose enough spending to satisfy the left while still upholding fiscal discipline. Even as he’s pledging to keep the budget in balance, Gore is proposing initiatives with a 10-year cost of $100 billion or more in these separate areas: education, prescription drugs, expanded Social Security benefits for widows and stay-at-home mothers, health care for the uninsured, and retirement saving subsidies.

In foreign policy, Gore parallels Clinton’s internationalist approach, which has moved the Democrats away from their post-Vietnam War reluctance to use force toward greater acceptance of U.S. military involvement in such conflicts as Bosnia and Kosovo. If anything, administration officials say, Gore may be even slightly more hawkish than Clinton in his willingness to commit troops in such causes.

In all these ways, Gore is tracking Clinton’s centrist course. But where Gore has publicly differed from Clinton, it’s been mostly to move to his left. Gore proposed licensing all gun owners before the administration did. Abandoning Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” compromise, Gore says that gays should be allowed to serve openly in the military.

Most significant, Gore has met one of organized labor’s priorities by agreeing that labor and environmental standards should be incorporated into the body of future trade deals, rather than relegated to side agreements. Clinton would not make such a commitment, which even liberals such as Reich believe “means it will be very hard to get any trade agreements in the future.”

A More Partisan Approach

Each of these policy differences reflects a broader difference in attitude. Friends and critics agree that Gore is more a creature of the Democratic Party than Clinton, closer to its members on Capitol Hill, more comfortable in its traditions and more instinctively partisan. “He reacts in a more partisan way,” says Panetta. “He tends to be less trusting of Republican motivations than Clinton. Clinton always felt he could cut a deal with anyone, anywhere. . . . I’m not sure Al Gore felt that way.”

On the campaign trail, these differences are hard to miss. When Gore pummels “Big Oil” “Big Tobacco” and the “big polluters,” he sounds less like Clinton than William Jennings Bryan, or more precisely his father.

Gore’s ties to Democratic traditions influence his policy agenda more subtly. While he has defended many of Clinton’s key initiatives, many analysts note that Gore has offered no new thrust of his own that challenges Democratic constituencies as directly as Clinton did with his positions on welfare reform, balancing the budget or free trade.

Gore, of course, isn’t alone in carefully calibrating when to confront and when to reassure his base. Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush, for all his emphasis on “compassion,” takes conventionally conservative views on abortion rights, gun control and taxes--all litmus test issues with core Republican constituencies. Even Clinton did not meaningfully challenge the Democratic consensus on abortion rights, affirmative action or entitlement programs.

Gore, though, may be trying to bridge a wider chasm than most as he expresses the Democratic policies of the 1990s with the Democratic language of the 1930s. The next three months will determine whether he has found a new way to reach the electorate--a populist centrism?--or stranded himself on a bridge to nowhere.