Clinton Held the Center All Along

With the rush to assess the Clinton legacy well underway, one thing is clear: It’s not newspapers writing the first draft of history; it’s Dick Morris.

The wily strategist, now banished to the far reaches of the Fox News Channel, is portrayed as the lone figure behind one of the most amazing events of the Clinton presidency: his comeback after the Republican takeover of the Congress in 1994.

If you believe two recent documentaries--”The Clinton Years” on ABC’s “Nightline” and PBS’ “Frontline”--a brilliant, politically ambidextrous Rasputin got the ear of a poll-driven president who lacked any principles except, perhaps, to win at any cost.

According to the Morris camp, the president was told that he had strayed too far to the left in his first two years and needed to “triangulate” back to the center, between congressional liberals and the GOP’s right-wing. Wanting to win, the president succumbed to the enchantments of Morris, whom one of the documentaries called Clinton’s “evil twin.”

Morris is an immensely talented strategist. But the repositioning of approach and policy in the Clinton presidency in early 1995 was not invented by Morris. It was part of a well-thought-out political philosophy, strategy and agenda developed over the previous decade. Bill Clinton ran and won on this “New Democrat” platform. Morris merely pointed the president back to his political roots.

Ironically, some liberal members of the Clinton team who vilify Morris are the same ones inflating his role. They blame him for implanting the balanced budget proposal, 1995 welfare reform and the soccer mom-focused campaign of 1996 into the Clinton brain. As George Stephanopoulos put it, “Triangulation was just another word for betrayal.”

Betrayal of whom? These policies were the bedrocks of the Clinton candidacy from the outset. In his announcement speech in October 1991, Clinton proclaimed that he was “fighting for the forgotten middle class,” those who were “spending more hours on the job, spending less time with their children.”

Fleshing out the details in his campaign manifesto, “Putting People First,” Clinton called for cutting the deficit in half by the end of his first term while providing middle-class tax relief; putting 100,000 new police officers on the streets and more criminals behind bars, and putting a two-year time limit on welfare.

These policies and the political outlook that informed them were not the result of poll-driven positioning. They were the fruits of a long reexamination of Democratic dogma by an upstart faction within the party, the New Democrats. Coalescing around the Democratic Leadership Council founded in the immediate aftermath of the 1984 Mondale defeat, these elected officials and party leaders believed that the Democratic Party was in danger of marginalization and even extinction if it did not craft a mainstream public philosophy that had wide electoral appeal. They embraced growth-oriented and fiscally sound economics, an internationalist foreign policy and a politics that reached beyond the Democratic liberal base to suburban swing voters.

In 1990 and 1991, the DLC unveiled comprehensive policy platforms built around the themes of “opportunity, responsibility, and community,” offering a robust defense of traditional values such as “the importance of work, the need for faith and the centrality of family,” and including innovative proposals, such as charter schools.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the DLC’s chairman, Bill Clinton, made this the center of his presidential bid. Likewise, it is no surprise that while Morris was supposedly the lone voice luring Clinton to the center, the New Democrats also were pressing Clinton to return to his New Democratic roots. This came to a head after the 1994 elections when Dave McCurdy, then-DLC chairman and fresh from an unsuccessful Senate bid, blasted Clinton. “Those of us in the center . . . we got screwed,” McCurdy fumed to one reporter.

This prompted a stormy Oval Office meeting with a delegation of senior New Democrats, including McCurdy and Sens. John Breaux of Louisiana and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. Despite this friction, these and other New Democrats supported Clinton as he made his way back to the New Democrat line in the next two years.

The Democratic Party’s left wing finds it hard to reconcile the practical success of the New Democratic approach in improving the political fortunes of the party and furthering the progressive ends of helping the poor, creating jobs and expanding opportunity. Now, given the results of the 2000 election, the simmering battle between liberal Democrats and New Democrats is moving to the terrain of the Clinton legacy. Both sides understand far too well that whoever wins the spin of explaining the past eight years will set the course for Democrats in the years to come.