Defying the Odds

by James W. Ceaser

  The Clintons themselves would continue to be major figures in the Democratic Party throughout the first 16 years of the next century. But Clintonism —or at least the version that America saw between 1992 and 2000—would go into decline. In fact, it would prove to be a burden for the Clinton who now carried the torch.

  BACK AND TO THE LEFT

  Health care was one issue on which Clinton’s needle-threading failed badly. Many Democratic thinkers wanted to follow the Canadian example and move the United States toward a single-payer system. Clinton spurned that approach, instead opting for a system of mandates and subsidies, drawing on a proposal that Richard Nixon had offered nearly twenty years before. As head of the president’s health care task force, Hillary Clinton supervised the drafting of the plan in 1993. As a brilliant policy maven, she understood the details, but practically no one else did. Clintoncare’s complexity and cost proved to be drawbacks, and it died before reaching a vote on the floor of either chamber. Together with the 1993 tax hike, the health care plan wounded the Democrats on the domestic front.

  Republicans were overdue for a victory. Population shifts had created many potentially winnable seats in the South and West, but the party had been unable to exploit the opportunity. It is very difficult for a party to gain downballot ground while holding the presidency, and Republicans had been in the White House between 1980 and 1992.16 Now, with Democrats in control of the political branches in Washington, along with most governorships and state legislatures, Republicans could go on the offensive. Another political asset was the Voting Rights Act. By encouraging the creation of majority-minority districts, the law had the side effect of making the surrounding districts whiter and thus more Republican.17

  In 1994, the GOP swept to majorities in both chambers of Congress for the first time since 1952, and it scored gains in statehouses as well. In the House, very conservative Republicans replaced fairly conservative white Democrats from Southern and border states. With fewer conservatives in Democratic ranks, the party’s center of gravity started to shift leftward, and many congressional Democrats took a dim view of Clinton’s bargains with the GOP majority. In 1996, they noticed that Clinton won a comfortable reelection while they languished in the minority. They concluded that Clintonism was good for Clinton, but not for the Democratic Party. When they rallied to his side during the impeachment controversy, their motivation was less about support for the president than anger at the Republicans.18

  The 2000 Democratic nominee was Al Gore, who had grown more liberal since his DLC days. In the fall, he lost every state of the Old Confederacy— the first time such a thing had ever happened to a Democratic nominee from the South. The party did fight the GOP to a draw in the Senate, and its most prominent victor was Hillary Rodham Clinton. After Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York announced his retirement, she ran for his seat even though she had never lived in the state. The Clintons bought a large house in Chappaqua, an upper-class community in Westchester County, and she commenced a “listening tour.” Republicans had high hopes for their candidate, Representative Rick Lazio, but she easily dispatched him.

  The Clintons’ move to New York State would reshape their political lives. Whereas she had once been First Lady of a conservative Southern state, she was now a U.S. senator representing a liberal Northern state. During the next eight years, she built a liberal voting record that would have been toxic in Little Rock but was popular in Manhattan.19 The job also tightened her ties to the financial community. Several days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the New York Stock Exchange held a ceremonial reopening, and she was on the dais. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton had headquartered the Clinton Foundation in the city, where he raised money from rich people.

  Her most fateful decision in the Senate was her 2002 vote to approve the invasion of Iraq. Explaining her position, she recalled presidential action that she had seen up close: “When Saddam blocked the inspection process, the inspectors left. As a result, President Clinton, with the British and others, ordered an intensive four-day air assault,” she said. “In 1998, the United States also changed its underlying policy toward Iraq from containment to regime change.”20 Soon, the American presence in Iraq would take a bad turn, and she would regret that vote.

  In 2004, she decided not to run against Bush. The nomination instead went, as it had in 1988, to a Massachusetts liberal. John Kerry had been in the Senate since 1984, and before that, he had briefly served as lieutenant governor under Michael Dukakis. Trying to re-create the old Democratic coalition, Kerry chose a running mate from South Carolina, Senator John Edwards. The choice did not work. As they had four years earlier, Democrats failed to carry a single Southern state. At the national level, Kerry lost the electoral and popular vote by small margins, and after the election, Democrats concluded that Bush and the Republicans had outclassed them in organization and technology.21

  The left regrouped. Wealthy liberals formed the Democracy Alliance, a network designed to coordinate contributions to progressive groups. Middle-class liberals found one another through an ever-expanding set of Internet sites such as MoveOn.org. Reporter Matt Bai observed, “What MoveOn had done, along with popular leftist blogs like Daily Kos and MyDD, was to establish a virtual clubhouse for like-minded liberals clustered in hostile places.”22 This clubhouse took on a militant air. “The conservatives have declared war on liberalism, and we have been treating it like we can appeal to people on the basis of reason,” said Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (a.k.a. “Kos,” founder of the eponymous website). “We need to be down and dirty and absolutely tear them apart.” He explained the site’s purpose: “I look at this as [training] armies. It’s training our troops how to fight rhetorically.”23 In 2004 former Vermont governor Howard Dean had tried to mobilize liberals online. Although he raised a surprising amount of money, he was an inept candidate. Looking ahead to 2008, liberals were looking for a new standard-bearer, and Hillary Clinton would have a hard time convincing them that she was that candidate. When Bill Clinton spoke to Democracy Alliance donors in 2006, one member challenged him on Hillary Clinton’s Iraq vote. His answer betrayed his anger and frustration: “You’re just wrong. Everything you just said is totally wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. . . . Only in this party do we eat our own. You can go on misrepresenting and bashing our people, but I am sick and tired of it.”24

  After Democrats won House and Senate majorities in the 2006 midterm election, presidential candidates came forward with high hopes about regaining the White House. Clinton was the early favorite, but there was also buzz about John Edwards. The third candidate, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, seemed to be a long shot. He was a freshman senator who had achieved national prominence only because Kerry had chosen him to keynote the 2004 Democratic convention. In Epic Journey, we told how Obama went from an improbability to a contender, and then to the forty-fourth president. We need not retell that story here. What matters for present purposes is that his tenure represented an important chapter in the transformation of the Democratic Party.

  Time magazine, on the cover of its 2008 post-election edition, superimposed Barack Obama’s head onto a photo of Franklin Roosevelt. A general assumption was that Obama, like FDR, would usher in an age of Democratic dominance. Columnist Harold Meyerson said that Obama’s victory “inspires that sense of awe that comes when we realize we are in the presence of a momentous historical transformation.” The American political future, he continued, “belongs to Barack Obama’s Democrats.”25

  Not quite. His signature health care reform legislation proved to be unpopular, and although the economy eventually crawled out of the Great Recession, progress was slow. In the 2010 midterm election, Republicans won back the House, and just as important, scored gains in state legislatures just in time for the decennial redistricting. Obama did get a second term in 2012—with an asterisk. As we explained in After Hope and Change, he made history by winning reelection while losing vote share. Previous incumbents had either increased their electoral str
ength from their first election (e.g., Reagan in 1984, Clinton in 1996, G. W. Bush in 2004) or lost their bid for another four years (Carter in 1980, G. H. W. Bush in 1992). Obama broke this pattern, squeaking through but in a weaker position than before. Two years after that, Republicans won the Senate and strengthened their hold on the House and the legislatures.

  President Obama failed to achieve the general electoral realignment that many had expected after 2008, but his time in office coincided with an ideological realignment within his own party. Liberals or progressives were now in the lead. At least in part, this result was a matter of subtraction. Among officeholders, advocates of rival positions—“New Democrats,” “blue dogs,” pro-lifers—had largely disappeared through either retirement or defeat at the polls. A symbolically significant turning point came in 2011, when the Democratic Leadership Council ran out of money and closed its doors. Many progressive Democrats were still angry at DLC’s efforts to compromise with Republicans during the Clinton and Bush years. “One of the things that’s happening right now in Democratic politics is that progressives are winning the battle for the party,” said Darcy Burner, president of a liberal group called the Progressive Congress. “The corporate-focused DLC type of politics isn’t working inside the Democratic party.”26

  Political scientists will long debate whether the increasingly leftward tilt of Democratic politicians was a cause or a consequence of an ideological shift among Democratic voters. There is little doubt, however, that such a shift did occur. In 2000, Bill Clinton’s last year in office, 44 percent of Democrats told Gallup that they identified as moderates, compared with 29 percent as liberals, and 25 percent as conservatives. By 2015, moderates were down to 35 percent and conservatives to 17 percent. Liberals had become the dominant group, with 45 percent.27

  One might argue that the meanings of “liberal” and “conservative” are fuzzy to many voters, but the Pew Research Center found a similar pattern by looking at responses to questions about political values. Both parties have become more ideologically consistent, Democrats moving to the left and Republicans moving to the right, with less common ground in between. In 1994, 64 percent of Republicans were to the right of the median Democrat. Twenty years later, that figure was 92 percent. In 2014, 94 percent of Democrats were to the left of the median Republican, up from 70 percent in 1994.28

  The demographic composition of the party had changed. Between 1992 and 2016, the percentage of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents under age 30 ticked up from 18 percent to 20 percent. Meanwhile, the figure for the GOP dropped from 21 percent to 13 percent, meaning that younger Democrats would have proportionately more sway in their party than their Republican counterparts. Not surprisingly, African Americans, Hispanics, and college graduates added up to a much larger share of the Democratic Party in 2016 than they had in 1992. As mentioned before, Bill Clinton’s first nomination campaign depended on a core of working-class whites. It was a smart strategy at the time, since whites without a college degree made up 59 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. By 2016, however, this category had shrunk to 32 percent.29

  It is hard to overstate the significance of that last figure. Working-class whites in both the North and the South had been a mainstay of the Democratic Party at least since FDR. Now the party was more a coalition of people of color and college-educated whites. Furthermore, the latter group was becoming even better educated: greater numbers of college graduates were going on to graduate or professional school, and people with such education were leaning more heavily Democratic. In 1992, people with postgraduate education were evenly split, with 47 percent identifying or leaning Democratic, and 46 percent Republican. In 2014, Democrats had a 56–36 percent lead.30 This group was quite progressive. Pew found that 54 percent of people with postgraduate experience had consistently or mostly liberal values, compared with 44 percent of those with a bachelor’s degree only, 38 percent of those with some college, and 26 percent of those with a high school diploma or less.31

  The numbers would vary from state to state, of course, but the national data pointed in a clear direction: the Democrats were a party of ethnic diversity and political liberalism, especially on social issues. Writing on the eve of Obama’s reelection, liberal columnist Joe Klein offered words of caution:

  The Democrats have a serious problem. It is a problem that stems from the party’s greatest strength: its long-term support for inclusion and equal rights for all, its support of racial integration and equal rights for women and homosexuals and its humane stand on immigration reform. Those heroic positions, which I celebrate, cost the Democrats more than a few elections in the past. And they caused an understandable, if misguided, overreaction within the party—a drift toward identity politics, toward special pleading. Inclusion became exclusive. The Democratic National Committee officially recognizes 14 caucuses or “communities,” most having to do with race, gender, sexual orientation or ethnicity.32

  In 2016, candidates would face rigorous tests of loyalty to this orthodoxy. When it came to the Democratic presidential nomination, no Bubbas need apply.

  THE BENCH

  Each party’s bench of potential presidential candidates has usually consisted of people who have served as governor, senator, or House member. The Democrats had a problem here, because the Obama years had left them in their weakest downballot position since the 1920s.33 As the presidential campaign got under way in 2015, they held thirteen fewer Senate seats, sixty-nine fewer House seats, and eleven fewer governorships than they had when he took office.34 As we shall see in the chapter on congressional and state elections, this weakness fed on itself, as it hobbled the party in recruitment and redistricting.

  Among the biggest states, Republicans held the governorships of Texas, Florida, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Georgia, and North Carolina. Democrat Tom Wolf was governor of Pennsylvania, but he had just won his first term in 2014 and was unknown elsewhere. One of the Democratic Party’s remaining big-state governors was literally a name from the past. In 1975, Jerry Brown of California had been the nation’s youngest governor at the age of thirty-six. After losing a 1982 Senate race, he made a run for the presidency (his third) in 1992. He later reentered office as the mayor of Oakland and attorney general of California. He regained the governorship in 2010 and easily won reelection four years later. (In 1990, state voters had put a two-term limit on the governor, but it was not retroactive.) In 2015, forty years after starting his first term, he was the nation’s oldest governor at age seventy-seven. There was some whimsical talk of his making a run, but Brown never took it seriously. The California political community saw him as a wise and prudent elder statesman—a stark difference from his 1970s “Governor Moonbeam” persona—while people east of the Sierra Madre Mountains had lost interest in him decades ago. He seldom got a glance from a national press corps that had lavished attention on his immediate predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

  On the other side of the country was Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York. His father, Mario Cuomo, served three terms as governor and seriously considered a 1992 run but bailed out just hours before the filing deadline of the New Hampshire primary. Twenty-four years later, the younger Cuomo could not even contemplate a race as long as Hillary Clinton remained the favorite daughter of the state’s Democrats. In any case, the pervasive sleaze of New York government would have been a stumbling block for him. The leaders of both chambers of the state legislature had left office after felony convictions. In 2016, several members of Cuomo’s inner circle would face indictment on federal corruption charges.35

  In the past, congressional leaders had been serious presidential contenders. Lyndon Johnson (1960) and Bob Dole (1996) were Senate majority leaders. In 1988, Democrat Richard Gephardt and Republican Jack Kemp were both chairs of their party caucuses in the House. In the run-up to the 2016 election, Capitol Hill did not look like the mother of presidents. The top three Democrats in the House—Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and James Clyburn—w
ere all deep into their seventies. Of the three, only Pelosi had made any impression on the national public, and it was a bad one.36 On the Senate side, minority leader Harry Reid of Nevada was retiring. Not only was he another septuagenarian, but a household accident had also blinded his right eye. The other top Senate Democrats, Charles Schumer of New York and Richard Durbin of Illinois, were also in their seventies, and they were largely unknown outside Washington and their home states.

  Beyond the leadership circle, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts drew interest from liberals. She was a fiery orator with credentials as a Harvard law professor and a consumer financial advocate in the Obama administration. She never got in the race, however, focusing instead on her Senate duties.

  Since Richard Nixon’s race in 1960, the vice presidency has often had the preferred spot on the bench. Joseph Biden, President Obama’s vice president, did have a history of presidential ambition. His bid for the 1988 nomination ended after revelations that he had misstated his academic credentials and plagiarized a speech by the British Labour Party leader. He ran again in 2008 but withdrew after getting only 1 percent of the vote in the Iowa caucuses. Despite his poor showing, Democrats liked him, and President Obama picked him as a running mate because his sunny personality and appeal to working-class voters could help the Democratic ticket.

  Biden thought about a 2016 run, but the untimely death of his son Beau devastated him. He grieved for months, unready to enter the race. In October 2015, he announced that it was too late to start a campaign, and that he would not run at all. Many Democrats later wondered whether he could have won the nomination and beaten Trump. We will never know, but there are reasonable arguments on both sides. On the one hand, he had decades of experience, deep knowledge of the issues, and reasonably strong favorability ratings with the public.37 On the other hand, he looked like a terrific candidate only as long as he was not running. In the early days of his ill-fated 2008 nomination race, he boasted of his state’s diversity: “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.”38 Once he was on the ticket, his gaffes annoyed Obama, who reportedly said, “How many times is Biden going to say something stupid?”39 The gregarious Biden’s tactile displays of affection sometimes resulted in embarrassing photographs.40 “Joe is his own worst enemy,” former representative Barney Frank (D-MA) said. “He’s a very bright guy, very good values. But he just—he can’t keep his mouth shut or his hands to himself.”41