Pivotal Tuesdays
Page 19
Economic malaise had multiple structural causes and no easy solutions. After more than two decades of rebuilding from postwar devastation (an endeavor financed chiefly with U.S. aid), the economies of Japan and Germany came roaring back to life, joined by new East Asian nations like Taiwan and Korea, presenting formidable competition to American industries that had enjoyed unchallenged global dominance for years. Employing newer technologies and production processes, overseas factories were able to manufacture goods like cars and steel more efficiently and cheaply than Americans could.
In the absence of foreign competition, American companies had not needed to build for efficiency. They could afford to pay their workers well and provide robust pension packages, and more workers belonged to labor unions than at any other time in history. Now, with shrinking profit margins, U.S. companies began to cut union jobs or move their factories to union-free Southern states or overseas. At the same time, increasing reliance on computer technologies and white-collar service industries made a college degree a prerequisite for more and more professions. The well-paying blue-collar jobs that had provided stable economic foundations for working-class families started disappearing.8
The cracks in the economic foundation broke open in 1973, when the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) enacted an embargo in protest of U.S. support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Gas prices spiraled, leading to long lines at the pump and rising consumer demand for foreign compact cars rather than American-made gas guzzlers. The combination of this with other economic forces pushed the nation into a combination of economic stagnation and inflation—stagflation—that strained family pocketbooks and led to sharp partisan divisions over how to fix the economy. While the 1970s were an era of increased consumer choice, personal freedoms, and huge technological advances, the economic malaise gave everyone the feeling that the good times were gone for good.
By the late 1970s, a new wave of Republican leaders—many of them from the Sunbelt states and Far West—started to shape the national understanding of what was wrong with America and where the solutions might lie. Chief among them was Ronald Reagan, who had continued to be a leading voice of the conservative wing of his party through his time as California governor and beyond. In 1976 he ran against Ford in the Republican primaries, and he had his sights on another run in 1980. Reagan had honed his free market, law-and-order message into a powerful indictment of the government-centered approaches of Democratic liberalism.
Social policies aimed at the poorest of the poor became a ripe and effective target for Reagan. On the stump in 1976, he told the story of a woman in Chicago who was milking government welfare programs for all they were worth through outrageous fraud: “she has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards, and is collecting veterans’ benefits on four nonexisting deceased husbands.” Allegedly raking in “$150,000 a year,” Reagan’s “welfare queen” was a symbol of liberalism run amok. Despite the fact that little about the story was true, Reagan repeated it again and again on the campaign trail. The anti-welfare rhetoric was a new, and devastatingly effective, variation of the political code that 1960s politicians like George Wallace had used to speak to white working-class audiences. Reagan never mentioned that the “woman in Chicago” was black, but in his exaggerated descriptions of her fur coats and gold Cadillacs he played off racist stereotypes and white assumptions about ghetto culture.9
The combination of ineffectual leadership and anti-government rhetoric meant that by 1980, voters laid the blame for economic malaise squarely on the shoulders of the Democratic Party. After a combative primary season, Reagan triumphed over more moderate rivals to become the 1980 GOP nominee. Many in both parties still found him an intellectual lightweight and an ideologue, but his conservative-tinged message of hope and opportunity resonated with many voters who felt squeezed by the new economy, threatened by newly empowered minorities, and abandoned by the party of FDR. So many of these core members of the New Deal coalition voted for the former movie star that they came to be known as “Reagan Democrats.” Ronald Reagan was their first Republican vote, and he would not be their last. Adding insult to Democratic injury, the Republicans took control of the Senate and won more House seats then they had held in nearly three decades.10
Reagan had a rocky first term. The economy was still in the doldrums. His solution had been a bold program of tax cuts and spending cuts that came to be called “Reaganomics.” The one area in which he beefed up government spending was on defense. As his reelection campaign loomed, Reaganomics didn’t seem to be doing much to bring the economy back. Tensions with the Soviets were rising. Democratic liberals charged that Reagan was a warmongering president who favored the rich and punished the poor. Many threw their hat in the ring for the 1984 race. The crowded Democratic field in the primaries attested to the fact that many considered Reagan beatable, and also reflected how much the party’s makeup had changed since the civil rights revolution. Prominent among the contenders was the first African American man to seek the presidency, Reverend Jesse Jackson. A magnetic civil rights activist from Chicago, in the previous decade Jackson had become a major figure in the national Democratic Party and a fierce and stirring critic of both Carter’s centrism and Reagan’s conservatism. Pushing a hard-hitting message of social justice and economic fairness, Jackson won more votes and political traction than any black candidate until Barack Obama.
Just as both parties started mobilizing for the 1984 race, however, the economy started turning around.11 By the time the election was in full swing, Reagan was able to campaign on the slogan of “Morning in America,” running gauzily filmed television ads that were light on policy details and heavy on emotion. In the most iconic of these, a warm male voice spoke as images of families, neighborhoods, and flag-raisings filled the screen:
It’s morning again in America. Today, more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country’s history. With interest rates at about half the record highs of 1980, nearly 2,000 families today will buy new homes, more than at any time in the past four years. This afternoon, 6,500 young men and women will be married. And with inflation at less than half of what it was just four years ago, they can look forward with confidence to the future. It’s morning again in America. And, under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?12
The economy still hobbled, and American upward mobility would never return to where it was in the 1960s, but Reagan’s message of hope triumphed decisively over the pessimistic and fractious message the Democrats put forth to counter it. The Democratic nominee in 1984 was Carter’s vice president and an old protégé of Hubert Humphrey, liberal Minnesotan Walter Mondale. Reagan trounced him in the biggest landslide since Johnson-Goldwater.
The smooth message discipline of the Republican Party, coupled with its embrace of conservative ideology and the marginalization of its moderate wing, moved it from the disaster of Watergate to the triumph of Reagan’s reelection in a mere ten years. In contrast, the Democrats’ diverse liberal coalition had difficulty speaking with one voice. “The trouble with the Democratic Party,” wrote Time a few months after Mondale’s defeat, “is that to many voters its national leadership appears to be no more than a collection of shrill special-interest groups.”13
Yet the generally conservative temperament of the American electorate aided the GOP revival. Since the birth of opinion polling in the early twentieth century, Americans had made it clear that they were generally disinclined toward big-government solutions and wary of rapid social change. The New Deal’s ambitious reformulation of the government’s role in American life only became politically feasible because of the crises of depression and war, and fiscally conservative, small-government views continued to hold steady even amid the heyday of the New Deal Order. The failures of political leadership since Vietnam and Watergate, and the failure of government to deliver on its promis
es to end poverty and restore law and order, had made Americans even more distrustful of liberal solutions.14
Shifting economic and social geography also aided the rise of the right. The New South, already a force to be reckoned with in the late 1960s, now played a critical role in any national political context. The region had exploded in population, most of it in the suburbs of large metropolitan areas. It had become wealthier. In 1960, the South’s per capita income was only 60 percent of the national average; in 1980, it was 80 percent. Reapportionment of Congressional districts in the 1960s had given the suburban South an increasingly powerful voice in national politics, moving the region away from staunch defense of white racial supremacy but toward an equally strong support of individual “freedoms” and “traditional” family structures.15
Over the course of several decades, factories had decamped from cities like Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Detroit for the green fields and cheaper, non-union labor of the Southern states. Farmland turned into industrial parks; small towns became manufacturing hubs making electronics, cars, and clothing. Small family farms gave way to large-scale agricultural enterprises producing cotton, chickens, and catfish. With the spread of air-conditioning, the hot and languid South became a feasible location for advanced manufacturing and a desirable destination for Northern migrants. The phenomenon was not limited to the former Confederacy, but extended westward into the West and Southwest. Cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas exploded in size; in California, metropolitan areas grew so large that they collided into each other, creating “megalopolises” of suburban homes and office parks that stretched from Los Angeles to San Diego, from San Francisco to San Jose.16
New Democrats
The rise of the Sunbelt paved the way for the rise of new Democratic leaders, most of whom—like the conservative icons of the Republican Party—hailed from the South and West. Some of them were literal heirs to an earlier generation of Southern Democrats who had ruled over the House and Senate in the Cold War years. Sam Nunn, grandnephew of powerful Georgia Representative Carl Vinson, won the Senate seat vacated by legendary Richard B. Russell in 1972, winning conservative votes by distancing himself from Democratic nominee George McGovern and accepting the endorsement of George Wallace. Al Gore, handsome son of the former Tennessee senator, won a House seat in 1976 at twenty-eight.17
Others were “Watergate babies,” young men elected to Congress after Nixon’s disgrace. Former McGovern campaign manager Gary Hart ran and won a Senate seat from Colorado in 1974, and soon became a vocal advocate for the high-tech “sunrise industries” that were so important to his state. Tim Wirth, another Coloradan, pushed forward organizational reforms in the House and took over Hart’s Senate seat in 1986. Massachusetts was another hub of high-tech industry, and in 1978 a young and cerebral liberal named Paul Tsongas defeated venerable but scandal-plagued Republican moderate Ed Brooke. The advocacy of Wirth, Tsongas, and others of this generation for investment in new technology led the press to call them the “Atari Democrats.”18
Governors as well as members of Congress were among those worried about their party’s political marginalization, and they went to work at the national level to shift the Democrats in a more moderate direction. It wasn’t easy. After the 1980 election, Louisiana Representative Gillis Long brought together a new House Democratic caucus committee of Sunbelt moderates “to reassess our Party’s direction and redefine our message.” Yet the reports issued by the group contained “few, if any, startling ideas,” and failed to ignite much excitement.19 Virginia governor Chuck Robb and Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt tried and failed to get a Sunbelt moderate installed as chair of the Democratic National Committee in 1984. Mondale’s subsequent defeat validated the moderates’ argument that the Democrats couldn’t win back the White House through its current interest-group politics. And, as many commentators pointed out at the time, many centrist Democrats had White House aspirations.
In early 1985, all these impulses came together in the formation of a new group, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), headed by Nunn, Robb, Babbitt, and others, and led by executive director Al From, who had run the earlier House effort to redefine the Democratic agenda. “There is a perception our party has moved away from mainstream America in the 1970s,” said Nunn. “We view the council not as a rival to any other party entity,” remarked another young leader, Missouri Representative Richard Gephardt, “but as a way station or bridge back into the party for elected Democrats.”20
The DLC drew its intellectual firepower from an ideology already circulating among Washington think tanks and journalists, whose founding document of sorts was an essay published two years earlier in the Washington Monthly titled “A Neoliberal’s Manifesto.” Written by the Monthly’s founding editor, Charles Peters, the essay laid out a new vision for political leaders who supported the broad goals of modern liberalism but were disillusioned with current orthodoxy. “We still believe in liberty and justice and a fair chance for all … but we no longer automatically favor unions and big government or oppose the military and big business,” wrote Peters. Neither traditional liberal nor traditional conservative responses had been adequate to tackle the crises of the 1970s. What was needed was a new brand of liberalism that forged a middle ground.
Peters wrote of encouraging entrepreneurship through tax and regulatory reform, instituting performance standards for unionized workers like teachers and government employees, and establishing time limits and stricter income limits on welfare programs. Just like Reagan, Peters portrayed government bureaucracy as a problem rather than a solution. Unlike Reagan, he saw government having a critical role to play—still intervening in markets, but more strategically and entrepreneurially. This was not an abandonment of Progressive and Rooseveltian principles, but, rather, a reinvention: big government reformulated for the age of the high-tech startup and the Sunbelt suburb.21
In many respects, the revolutionary aspect of this neoliberalism was not in the substance of what it proposed to do, but in the way it talked about these goals.22 The importance of style and language became clear as the DLC took these precepts and began to build a movement, going into the Southern and Western heartland to urge Democrats to “fight, don’t switch.” They gained plenty of critics on the way. Jesse Jackson, noting the all-white, all-male makeup of the group as well as its preponderance of new-style Dixiecrats, scoffed that DLC stood for “Democratic Leisure Class.” In an op-ed, historian and JFK advisor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., derided the approach as “me-too Reaganism.” Liberals argued that Reagan’s 1984 triumph came from his likability, not his politics; after all, Democrats still made up close to 40 percent of the electorate. Undaunted, Al From countered that such arguments “have been advanced by the standpatters in our party,” and that “we cannot be constrained by policies that no longer work and labels that no longer apply.”23
The defeat of Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis in the 1988 election further fueled the DLC’s sense of mission. Neither a strident liberal nor a core member of the DLC alliance, “Dukakis erased the graffiti on the wall but put nothing on it,” said From. In the vacuum, Dukakis’s rival George H. W. Bush was able to blast him as an out-of-touch liberal. The DLC had proved ineffective in getting its preferred candidates to the top of the ticket in either 1984 or 1988. The group began to subtly advance the presidential aspirations of Robb, Babbitt, and Nunn. It revved up its policy operations, churning out one white paper after another. Its membership increased to over 200, including leaders who had previously avoided affiliating themselves for fear of alienating the Democrats’ liberal constituencies.24
One of these newcomers was the young governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton. Clinton was born in a small town in Arkansas to a single mother with few resources. He was very smart, very outgoing, and with an astounding ability to connect on a personal level with a range of people. From a very early age, Clinton had his eyes on a political career, and he had teachers and mentors who nurtured this ambition. He went to
Georgetown University, using scholarships and part-time jobs to pay his tuition, then on to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Returning to attend Yale Law School, he met another extraordinary young person, Hillary Rodham.
Hillary went back with him to Arkansas, where he ran for Congress in 1974 at twenty-eight. He lost, but made a strong showing, and Democratic leaders in Arkansas pegged him as a young man to watch. He won the post of attorney general in 1976, and two years later—at thirty-two—he became governor of Arkansas.
In Clinton’s first term, he got ahead of himself. Young and idealistic, filled with liberal fervor, he brought in a great many young people like him to mix things up and do a lot of reform in a short period of time. Conservative, tradition-bound Arkansas was not ready for this change. They looked at the long-haired young governor. They looked at his scholarly, feminist wife, who hadn’t changed her last name when she got married.
Up for reelection in 1980, Clinton lost. Chastened, he returned to run two years later as a more centrist candidate. He cut his hair short, and Hillary changed her last name to Clinton. They both understood that he wasn’t going to appeal to everyone. With the right message, however, he could get enough Arkansas voters on his side to win.
Clinton was reelected again and again, blending old-style liberal populism with business-friendly approaches and neoliberal rhetoric. He was particularly effective at winning support from the black community while still getting strong support from whites. Arkansas was perfect for Clinton’s style of intensive, personal retail politics, being a small state with a population of about two million people. Its largest city, Little Rock, had a population not too much more than 100,000 at the time Clinton was governor.