Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (18 page)

A group of younger Bush aides shared Gingrich’s belief that consolidation was a strategy for accommodation and defeat. Conservatism could prosper,
in their view, only by continuing to push forward: against taxes, government, regulation, and bureaucracy. It was the conservative version of a theory of permanent revolution. Gingrich saw a narrower discussion of exactly how much government should do to solve particular problems as conceding the terms of the debate to liberals and Democrats. They would win such arguments because voters typically turned toward the center-left when they wanted government to engage in problem solving. The only acceptable conservative solutions (vouchers for education, for example) would be those that further weakened the public sector, decreased the number of public employees, and empowered new private initiatives.

Bush made a spectacular recovery from his October budget setback with his Gulf War triumph. But by the fall of 1991, memories of war victory faded and the economy continued to struggle. Domestic politics returned with a vengeance. Bush seemed directionless, the staunchest conservatives remained restless, and Bush was confronted with a surprisingly robust challenge in the 1992 Republican presidential primaries from Pat Buchanan, who ran boisterously to his right. On February 18, Buchanan shocked the Bush apparatus by winning 38 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary and holding Bush to 53 percent. It proved to be the beginning of the end of the Bush presidency.

“Richard Nixon was the last president of the liberal era,” Robert Borosage, the veteran progressive activist, told me one day over lunch in the 1990s. “Bill Clinton was the last president of the conservative era.”

There was hope mixed with analysis here, a reflection of Borosage’s desire for an end to the conservative ascendancy that Reagan had announced. But it was a shrewd observation. For most of his career, Nixon operated in the shadow of the New Deal. Arthur Larson’s “Modern Republicanism” reflected an acceptance of the America that FDR had created. Nixon’s own record included many progressive departures. To win over the working-class voters whose support he so prized, Nixon needed to reassure them that he would not undo the many aspects of the Roosevelt-Truman legacy they prized. Reagan
himself was eventually forced to give up on plans of replacing Social Security and scrapping Medicare, LBJ’s popular extension of FDR’s social insurance state.

Clinton, on the other hand, was reacting to a set of conservative triumphs—to the five Republican election victories since 1968. He understood that the progressive project and the Democratic Party’s strategy needed to adjust. A child of the sixties (he had helped run Texas for George McGovern’s campaign in 1972), Clinton was acutely aware of how first Nixon and then Reagan had pried working-class votes away from the Democrats. They had done so not by touting Hayek’s economic theories or traditional right-wing arguments about “constitutionalism,” but by using those “gut” issues that Buchanan and his conservative colleagues on the Nixon campaign championed in 1968: crime, welfare, race, rights, and taxes. These were the issues that had produced what Thomas and Mary Edsall described as a
Chain Reaction,
the title of their perceptive book published in 1992.

Guided by his own instincts and the polling of Stanley Greenberg, who had conducted elaborate studies of Reagan Democrats in the Detroit suburbs of Macomb County, Clinton launched his project to create “New Democrats” in conjunction with the Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist group formed in response to Democratic defeats. The New Democrats’ answer to Reagan’s paean to “family, work, and neighborhood” was “opportunity, responsibility, and community.” Clinton would be tough and smart on crime, and unwavering in supporting the death penalty. He proposed welfare reform, signaling to hard-pressed blue-collar whites who had drifted from the Democrats that he would stand against what he called a “something for nothing” approach to social insurance that those whites saw as promoting indolence. But the design of the Clinton approach, heavily influenced by the progressive Harvard economist David Ellwood and his book
Poor Support,
would be more generous to the needy than the existing system.
Clinton’s policy balance was also a political balance: “No one who works full time and has children at home should be poor anymore,” he’d say. “And no one who can work should stay on welfare forever.”

Yet there was also left-of-center populism at the heart of Clinton’s appeal. He assailed the Republicans as the party of “the rich and special interests”
and spoke of declining pay and the millions of Americans who were “working harder for less,” even as business executives pulled down “outrageous salaries.” It’s likely that no one would have understood what Clinton was doing better—or, in professional terms, appreciated it more—than Lee Atwater.

Clinton’s political genius lay in his gifts for juxtaposition and synthesis. He was America’s dialectical politician, skilled at drawing on seemingly opposed insights to create something new. He could be seen as trying to re-create the old New Deal alignment by emphasizing a politics of class over race and economics over moral and religious issues. His formula on abortion—it should, he said, be “safe, legal, and
rare
”—was designed to keep pro-choice votes on the Democratic side without alienating too many pro-lifers. His approach was highly satisfactory to the large share of the Americans whose views on abortion were ambivalent and who were altogether tired of the prominence the issue enjoyed.

The historian Sean Wilentz captured the nature of Clinton’s politics as well as anyone, and, in keeping with Borosage’s insight, he included his account of the Clinton years in a volume titled
The Age of Reagan.
Clinton, Wilentz said,
“was not one thing or another, but many things at the same time, and somehow they all hung together.” He was presented with political tasks that “required continual bobbing and weaving, compromising and negotiating, retreating in order to advance.” He “figured out a great deal on the run.” Clinton
ism
, Wilentz added, contrary to what both his staunchest friends and archest critics might have said, “turned out to be
neither a set of public positions nor a psychological dysfunction, but an evolving, sometimes improvised, pragmatic politics, informed by liberal values and worked out on the job.” Wilentz’s last point about Clinton being informed by “liberal values” is important and a fact often ignored both by critics to Clinton’s left and by journalistic detractors who saw him as a mere opportunist. Surely there was opportunism, but it was opportunism with a purpose. Paradoxically, Clinton’s conservative critics who suspected him of being a stealth progressive may have understood this best.

In the absence of Atwater, Bush’s advisers made the great mistake of not taking Clinton seriously in 1992. They saw him as an Arkansas governor who won the Democratic nomination only because so many Democratic
heavyweights passed up the race, assuming that Bush would win reelection easily. It was only much later that most political professionals realized Clinton was, in fact, the political heavyweight of his generation. There were a few who did understand Clinton’s skills, especially among his fellow governors and old friends from past campaigns. They formed the core of Friends of Bill: the informal, national, and largely invisible political machine he had been building since his college days at Georgetown.

If Bush was hit early from his right by Buchanan, he was the subject of what was a kind of sneak attack from the center, courtesy of the eccentric and very rich Ross Perot. Perot harbored a personal dislike of Bush, an obsession with the budget deficit, and a deep mistrust of free trade. One of his best-known phrases referred to the “giant sucking sound”—of jobs being drawn out of the country. He was the perfect protest candidate of the middle. His budget talk appealed to a certain kind of conservative, his opposition to free trade appealed to blue-collar union members and economic nationalists of the Pat Buchanan stripe, and his discussion of class divisions in the country drew some support on the left.
“A disturbing trend has emerged from the decade of greed, the era of trickle-down economics and the period of capital gains tax manipulation,” Perot declared, long before the days of Occupy Wall Street. “We are headed for a two-class society.” His personal values were obviously conservative, yet his stands on issues such as abortion were moderate or even liberal. At a time when the religious conservatives were a rising force in the Republican Party, Perot did best with more secular voters, including conservatives who were not particularly religious.

Perot entered the race at a moment when both Bush and Clinton were hemorrhaging support, and he was briefly the front-runner, a sign of how utterly unsettled American politics had become and how great the yearning for change was.
A Gallup poll in early June 1992 showed Perot at 39 percent, with Bush at 31 and Clinton at 25. But the unpredictable Perot dropped out of the race in July, in the midst of the Democratic National Convention. He declared that his candidacy might no longer be needed “now that the Democratic Party has revitalized itself.” There could not have been a move better calculated to hurt Bush. Clinton soared in the polls after a strong convention performance and his choice of a young fellow southerner, Al Gore, as his running mate.

Perot altered the content of the political debate in a way that undercut Bush and unsettled conservatism. Bush’s major calling card was a well-executed foreign policy. Conservatives since the time of Goldwater—and especially in the McGovern-Nixon and Carter-Reagan contests—had relied on their reputation for strength in military and foreign affairs as a major asset against liberals whom they regularly accused of being weak. But Perot, capturing the country’s post–Cold War mood, announced a new era.
“The people are concerned that our government is still organized to fight the Cold War,” Perot said. “They want it reorganized to rebuild America as the highest priority.” Barack Obama did not invent the idea that “nation building begins at home.”

Perot came back into the race in October. He regained his original core support, added liveliness to three televised debates, but never threatened Clinton. And Election Day left Nixon’s New Majority and Reagan’s coalition shattered.

Bush’s 37.4 percent of the popular vote was the lowest Republican share since the 1912 election, when Theodore Roosevelt split the GOP and ran as a Progressive. Bush received nearly 10 million fewer votes than he had won in 1988, and 15 million fewer than Ronald Reagan had received in 1984. He lost particular ground in suburban areas outside the South that had long been a source of Republican strength. Clinton would extend those Democratic suburban gains four years later, and Democrats have largely maintained them since. And even the Republicans’ conservative bedrock in the South became competitive again as Clinton picked up 4 of the 11 states of the Old Confederacy and ran Bush close to even in the southern popular vote. Clinton’s 43 percent of the popular vote nationally was actually less than Dukakis’s share four years earlier. But in a high-turnout contest, Clinton received over 3 million more votes than Dukakis had.

Republicans always insisted that Perot had split the Republican vote and they used Clinton’s status as a president elected with well under 50 percent of the vote as part of an effort to undercut his legitimacy. But the truth was that Perot’s vote was drawn equally from both parties, and he brought new voters to the polls who would not have shown up had he not run.
Exit polls showed that if Perot had not been on the ballot, 38 percent of his supporters would
have voted for Bush, 38 percent would have voted for Clinton, and the rest would not have voted at all. Clinton would have won an outright majority if Perot had not rejoined the contest.

Because the “Perot voters” are, into our day, a touchstone of political analysis (an iconic group like the “Wallace voters” or the “Reagan Democrats”), it’s important to remember that Perot drew his support from the middle of the middle. Among voters who called themselves both moderate and independent, Perot ran second, ahead of Bush. He did best among voters with middle levels of education—those who attended college but didn’t get a degree. He did better in the heart of the middle class than among those who were the best or worst off. He was stronger with men than with women, and 94 percent of his supporters were white.

But the political analyst Ruy Teixeira pointed to two factors that made Perot voters substantially different from Clinton voters. Perot voters were far more skeptical than Clinton’s of government spending and government activism. And Perot’s partisans had suffered more severe wage losses than comparable voters who shared their demographic backgrounds. This combination of skepticism about government and anger about the economy would matter to the outcome of the midterm elections two years later.