Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (21 page)

The Contract was also a tribute, simultaneously, both to Clinton
and
to Clinton’s failures. Its proposed tax credit for parents and children was a Clinton idea (his old middle-class tax cut) that blended relief for working-class and middle-class voters with a mild pro-family social traditionalism. It was a rebuke to Clinton for having allowed the middle-class tax cut to go by the wayside when he shifted his emphasis to budget reduction. The Republicans’ welfare reform measures were far harsher than Clinton’s—but the failure of Clinton and Democrats in Congress to enact a plan of their own opened a path for the GOP’s more punitive approach. As for the Perot voters, Clinton had promised a variety of political reforms, including campaign finance
reform, but these were killed by Democrats in Congress who had become accustomed to generous political action committee contributions. The shortsightedness of Democrats on this issue became clear with lightning speed. Business interests that had contributed generously to Democrats when they seemed likely to control the House indefinitely now massively shifted their funds to Republicans, with whom they had far more ideological affinity.

Decades after the fact, it’s easy to forget the import of 1994. It is not simply that the structural changes in our politics that the election ushered in are still with us. The election also helped discredit one conservative approach and ratify another. Gone was George H. W. Bush’s hope to create a conservatism that would consolidate the movement’s gains while making concessions to middle-ground opinion on the environment and education. Gone also was acknowledgment of the need for more revenue to run a government that provided benefits American voters wanted. On the rise was the claim by Gingrich and his allies that a tougher, bolder approach that held the line on taxes and pushed the boundaries of conservatism rightward would be more successful. That Bush lost in 1992 and Gingrich won in 1994 sent a powerful message as to which approach held more promise.

In the meantime, Clinton’s supporters were disappointed in their hope that his Third Way politics would not only create a broad center-left majority but also eventually force the Republicans and the conservative movement to pursue a more moderate path. This was by no means a foolish bet. It is precisely what happened in Britain when the Conservative Party, after three successive defeats at the hands of New Labor, modernized itself under David Cameron.

But rather than ratify center-left gains, the 1994 election upended them. The parts of the progressive coalition that leaned toward the center still had profound differences with the parts that leaned left, trade being emblematic of some of the deepest tensions. Later in the decade, arguments over deregulating the financial industry would sharpen these divisions. And the difficulty Democrats had in bringing the white working class back into the fold—a problem since Nixon’s days—limited their ability to create a durable majority of their own. This set up an ongoing battle of two populisms, with conservatives relying on social issues (again, “race, rights, and taxes”), and progressives
trying to develop what Greenberg called “a renewed bottom-up vision” rooted in economic inclusion.

In 1994, the initiative passed to the conservatives’ side. They would not keep it for long.

Since the rise of Reagan, conservatives have always foundered on the interrelated issues of taxing, spending, and popular attitudes toward government. The cause of their difficulty was first explained in 1967 by two wise students of public opinion, Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril.
In what has become a hallowed formulation among political scientists, journalists, and politicians alike, Free and Cantril argued that Americans are, at one and the same time, “ideological conservatives” and “operational liberals.” Americans tend to express conservative views at a general or philosophical level but seek rather a lot from government and usually welcome its efforts to solve problems.

Free and Cantril help explain the voter, often mocked by liberals, who tells a politician to “keep the government’s hands off my Medicare.” It is, of course, an absurd statement on a substantive level. Yet this citizen was probably a Free-and-Cantril sort who liked the government program in question just fine but so mistrusted government he could not imagine that something he appreciated so much was actually a state-run program.

Ever since the rise of supply-side economics, conservatives have saddled themselves with commitments that are difficult to square. It’s true that they have been able to have them add up in theory, as Paul Ryan has done by proposing budgets with steep spending cuts designed to make possible the large tax cuts he favors. But even if the public either did not mind or welcomed the reductions in taxes—though tax cuts for the wealthy are not, in fact, broadly popular—they want core public services (particularly those they benefit from) and resist most program reductions. This is why Reagan could manage steep cuts only in the modest part of the budget that goes primarily to the very poor.

Conservatives often compound their difficulty by supporting large increases in military spending, as Reagan did and Ryan does. The growth in the libertarian wing of the Republican Party reflects a partial coming to terms with this challenge. Rand Paul and his allies want to cut defense budgets along with everything else. But libertarians, in the end, face the same overall
political problem: defense aside, voters still want far more from government than the libertarians are willing to provide. And, as Paul’s political difficulties showed, they remain a minority within the broader conservative movement.

Related to this problem is conservative fealty to “small government” as a moral imperative. Again, as an abstraction, this is popular. Calling for an end to “government intrusion” and “excessive regulation” brings cheers—until an environmental catastrophe strikes, an unsafe product kills people, or an inadequately inspected plane goes down. The definitive observation on the subject was offered by a Republican in the midst of the Gingrich Revolution in 1996, after the crash of an airliner flown by a now-defunct company called ValuJet.
“Government is the enemy,” said Senator William Cohen of Maine, “until you need a friend.” Reflecting the direction many moderates were moving in, Cohen, a classic Eisenhower Republican, later joined the Clinton administration as secretary of defense.

The Republicans’ budget and regulatory conundrums revived Bill Clinton’s political fortunes. But his political resurrection set loose the conservative furies.

“I was determined to hold them to the laws of arithmetic.”

Clinton was shell-shocked by the Republicans’ 1994 gains and his reaction was comprehensive. He went into a period of introspection and shook up his operations. A key move was bringing back into his fold a consultant from earlier in his career. Dick Morris had become increasingly conservative with the years and was known as a political Svengali who did what it took to win. Clinton reasoned that Morris would be more in tune with what seemed to be a growing conservative mood in the country. Clinton also pushed aside Greenberg, who believed in a populist approach to the middle class, and brought in Mark Penn and his partner Doug Schoen. Both had a passion for seeking and finding the political center.

As Clinton explained in his memoir, Morris’s “main advice was that I had
to practice the politics of ‘triangulation,’ bridging the divide between Republicans and Democrats and taking the best ideas of both.” Thus did a new word enter the American political lexicon. Clinton put a positive spin on the idea, but it also meant that he could run
against
both Republicans and Democrats when doing so was convenient. He was at pains after his presidency to insist that “while many liberals and some in the press corps” saw triangulation as “compromise without conviction, a cynical ploy to win re-election,” he saw it differently—as a continuation of his DLC-style politics and the sort of thing he had done as governor of Arkansas. “I had always tried to synthesize new ideas and traditional values, and to change government policy as conditions changed,” he insisted.

Whatever “triangulation” was, Clinton’s rebound owed at least as much to what Republicans did as to his own strategy. The GOP, particularly in the House, gave Clinton plenty of maneuvering room, and he noted elsewhere in his memoir that his belief the GOP would overreach was a source for his confidence that he would survive politically after 1994.
He’d be helped by steady economic improvement, but also by the fact that “the new Congress, especially the House, was well to the right of the American people.” Republicans, he predicted, “would soon be proposing cuts in education, health care, and aid to the environment to pay for their tax cuts and defense increases.”

“It would happen,” he added, “because that’s what ultra-conservatives wanted to do, and because I was determined to hold them to the laws of arithmetic.” Salvation through math: it would work again and again whenever liberals confronted a resurgent conservatism.

Before the fight, however, came Clinton’s nod to conciliation. His 1995 State of the Union address contained many bows to the new Gingrich dispensation—with little digs thrown in for the future.
“I think we all agree that we have to change the way the government works. Let’s make it smaller, less costly, and smarter; leaner, not meaner,” Clinton said.

The congressional crowd noticed the “not meaner” line and chuckled. Clinton was doing what he could to triangulate the Republicans’ way rhetorically while still defending core Democratic propositions.

First came the bow to the Republican victory:

Our government, once a champion of national purpose, is now seen by many as simply a captive of narrow interests, putting more burdens on our citizens rather than equipping them to get ahead. The values that used to hold us all together seem to be coming apart. . . . Our job is to get rid of yesterday’s government so that our own people can meet today’s and tomorrow’s needs. And we ought to do it together.

Then the Democratic pivot:

But I think we should all remember, and almost all of us would agree, that government still has important responsibilities. Our young people—we should think of this when we cut—our young people hold our future in their hands. We still owe a debt to our veterans. And our senior citizens have made us what we are. Now, my budget cuts a lot. But it protects education, veterans, Social Security and Medicare, and I hope you will do the same thing. You should, and I hope you will.

He was setting the Republican revolutionaries up.

The Republicans busily went about passing their Contract—for the new congressional majority, it served the useful postelection function of creating discipline in a raucous caucus—but this would not prove to be the 104th Congress’s main act. The Republicans and Clinton negotiated on the budget through the end of the fiscal year on September 30, 1995, and the government continued to operate on a continuing resolution (they’re known to budgeters as “CRs”) until mid-November.
On November 10, as Clinton recounted, Congress sent him “a new CR that increased Medicare premiums 25 percent, cut funding for education and the environment, and weakened environmental laws.” Clinton wouldn’t go for it. On Veterans Day, he continued to insist he wanted to work with Republicans to balance the budget but in a way that was “consistent with our fundamental values” and “without threats and without partisan rancor.” Clinton did not leave it to the media to get the message across. After Labor Day, Democrats started running television ads criticizing the GOP’s cuts, especially in Medicare and Medicaid. This infuriated Gingrich and his colleagues, who had not expected as much resistance from the triangulating Clinton.

After a fruitless and angry negotiating session on November 13 (Clinton reports that House Majority Leader Dick Armey complained that the Clinton TV ads had “frightened his elderly mother-in-law”), Clinton vetoed both the CR and a bill raising the debt ceiling that was also packed with objectionable Republican measures. The shutdown began on November 14 and 800,000 federal workers were sent home. Shutdowns continued off and on until January 6, 1996, when Republicans finally reached a deal that gave Clinton most of what he wanted. The Gingrich revolutionaries in the House felt intense pressure from Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, who was running for president. Dole had always harbored doubts about the shutdown strategy, and he knew his association with Gingrich was hurting him. In all, the government was shut for twenty-seven days.

In the long saga, Republicans made a series of errors that were characteristic of problems that conservatism would continue to confront. The most basic miscalculation was one that Clinton took pleasure in recounting in his memoir. “ ‘We
made a mistake,’ ” he quotes Gingrich as saying during a budget meeting shortly before a deal was reached. “ ‘We thought you would cave.’ ”

It was not an entirely foolish blunder. Clinton himself was uncertain early on as to whether he could win a shutdown fight. Morris believed the administration needed to reach an accord with the Republicans and thus sent signals—not intended to be misleading—that there was an agreement to be had. But as the fight went on, Clinton realized he was on the high ground. His political resurrection, he realized, would depend on standing strong and not capitulating.

The strength of Clinton’s position owed to a more fundamental miscalculation by his opponents, one rooted in conservative ideology. Forgetting the Free and Cantril insight, Republicans assumed that voters had handed them a mandate to shrink the size of government and that this abstract goal was more important to voters than the particulars of the cuts it would take to achieve the objective. Clinton zeroed in on four areas where majorities welcomed public spending. “Medicare, Medicaid, Education, and the Environment” became a Clinton litany repeated so often that that the administration’s defenders gleefully turned it into a would-be character from the
Star Wars
movie: M2E2. Clinton reduced Gingrich to the role of Darth Vader. In
the name of the Conservative Empire, the Speaker was endangering the good that government did.