What the pre- and postmortems denied Clinton was the recognition due him for his return engagement as the Comeback Kid. Great man or not, he had learned what Jack Kennedy had discovered in his history books and Ronald Reagan had intuited from the movies: the presidents who succeed are those who master the part. Jerry Ford never managed it. Neither did Jimmy Carter or George Bush. Clinton did, bringing to his presidency his already formidable gift for hands-on electoral politics. Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster and student of public rhetoric, called him the greatest communicator since FDR–better, even, than the Gipper. ““Reagan was likable,’’ Luntz said. ““People don’t like Bill Clinton, and yet they follow him.''
They followed him in important part because he seemed connected to his moment in history–a moment of deep economic, social and political change. The New Deal and the cold war, the organizing principles of our politics for decades, were history. The baby boomers had come of age, moved to the suburbs, borne children and planted the seeds of a postmodern political agenda. It had little to do with the old issues, or with the great debate over whether government should be big or small. What people wanted in the ’90s, in Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin’s reading, was enough government to help them cope with the cares of everyday life–work and family, schools and doctors, safe streets and clean water.
Both parties had interesting answers to offer, but in the presidential politics of 1996, it was Clinton who captured the music of his time. Dole by contrast seemed unplugged, an artifact from another era in a nation whose statistically average citizen was a woman in her middle 30s. He promised a return to a golden age that most of America knew, if at all, from K-Tel nostalgia albums and Norman Rockwell paintings. When the press asked the candidates which television shows they had liked best in their teens, Clinton said ““Bonanza’’; Dole’s reply was that TV hadn’t been invented yet. It mattered less that he was old–his 96-hour finishing kick was evidence enough of his vigor–than that he came from that other country called the past. For a newer, younger America, Simon Rosenberg of the centrist New Democrat Network said, ““Bob Dole was always a black-and-white movie in a color age.''
In the circumstances, the great issues of the day never got addressed. They rarely are in presidential elections, except in years of crisis like 1860 or 1932; campaigns are struggles for power, and candidates most often seek it by finessing the hard questions until they are safely in office. So it was with Clinton. The state of the economy was good, or good enough for him to brag on in an election year. The quest for a post-liberal approach to its deeper, longer-term weaknesses was accordingly postponed to another day. ““I’m not sure we know what the answers are,’’ said Stan Greenberg, Clinton’s pollster in 1992, ““and if we do know what they are, we know they cost money. This isn’t exactly the moment when you want to be talking about $100 billion spending programs.''
Neither was it a propitious time to be arguing the proper size or role of government–not, anyway, in the apocalyptic terms proposed by Newt Gingrich in his moment of glory two years ago. Gingrich’s Hundred Days had ended more like Napoleon’s at Waterloo than FDR’s in the White House. He had mistaken the election returns of 1994 for a revolution, when only 19 percent of the eligible electorate had actually voted Republican for Congress. His excesses of language and ambition were his undoing; long before the first attack ads against him, he had supplanted Ross Perot as the least-loved man in our public life.
Gingrich could claim nevertheless to have won the war of ideas; he and his comrades-in-arms had forced Clinton to agree to the principle of a balanced budget and to concede that the era of big government was over. But that issue had long since been settled in the real world, as against the historical pageant Gingrich had brought to the capital. It has been reasonably argued, indeed, that a Republican, Richard Nixon, was our last New Deal president–the last, that is, to dare to expand the reach of the welfare state and of government regulation. None of his successors had argued the philosophic case for more government. Clinton had tried to push the boundaries in his first two years, notably with his and Hillary’s health-care plan. Its defeat, and the president’s own as party leader in the 1994 midterm elections, seemed to cure him of his edifice complex.
The lesson he took from his losses was the one Gingrich had so grievously missed: that Americans in normal times do not like to be governed by abstract principle. Old-line Democrats were angry with Clinton for his serial retreats on the balanced budget, on Medicare spending and finally on what seemed to them a punitive welfare-reform bill. A Democratic president seemed to be walking away from the core Democratic idea of an activist government, one young party strategist complained, when he ought to have been trying to ““reinvest’’ people in it. The old crowd wanted him to be a liberal, that is, at a time when the purer ideologies of the left and right were out of public favor.
In fact, Clintonism was nearer to the New Democratic platform he ran on four years ago than to the old New Deal and Great Society traditions. It was less an ideology than an assemblage of tactics forced on him by the necessities of dealing with a hostile Congress and of getting himself re-elected. In the national conversation of our politics, he changed the subject from grand to homelier concerns: V-chips and school uniforms, breast cancer and tobacco, time off for family emergencies and longer stays in maternity wards. He was much derided in Washington for running a government and a campaign of tiny ideas, but there was a certain binding genius to them: they addressed the quotidian anxieties of middle-class life without the swollen bureaucracies and the red-ink budget lines of the Democratic past.
WHAT HE OFFERED AMERICA in effect was the Small Deal, an ad hoc activism that sought to meliorate problems rather than write and staff expensive programs to solve them. It had a disappointingly Lite taste to older Democrats, who were accustomed to a headier brew, but it fit a newer, under-50 generation coming into positions of power and influence in the party. The GOP had been getting less moderate with the arrival of the boomers; especially on the Hill, they tended to draw their political economics from Newt Gingrich and their social values from the religious right. The younger suburban Democrats thought and sounded more like Bill Clinton than, say, Ted Kennedy, and after the bloodbath of 1994, a Small Deal suited them just fine.
Whether it would sustain the Democrats in power beyond the year 2000 was another question. All politics in America is situational; it is shaped more by personalities and events than by large ideas. This Election Day, it was Bill Clinton who found himself in the right place, where the people were, at the right time, when moderation was back in vogue. His central promise was to keep doing what he had done in his chastened fourth year in office: seeking out lesser good works that could be wrought at low cost–often a few words from the bully pulpit would do–and with the cooperation of both parties. The Small Deal was unlikely to qualify him for enshrinement on Mount Rushmore. But as Newt Gingrich could tell him, if candor were habit, it would be foolish to look at one election and claim a ““mandate’’ for anything more.
