Redefinition Is A Work In Progress

The question that will largely determine President Clinton’s legacy is not how much he has changed the world or the nation but how much he has remade the Democratic Party.

The first re-elected Democrat to occupy the White House since Franklin D. Roosevelt, Clinton has been denied so far the opportunity for heroic leadership FDR was given. Roosevelt created the New Deal in response to the Great Depression. He forged the alliances with Britain and the Soviet Union to win World War II.

In the course of doing that, he also redefined the meaning of his party, transforming it from a strange amalgam of immigrant urban dwellers and southern Bourbons into an engine of governmental activism at home and abroad that commanded a long-term majority across America.

Clinton has faced no domestic or international crisis of remotely Rooseveltian scale. Yet there are those who already assert that he is reinventing the Democratic Party for the 21st century.

The ultimate test of that proposition will be his ability to secure the nomination and election in 2000 of his chosen successor, Vice President Al Gore. But in the meantime, the Clintonites are not shy about claiming a transformational role for their leader.

The latest supporting evidence appeared in the past fortnight. Almost four-fifths of House and Senate Democrats (notably excluding House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri) supported the compromise budget and tax bill Clinton negotiated with congressional Republicans, thus formally committing the party to a domestic policy course notably more conservative than any in its past. And almost simultaneously, the president’s pollster, Mark Penn, published a survey of grass-roots Democratic voters demonstrating that Clinton’s policies not only appeal to swing voters but define the emergent majority within his own party.

That majority, according to Penn, is made up of people comfortable with their prospects in the new international economy but strongly attached to traditional family values.

They see the government neither as oppressor nor as protector, but as an empowerment machine that “should help people equip themselves to solve their own problems.”

Al From, president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, which paid for and released Penn’s poll, said in an interview that “this is clearly not our fathers’ party. It is now the party of the new economy and suburban values, embodied by Al and Tipper Gore.”

That may prove to be the case, but the picture is more complicated and uncertain than these statements suggest.

The “conversion” of congressional Democrats to Clintonomics will be tested this autumn, when the administration goes to Capitol Hill seeking “fast track” authority to negotiate more free trade deals like NAFTA. In 1993, NAFTA was approved with Republican votes, over the opposition of most Democrats.

Labor is mounting a major campaign to defeat “fast track,” and it will be important to see how Clinton fares on the Democratic side of the aisle.

Penn’s poll is more ambivalent on that issue than he is comfortable conceding. He told me that it shows “Democrats support free trade, as long as there is reciprocity.” But his own data show that exactly as many Democrats favor “working to limit trade to protect American jobs” as endorse “working to maintain free international trade and open up new markets for American products.”

Two out of three Democratic voters said they agree with the statement that “U.S. markets are too open to goods from other countries,” even though nearly as great a majority rejects a “protectionist” policy when that loaded word is used in the question.

Similarly, when “fast track” is explained in positive language, two-thirds of the Democrats approve it. But on other, more neutrally worded questions, a plurality of Democrats believe that “America’s integration in global markets … benefits multinational corporations at the expense of working families” and “encourages U.S. companies to move overseas.”

Trade is only one dimension - albeit an important one - in the ongoing debate within the Democratic Party. Penn’s poll draws a fascinating picture of a Democratic constituency that defies conventional categories.

It appears to be a constituency that on the whole supports both abortion rights and prayer in schools, national school standards and vouchers that would let parents remove their children from public schools, that opposes gay marriages but favors government requiring insurers to offer gay couples the same spousal benefits that are available to conventional families.

This is a party in transition, but its destination is not yet clear.