In his 1992 stump speeches, Bill Clinton liked to criticize the serial failings of trickle-down economics by quoting Hillary. "My wife tells me," he would say, "that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result."
Early in the campaign he delivered the line carefully, landing a quick jab but avoiding the appearance of abject disrespect for a sitting president. As the campaign reached its peak, though, and Americans were convinced of the point, it was a roundhouse knockout.
Ten years later, it's the Democrats who are flat on the canvas. Now it is they who seem vulnerably out of touch, especially those who still insist that there's nothing to learn from the midterm elections. To nearly everyone else, the electorate made crystal clear this November what was less obvious in 2000: American voters prefer bad ideas to no ideas, and centrism is the herbicide of ideas.
Clinton's campaign in 1992 is still the high-water mark for the Democratic Party over the last two decades. Its agenda recast the Democrats as a unified, formidable, 21st-century force to be reckoned with. But his personality flaws, his young administration, selfish Democrats and furiously driven Republicans killed his plans in the cradle. The temporary success of Clinton's reaction to his presidency's demise -- the strategy of "triangulation" that he and adviser Dick Morris created -- is largely responsible for the party's current impotence and identity crisis.
Clinton '92 is often remembered as a centrist campaign. It wasn't entirely. It was a combination of populist family-values progressivism (back when the Democratic Leadership Council and its sister organization, the Progressive Policy Institute, were still salons of ideas). Concocted at the tail end of 12 years of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Senior, Clinton's campaign offered solutions to real working-class problems by hybridizing liberal ideology and moderate American values. Take Clinton's national service idea, which said that every child should have the opportunity to go to college (liberal) but that they must earn that right by working to improve the community (moderate). Clinton offered the same kind of amalgamated solutions to problems moderates cared about -- reforming welfare by giving it a two-year limit (moderate) but making big investments in day care and worker retraining (liberal).
Developing these initiatives required more than the repackaging of old-school liberal ideas as centrist ones. It meant creating a new, pragmatic vision that energized all the party's constituencies and resonated with swing voters. Just as important, Clinton's presentation of these ideas always had a central theme -- opportunity and responsibility -- that was easy to understand and supplied the cognitive glue necessary to turn a bunch of policy brainstorms into a platform.
As E.J. Dionne describes it in his still-prescient 1996 book, They Only Look Dead, that platform dispelled misconceptions about liberals. "Tolerance and open-mindedness," he writes, "were not the same as a rejection of traditional standards; opposition to bigotry against gays and lesbians did not entail a denial of the importance of the two-parent family; embracing civil liberties did not translate into permissiveness toward violent crime."
While our memory of that winning 1992 platform is hazy, the events that led to its death are -- unfortunately -- more memorable. Trauma has a way of keeping permanent residence. Republicans immediately declared total war, hoping to kill everything in sight (attorney-general candidates Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood, gays in the military), and ruthlessly inflamed every cut and abrasion (the Travel Office, the Air Force One haircut and, eventually, the indomitable Whitewater). At a time when it was absolutely crucial to establish himself as the country's new leader and commander in chief, Clinton proved incapable of wielding his power to gain the upper hand.
Congressional Democrats hastened the disaster. They didn't seem to comprehend that a successful Clinton presidency was in their vital long-term interest. When they weren't stepping aside to watch him fall on his face, they were setting the trip wire. Where was the groundswell of liberal support for gays in the military? Why wouldn't then-Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) wait six months before taking on his party's president? You won't see many of these behaviors emerging from the well-disciplined Republican ranks.
As we all know, the Clinton presidency never recovered from its disastrous beginning -- not just the scandals, but the bungled attempts at health-care reform and many other important projects. It survived eight years, but nearly all were spent playing defense. Clinton's co-opting of right-of-center issues allowed him to survive, but the cost to the party has been huge. Centrism is a last-resort, a defensive non-position.
However, the lesson from this year's elections is not that entitlement-based liberalism is poised for a resurgence. Clinton was able to excite the electorate about liberal ideas because his policies were rooted in the core American values of self-reliance and work. He was effective in making the point that people require basic standards of living to be self-reliant -- standards that the government can provide. If the next incarnation of the Democratic Party sounds like a collection of greatest hits from the Great Society, the public won't listen.
Further, the new agenda must have aggressive backing by party leaders. The stunning effectiveness of the current administration has served to highlight another Clinton deficiency: Leaders must be bold in using the levers of power to blow away their opponents' arguments. This is something that runs against the fairness instinct of most progressives, but it is crucial. Leaders must reward their allies and punish their enemies if they hope to win the war.
While these lessons certainly don't fill a full prescription for a Democratic comeback, they may provide a place to start. Bill Clinton's retreat played a large part in leading the Democratic Party to its current state of contorted impotency, but the embers from that early blaze might still be hot enough to ignite the next electoral bonfire.
Rhoades Alderson worked on Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign. He's now a communications executive in Providence, R.I.
