Chaotic neutral, p.15
Chaotic Neutral, page 15
Michael Dukakis’s 1988 presidential campaign convinced Democrats, especially moderates, that the party had an image problem regarding crime among mainstream (white) America when the campaign was damaged by two high-profile incidents. First, Dukakis gave what was panned as a robotic, uninspired answer to a (wildly inappropriate, for the record) debate question from CNN’s Bernard Shaw about whether he would favor the death penalty in the case of the rape and murder of his own wife. The second was a GOP ad featuring a prison inmate, a Black man named Willie Horton, who had been given a weekend furlough under a program Dukakis oversaw as governor of Massachusetts, during which Horton committed rape and murder. These attacks, Democrats felt, fatally wounded Dukakis, whose record and quiet demeanor made him an easy target for the soft-on-crime attack Republicans deployed so effectively.
New Democrats like Clinton and then senator Joe Biden, author of what would become the 1994 Crime Bill, had little difficulty convincing their party that some tough anticrime posturing would help. Politically, however, the legislation’s more promising components, like the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and Assault Weapons Ban (AWB),xxv were overwhelmed in the long term by its negatives. And as the midterms would show, Democrats failed to gain even a short-term boost from the new law. The long-term impact has been mass incarceration, disproportionately of people of color and particularly Black men.39 The effort to woo white voters condemned another part of the electorate the Democrats relied (and still rely) heavily on to suffer generational consequences.
As federal law dealing only with federal crimes, the 1994 Crime Bill was directly responsible for comparatively little of the mass incarceration that grew out of that era. State prisons hold the vast majority of America’s incarcerated. Yet state laws getting tough on crime were endemic in that era, imposing prison-filling measures like mandatory minimum sentences, three-strikes laws with mandatory life sentences, expanded death penalty offenses, and antidrug laws by the hundreds. The federal crime bill was more a reflection of the zeitgeist than the motive force behind it.
Undeniably, Biden, Clinton, and other Democrats sought to use the legislation to convince voters that their criminal-coddling reputation was undeserved. Whether the long-term consequences were foreseen (and the damage considered acceptable) or not, the intention to appeal to largely white, middle-class ex-Democrats was clear. After Clinton obsequiously praised the legislation, calling it “the toughest, largest, and smartest attack on crime” in American history, Senator Biden noted:
The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties. That is what is in this bill.… The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 100,000 cops. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 125,000 new state prison cells.
Democrats, including then representative Bernie Sanders and even bill author Biden, criticized parts of the bill even as they voted for it. For example, Biden called three-strikes laws “wacko” but kept them in the bill. Whether the bill proves Biden was or is a “mass incarceration zealot” is debatable,40 but there is no debating the role he, Bill Clinton, and other Democrats played in yielding to the right on the politics of crime. The aggressive right-wing approach that reduced the range of acceptable solutions to more cops, more laws, and more prisons became—and remains—the default position that all efforts at reform must overcome. The process of recognizing and addressing the damage done is only beginning.41
Even potentially useful parts of the 1994 Crime Bill like VAWA—included as a sop to Democrats who wanted something that reflected liberal priorities—were little more than sentencing enhancements that purported to reduce crime not with prevention but with punishment.42 But if Democrats hoped the crime bill would boost their fortunes in 1994, they badly miscalculated. In the analogy of the Overton window,xxvi the idea that disagreement between the parties is often lively but limited in range to elite consensus definitions of acceptable outcomes, the Democrats’ evolution on crime under Clinton shifted the discourse considerably rightward. The debate was and remains largely a debate over how much money to shower upon law enforcement.
IT GETS BETTER, RIGHT?
The beginning of the Clinton presidency, seen hopefully by New Democrats as their opportunity to take the reins of power and lead the party in a new direction, was not pretty. It combined successes that before Clinton were actually Republican priorities with failed attempts to secure Democratic priorities, and, in the process, demonstrated many of the bad habits that not only characterized his White House but have hamstrung the Democratic Party ever since: trying to please everyone (and ending up satisfying no one), negotiating with themselves, obsession with elite issues like the deficit that have political consequences but few benefits, and an inability to state directly, simply, and clearly what their policy proposals are. Fortunately, presidents do not have a mere two years to accomplish things. After the 1994 midterm elections there would surely be more opportunities for both Clinton and the Democratic Congress.
Footnotes
i In a speech in Manchester, New Hampshire, after winning the state’s primary in 1992, Clinton thanked voters for making him “the comeback kid,” and reporters covering the otherwise dull nomination contest ran with it.
ii Throughout this chapter, I hope that context will make clear that “Clinton” is Bill Clinton, whereas when Hillary Clinton is the subject, I use her full name. In later sections when Hillary is clearly the subject, I reverse this.
iii In Cleveland’s case, wisdom was imparted on two occasions, nonconsecutively.
iv An exaggeration, but only slightly.
v For Bill Bryson and Mr. E. T. Stotesbury.
vi Boos can be heard throughout the rambling thirty-three-minute address; see Clinton, B., “The 1988 Democratic National Convention Speech by Gov. Clinton,” C-SPAN, July 20, 1988, clintonlibrary42, YouTube video, 36:12, www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TdQwyd08A.
vii I believe the kids these days call this “vibes.” Bill Clinton was all vibes.
viii At one point in 1993, the DLC grew so frustrated with Clinton’s unwillingness to advance their specific agenda that he was briefly considered an apostate (though quickly absolved).
ix Clinton’s original “I feel your pain” moment came during a tense exchange with an AIDS activist heckling him during a March 28, 1992, speech. He noted how well the crowd reacted to the line and reused it on the topic of economic pain during a presidential debate on October 15, 1992.
x Homophobes.
xi After signing NAFTA, Bush asked Congress for fast-track authority to ratify the agreement but was rebuffed. His presidency ended before further action was taken in Congress.
xii Please kill me.
xiii Paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan, a direct antecedent of Trump, seized on anti–free trade, antiglobalization sentiment—rhetorically if not in practice—as an effective pitch to Rust Belt voters.
xiv Perot’s campaign also popularized the intentionally deceptive analogy of comparing the federal budget to household budgeting, a fallacy that continues to poison politics.
xv The only alternative would be for the GOP to lie. Seems unlikely!
xvi Note that the national debt and the budget deficit are distinct but related concepts. The deficit is the difference between revenues and expenditures in a single budget year. The debt is the total amount borrowed by the federal government, an accumulation of deficits across years.
xvii More recent developments have seriously called this into question, with low or even negative interest rates corresponding with exploding deficits and debt. As of 2021, the debt stands at an inconceivable $29 trillion while the Federal Reserve interest rate is 0.25 percent.
xviii James Carville remarked (quoted in Woodward, B., The Agenda [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994]) that if reincarnation were a possibility, he once “wanted to come back as the president or the pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.”
xix The term spin and its negative connotations were also advanced by Howard Kurtz’s bestselling Spin Cycle: How the White House and the Media Manipulate the News (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), which drew the overwhelming majority of its examples and discussion from the Clinton White House.
xx COBRA (Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985) created an employer obligation to allow employees to continue to purchase insurance after termination of employment, ostensibly to address this problem. Anyone who has ever seen the cost of COBRA coverage understands why it didn’t.
xxi “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This is used in economics to illustrate an endeavor in which any one deficiency dooms the whole to failure, so success requires the unlikely feat of avoiding every pitfall.
xxii This was also the moment at which key GOP figures realized that for their base, attacking Hillary Clinton was like catnip.
xxiii This is hard to adjudicate. Clinton’s plans used a “managed competition” model that moved individuals into private insurance, so the idea was not originally Republican property. However, several important aspects of the ACA do resemble one or more Republican proposals floated in 1993–1994.
xxiv Considerable research demonstrates that perceptions of crime and actual crime rates are separate phenomena. Media coverage impacts whether the public is likely to believe crime is high or increasing even when it is decreasing or at low levels. See, for example, Lowry, D., et al., “Setting the Public Fear Agenda: A Longitudinal Analysis of Network TV Crime Reporting, Public Perceptions of Crime, and FBI Crime Statistics,” Journal of Communication 53, no. 1 (2003): 61–73.
xxv The AWB, which expired under George W. Bush, was limited in its effectiveness because of difficulty in defining what an assault weapon is.
xxvi This idea, popular on the Internet, ironically came from the libertarian think tank Mackinac Center for Public Policy but is essentially a light rebranding of Noam Chomsky’s theories on discourse shifting as fleshed out, for example, in The Common Good (Berkeley, CA: Odonian Press, 1998).
CHAPTER 6
RED TIDE
1994 and the Republican Revolution
On Election Day 1994, I clearly remember watching CNN coverage of the results—we were basic cable rich!i—with my father, who was born in 1951. By the time Democratic Alabama senator Richard Shelby punctuated the Republican landslide by announcing, in made-for-TV dramatic fashion, his switch to the GOP, the on-camera personalities agreed that we were indeed witnessing a historic change.
It wasn’t immediately clear to me why that was true. I was sixteen at the time, and the events of that day seemed much weightier to my father than to me. As I saw it, parties pass power back and forth in elections. It happens. And nothing about the numbers in 1994 was unprecedented; the trusty Congressional Quarterly Almanac told me that a loss of ten Senate and fifty-four House seats was substantial but hardly record breaking. Republicans had, for example, gained twelve Senate seats in 1980 and lost eight in 1986; nobody proclaimed those elections epochal.
But the 1994 election shook the political system in a way that a young person couldn’t appreciate: it gave the GOP unified control of Congress for nearly the first time in fifty-two years.ii Since 1932 Democratic control of the House had been a fact of life, the political equivalent of the sunrise. It wasn’t the number of seats the GOP won that night; it was the transfer of power that occurred in a way that didn’t feel temporary or fluky. Older people who had lived through more political events understood that they were watching something change. Things henceforth were going to be different.
Boy were they.
Republicans were led to victory in 1994 by Newt Gingrich, a former small-school history professor with a yawning void where most people have a soul. Gingrich understood better than any of his contemporaries the weaknesses not only of the establishment Democratic Party but of the political culture of Washington, DC—especially the political media. He knew, in short, how to steer the narrative. And once in the Speaker’s chair, he demonstrated that he was completely uninterested in doing things as the New Deal Democrats had done them. He changed the way Congress and American national politics work so comprehensively that the Democrats are still struggling to adjust decades later. McKay Coppins in 2018 called Newt Gingrich “the man who broke politics.”1 A statement like that usually prompts cries of bias and hyperbole. But in this case, it was too obviously true to dispute.
CHANGE AGENT
Newt Gingrich did not become a transformational figure in the modern Republican Party by accident; like Bill Clinton, he set out to change what his party stood for. Looking back on his career, he said his goal was to “drive the system as hard as I could, to reshape the way the system worked.”2 He entered politics during an era in which the GOP was a permanent minority. By the Reagan years its leaders, people like House Minority Leader Bob Michel (R-IL), pursued a “go along to get along” strategy that had proven politically expedient for them throughout the New Deal era. This approach saw winning the majority as an impossibility—the Democrats were the House majority, period. Hence, the best strategy was to make deals, to get what the GOP could from the Democrats by playing along and extracting periodic concessions. To Michel and other Republicans who had only ever known Democratic control of the House, developing a coping strategy made more sense than trying to defeat an invincible foe.
Gingrich was frustrated by his party’s approach of “get as much as you can without being disruptive” and sought to replace it with “be as disruptive as necessary to get what we want.”3 He succeeded, and the ways in which he taught Republicans to be disruptive left the system of bipartisan congressional palm greasing in tatters. Republicans rallied behind Gingrich and adopted his approach for the simplest of reasons: they saw a chance to win if they tried his tactics, whereas they could not win if they continued to play the role of amiable doormat to the Democrats.
Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton, as endless news features reminded us in the 1990s, had eerily similar backgrounds.4 They were born in moderately humble circumstances, excelled academically, and entered politics with unsuccessful congressional campaigns in 1974. They also shared similar beliefs about the future of their respective parties, envisioning “revolutions” that weaved together a new postpartisan, beyond politics approach to winning voters.5 In that sense, the Clinton-led shift toward the DLC’s centrist, technocratic politics was the mirror opposite of Gingrich turning the GOP into an antigovernment party of cultural grievances waging endless war against the libertine 1960s.iii
In his early political career, Gingrich confronted the central problem of a Republican attempting to win a House seat in the solidly Democratic New Deal South: Why do these voters loyally vote for Democrats who do not represent their beliefs? He saw Black voters voting for white segregationist Democrats, and white conservatives voting for Democrats even as the party embraced ideas most rural southerners abhorred like the gay rights and women’s liberation movements. The solution Gingrich concocted was a scorched earth approach to politics that disdained party and presented voters with a stark choice of personalities and moral views between two candidates. At the subpresidential level, where voters are more open to casting votes across party lines, Gingrich felt that this could succeed if done properly.
Throughout his early failed forays into politics, Gingrich concluded that liberals were loyal Democrats and could not be won over. The opening for the GOP was with a hard right-wing message that appealed to the areas where liberals were perceived as weak: patriotism, hegemonic (as opposed to merely staunchly anticommunist) foreign policy, and traditional values wherever that frame could be applied. In an era when there were still conservative Democrats, Gingrich clearly saw a future in which all liberals became Democrats and therefore all conservatives must be won over by Republicans. New Deal lite, as previous generations of Republicans had accepted, would not cut it, nor would the GOP approach of salvaging some scraps as the permanent minority in Congress.6
The Clinton-Gingrich comparisons extend to Gingrich creating a Republican counterpart to the DLC, the Conservative Opportunity Society, to hone his new style outside the formal structure of the Republican Party.7 Gingrich made many Republican enemies in an era when Ronald Reagan’s cloyingly optimistic patriotism reigned, relegating to the margins the dark, confrontational politics of moral warfare Gingrich favored. But Gingrich slowly made himself into a force to be reckoned with in his party with the alluring promise that his way would bring the GOP into the majority. He identified the “liberal welfare state” as the common enemy that all conservatives could rally against—be they Bible Belt social reactionaries, quasi-libertarian New England antitaxers, or neoliberal deregulation enthusiasts. House Minority Leader Michel underscored Gingrich’s point about feckless GOP leadership by urging Republicans to ignore Gingrich’s “seductive” promises of winning and instead continue to work to cut deals with the Democrats. Then, as now, there was a self-defeating, even repellent, quality to the argument that winning is an unrealistic goal.
Though first elected to Congress in 1978, Gingrich made his first major mark on national politics in 1988 when he led a group of House Republicans bringing ethics charges against heavyweight Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright.8 Wright was, for the Republicans of his era, what Mitch McConnell represents to modern Democrats: a chamber tyrant, a win-at-all-costs leader who would bend, break, or change any rule necessary to get what he wanted. He was an aggressive partisan and a skilled legislator, a vote gatherer. Comity was not his priority. Wright, who became Speaker in 1986, mastered House rules and used them to crush opposition (from either party) without mercy, but he adhered to an older, more casual attitude toward rules of conduct outside the chamber. He was a throwback who learned politics in the era of cocktails at lunch, backroom dealing, and string pulling. And that ultimately gave Gingrich an opening to engineer Wright’s downfall.
