Left adrift, p.6
Left Adrift, page 6
The news wasn’t all good. Turnout in the primary was down from four years earlier, and the slump was especially pronounced with African Americans. But the size of Clinton’s margin—he won 52 percent of the total vote—eased a lot of doubts. An editorial in the New York Times described the results as a potential turning point for American politics, saying that Clinton’s victory marked “the first time since Robert Kennedy’s Indiana primary campaign in 1968, that it is politically possible to bring poor blacks and blue-collar white voters together.”
Greenberg could have written the line himself, and the reports from his focus groups were even sweeter. Years later, he remembered crying over results from a session that showed Clinton’s message resonating with African Americans in Georgia and South Carolina. “The people who gathered around the table in the focus groups were a test of my life’s work,” he said. And the campaign passed with flying colors.
A secure base of support with African Americans enabled Clinton to ramp up his courtship of Reagan Democrats. He could afford to pick fights with Jesse Jackson because he trusted that Black voters would stick with him, even after he embarrassed Jackson by chastising the reverend for associating with the controversial rapper Sister Souljah, turning “Sister Souljah moment” into shorthand for picking fights with the base to establish credibility with moderates.
How much any of this mattered in the general election was tricky to say. The parade of scandals that followed in Clinton’s wake—cheating on his wife, dodging the draft, smoking but not inhaling—made it difficult to focus on policy, and a lifelong politician wasn’t the most natural choice to play the role of populist outsider who would shake up Washington. Americans in a sour mood with both parties expressed their frustration by voting for Ross Perot. Although Clinton won a landslide in the Electoral College, the big stories were Bush’s collapse (down almost 10 million votes from 1988) and the 18.9 percent of the electorate that supported Perot, the best performance for a third party since Teddy Roosevelt’s 1912 campaign.
The verdict on Clinton’s populist strategy was mixed. In line with the primary results, Clinton’s vote had a clear economic basis: highest at the bottom, falling as incomes rose. Elsewhere, however, the Clinton coalition looked more like George McGovern’s than Harry Truman’s. He was strongest in the Northeast and the West Coast, weakest in the South and Great Plains. Core Democratic constituencies—liberals, racial minorities, the poor—still made up the base of his support. He was also the favorite among voters with post-graduate degrees, and he performed better with voters in the top third of the income distribution than any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson. In total, the results were a good sign for Democrats who just wanted a win, but a warning that rebuilding the New Deal coalition would be even harder than Greenberg imagined.
Whether Democrats could turn a revolt against the status quo into a lasting realignment depended on Perot’s nearly 20 million voters. They came from a familiar type: white, blue-collar, disproportionately male, most without a college degree—the latest version of the Reagan Democrat. Clinton had not done terribly with this demographic. For the first time since Jimmy Carter’s 1976 campaign, non-college-educated whites had supported a Democrat in significantly greater numbers than whites with a four-year degree. But a reluctant vote for Clinton after a longing look at Perot was more a rejection of the GOP than an affirmation of whatever Democrats represented.
To Greenberg, the story could be told through Macomb County. Although Clinton didn’t carry Macomb, his narrow defeat marked an improvement over Michael Dukakis’s twenty-point rout in 1988. When Macomb reentered the Democratic fold, the party would have its new majority. The incoming president’s favorite pollster intended to be there when it happened.
Trending Right
Meetings at the White House soon became a regular part of Greenberg’s routine. The most important were his weekly fifteen minutes with Clinton. In rigorous and eventually agonizing detail, Greenberg summarized the results of his latest polls and focus groups as the president’s approval rating fell from a high of 58 percent at the start of his term down to 41 percent in October 1994, just before Republicans trounced Democrats in the midterm elections, regaining control of the House and Senate for the first time since the Eisenhower years.
Greenberg had a simple explanation for the debacle. “The administration’s silence on populist themes,” he told the president, “was the single biggest error.” The middle-class tax cut was nixed after Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan insisted that shrinking the deficit come first, with the promise of lower interest rates as the carrot, and the threat of monetary tightening as the stick. Universal health care went down in flames, but NAFTA survived a tough fight in Congress. And the president’s closest economic adviser, former Goldman Sachs chairman Robert Rubin, kept insisting that even a hint of class warfare could tank business confidence.
Not that Greenberg objected to all of Rubinomics. He was a free trade supporter, and he came around to the White House’s tougher line on deficits. Nor did he object to borrowing Rubin’s private jet for a quick flight back home to New Haven. On a host of issues the difference between the two was negligible, including the importance of fighting poverty.
But Greenberg still thought the divide between him and Rubin was fundamental. “He just did not want the president to talk about taxing the rich,” Greenberg explained. “I wanted to shake Bob because this kind of ‘liberalism’”—culturally progressive and concerned with the plight of the poor but deaf to middle America—“is exactly the politics that … blocked Democrats from creating a real majority.”
It was also the politics that came to define Clinton’s first two years in the White House. As the administration shifted to the right on economics, a series of early steps pushed it to the left in the culture war, alienating the Perot voters that Democrats needed to build their majority. “Bill Clinton,” Greenberg wrote in a dyspeptic memo, “was not sent to Washington to put gays in the military, open our borders to all HIV positive immigrants, create abortion on demand and cut the deficit by taxing the middle class.”
Clinton thought Greenberg’s diagnosis missed one crucial point: the White House pollster hadn’t saved Democrats from an electoral massacre. After the midterms, Greenberg’s weekly meetings with Clinton were dropped from the presidential calendar, and, without being formally terminated, he was eased out of the administration’s inner circle. Clinton needed a scapegoat. Greenberg’s reputation as one of the administration’s chief liberal voices—he had urged the White House to go big on universal health care—made him a convenient sacrifice.
At first, Dick Morris stepped into Greenberg’s place. He had known Clinton for almost twenty years, first meeting him in 1977, not that long after recruiting Schoen for the West Side Kids. Morris was an ambitious young political consultant, and Clinton was his first out-of-state client. Clinton called him “my alter ego,” but the two had an on-and-off relationship, and Morris’s record for advising candidates on both sides of the aisle—including hardline conservatives like Jesse Helms—made hiring him for the 1992 race a nonstarter.
Now that Clinton was in trouble, Morris was summoned back into the arena. But he needed help to run a national campaign, and he called on his old friend Doug Schoen, who brought Penn in with him.
Tensions inside the group ran high. Morris and Penn couldn’t stand each other, and all three were regarded as ideologically suspect by a good portion of the White House staff—Morris because of his work with Republicans, Penn and Schoen because they conducted early polling for Perot in 1992.
Despite the internal strife and the external hostility, the trio quickly settled on a plan. “The perception across America was that Clinton was a liberal,” Schoen later observed. “Our first task would be to change that.”
They began, as usual, by sounding out the public. Penn and Schoen drew on the full repertoire of techniques they had developed in their political and corporate work, mixing conventional surveys with a modified version of a Myers-Briggs test they dubbed a “neuro-personality poll.”
After slicing the electorate into eight distinct categories, they zeroed in on two key demographics, labeling them “Swing 1” and “Swing 2.” Swing 1 voters leaned to the right on economics and to the left on culture. Often well-educated women in dual-income families, they fell squarely into the middle and upper-middle class but worried about keeping what they had. Swing 2 was more blue-collar and male, hostile to Washington and uncomfortable with social change.
These were rebranded versions of political types that were already familiar characters in punditry on the campaign—soccer moms in the first case, Perot voters in the second. Both of those categories were slight updates of two standbys in debates over the future of the Democratic coalition, educated suburbanites and the white working class.
According to Schoen and Penn, the main challenge facing Democrats was that Clinton couldn’t afford to choose between the two. They gave a slight preference to Swing 1 voters, who polls showed were more gettable, but warned that a blowout with Swing 2 would be fatal. There wasn’t one “center” to the electorate, but two, and Democrats had to contest both fronts.
So the Clinton team set out to draw both groups into the coalition. On culture, the campaign depicted Clinton as the moderate alternative to a reactionary GOP that would drag the country back to the 1950s; on economics, an advocate for sensible government who would protect Social Security and Medicare without busting the budget. The president signed welfare reform legislation that prominent Democrats, including Schoen’s old mentor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, viewed as draconian. At Schoen and Penn’s urging, Clinton supplemented this central message with programs aimed at their target audiences—initiatives against teen smoking for Swing 1, tough talk on trade for Swing 2; stronger environmental regulations for one, strict border controls for the other.
Many of the policies could have fit into Clinton’s 1992 platform, but the campaign’s overarching message marked a clear break from Clinton’s earlier populism. “When you divide rich and poor,” Schoen insisted, “the middle class sides with the rich.” Too much talk about conflict risked distracting attention from a more important theme. “It’s not about economics,” Penn told Clinton. “It’s about values.” The president should be a healer rising above the partisan scrum, the one looking for common ground, not ginning up conflict.
Clinton won a clear victory on election day, making him the first Democrat to win a second term since Franklin Roosevelt. But the win came with asterisks. Republicans held on to the House while adding two seats to their majority in the Senate. Ross Perot had run again, and he drew enough votes to keep the president under 50 percent of the popular vote. After soaring in 1992, turnout crashed to the lowest level since the 1920s.
Critics from the left pounced, including Greenberg. “Rather than ushering in a new progressive era the current period seems to reflect the exhaustion of political forces that have battled to an inconclusive and ugly draw,” he declared. According to Greenberg, Clinton won by persuading middle-and working-class voters that he would protect Medicare and Social Security. A conventional Democratic message had turned out a conventional Democratic coalition, resulting in an “incomplete victory.”
But to the brains behind this incomplete victory, Clinton’s slender margin proved that they had made the right choice. “Downscale voters are not the center of the electoral universe,” Penn sniped in a debate with Greenberg. Clinton had improved on his 1992 performance across the board, and even his gains at the bottom, Penn argued, had more to do with culture than class. Young people, for example, had below-average incomes, but they responded more to the generational appeal of Clinton running against septuagenarian Bob Dole.
Schoen went even further. “Democrats must face a hard truth,” he said. “We do not have the natural majority coalition in American politics.” Schoen thought Dick Morris’s preferred term for Clinton’s strategy, “triangulation,” was sugarcoating the issue. Voters didn’t want an activist government, and populist appeals weren’t resonating with the electorate. “The country,” in short, “was trending to the Right.”
To back up his argument, Schoen only had to point to the polls. According to Gallup, about two-thirds of the country believed that taxes, crime, and immigration rates were too high. Sixty-two percent had a favorable opinion of corporations. Only 49 percent said the same for labor unions, whose membership had plunged to just 11 percent of the private sector workforce. Forty-one percent of the country identified as moderate, 38 percent as conservative, and 17 percent as liberal. There was room to maneuver within these constraints—plenty of self-described “conservatives” loved Social Security and Medicare—but the limits were real.
Which left Democrats with few options. “Wishing for a mass conversion is not a political strategy. Neither is rallying the base,” Schoen said. Comprehensive polls and microtargeted policies were just ways of navigating around these unpalatable facts, tools for making it through a hostile environment with a bare majority of the vote. (Or, in Clinton’s case, an even-less-impressive plurality.) “For Democrats to win elections,” Schoen concluded, “they must come up with a compelling broad-based vision that … must be moderate—even conservative—in tone.”
Progressives might grumble about what could have been, but Clinton was satisfied with the results. Penn took over weekly meetings with the president. (Morris had been dropped from the campaign after reporters discovered that he had been seeing a prostitute, and articles began appearing with lurid details about the consultant’s kinks.) “In a White House where polling is virtually a religion,” the Washington Post observed, “Penn is the high priest.” The remaining heretics in the administration had another name for their perennially disheveled oracle: “Schlumbo.”
Penn supplied the kind of detailed advice on policy that Greenberg had shied away from, regularly meeting with key policy advisers and testing their proposals in his polls. He and Schoen also replaced Greenberg as the DLC’s go-to pollsters, a transition that was eased by the fact that many of the DLC’s funders were already their clients, and that they were much more sympathetic to favorite DLC policies like entitlement reform. And they began advising Al Gore during the run-up to his presidential campaign in 2000.
Their influence was all the more impressive because neither Penn nor Schoen was a full-time member of the administration. They were private consultants, with an office half a block from the White House, and a list of clients that included Microsoft, AOL, and Citibank. “Many of the country’s foremost political and business leaders,” the New York Times reported, “are listening to America through the same small, secretive shop.” They were updating the political machine for the twenty-first century, providing a place where Bill Clinton and Bill Gates could each look for advice, blending public service and corporate interests together into one integrated whole.
Penn and Schoen didn’t promise a realignment, only a shot at slogging through one painful win at a time. They didn’t believe government could transform the lives of ordinary Americans, but they did say it could make getting through the day a little easier. They didn’t want to lead a crusade for the middle class, but they did promise that people wouldn’t have to spend so much time worrying about politics. They were, in short, New Democrats—or, rather, what New Democrats had become as Clinton entered his second term.
This is what an incomplete victory looked like. If you were sitting with Penn and Schoen at the top, the view wasn’t bad at all.
Anatomy of a Stalemate
Except it turned out that even this ambition was out of reach. Impeachment derailed what would have been the signature policy initiative of Clinton’s second term—drastic Social Security reform that could have allowed individuals to invest part of their accounts in the stock market. With Republicans trying to push him out of office, Clinton couldn’t afford to lose Democratic support by tinkering with the crown jewel of the New Deal.
Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky also, indirectly, cost Penn and Schoen their contract with the vice president. Gore fired the pair just a few months into his presidential run, frustrated by their suggestion that he wrap himself around the Clinton legacy. He steamrolled through the Democratic primary without their help, but by the summer of 2000 he was lagging behind George W. Bush and fumbling for a campaign message. That’s when, on the recommendation of senior adviser Bob Shrum, he got in touch with Stan Greenberg.
It was a predictable choice. Shrum and Greenberg were partners in the same firm, the chief rival to Penn and Schoen. Greenberg’s public clash with Penn had turned him into the main spokesman for his side of the roiling debate over the Democratic coalition. There was, Greenberg said, “no future for a party competing more and more narrowly for the votes of upscale suburbanites, while grasping at the monied contributions of the well-to-do.” Taking on Greenberg was Gore’s way of signaling a break with Clinton while gambling that a dose of populism would revive his campaign.
At first it seemed like the bet would pay off. During the Democratic National Convention, Gore unveiled a new slogan, “the people versus the powerful,” and moved ahead of Bush for the first time in the race. It was one of the largest post-convention bounces in the history of modern polling, and Gore held on to the lead for over a month. But his margin began shrinking after the first presidential debate, closing to a virtual tie on election day.
Greenberg insisted that Gore’s populist conversion had saved the campaign, arguing that a better performance in the debates would have given Democrats a hanging chad–proof majority in the Electoral College. Gore’s biggest losses, he pointed out, came with white working-class men put off by his ties to the Clinton scandals, and, more broadly, by the party’s increasing association with cultural liberalism and its embrace of globalization. Penn countered in a report for the DLC claiming that Gore had blown the election by alienating “wired workers” of the new economy. Schoen told the Washington Post that if Gore had followed Penn’s advice, “I’m very confident he would be president-elect today.” Meanwhile, he and Penn congratulated themselves on shepherding Hillary Clinton to her Senate victory in New York.
