Putting People On

The Pander Bear Returns

Thomas W. Hazlett from the November 1996 issue

The budget deficit is the central problem of the federal government and one from which many of the country's other, most difficult problems flow. Bill Clinton and congressional Democrats were handed an unusual chance this year to deal constructively with the effect of Medicare on the deficit, and they blew it. The chance came in the form of the congressional Republican plan to balance the budget over seven years. Some other aspects of that plan deserved to be resisted, but the Republican proposal to get at the deficit partly by confronting the cost of Medicare deserved support. The Democrats, led by the president, chose instead to present themselves as Medicare's great protectors. They have shamelessly used the issue, demagogued on it, because they think that's where the votes are. If the Democrats play the Medicare card and win, they will have set back for years, for the worst political reasons, the very cause of rational government in behalf of which they profess to be behaving.

"The Real Default"
Editorial, The Washington Post, November 16, 1995

Last fall, TIME has learned, [presidential adviser Dick] Morris urged Clinton to agree to a proposed increase in premiums paid by Medicare recipients. It was a responsible position--middle-class entitlements are devouring the budget--but Clinton didn't take it. Instead he cast the G.O.P. as granny-bashing extremists and saw his popularity soar as the government closed and Gingrich got the blame.

Time, September 2, 1996

It worked. My God, it worked. The high road, the low road--is it any shock that President Clinton chose the poll road? It is some kind of testimonial both to the American political system, and to the public discussion of government policy in these United States, that the presidential campaign in 1996 is almost solely devoted to the brilliant political strategy of Clinton--even overruling his political Svengali--in bringing back his party from the edge of extinction. It is the boldness of the president, gaining relevancy by wielding the veto pen to protect our nation's meek and needy, contrasted with the unctuousness of Speaker Gingrich, having the temerity to shut the government down in a brash display of arrogant audacity, that has produced Campaign '96's conventional wisdom.

There is no question that the Republicans miscalculated the political dynamics of the famous budget showdown during the winter of 1995-96. Knowing that the mighty Ronald Reagan had been intimidated into signing bloated budgets patched together by Democratic porkmeisters, they figured there was no chance that this squishy meatball of a president, Bill Clinton, would not tremble and collapse when subjected to the same sort of blackmail. But the GOP had fallen into the president's trap; Clinton is only squishy when it comes to ideas and principles. There is not a wimpy cell in Bill Clinton's body when pressed to defend his beloved presidency. And in those formative days in late 1995, the polls indicated that registered voters wanted the president to veto the Republican budget--by over 3 to 2.

The Clinton strategy, credited to the genius of Dick Morris, was actually lifted from Political Economy 101. The simple model is called the "median voter theorem," the notion that political competition is all about snagging that voter in the middle. A little more casually, it's known as "Nixon goes to China": Steal the other team's thunder--all while trashing them as traitors who are selling national security secrets to our enemies. But don't try this at home--some finesse is involved. The trick is to move the moderate center into your camp while keeping your core constituency from getting antsy (bolting to the other side, bailing for a third party, or just sitting home, depressed). In 1972, Nixon lucked out when the Democrats nominated a leftish George McGovern who really did believe in the wacky, far-out things that Dick Nixon may have advanced but was never foolish enough to believe in (such as guaranteed incomes and price controls).

The Medicare scare was the perfect wedge for Clinton's purposes. Medicare spending is exploding (from about $53 billion in 1983 to $177 billion in 1996), but it's mad money for the elderly middle class (the poor have much shorter lifespans, don't forget), retired and just cruising for some trouble to get into--like jumping the first whippersnapper who so much as looks at the budget line item called Medicare. Clinton's poll numbers exploded as fast as Medicare spending when he stood up to the Republican "cuts." A Clinton-Dole dead heat among men turned into a 30-point runaway among the elderly.

Of course, Clinton did not act alone. There was the press. Taking a cue from the White House, it faithfully reported that Republican plans to increase spending by 7 percent per patient per year would "cut," "slash," and "decimate" Medicare. When confronted by CNN's Wolf Blitzer at a summer press conference as to why he insisted on mislabeling increases as reductions, the president cited the press as his source of misinformation: "We got that from you. The press was saying that." The perfect circle.

And Clinton had an active assist from Gingrich, a man who believes so firmly in the two-party system that when the Republicans were on the precipice of an electoral realignment of historic proportions, he rushed in to revive flagging Democratic hopes with his made-for-tabloids "Cry Baby" routine vis-a-vis his seating assignment on Air Force One.

But what Gingrich really did to help Clinton was to present the unifying threat which Democrats have lacked for generations. The 1994 elections--an embarrassing repudiation of Clintonism--allowed the president to reassert his position as the Democrats' last, best hope against the surging tide of conservative government. The desperation, the shock, the moment of terror: Democrats out of power! Where were the federal jobs, the perks, the levers, the Washington way of life? Gone with the Winds of '94? Clinton soon saw that his party faithful, many of whom privately loathed his "leadership" for plunging the party to the disaster of '94, could not--would not--bear the thought of Republican hegemony.

The acclaimed Dick Morris helped Bill Clinton craft this strategy as early as April 1995. It was standard political strategic calculation, cold-blooded, scientific. Bob Woodward recounts in The Choice that Morris had the White House divide up all the Republican agenda items--including those in the now-vilified "Contract on America"--and place them in two computerized files: "olive branch" and "fuck you." The items in the first file would be taken as Clinton's own; they included such popular Contract items as the law mandating that U.S. regulations apply to Congress and the measure ending unfunded mandates levied on the states. The second file contained those items, like Medicare reform, which the administration would denounce in the most vicious terms. Of course, the first file dwarfed the second. Clinton was able to--on paper--agree to a seven-year balanced budget and most of what the GOP was talking about, if he only retained a few weapons of democratic terror. Again, Medicare (with minor backup from spending on education and the environment, liberal mom-and-apple-pie issues) gave him the cover to co-opt Congress on most everything else. In the end, it was a remarkable performance: Newt was demonized as "dangerous and extreme" (in the first Bill Clinton fundraising letter, written by the president himself, proclaimed in mid-1995)--even as the administration could claim to be doing most everything he was trying to do anyway. You don't want him, you don't need him. And from there it's just been politics. That is to say, a phony issue here, a photo op there--panderama '96.

Let's face it: Pandering is the Democrats' home turf. Take the minimum wage. The press has now written that episode as an embarrassing defeat for the Republicans, who were foolishly outflanked in this race to help the least among us. The irony is rich. When 40,000 middle class executives at AT&T are cut loose (albeit, with generous severance packages), all hell breaks loose. From Patrick Buchanan to the editors of The New York Times, we are bombarded with horror stories about worker anxiety and the "downsizing of America."

But where has the moral high road led us on the minimum wage? If Clinton is correct, and 10 million workers are affected by the roughly 20 percent mandated increase in wages, over 400,000 low-wage laborers will be tossed out of work. (This is implied by a study of the actual New Jersey minimum wage hike in 1993--the very episode which the Clinton Labor Department uses to "prove" that the minimum wage does not reduce employment.) These, the most vulnerable members of our labor force, are now thrown to the dogs by the same president who dubbed the minimum wage a "job killer" in 1992. And this is the brainstorm which embodies Democrats' largess! (Will these 400,000 ex-workers even say "thank you"?)

And so the competition of politics has swept the radical Republicans of 1994 into the sheepish moderates of 1996. The Republican Convention was not so much the p.r. sham that the media were distressed about--after all, Colin Powell and Susan Molinari really are (or were) Republicans holding high public office. The convention was an apology. The bona fides of the 104th Congress were neatly tucked away, out of sight of the millions of guests looking in. But what is there to be ashamed of?