Dean urges a different direction from Clinton
By Susan Page, USA TODAY
DES MOINES — The battle among Democrats that begins with the Iowa caucuses on Monday will determine more than the identity of the party's presidential nominee. Also at stake are the identity of the party and the legacy of the last Democrat to win the White House.
Bill Clinton, left, and Howard Dean, far right, appear at a fundraiser in Iowa with Democratic hopefuls Carol Moseley Braun and Dennis Kucinich.
Charlie Neibergall, AP
"Bill Clinton was a master politician ... but that was a different time," former Vermont governor Howard Dean told supporters gathered at an Indianola, Iowa, winery the other day. Republican leaders have become more conservative, he said, and Clinton's philosophy of governing from the middle is no longer the right thing to do. "I think this is a time to fight," Dean said.
For his more moderate rivals, Dean's combativeness raises the specter of the landslide losses the party suffered in 1972 and 1984.
"I have no idea" why Democrats would move away from Clinton's approach to the economy and other issues, retired general Wesley Clark said in an interview. "They work."
The battle for the Democratic nomination has revived a debate over the direction of the party that Clinton's camp thought his two terms in the White House had settled. Fueled by antipathy to President Bush, liberals who bristled at Clinton's "new Democrat" approach now see an opportunity to reshape the party with a harder edge. Even Clinton's vice president, Al Gore, has embraced Dean.
The next 60 days of caucuses and primaries will help define the nation's oldest political party and its direction in the 21st century, particularly if the race becomes a battle between Dean and centrists Clark or Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman
During his tenure, Clinton sought to replace the stereotype of the Democratic Party as being soft on defense, ambivalent about American values and likely to raise taxes and spend money. Instead, he touted policies that sought a "third way" — not classically Democratic or Republican — to respond to modern challenges and appeal to middle-class voters.
No one is watching the debate over the future of that philosophy more closely than Clinton himself. At the moment, he's spending much of his time in the office behind his home in Chappaqua, N.Y., finishing his memoirs for publication this spring. But he is also on the phone regularly with nearly all the contenders, including Dean, as well as former aides working in campaigns and for interest groups.
In some conversations, Clinton has been "ticked off" by Dean's comments about him and "new Democrats," according to three former White House aides who didn't want to be identified. They say he has expressed exasperation and "befuddlement" about the wisdom of some of the stands Dean is taking and his dismissive description of Clinton's tenure as "damage control."
Clinton declined to be interviewed. He hasn't endorsed a candidate and says he'll support whoever wins the nomination.
The former president remains a compelling and popular figure among many Democrats, and his wife, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, is a rising star and possible candidate for president in 2008. But his enduring impact as president, already compromised by personal scandal, would be diminished if just four years after he left office Democrats moved away from the policies he prescribed.
"It's exceedingly important to a president's legacy that he live on in his party's history," says Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at the University of New Orleans and author of Tour of Duty, a new book on the Vietnam experiences of presidential contender John Kerry.
But Clinton's embrace by Democrats is "ambiguous," Brinkley says, in part because of scandal and impeachment. "It's certainly not like (President) Reagan in the Republican Party," he says.
Reagan's reverberations
Reagan looms as a consequential president not only because of what he did in the White House but also because his influence has reverberated among Republicans ever since.
A quarter-century after he won the White House and a decade after he left the public stage, Reagan continues to define the GOP. Every major Republican presidential contender to follow has paid homage to his vision of a smaller government, his devotion to tax cuts, even his dream of a missile-defense system. President Bush fashions himself more as the political heir of Reagan than of his father, the first President Bush.
Like Reagan, Clinton led the nation for two terms, one of just eight Democrats to do so. Some of them — Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson in the 19th century, Franklin Roosevelt in the 20th — were towering figures whose influence shaped the party for decades after they left office.
Clinton's most ardent advocates saw him as leaving the same sort of long-term imprint. They note that his "third way" approach has influenced political parties in Great Britain, Brazil and elsewhere.
But Clinton isn't the subject of veneration the way Reagan and FDR have been, in part because of tarnish from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. "Because of the personal swirl the Clintons constantly found themselves in, people don't want to say, 'I'm a Clinton Democrat,' " Brinkley says.
Even on policy, most of the Democratic presidential contenders — especially Dean, who has inspired the most excitement in the field — have moved away from Clinton on some signature issues.
At stake in the current campaign is "whether we go back to where we were before Bill Clinton," says Lieberman, the most moderate Democrat in the field, something he opposes. Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, the most liberal one, thinks that would be a good thing. "I reject where the Democratic Party has gone" during the Clinton years, he says.
Candidates have broken with Clinton on fundamental issues:
• Trade. In the 1992 election, Clinton espoused free trade in a global economy. In office, he signed the North American Free Trade Agreement and pursued other trade deals. Then, Kerry and Lieberman voted for NAFTA; Dean spoke out in favor of it.
Now, NAFTA's sole defender in the Democratic field is Lieberman. Missouri Rep. Dick Gephardt, who clashed with Clinton over trade during his tenure, has been joined by Kerry, Dean and North Carolina Sen. John Edwards in decrying NAFTA's effect on U.S. workers and the environment. Clark supports it but calls for a "strong review" to consider modifying it.
• Taxes. Clinton's campaign emphasized what he called "the forgotten middle class." He promised them tax relief, though in office that pledge took a back seat to lowering the federal budget deficit. He did provide some middle-class relief in a package that raised taxes on the wealthy.
Now, Dean and Gephardt have called for repealing all of Bush's tax cuts to finance health care and other priorities. They would scrap provisions that benefit middle-income families, including an expansion of the child tax credit and an easing of the tax penalty on married couples. Critics warn that will help Republicans revive the Democrats' old tax-and-spend label.
Dean, who in the past said there wasn't room for a middle-class tax cut, is reconsidering. He says he might propose tax cuts down the road.
• Sacred cows. Clinton deliberately took on some Democratic shibboleths, in part to send a message to moderate voters. In 1992, before Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, he criticized rap singer Sister Souljah for lyrics that seemed to espouse violence against whites. In office, he pursued an overhaul of welfare opposed by many liberals; two top appointees resigned in protest.
None of the current crop of presidential contenders has taken similar steps. During the past six months, they've cultivated favor in appearances to groups representing the party's most powerful interests, among them labor unions, African-Americans and advocates of abortion rights and gay rights. In recent days, Dean has disavowed comments he made a few years ago suggesting that the party's special interests have too much sway in Iowa's caucuses.
He now says his strategy is to energize the Democrats' most loyal supporters. "We're not going to beat George Bush by being Bush Lite," Dean said at the Indianola winery. "The way to beat George Bush is to give the 50% of Americans who quit voting because they can't tell the difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party — give them a reason to vote again."
But many Democrats fear that Dean, a liberal nominee drawing partisan lines, will have no more success against a Republican incumbent than George McGovern did against Richard Nixon in 1972 or Walter Mondale against Reagan in 1984. In both elections, Democrats lost 49 states. Mondale's rout prompted creation of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) that Clinton chaired before running for president.
"I only have one concern, and that's electability," says Clark Rasmussen, 69, after watching Gore stump for Dean at the Valley Southwoods Freshman High School in West Des Moines. Rasmussen, a former Iowa Democratic state chairman who has been active in politics here since 1960, says that's a big reason he's supporting Kerry, the Massachusetts senator, instead of Dean.
"Can a Democrat get elected who abandons the Clinton transformation of the Democratic Party?" Lieberman said in an interview. "I worry that the answer to that is 'no.' "
Slide to the center?
But Dean dismissed the DLC last month as the "Republican wing of the Democratic Party." When a furor erupted, he said he was joking.
Of course, Dean or another contender could secure the nomination with appeals to the party's base and then slide toward the political center, much as Bush did in the Republican contest in 2000. Dean has credentials to do that. As governor, he was known as a hard-nosed centrist who demanded a balanced budget even as he expanded some health-care and other programs.
And Clinton's imprint on the party hasn't been erased, though it's imperiled. "We do have a handful of candidates who are aggressively going after the forgotten middle class," says Bruce Reed, a Clinton campaign aide and White House adviser who now heads the DLC. He mentions Edwards, Kerry, Clark and Lieberman. "If you close your eyes, you hear Bill Clinton giving the same speech they're giving."
But Dean's chief strategist, Joe Trippi, says that Clinton's success was due less to his policy positions than his communication skills. With conservatives such as Bush and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas in power, he says, Clinton's "third way" is a dead end. "It's not, 'Let's try to cut a deal so we can go down the middle together,' " he says.
At the moment, the Democratic presidential race is being shaped more by antipathy to Bush than allegiance to Clinton.
Many activist Democrats are still outraged by the disputed 2000 election, which was ended in Bush's favor by a 5-4 Supreme Court decision. In a USA TODAY survey this month, more than one-third of Democrats said they believed Bush "stole the election." (Just 1% of Republicans felt that way.) Dean has tapped anger that the party hasn't done enough since then to stand up to Bush.
"The party has moved back to the left in response to Bush conservatism," says presidential scholar Robert Dallek, who has written biographies of several modern Democratic presidents, among them FDR and John Kennedy.
Dean has suggested that his supporters will be in no mood to turn out in November if Democrats nominate someone with a less fiery approach. His rivals suggest that independent and moderate voters will be scared off if the nominee isn't more temperate.
In a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll conducted Friday through Sunday, Democrats were split evenly, 48% to 48%, over whether they wanted a nominee who agreed with them on issues or one with the best chance to beat Bush. And 56% wanted a moderate, 26% a liberal, 14% a conservative.
The current debate could make it harder for the party to unite once a nominee is chosen — or even to agree on what it means, precisely, to be a Democrat. |
