THERE’S A DOG THAT HASN’T BARKED during President Clinton’s impeachment trial in the Senate. It also didn’t bark as his State of the Union address was being prepared. That dog is the liberal wing of the Democratic party.
Though Clinton routinely gives liberalism short shrift, liberals are the party’s most unwavering advocates of keeping him in office, no matter how strong the case for expulsion. And most liberals have taken a vow of silence about the president’s embrace of moderate and conservative policies — most strikingly in early January, when the White House proposed the biggest hike in military spending in more than a decade. It used to be that liberals reflexively opposed increases in Pentagon spending. Now they barely respond at all. This is probably smart politics as Clinton moves to deny Republicans another issue, but that’s my point. Democratic liberals used to care more about the substance than the politics of issues.
Clinton’s allies have many ways of saying he’s tamed the liberal wing. They try not to be demeaning. “Clinton has permanently moved the Democratic party to the center,” says Don Baer, the ex-communications director at the White House. “He has succeeded in making once seemingly incurable ailments vanish,” writes Jacob Weisberg in the January 17 New York Times Magazine. In truth, Clinton has turned liberals into political eunuchs. They’ve given up their passions — providing programs for the poor, attacking big business, even fighting for income redistribution. In exchange, the president has tossed them a handful of administration jobs and sought to preserve some (but hardly all) of the creaky old New Deal and Great Society programs and social policies. How was Clinton able to sell this to liberals? By persuading them that he’s the last line of defense against a conservative takeover in Washington.
One of the few liberals embarrassed by all this is Democratic senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. “The silence [of liberals] is deafening,” he told me. “I’m going to rectify that — soon.” Well, maybe. Because of a back operation, Wellstone recently had to drop out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000. That means that no liberal except Jesse Jackson is likely to challenge Al Gore, and Jackson’s support is chiefly racial, not ideological. Wellstone says he’d try to raise hell about some Clinton policies now, but the impeachment trial crowds out all other issues. “We’ve always been at our best when we’re cutting edge,” he says, “when we speak to values of right and wrong, as opposed to issuing a 10-point program.”
If he pipes up, Wellstone will be in a distinct minority among liberal Democrats. He says there’s been “a sort of closing of the ranks” behind Clinton by liberal groups aligned with the Democratic party. Liberals have adopted “a pragmatic view” that nothing should be done to abet a GOP victory in 2000. They’ve become “hesitant about oppositional politics” inside the party, and Clinton has encouraged their hesitancy. Weisberg recounts a late-night meeting toward the end of 1997 at which Clinton insisted he’s all that stands “in the way of conservative control over the whole apparatus of government.” A few weeks later, Hillary Clinton warned of “a vast right-wing conspiracy.” Anyway, Wellstone fears liberals have succumbed to “a kind of maintenance politics” in Washington — that is, politics designed to maintain the Clinton administration. He says, “There’s a losing of the fire.”
Notably about wrongdoing by the White House. Liberals are scarcely troubled over whether Clinton committed perjury and obstructed justice. They’ve restrained any indignation about his personal conduct. They’re for him, period. It’s party moderates — those closest to Clinton ideologically — who’ve been most alarmed. During House impeachment hearings, the farther to the left, the more noisily pro-Clinton the Democrat was, and the same is true in the Senate. After the first two days of the Senate trial, most senators, even Teddy Kennedy, said little. But a half-dozen liberals rushed to criticize the case against Clinton as repetitive and insubstantial.
And in the run-up to the State of the Union, liberals (except Wellstone) were endlessly tolerant of Clinton’s drift to the right. Health care, for example, has always been the issue dearest to the heart of congressional liberals. Yet when Clinton called for using tax credits to help pay for long-term care — in other words, the Republican approach — they didn’t protest. The lobby for the health-insurance industry did respond, however, and favorably, calling the proposal “a welcome boost for what most experts consider to be the most pressing financial problem facing the baby boom generation.”
Okay, it’s true that liberals have some influence on Clinton policy making. Organized labor has steered the president away from accepting any privatization of the current Social Security program. But that’s only for now. My guess is Clinton will accede to partial privatization eventually as the price of achieving Social Security reform. Labor leaders and their congressional allies have also pressured Clinton to hold off on renewing fast-track authority for new free trade agreements. But most of the bones Clinton throws to liberals fall in the category of reactionary liberalism. They’re aimed at thwarting conservative efforts to kill federal programs that liberals created and still adore.
In one sense, conservatives ought to be delighted by Clinton’s emasculation of liberals. It means, of course, that he’s free to move rightward and make concessions that were unthinkable a decade ago: ending the welfare entitlement, insisting on a balanced budget. But there’s another aspect to the collapse of the liberal wing, and it’s not so pretty. In his personal life and in his policies, Clinton corrupts those around him. They are forced to make his survival and political health their top and all-consuming priority, lest the Republican right triumph. Nothing else matters. Apres Clinton, the conservative deluge. We’ve seen this attitude before in Washington, but not since Richard Nixon was president.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
