WELCOME, MY FELLOW DEMOCRATS!” hollered ayor Marion Barry. It was meant to be an plause line, but the audience fell silent. Several of them looked as though they didn’t want to be on the same planet as Marion Barry, much less in the same party.
Washington’s mayor forged ahead anyway, welcoming last week’s conference of t he Democratic Leadership Council to the Washington Co nvention Center. He shouldn’t have been surprised by their “What do you mean we, Kemosabe” response. DLC members are the New Democrats, seekers after the Third Way, moving beyond the tired categories of Left and Right. Barry is Mr. Old Democrat, the Traditional Liberal, a walking exemplar of the Worn-out Bureaucratic Model.
But he’s learning, as a good host should. “Here in the District,” the mayor went on, “we’re going to transform our old-fashioned liberal government into an enabling government — that’s the wave of the future.” He paused again for applause that didn’t come. “We’re very into self-help.” Self-help! You could almost feel the assembled New Democrats cringe. Self-help is a simplistic term, plucked from the rightward side of the old outmoded liberal-conservative spectrum, and by tossing it out this way the mayor merely confirmed his cluelessness. As the New Democrats wrestle with the complexities of the challenges of a new era, Barry remains mired in an either/or dichotomy. It was, as one DLC member told me, “paradoxical” that he should appear at the start of their annual convocation.
But no matter. For the New Democrat, life is incredibly complex. Politics is incredibly complex. New Democrats are comfortable with paradox, fluent in the language of oxymoron. The New Democrat spits out the epithet “simplistic” as if it were a chunk of gristle. Speak of nuance and subtlety and a smile of pleasure floats across his face. Rise before a New Democrat convocation and call for a new politics that moves us as a people and a nation beyond the orthodoxies of the past, and you will see members of the movement swoon into rapture.
Maybe swoon is too strong a word. So is rapture. Come to think of it, so is movement. New Democrats are earnest but not numerous. Founded 11 years ago (by, among others, A1 Gore and Bill Clinton), the DLC considered this year’s conference a landmark. Turnout was nearly double last year’s showing. Hard on the heels of the 1994 debacle, almost 1,500 Democrats registered to attend — nearly one out of every 27,000 Democrats in America. But still.
“I’m here to get new ideas for my campaign,” said Tracey Vance, an Iowan who plans to run for Congress next year, and as he scurried from panel to plenary he was not disappointed. Along with its affiliated think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute, the DLC fairly fibrillates with ideas. “Because Ideas Matter, ” is the council’s (mysterious) slogan. And where are ideas found? In “The Idea Book,” a three-ring binder issued to all particpants, stuffed with briefing papers, mission statements, manifestoes, magazine articles, and talking points — for New Democrats, a Thanksgiving Day feast, served a week early.
The ideas are, as you’d expect, incredibly complex. They contain more paradoxes than a book of koans. They represent the Third Way: progressive and ambitious but not liberal, cautious and skeptical but not conservative. The Democratic party’s problem, according to the DLC diagnosis, is that, as the left-leaning party in America’s two-party system, it leans to the left. Why, they ask, doesn’t this bull have teats?
“The beginning of wisdom,” says PPI president Will Marshall, “is to reject the either/or dichotomy.” Thus: “The Gingrich revolution goes too far, but doesn’t go far enough.” New Democrats reject “the command and control model” of regulation in favor of the “opportunity and outcome” model. Taxes? “Neither the liberal nor conservative approach meets the true goal of tax reform.” Ditto health care: “Traditional left-right remedies sidestep the all-important goal…” Job creation: “Traditional liberal andconservative answers are not much help.” On the touchy issue of teen pregnancy, policymakers must ” distinguish between young teens” who — shouldn’t do it, and “older teens” who will do it anyway but should use a condom when they do. New Democrats walk through gray areas, swim in deep waters. This may be why there are so few of them.
At first blush all this complexity could mean trouble for New candidates like Tracy Vance. Electoral campaigns demand bright, bold colors; the DLC offers a p alette of pastels. Many participants I spoke with described themselves therefor e as “raging moderates” or members of the “radical middle” — currently fashion able oxymorons meant to jazz up something unexciting (moderation) by twinning i t with a self-cancelling opposite. You might as well speak of a “horny Pat Boon e.” It is difficult to see how the DLC agenda could sell as a campaign platform . “Take the issue of regulation, like OSHA,” Tracy Vance said. “I can tell vote rs that we need devolution, to move power out of Washington, down to the lowest possible level of government decision-making.” But isn’t that what his Republic an opponent will be saying? “Oh no,” he said. “Because New Democrats don’t see regulation as evil. These radical Republicans do. We want devolution, and we wa nt national standards, too. The main thing is, people d on’t want Washington telling them what to do.” Or, as DLC talking points put it: We need “accountal devolution” rather than “wholesale national divestiture. ” This is how you get moderates raging.
Their protests to the contrary notwithstanding, New Democrats remain Democrats first and foremost, at least rhetorically. Every panel I saw over the two-day DLC conference, every plenary, every speech, offered ritual denunciations of Republican extremism, harshness, cruelty, and intellectual poverty, even as the speaker pushed an idea — say, market-based environmental regulation — conceived and advocated by Republicans.
The “New” in New Democrat allows innumerable strategic advantages like this. You can condemn plutocrats and the bureaucrats who harass them. You can advocate a massively expensive “Workers” GI Bill” for people who were never GIs. You can showcase Americorps, which pays kids to volunteer (talk about paradox!). You can condemn the instrusiveness of government while finding new things for it to do. You can, in short, have it both ways: PPI’s budget plan is called “Cut and Invest.” And best of all, you never have to become a Republican, avoiding association with such vulgarians as Helms, Buchanan, and Enid Waldholz’s husband.
Still, the DLC is a pretty thin reed from which to build a movement. “I have seen the future of the Democratic party,” DLC chairman Joe Lieberman told the audience, “and it’s right here in this room.” He meant it as a compliment, but he could be righter than he knows. If they can’t do better than this, we may indeed have seen the Democratic party of the future: a roomful of 1,500 people.
by Andrew Ferguson
