Chicago
THEY SAY A PERSON IS NEVER SO ELATED as he is after someone has tried to kill him and missed. No wonder the Democrats were so happy in Chicago, given the scare of 1994. They’re not especially happy about Clinton. They’re not especially happy that the era of big government is over. But they are happy to be alive, and winning. “I couldn’t be happier,” party chairman Don Fowler exulted. “I can’t imagine how I could be happier!”
The floor of the Democratic convention was just about the most gleeful place on earth. Throughout the convention, delegates were greeting each other with causeless laughter and odd giggles. These donkeys were happiest doing the Macarena every night. They were happy singing along with “Working for a Living” and ” Amazing Grace.” They were in raptures at each church choir that came to belt out at them.
The Democrats can’t imagine how they can lose this time. The gay and lesbian activists were happy. The union workers were happy (even though they were supposed to be mad at Firestone and a host of other companies). The teachers were happy (even though they were wearing buttons that read “Mad and Mobilized”).
They’re saps, all of them. These overwhelmingly liberal delegates were being snookered. Ideologically, the delegate profile hasn’t changed since the bad old liberal heyday. But while they were butt-bouncing in their chairs to the dozens of musical groups that were thrown at them, their party was being quietly hijacked.
There was lots of pablum and heart-tugging during the week, but the crucial event, as far as the future of the Democratic party was concerned, came on Tuesday night with the speeches of Mario Cuomo and Jesse Jackson. That’s when the two leading spokesmen of American liberalism validated Bill Clinton’s effort to move the Democrats away from liberalism. The delegates thought they were listening to stirring calls from liberal champions, but they were actually watching liberals who had become complicit in their own renunciation.
Mario Cuomo was the public rubber stamp for the transition from the San Francisco Democrats of 1984, when he was the dominant spokesman for left-liberalism, to the Chicago Democrats of 1996. Yes, Cuomo. He admitted that the San Francisco Democrats had “slighted the middle class.” And he celebrated Bill Clinton for his efforts to reconnect with that class. He praised the balanced budget, putting more cops on the street, and other formerly Republican priorities. Mario Cuomo praised Bill Clinton for moving the party away from Mario Cuomo.
Jackson’s address was by far the convention’s most historically rooted and substantive, and its most unapologetically liberal. But what mattered was not its rhetoric. What mattered was that by appearing, and by endorsing Bill Clinton, Jackson signaled his approval of Bill Clinton and his effort to modernize their party. Like Cuomo, he acknowledged implicitly the point Barney Frank acknowledged explicitly, that Bill Clinton — this one man and this one man alone — is the party’s only hope.
The Democrats used to talk about the poor, and more recently the homeless. But there was hardly a single word spoken about homelesshess at this convention. Instead, today’s conventions project compassion for the disabled. After all, disability is so much neater as a political issue than poverty. Convention disability stories always seem to have uplifting endings. But poverty is stubborn. And the disabled speakers at conventions are always so middle class (and so more comfortable for the suburban white married women who are the main target of these shows).
The Democratic party no longer defines itself by its approach to the poor. Under Clinton, it defines itself by how it responds to the anxieties of the middle class. Clinton signed the welfare-reform bill, and his party went along, because the views of the white middle class take priority over the concerns of the underclass and the liberal social policy mavens.
A liberal thinker from California told me that the psychological scars from Clinton’s signing the welfare bill are not to be underestimated. It was, he said, comparable to what happened when the Communists stopped believing in communism. They went on being Communists because that is what they were. But somewhere deep inside, they knew they were not the future. The most remarkable Democratic story of the year is that no liberal rose during the primary season to challenge Clinton, to stand up for liberal ideas. The second most remarkable is that Clinton ended the most basic government entitlement, and a few weeks later, 3,400 liberal delegates cheered him on.
Many on the right, Republican and Democrat alike, are already saying that this convention’s centrist triumphalism is only an election year gambit. Don’t you believe it. Sure, there are pockets of liberalism, represented by members of Congress, state legislatures, and the state delegations (some of which are drifting further left). But there are other, more centrist pockets – – in the White House, in governor’s mansions, and in city halls. When the two actually face each other, the centrists usually win, even with the Left’s superior grass roots. Not only is the Left psychologically undermined, it’s out of touch with the Zeitgeist and its policy ideas are wildly unrealistic: The AFL-CIO is still dreaming of unionized public works programs to cure unemployment.
The Democratic Leadership Council is in the driver’s seat. It held a conference in 1991 called “The New American Choice: Opportunity, Responsibility, Community” — and those three words made up the theme of this convention. More important, the frame of debate has now shifted. Tax hikes are hard to talk about. Balanced budgets are the premise of the left and center of the party.
And so all the policies are small. Even Hillary Clinton is left touting policies so tiny (48 hours in the maternity ward!) that you need a magnifying glass to see them. When even the Democratic party loses faith in the great big transformative powers of government and opts instead for federally sponsored 800 numbers and tax breaks for community college, then something is really gone. By the way, the British Labor party was here in Chicago in force, proving that the international trends are unmistakable: Modernization is the central task of those on the political left. And modernization means moving right.
Robert Benchley once wrote a column about how in every news photo of a dramatic event, there is always one person in the photo looking absent-mindedly the other way checking his watch while history is happening over his shoulder. In Chicago, as liberalism was suffering yet another blow, almost all the liberal delegates were looking the other way. They had their eyes on the DiamondVision screen, pointing at the big pictures of themselves dancing, and meanwhile their own party and their own leaders were renouncing their creed. They did the Macarena while liberalism burned.
