In the 1992 presidential campaign, Black was a familiar figure, a strategist and spokesman for George Bush’s campaign. A multimillionaire political consultant, clad in smoothly tailored suits, Black was a close confidant of James Baker-and argued successfully for a campaign based not only on conservative ideology, but on Bill Clinton’s character.
Last weekend Black was hunkered down at a California resort, golfing with the conservatives he had come to know in YAF, and plotting his own and his party’s comeback. His career path is as good a symbol as any of the rise and fall of the GOP hegemony-and the ever-turning gyre of American politics. Ensconced in Washington, once fiery movements yield to new grass-roots surges whose contours are beyond the fingertip feel of manicured hands. “One trend got away from us,” Black glumly conceded, “and that was the feeling of long-term insecurity Americans have. Bill Clinton and Ross Perot tapped into it better than we did.”
Indeed they did-and now a new race is underway to see who can continue to speak to those middle-class fears. For Democrats, the challenge is to be true to the centrist message of Clinton’s campaign: that government must foster not only “community” but renewed belief in individual initiative and responsibility. “Clinton won with what in many ways was a conservative message,” said GOP strategist David Keene. “If he follows it now, he could close the door behind the ‘Reagan Democrats’ who went back to him.” Republicans, meanwhile, must update their own message, find new leaders and heal deep divisions in their ranks. And as both parties struggle in an anti-political era, the key may well be the 19 million Perot voters, the balance of power in presidential politics.
On the surface, Clinton’s win last week was a mirror image of Nixon’s in 1968, portending another shift in the tectonic plates of politics if the economy improves. Like Nixon’ Clinton won comfortably in the Electoral College despite garnering only 43 percent of the popular vote. Like Nixon, he faced a strong third-force candidate who embodied voters’ disillusionment with parties that didn’t seem to offer a “dime’s worth of difference” between them. But as president, Clinton may have a harder time winning over third-force voters than Nixon did. The Republicans found it easy enough to outmaneuver George Wallace, whose 1968 candidacy focused on one region and one constituency. Employing a “Southern strategy” that played on cultural and racial fears, Nixon in 1972 succeeded in corralling Wallace’s supporters. Other third-party candidacies have been similarly confined.
Not Perot’s. His support was evenly spread among regions (map) and demographic groups, minorities excepted. To win over Perot voters, Clinton must address fears that defy political manipulation: the pervading sense that Washington is corrupt and that America is losing its economic prowess because of that corruption.
Author Kevin Phillips’s famous crystal ball sees no dynasties. “The Republican coalition is finished,” he declares. But in an era of sluggish economic growth, a new “long-term supremacy” is unlikely, he says. Perot pioneered new ways of communicating that are a threat to traditional two-party politics. Term-limit initiatives were approved in 14 states. Perot’s legions, Phillips warns, may signal the end of the zero-sum game between Democrats and Republicans. “We’re looking at a two-party system that’s ready for a breakdown,” says Phillips. Lowell Weicker, the Independent governor of Connecticut, was more emphatic. “This is the last election the Republicans or Democrats are going to win for a while,” he announced.
Still, Clinton has a stronger base to work from than his plurality victory would indicate. He won a greater percentage of white votes than any Democratic candidate since Carter. Unlike Michael Dukakis in 1988, Clinton not only ran strongly among the poorest voters, but led among middle-income Americans earning up to $50,000. The Clinton-Gore ticket made the GOP pay for its overweening reliance on the South; the Democrats’ all-South ticket won eight Southern and border states (map) even as it swept the coasts and the Midwest industrial heartland. If he pursues his centrist agenda and enjoys favorable economic winds, says adviser Alvin From, “Clinton can carry out another Democratic realignment like Roosevelt’s, and fashion a new majority.”
If he does so, From’s organization, the Democratic Leadership Council, will have had something to do with it. Clinton honed his thinking through the group, using it to mount a friendly takeover of the party’s presidential wing. Formed in 1985 primarily by outside-the-Beltway Democrats, the DLC blamed Walter Mondale’s devastating loss to Reagan in 1984 on a party that was too close to capital’s liberal interest groups. Clinton adopted-and shaped-DLC proposals that he has promised to pursue in office: welfare reform, a national service college-loan program, worker retraining. Last week From, the DLC’s director, was one of the first Washington advisers Clinton met with in Little Rock, Ark.
Many Republicans, at least those based inside the Beltway, insisted on an “I’m all right, Jack” mood, convinced Clinton would be dragged from his centrist DLC themes by the Washington branch of his own party. “The Senate is actually more liberal now,” said Keene, “and he’s going to have to deal with it as such.” The Senate Republican leader–Mr. Republican, by default–is Bob Dole, who relished his revived role as anti-Democratic hatchet person. Clinton will have a honeymoon, he joked–“with Bob Dole as chaperon.” The GOP made minimal gains in the House and picked up legislative seats in every region. “If Bill Clinton raises taxes and nationalizes medicine and doesn’t cut spending back, we’ll be just fine in 1996,” predicts Republican consultant David Carmen.
The sanguine GOP view is that the party’s conservative message is alive and well-it’s just that Bush failed to articulate it. But the notion belies the warfare breaking out inside the party over economic and social issues. Perot’s stern attack-the-deficit message echoes a view GOP supply-siders have long since dismissed as mere “root-canal Republicanism.” The GOP ignores it now at its peril. Yet tax-cutting supply-siders are hardly in retreat, arguing that President Clinton will steal the theme with his own proposals for stimulative business-tax cuts. “The same divisions and confusions that characterized the whole Bush administration are still with us,” said former White House political director Mitch Daniels.
The capital’s chattering classes have already designed the two sides of the economic debate in the early 1996 sweepstakes: Dole and Texas Sen. Phil Gramm leading the Root Canal wing; HUD Secretary Jack Kemp, the putative front runner for now, the everlasting darling of the supply-siders. Most of the other possible candidates, including Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and former Delaware governor Pete du Pont, are ranged along that grid.
Social issues, abortion in particular, are the other great dividing line. Many Republican insiders hope that Clinton will appoint enough pro-choice Supreme Court justices to make the abortion issue moot-even while keeping it alive as a GOP organizing tool. If they run, Govs. Pete Wilson of California and Bill Weld of Massachusetts might pursue a more “libertarian” line on issues such as abortion and gay rights. If Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson and William Bennett don’t run, even Dan Quayle could tap into the “family values” constituency he staked out during his vice presidency.
The abortion issue already is influencing the race to succeed Rich Bond as chairman of the Republican National Committee. Among the candidates: Labor Secretary Lynn Martin, who is pro-choice; Congressman Vin Weber, a Kemp ally who is staunchly pro-life, and Haley Barbour a Black protege, with good contacts i, both camps. Black himself, a disciple of the late Lee Atwater’s “big tent” theory on abortion, is considering the race.
The insiders’ maneuvering misses a basic point, said Daniels, who, like Black, was enjoying last week’s conservative retreat. “We have to make sure that we’re the second, as opposed to the third, force in American politics,” he said. “When the Democrats lose a national election, they’re still in power in the Congress. When we lose, we’re nowhere. Most of our people don’t realize it yet. We have a long road ahead of us.” But it’s not an easy road to see from the middle of a golf course.
WHERE THE VOTES WERE
Bill Clinton won a decisive victory in last week’s election. But Republican strength, seen in blue in this county-by-county analysis of presidential balloting, plus support for independent candidate Ross Perot that topped 20 percent in 30 states, may deny the Democrats the dynastic grip of a landslide. ..MR.-
Alaska and states in New England do not provide county information. The largest districts in each county were used in Alaska. The largest city or cities in each county were used in Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont. Counties with unavailable results or a tie among the three candidates are shown in white.
MAP: United States ..MR0-
Perot Country: Where He Topped 20 Percent Alaska 27% Nebraska 24% Arizona 24 Nevada 26 California 21 N. Hampshire 23 Colorado 23 N. Dakota 23 Connecticut 22 Ohio 21 Delaware 20 Oklahoma 23 Florida 20 Oregon 25 Idaho 27 R. Island 23 Indiana 20 S. Dakota 22 Kansas 27 Texas 22 Maine 30 Utah 27 Massachusetts 23 Vermont 23 Minnesota 24 Washington 24 Missouri 22 Wisconsin 22 Montana 26 Wyoming 26
