Bill Clinton is moving to the right fast, but perhaps too late. The Elders episode is only the most recent reminder that the baby boom’s first political establishment – the liberal one Clinton joined in the ’60s – is finished. Think of the recent election as a race for generational class president. The candidates: two loquacious, overachieving white males who wear relaxed-fit slacks and own 1967 Mustangs. For years, Clinton’s crowd – obsessed with racial and gender justice, sexual freedom and the risks of war – got most of the attention and power. They were opposed, then and now, by a counter-counterculture – obsessed with the family, private enterprise, Biblical values and the need to use force to protect society. Last month the voters spoke: former cool dude Clinton clearly was bested by former geek Gingrich.
When he ran for president, Clinton seemed to sense the rightward drift of his generational history. He angled away from his early student days, picking fights with Jesse Jackson, promising to ““end welfare as we know it,’’ dedicating himself to ““people who work hard and play by the rules.’’ But once in Washington, it was as though he were back on campus, surrounded by professors, law jocks and Rhodes scholars. They produced the early cultural debacles, summarized by Hillary Clinton as ““gays and guns’’: politically damaging support for gun control and new rights for gays in the military. Hillary’s colossal health-care plan was easy to tag as old-fashioned Big Government liberalism of the ’60s variety.
Voters didn’t like the Clinton they saw. He seemed too much like Yale Law, circa 1970. Post-election surveys show that voters punished Democrats for Clinton’s failure to deliver on his promise of ““fundamental change’’ in Washington, and for his inability to make people feel more secure about their jobs. But the generational war played a part, too, polltakers say. Republicans effectively portrayed the Clinton crowd as an enclave of the old-left ’60s, led by Hillary Clinton, health-care adviser Ira Magaziner and ““condom queen’’ Elders. ““A lot of baby boomers were reflecting a change in attitude about their own past,’’ said GOP polltaker John McLaughlin. ““It began in the ’80s; it’s accelerating now.''
Shape up, the Democratic Leadership Council warned Clinton last week. The president is a former chairman of the self-styled ““mainstream’’ group, which had given him a national platform in the center in 1991. DLC leaders such as Sen. John Breaux and Rep. Dave McCurdy bluntly lectured the president. They told him he had to move right, shake up his cabinet (Elders was among those they urged him to replace) and sign on to at least some of Gingrich’s ““Contract With America.’’ The DLC released its own alternative ““contract,’’ which included tax cuts and a crusade against teen pregnancy. Clinton is merely a ““transitional figure,’’ McCurdy publicly declared. He’ll be a marginal one – and a loser in 1996 – if he doesn’t move quickly, Breaux privately warned.
Clinton is trying. Indeed, he began within days of the election, agreeing to discuss school prayer (he’d supported a moment-of-silence bill in Arkansas) and proposing to raise defense spending by $25 billion. Last week he ended all doubt about where he was headed. Administration officials said they were considering a massive downsizing of government agencies, including leveling the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Clinton announced he would convene a bipartisan conference of mayors, governors and congresspeople on welfare reform. When Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen announced his retirement, Clinton was careful about whom he chose to replace the most conservative figure in his cabinet. He picked Robert Rubin, an economic adviser who is admired on Wall Street – and who had been a vehement foe of Hillary’s health-care plan. Administration officials were delighted at the chance to fire Elders. ““She was a bomb waiting to go off,’’ said a top insider.
How far will Clinton be willing to go? Will he take on soulmates from the ’60s? Democrats from the old days, with ties to the remnants of the old establishment, warn of betrayal. ““If the president tries to out-Republican the Republicans, he’ll fail,’’ declares Joseph Califano, who oversaw or ran welfare policy for Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter. DLC officials dismiss such concerns. ““The elections have liberated Democrats from special-interest liberalism,’’ said DLC executive director Al From. ““Now the party is free to look ahead.''
Free, yes. Serious, who knows? The president will have to do more than announce a policy shift to convince skeptical voters, who have seen him back and fill on too many issues. He’ll actually have to cut deals with Newt, whom most White House insiders loathe. Loather-in-chief is Hillary Clinton, who still harbors hopes for a major health-care overhaul, and who encourages the notion – shared to some extent by her husband – that last month’s debacle was strictly the result of lousy PR strategy. ““She just doesn’t get it, and I’m not sure she’s going to try,’’ said a top Democratic insider.
While Clinton scrambles, Gingrich reigns triumphant – at least until they start the tough votes in the House. The parallel histories of the two men are fascinating, and instructively ironic. In some ways, it’s now clear, Gingrich is the more representative ’60s figure. He was, in fact, always more rebelliously anti-establishment than Clinton, who coveted traditional credentials. In the summer of 1963, as the world now knows, 16-year-old Bill Clinton already was tagged as a future insider, shaking hands with President Kennedy. That same summer, Gingrich, a 20-year-old college student at Emory University, was trying to talk one Jack Prince, a Georgia poultry processor, into running for Congress as a Goldwater Republican in a state full of Yellow Dog Democrats. At that time and in that place, Gingrich was as far from the political establishment as a young man could get.
That was then. Now Gingrich is consolidating his power in the House. He packed key House committees with his loyalists, and began setting a timetable for his forced march through his ““contract.’’ His every utterance is news. Pursuing his attack on Clinton’s ““counterculture,’’ Gingrich said last week he’d been reliably told that ““up to a quarter of the White House staff, when they first came in, had used drugs in the last four or five years.’’ He offered no proof. The White House accused him of cultural McCarthyism and hypocrisy, since he admitted to having smoked dope in the ’60s. But the Clintonites were missing the point. Politically, it doesn’t matter anymore what you did in the ’60s. It matters what you say about them now.
