Mr. Populism returns. Play It Again, Stan
By JONATHAN COHN Issue date: 09.11.00 Post date: 09.01.00
http://www.thenewrepublic.com/091100/cohn091100.html One of the great fictions perpetuated by modern political campaigns is that advisers don't really advise their candidates. And no one perpetuates it more than the Gore campaign. Stung by months of negative stories on the campaign's ever-shifting staff and message, the Gore team now reflexively downplays the role of its campaign strategists. Ask Chris Lehane, Doug Hattaway, or some other Gore spokesperson about what this or that adviser is doing, and you're likely to be scolded, "The candidate is the story, not his strategists." To hear them tell it, Bob Shrum, Bill Daley, and Carter Eskew do little more than lick envelopes, shuffle papers, and make the occasional Diet Coke run. But in the case of Stanley Greenberg, who officially signed on with Al Gore in late July, the skittishness is easier to understand. It's not just that Greenberg is a pollster, whose prominence would therefore bolster the charge that Al Gore doesn't know his own mind. Greenberg is also the pollster associated with the early Clinton years, when the president was widely seen as too liberal. And Greenberg is frequently blamed for the 1994 health care fiasco, for which he ultimately lost his job. Yet, communications-office spin notwithstanding, Greenberg's presence on the campaign team at this moment is hardly incidental. Last month, in a cover story co-authored for The American Prospect, Greenberg outlined a strategy for post-Clinton Democrats: Establish credibility with disenchanted swing voters by affirming family values, then embrace populist programs that put government to work for middle- and low-income Americans. "A family-centered progressive discourse on values," Greenberg wrote, "would free voters to respond to Democrats on the social and economic issues on which Democrats now have a presumptive advantage." Sound familiar? It's an argument Greenberg has been making for more than a decade. And, for the past month or so, Gore has been making it, too. That doesn't mean Greenberg is Gore's Rasputin. But it does mean Greenberg has helped shape Gore's message. And that's no cause for shame. While many journalists and conservative Democrats see Greenberg's populism as unreconstructed liberalism, it actually represents something very different: a middle ground between the Walter Mondale-style liberalism that dominated the party in the 1980s and the John Breaux- (or Joe Lieberman-) style centrism that has been taking over the party in the last few years. Where the former focused largely on the plight of the poor and the latter has targeted suburban professionals, Greenberg insists that the economically vulnerable working class must form the backbone of any Democratic majority. If the Greenberg philosophy is indeed a throwback, it is a throwback to the New Democrat ideal of 1992, when Clinton first ran for president. It makes just as much sense today as it did then, and it helps explain why Gore has surged ahead in the polls.
reenberg first entered the national spotlight in the mid-'80s, with his groundbreaking research in Macomb County, Michigan, a blue-collar suburb of Detroit. For decades, the residents of Macomb County, many of them union members, had reliably voted Democratic. But by the '80s something had changed: Macomb went overwhelmingly for Ronald Reagan. The Michigan Democratic Party and the United Auto Workers asked Greenberg to find out what had happened. Through numerous focus groups, Greenberg disentangled the sources of Macomb voters' disaffection with the Democratic Party and decided that its liberal stances on welfare, affirmative action, and crime were to blame. "The Democratic Party, in their eyes, once represented working people but no longer," wrote Greenberg. "It worries about blacks and minorities and supports a government that mainly blocks opportunities for people like thems elves." Although Democrats still had plenty of good ideas for helping middle-class voters economically, Greenberg concluded that they'd never get the chance to implement them until they regained these voters' trust. And to do that they had to shed their reputation for cultural permissiveness and reaffirm their belief in the middle-class work ethic. Today, this is conventional wisdom. But when Greenberg first proposed it in the mid-'80s, it was anything but. Civil rights, feminist, and labor activists charged that Greenberg's work amounted to a highbrow validation of working-class racism. So frightened of Greenberg's findings was the Democratic Party leadership that, in 1984, it suppressed an internal Democratic National Committee follow-up to the Macomb research that concluded that Democratic appeals to "fairness" were alienating middle-class voters, who interpreted the term as a code word for welfare. But, as Democratic defeats mounted, Greenberg's work became harder to ignore. And one of the politicians who took notice was Bill Clinton. As a Southern governor who'd once lost reelection by getting to the left of his constituents, he had firsthand knowledge of his party's problems with moderate voters. So in 1992 Clinton gave Greenberg the chance to test his theory in an actual campaign. With Greenberg as his polling strategist, Clinton signaled his mainstream values by promising tougher laws against crime, time limits for welfare recipients, and a commitment to "mend" affirmative action. At the same time, he promised government assistance to the working class in the form of targeted tax breaks, job training, and a broad health insurance initiative. Even at the time, the Greenberg strategy--laden with language about inequality and built around expensive government programs--was more populist than the Democratic Leadership Council and many other New Democrats would have liked. But, for Greenberg and Clinton, the idea was not merely to limit government spending; it was to build a case for more aggressive federal interventions by adopting a conservative stance on values and demonstrating that government could be efficient as well as compassionate. And the strategy seemed to work brilliantly. Clinton didn't quite carry Macomb County, but he won back many other disaffected Democrats in middle-class districts, enough to win the presidency. As of Election Day 1992, the popular appetite for government activism seemed stronger than it had been in years: according to the polls, the public was strongly behind Clinton's signature promise, universal health care.
s a reward for his work, Greenberg got the plum job of White House pollster and a lucrative contract with the Democratic Party--not to mention a featured role in the 1993 documentary The War Room. But then things went downhill. For many conservative New Democrats, the administration's early moves--snubbing DLC officials in staff appointments, prioritizing health care over welfare reform--validated their initial squeamishness about Clinton's campaign-trail populism. And they blamed, in part, consultants like Greenberg. Eventually Clinton himself shifted to the right. The president held Greenberg personally responsible for the health care fiasco--the pollster, Clinton said, had overestimated the public's tolerance for sweeping reform. The president brought in a new polling strategist: Dick Morris, a man with no interest whatsoever in reaffirming activist government. With great dismay, Greenberg watched as Clinton, at Morris's behest, adopted ever more conservative positions on the budget--in effect, undermining the original Clintonian project by dismantling the very government apparatus Greenberg had hoped to rebuild. So in 1995, as disenchanted with the president as the president was with him, Greenberg began a voluntary exile from Democratic presidential politics, taking his "project" to a list of foreign clients that reads like a who's who of center-left world leaders: Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroder, Ehud Barak. To the extent that he kept a finger in domestic politics, it was mostly as an intellectual gadfly: together with Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol, he ran a seminar series for labor-liberal intellectuals called the New Majority Project. In The American Prospect, Greenberg sparred with Clinton's newest pollster, Mark Penn, over the emerging administration consensus that it made more sense for the Democrats to target upscale middle-class voters rather than Greenberg's signature working-class constituencies. That consensus basically held until last month, when Greenberg was hired by Gore. When Gore first trotted out his new populism at the Democratic convention in August, the punditocracy reacted negatively. "Gore ceded the political center," Morton Kondracke opined, "and with it, probably, the election." But Greenberg thought otherwise, and Gore apparently agrees. In the last few weeks, the Gore campaign has turned into a test of Greenberg's grand agenda: a test of whether the Democrats are sufficiently inoculated on "values" issues that they can boldly expand government protection for the working class and the poor. There is some evidence Greenberg is right. Today, the Democrats hold an edge with voters on almost every major issue, from health care to Social Security to the environment to education. Meanwhile, the Republicans' ability to counter these strengths with issues that function as a proxy for race--crime, welfare, even affirmative action--has diminished. So much so, in fact, that George W. Bush seems to have concluded that the best way to win back the presidency is to emulate the Democrats' minority overtures rather than subliminally attack them. As Greenberg puts it, "Most of the races that I've thrown myself into ... they all had to address the problem of a Democratic Party, or a center-left party, that was weighed down by its past. What's exciting about Al Gore and this election is that it's a very different situation." Indeed, the real question may be not whether Greenberg's strategy makes sense but how committed to it Gore really is. Just a week after Gore's convention speech, running mate Joe Lieberman reassured pharmaceutical companies and other businesses unnerved by the vice president's populist attacks that the language in the speech had some "rhetorical flourishes." And, in one background leak to the press that contradicted the vice president's own statements, a Gore strategist suggested that the populist language is just a targeted appeal to the Democratic base-- distinct from the campaign's message to independent swing voters, to which Gore will soon return. For Greenberg, it must seem like déjà vu. A victim of the Clinton administration's drift right, he has been given an unexpected second chance, only to hear the same criticisms well up once again. Greenberg clearly thinks Gore's populism is more than a fad--that it reflects the vice president's deep commitment to resurrecting the vision of activist government that brought Greenberg to Macomb County more than a decade ago. He had better hope so. Because one good barometer of Gore's commitment to populism is how long Stan Greenberg stays in his job.