His way

THIS WEEK IT WAS Bill Clinton's turn. Two weeks after the nation ground to a halt to mourn Ronald Reagan's death, the publication of Clinton's memoir, "My Life" (Knopf), shifted the spotlight to Reagan's Democratic counterweight.

Possessed of Reaganesque cheer, and having midwifed an economic boom that outstripped his predecessor's, Clinton left office in 2001 as the most popular departing president since such polling began -- better liked than Reagan upon his exit, better liked even than John F. Kennedy upon his death. Indeed, but for the vote of a single Republican Supreme Court Justice, Al Gore would now be presiding over a third consecutive term of Clintonism.

Clinton's victory lap won't end with this week's talk show appearances. Clinton will speak on opening night of the Democratic National Convention next month, and will be feted, along with Hillary, at both a joint book signing and a Sunday evening kick-off gala. Organizers clearly hope Clinton can transmit his magic to John Kerry.

Personally, however, Clinton probably can't do much to help Kerry. Speaking skills, star power, and the ability to convey empathy aren't easily transferable. What can help the Democratic nominee, however, is Clintonism -- the reworking of Democratic philosophy that the Arkansas governor pioneered in 1992 and carried through his presidency. But Kerry should study Clinton's playbook and briefing books closely, for many of the received notions about Clintonism are, in important ways, wrong.

Clinton was not the quintessence of 1960s liberalism, as his right-wing enemies imagined. Nor was he the sell-out to the right that some on the left supposed, or the unprincipled opportunist mocked by the pundits. Rather, Clinton's feat was to move the Democratic Party back into the mainstream where it could win electoral majorities, usually without resorting to the naked accommodationism championed by the party's conservative wing, typified by Southern senators Sam Nunn and John Breaux.

To be sure, Clinton could partake of cynical "triangulation," his pollster Dick Morris's term for the expedient adoption of small-bore policies like school uniforms or the television V-chip that sought to situate the president between, and above, the two parties. Like all politicians, he sometimes employed deliberately ambiguous rhetoric, in futile attempts to reconcile irreconcilable differences.

But at its best, Clintonism entailed retrieving three key elements that had long been missing from Democratic rhetoric and policies -- populism, pragmatism, and the language of values -- and molding them into creative new ideas that impressed voters as a genuine departure from both parties' orthodoxies.

he fight over the meaning of Clintonism began in the 2000 presidential race, as Al Gore sloshed about in search of a theme and an identity. Journalists began propounding the mistaken idea that Gore had to choose between one of two directions for his campaign.

Those Democrats who rallied to Gore's "people versus the powerful" theme -- including Bob Shrum, the veteran consultant who crafted it and is now one of Kerry's top strategists -- believed that Clinton's winning formula rested on his raw populism, his promise to put government back to work on behalf of working-class and struggling middle-class voters being squeezed by corporate America.

In contrast, the conservative-leaning Democrats of the Democratic Leadership Council -- the group formed in the mid-1980s to take back the White House by making the party friendlier to business, religion, and the military -- believed such populism vitiated Clinton's fundamentally centrist principles. They favored what might be called me-too Republicanism: nudging the Democrats closer to their rivals' stands on issues from race to trade to education. Formed in the wake of Jimmy Carter's bungling of economic affairs, the DLC wanted to shuck their party's onerous tax-and-spend label by seeking out market-based solutions to social problems.

The DLCers believed -- and convinced many journalists -- that Clinton was an instrument of their ideology. In truth, they were an instrument of his aspirations. The organization was just one of many groups -- the black community, the nation's governors, the intellectuals, the liberal interest groups, and others -- whose support Clinton marshaled en route to victory in 1992 and whose ideas he drew upon as he saw fit. "When you come to a fork in the road, take it," Yogi Berra once said. Instead of choosing between the two seemingly opposite approaches of populism and market centrism that were laid before Gore in 2000, Clinton took the best from both and blended them.

The DLC types never fully appreciated Clinton's message because they never accepted the populism at its core. The "Putting People First" agenda of his 1992 campaign set the tone that continued throughout his presidency. Addressing "the people who work hard and play by the rules," he rebuked both the Republicans' favoritism toward those at the top and the liberal dinosaurs' sentimentality toward those at the bottom.

Yet Clinton did share the DLC's recognition that key planks of post-World War II liberalism had lost favor among critical constituencies. By the 1980s many former Democrats -- notably white, working-class ethnic voters -- felt that liberalism no longer spoke to their needs or values and were embracing Reaganism as a result. The Reagan critique cast the Democrats, not always inaccurately, as undisciplined in their social spending and committed to high taxes, soft on crime and defense, captive to the interests of blacks and the poor, and beholden to fuzzy-minded ideals and out of touch with practical problems.

Senator Gary Hart's 1984 campaign for the Democratic nomination represented a first effort to fix this problem. He spoke of a strong but streamlined defense, worker retraining programs, and other "new ideas" that would forge beyond Vice President Walter Mondale's fusty 1960s liberalism. But Mondale's riposte to Hart's vaunted new ideas in a primary-season debate -- "Where's the beef?" -- underscored how conventional the bulk of Hart's program was.

Governor Michael Dukakis's 1988 candidacy inched the party closer to reform. Dukakis, it's often forgotten, wasn't the liberal in the field that year. That title belonged to the professorial, bow-tied Senator Paul Simon of Illinois, while the Reverend Jesse Jackson staked out the far left. Dukakis, in contrast, promised a technocratic efficiency even as he remained a liberal on civil rights and civil liberties. But in the fall George H.W. Bush steered the debate into a tangle of "wedge issues" such as race, crime, patriotism, and defense, on which swing voters reliably leaned to the right. Although Dukakis found a populist pitch as Election Day neared and gained ground, it was too little, too late.

. . .

The `84 and `88 campaigns cemented the consensus that the Democrats had to change -- although not simply to move to the right. Rather, it became clear they needed hard-headed thinking in lieu of utopian idealism. And given how Republicans since Richard Nixon had captured the language and imagery of populism -- rallying besieged working- and middle-class voters against cultural mandarins said to be wasting their tax money in pursuit of social engineering visions -- they needed a passionate, values-laden appeal to the "Reagan Democrats" and other disaffected middle-class voters.

Clinton's "New Democrat" message built on these approaches in championing, first, pragmatism, and second, a populism that was both economic and cultural. He promised an efficient, responsible activism that served the middle class. Indeed, if Dukakis is wrongly recalled as the liberal from 1988, Clinton gets misremembered in the press as the conservative from 1992. Actually, Senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts ran to the right of Clinton that year, proposing to cut capital gains taxes and balance the budget, as did Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, who called for pruning entitlements.

Clinton triumphed in `92 and then governed successfully for another reason, too: His vision rested not on airy rhetoric but on specifics. He staked out policy positions that he described as neither liberal nor conservative, but both and neither. Usually such claims amount to election-year cant, but in Clinton's case the description was apt. How else to characterize a crime policy that allocates more money for local police, imposes common-sense gun-control rules, and allows for the death penalty?

Clinton's message also had the virtue of letting liberals think he was a liberal and centrists think he was a centrist. Sometimes, as with his call to make abortion "safe, legal, and rare," this effort depended on deliberate rhetorical ambiguity: reducing abortions could involve either contraception and education (as liberals heard it) or erecting legal barriers such as parental notification laws (as centrists inferred). Ending welfare "as we know it" could mean mandating work or cutting red tape.

In such cases, Clinton could find it hard, once in office, to please the different groups that claimed him (though not for lack of trying). DLCers charged that he was governing from the left, as when he tried to permit gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. Liberals thought he caved too often to the right, notably in hanging out to dry embattled nominees like his would-be civil rights chief Lani Guinier.

But by and large Clinton did govern from the center, as he had promised, and successfully so. True, he declared in his 1996 State of the Union address that "the era of big government is over." The applause that greeted that line, however, buried his next sentence: "But we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves." His was a middle way. Eschewing both big-government liberalism and the DLC's accommodationism, he combined elements from different philosophies in a kind of alchemy. His best policies addressed longstanding Democratic weaknesses on issues like spending, crime, welfare, and the economy, without sacrificing progressive principles.

The formula worked most noticeably on the economy and federal budget. Early on, Clinton grudgingly accepted that the huge Reagan-Bush deficits made the social investments he desired all but impossible. He embraced both fiscal discipline and a fairer tax code that helped those on both the middle and bottom of the economic ladder. He thus won the confidence of bond traders and Reagan Democrats alike. A departure from both parties' past policies, Clintonomics helped turn record budget deficits into record surpluses. The feat helped him to pass favorite programs piecemeal (and almost unnoticed), including $30 billion in tax credits for higher education and $24 billion for children's health. All the while he guarded Social Security and Medicare from right-wing government slashers, such as Newt Gingrich's minions, and from neoliberal wonks who warned of the programs' imminent insolvency.

On trade, Clinton grasped the inevitability of globalization yet took heed of environmentalists' and workers' concerns. He honored his pledge to reform welfare, pushed for more job training, then honored his 1996 pledge to fix some of the welfare bill's faults. He chose to "mend, not end" affirmative action -- setting the right tone, if not changing much in practice. Even his great failure, his clumsy scheme to overhaul the health-care system, ran aground not because it embodied government planning, but because its reliance on cumbersome market-rigging mechanisms deprived it of any natural constituency.

His foreign policy, likewise, began to dispel his party's problematic image as neo-isolationist, while addressing new challenges of the post-Cold War age. After struggling in his first term, he found his footing with the 1995 intervention in Bosnia and was soon confidently playing an active role around the globe. He defied the Democrats' post-Vietnam reluctance to use force, deploying it for humanitarian reasons, in Kosovo as well as Bosnia (although not in Rwanda), and for national-security reasons, as against Al Qaeda and Iraq, all the while working with NATO and the UN to make sure American interventions had legitimacy in the world's eyes. In his second term, he bored in on rising threats and longer-term issues such as global poverty, AIDS, and terrorism.

Clinton pulled off such feats partly because of his personal skills, and the same qualities that got him into trouble -- ambition, hair-splitting attention to detail, a belief that he could talk anyone into anything -- allowed him to bridge differences within his party and the larger electorate on a range of issues. But the real key was a different aspect of Clinton's style: the specificity of his policies. ("Specificity is the character issue," Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos said in 1992.) By putting meat on the bones of his populist, reformist rhetoric, Clinton did what Hart and Dukakis could not.

oday, the Republicans' control of all three branches of government sometimes makes it seem that conservatism is ascendant. In fact, Clinton's eight years -- with an assist from the extremism of Gingrich's Republicans and now of the Bush administration -- revitalized the Democrats and strengthened their claim to the center. Increasingly, the Republicans are the ones seen as utopians or ideologues, clinging to anti-tax, anti-government and unilateralist dogmas, whatever the results. The Democrats have claimed the standards of fiscal discipline, responsible internationalism, and creative problem-solving on the domestic front.

John Kerry has an opportunity to capitalize on the Democrats' new reputation, to extend the Clinton legacy. He'll have to do so not just on domestic matters but, more pressingly, in foreign affairs, where Clinton never faced a first-order challenge. But Kerry will have to do more than trot Clinton out for fundraisers, more even than imitate Clinton's words. He'll have to offer a message, built on concrete policy ideas, that shows his liberalism to be grounded in reality, relevant to people's values, aware of limits, and dedicated foremost to solving the most pressing problems.

David Greenberg is the author of "Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image," which won the 2003 Washington Monthly book award. He teaches at Rutgers University.