The Democrats (Re)Discover Class

DENVER, CO – There are two common features to every gathering of the Democratic Leadership Council. One is the canonization of Bill Clinton, the DLC’s biggest status symbol. The second is –- a hopper full of new ways to get Democrats elected outside the Northeast.

But this year, there’s a third task at hand-- how to justify their place in a large Democratic coalition when the party’s populists and liberals are ascendant, energized, vengeful, and apt to see them as the enemy.

Here’s what weird about that: for all the bloviating about the DLC’s corporate funding, the mushy, tasteless centrism that occasionally defines their policy suggestions, the liberals and the DLCers – call them Democratic progressives – agree on something.

In order to win elections, Democrats need to somehow regain the trust of the American Middle Class.

For the sake of argument, let’s define middle class by economic boundaries and not worry about inflation. We’re talking about voters who made between $30K and $75K a year.

Even in a three-way race with a populist, Bill Clinton won a plurality of middle class votes in 1992 and again 1996.

But Al Gore, running as a populist in the last months of his race, lost this economic cohort by three percentage points to George W. Bush. John Kerry lost it by nine points. There are many cross-cutting cleavages in such a broad group; as Clinton adviser James Carville has pointed out, Clinton won white Catholics by more than five points; Gore lost them by the same amount; Kerry lost them by 13 points. But even more than the Catholic vote, even more than the married and single women chasm, more than churchgoers and secularists, what has worried and disappointed Democratic strategists of all ideological stripes is the steep Democratic fall off among those who tell pollsters that Democratic economic policy positions are better than Republicans.

Why?

In one version of recent American political history, there was Bill Clinton, and then there was a vacuum.

That is: Clinton, a Southern governor who spent a career cajoling voters who weren’t liberals, ran a change election based on his desire to do right by the middle class. He campaigned on a middle class tax cut. At the same time, he yanked the Democratic Party out of internecine conflict and proved that Democrats didn’t have to play identity politics to win. Instead, Democrats had to be the pragmatic party. Prosperity ensued. Tides rose; all boats were lifted.

That’s an oversimplification, to be sure, but you hear it enough from DLC types.

That’s not how the party’s loudest liberal activists see things. Far from becoming the post-ideology party, Clinton rejected longstanding Democratic principles. By signing welfare reform, he pandered to conservatives. By pushing for NAFTA, he kicked organized labor in the groin. By triangulating, he tried to be all things to all people and thus left a lasting stench of contrivance on all things Democratic.

Something happened, though. Think about this: Bill Clinton never had to run with Bill Clinton’s baggage. So there’s no way to know whether Clinton was the solution or the mother of the problem.

But his victory endures. Almost every single Democrat considering a presidential bid has placed the forgotten/unappreciated/bewildered/exploited American Middle Class at the center of their incipient campaigns.

Sen. Evan Bayh likes to use the term Middle Class with capital letters and has challenged his party to stop ignoring it.

Former Sen. John Edwards likes to use the phrase “Working Class,” a term that stretches all the way from the very poor to the middle Middle Class. They’re always the ones at the short end of the stick. They word hard and get squeezed by government and corporations.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has given three policy speeches in the past few months. A common theme has been that the American Dream is out of reach for too many Americans. Her proposals aim at the economic superstructure – trying to rebuild the country’s manufacturing capacity, promising to protect privacy in a prying, atomistic world, promoting energy independence – and more.

Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa calls it the American Bargain. You work hard, don’t get in trouble, and the government ought to make sure you can afford college tutition and health care.

The entire party, it seems, has rediscovered class.

The differences are in the priorities. For the DLC, it’s about reciprocal responsibility, to use a phrase coined by Bill Galston, Bill Clinton’s intellectual gurus. That is –- as government provides, it also expects. The liberals want the guarantees, first. And they want more attention to the underbelly of economic progress.

Make no mistake: the gulf between the liberals and the DLCers is wide on foreign policy and on social values.

But on one important philosophical idea – those who work hard deserve a fair shot at the American Dream – on one part of election strategy – appealing to the Middle Class – and on one important tactic within that strategy – a new frame for those policies – there’s more agreement than either side would like to admit. [MARC AMBINDER]