A Party in Search of Itself

By Evan Thomas

Still tethered to the past, the heirs of F.D.R. are groping for the future

The band will strike up Happy Days Are Here Again, the party leaders will clasp hands in the traditional victory salute. Banners will wave, rhetoric will flow. When the Democrats meet next week in San Francisco to nominate a ticket for the 1984 election, they will strive mightily to stage a tableau of unity and shared purpose.

The hoopla will be a fac,ade. Even if Walter Mondale manages to smooth over his rifts with Jesse Jackson and the feisty women's movement, even if he somehow upsets Ronald Reagan in the fall, deep divisions will remain within the party. The Democrats are groping for a fresh identity and a modern agenda. They are badly split between old New Dealers, as embodied by Mondale, and a large and restless group of "new generation" Democrats, championed vocally if so far unsuccessfully by Gary Hart. The party is in the midst of a prolonged mid-life crisis, no longer able to rely on the formulas of the past, not yet able to articulate a clear vision of the future.

The party's collective confusion is on display from the campaign stump to Congress. Mondale preaches compassion, Hart calls for "new ideas." Old liberals like Tip O'Neill support massive jobs bills, while young reformers vote to freeze spending on all domestic programs. Southern Democrats seek to contain Communism in Central America, while Northern Democrats look at El Salvador and see Viet Nam. No center holds. "The party is floundering because it lacks a vision of where it is going," says Duke University Political Scientist James David Barber. "Where there is no vision, the parties perish."

For almost half a century, the Democratic Party derived its power from what it could give away. It was the party of benevolent Government, offering help for the disadvantaged and services for everyone. "In the postwar era," observes Harvard Political Economist Robert Reich, "it was possible to dispense [Government largesse] and pump [the economy] at the same time." But in the '70s and '80s, the demand for Government goodies began to outstrip the growth of the economy. Lyndon Johnson, and by extension the Democratic Party, was wrong: the U.S. was not "an endless cornucopia."

With this rude awakening, the Government bureaucracy came to be seen as inflated and wasteful. The Viet Nam War made the U.S. seem weak abroad. Then Watergate soiled the presidency. The public began to lose faith in Government--and in the Democrats' activism.

At the same time, paradoxically, the Democrats fell victim to their accumulated success. "The New Deal and Great Society programs worked a lot better than people think," says Democratic Senator Dale Bumpers of Arkansas. "A lot of people left poverty and joined the middle class. We lost a lot of traditional coalition Democrats in the process." Says former Senator Adlai Stevenson III of Illinois: "We cannot win any more with just the old core constituencies. There aren't enough of them. They've moved on."

The party, to be sure, is far from moribund. Some 43% of all voters still call themselves Democrats, only 30% Republicans and 27% independents. The Democrats have a majority in the House and hold 35 of 50 governorships. But to recapture the presidency and to control the national debate, the party will have to appeal to the middle class, particularly the so-called Yuppies, the baby-boom generation. This requires a more hardheaded approach to economic problems, which in turn risks alienating the party's traditional supporters. "Defining the role of Government is the central philosophical dilemma Democrats have to confront," says Tennessee Congressman Albert Gore.

Historically, Democrats won by embracing disparate and even warring factions. The New Deal coalition included urban ethnics, Southern Protestants, dirt farmers, Jewish intellectuals, illiterate coal miners, poor blacks and virulent racists. Improbably, they rallied behind a Groton-and Harvard-educated polio victim with a patrician accent.

What Franklin D. Roosevelt was able to offer was hope: hope of an end to the breadlines and dust bowls of the Great Depression, hope of prosperity for all.

This prosperity would not come the old Republican way, by letting the free market create wealth that might then trickle down to the lower classes. It would come instead by using Government to create jobs. Through a host of alphabet agencies--the NRA, the CCC, the WPA--the New Deal pumped money into the economy, artificially creating demand for goods and services. It took World War II to really spur production and cure the Depression, but by then F.D.R. had won a victory of the spirit. His programs attacked not only poverty but helplessness. The poor and dispossessed began to feel that Government was their protector.

L.B.J.'s Great Society gave the welfare state a mighty push. In the 1960s, benefit checks began to flow out of Washington in a stream that soon became a torrent: a nationwide food-stamp program, rent supplements for the poor, scholarships for college students, federal grants for the arts, Medicare, Medicaid, higher pensions for federal employees and veterans, subsidized low-income housing, aid to handicapped children. Despite Johnson's intention to help the helpless, middle-and even upper-income groups climbed aboard.

As interest groups proliferated, they jostled each other at the federal trough. Blacks, women, the handicapped, the elderly, all demanded more of "their share." The established groups, particularly labor, tried to pull up the social ladder behind them, protecting high wages and benefits. The $12-an-hour white construction worker bitterly resented welfare "handouts" to unmarried black mothers. He feared affirmative-action quotas that threatened his job security. He worried about taxes, crime and mortgage rates. He believed that Government largesse was eroding America's self-reliance, American independence. These were middle-class concerns--Republican concerns.

A demographic sea change was under way, and the Republicans exploited it. They tailored their campaign techniques to voters who were more affluent and mobile than those in the past. Television allowed candidates to reach into the home, bypassing cumbersome and outdated political machines. The message had to be short and simple, conveyed in a 30-second spot. In 1980 the Republicans were able to outspend the Democrats $152 million to $98 million, and their television ads were particularly effective. One of the meanest showed a Tip O'Neill look-alike driving a long black Lincoln Continental that ran out of gas.

Ronald Reagan, as a result, was able to steal a march into Democratic territory. He won away urban ethnics from their Democratic ward leaders, white Protestants from the once solidly Democratic South, and even union workers disaffected from their labor bosses. In 1980 fully 43% of union workers and 26% of registered Democrats voted Republican.

Reagan's most effective pitch was simply to run against Government. "Government is not the solution to our problem," he would tell voters. "Government is the problem." Remarkably, Reagan is still able to make this case, even though he now runs the Government.

He also managed to lay claim to the issue of patriotism, radiating a sunny assurance about America's future even as Jimmy Carter brooded about the malaise that, as he saw it, was gripping the country. "We let them have the high ground," concedes Democratic Congressman James Shannon of Massachusetts. "The Republicans became the flag wavers, the protectors of American values." The G.O.P. succeeded in casting itself as the party of optimism. The Democrats, once the party of the future, became the party of pessimism and stagnation.

Mondale, to his political detriment, is the consummate symbol of Democratic traditionalism. To a large extent, he retains his faith in the efficacy of Government. He often approaches great national issues not with overarching vision, but like a train conductor punching tickets. On education, he heeded the teachers' union opposition to merit pay, and promised instead more pay for all teachers. On foreign trade, he rejected warnings of a trade war and endorsed a protectionist bill backed by the autoworkers' union that would save their jobs but raise prices for consumers. The huge federal deficit--Reagan's federal deficit--has limited Mondale's generosity somewhat, but Mondale has been unwilling to suggest major cuts in entitlement programs.

Mondale's aides argue that their man cannot win by trying to sound like a Republican in Democrat's clothes, preaching belt tightening and less Government. They point out that anti-Government feelings are not as clear-cut as public opinion polls seem to suggest. While many Americans are against Government in principle--a 1983 survey showed that a majority believe Government to be "the biggest threat to the country"--few are willing to give up what it bestows on them. Says Chicago Political Consultant Don Rose: "Everybody is against Government, but all are in favor of what Government does."

The key to victory, Mondale's advisers believe, lies largely in energizing the party's traditional base: the poor, the elderly, union members, minorities. The Mondale camp points to the 11 million black and Hispanic voters and the millions more who are not registered. Blacks have traditionally been loyal Democrats, but Jesse Jackson has touched a strong streak of restiveness. These groups may not vote for Reagan, but they may not vote at all if the Democrats ignore their needs. If the party can meet its goal of registering 3 million blacks and Hispanics, Mondale's aides say, "Populist Fritz" can win in the fall--as long as there is not a correspondingly large white backlash.

Mondale's interest-group politics makes many nontraditional Democrats cringe. "A winning party has to have a vision and a message," says Gerald Rafshoon, former media adviser to Jimmy Carter. "Mondale's message is Hubert Humphrey." The emerging neoliberal wing of the party believes that the days of Big Government are over. Says Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut: "Ronald Reagan has convinced people that the Democrats think Government is the solution. The new Democrats operate on the assumption that Government is a solution."

Pragmatism is the cornerstone of the new movement. While many of its disciples dislike being pigeonholed as neoliberals, they share a conviction that Government programs must be carefully reviewed to weed out those that do not work. Says Charles Peters, editor of the Washington Monthly and one of neoliberalism's gurus: "Liberals have automatically defended Government without scrutinizing whether it actually delivers the mail or builds a good tank."

The cool rationalism of such an approach is well suited to its purveyors. Those who articulate it best--like Congressmen Richard Gephardt of Missouri and Timothy Wirth of Colorado and Senators Bill Bradley of New Jersey and Dodd of Connecticut--tend to share a generational outlook. They are the post-Viet Nam generation, liberal but nondogmatic.

They are products of the television age: their regional accents have been smoothed and diluted, their dress is subdued, their ambition is high. They eschew the flamboyant rhetoric of old pols like Senate Minority Leader Robert Byrd and House Majority Leader James Wright of Texas, preferring a more measured and sometimes sardonic tone. They even look alike, which is to say telegenic. Says Hart, their most conspicuous spokesman: "Everyone in my generation is good on television. If we weren't, we wouldn't have won."

For all their obvious intelligence, however, it is not always easy to know just what neoliberals stand for. Pragmatism is a sound approach to governance, but it is not a clarion call. Challenged to offer specific "new ideas," Hart would drone on about individual training accounts for workers or the need for smaller aircraft carriers. His high-tech notions were often imaginative, but they benumbed voters.

"Our problem is that we do not have a single, bumper-sticker solution. We're working through some pretty complicated notions," says Wirth. The arduous effort to sum up Government's proper role can produce mush. "Government should be in where it should be and out where it shouldn't be," earnestly intones Adlai Stevenson III. Simple ideas may make for simplistic, even foolhardy policies, but they help win elections. Reagan, for example, is able to summarize Reaganism in four words: less Government, more defense.

Neoliberalism has a detached, bloodless quality. As the New Republic columnist TRB notes," 'Neoliberar can mean 'not very liberal.' 'Rethinking' can be a code word for 'reneging.' " The old New Dealers look at the young Turks and fear for the party's soil. Says Paul Simon, a five-term Congressman from Illinois: "The Democrats have to continue to be a party of heart and compassion. If we neglect that, we have lost our reason for existence."

The new-generation Democrats say they are mindful of the party's historic role. They do not want to rip any more holes in the "safety net" for the poor. They want to spend billions on education and on rebuilding the nation's decaying roads, bridges and dams.

But how do they aim to do that and still reduce the nation's almost $200 billion-a-year deficits? The neoliberal answer is economic growth--quite a shift from the gloomy "limits to growth" notions purveyed by the Club of Rome in the early 1970s and eagerly endorsed by many liberals. "We have spent the past 50 years worrying about the distribution of golden eggs," says Senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, a leading neoliberal thinker. "It is now time to worry about the health of the goose." Economic growth, of course, is the same answer Reagan offered when asked how he planned to reduce taxes, balance the budget and build up the military, all at once. Reagan's solution was supply-side economics.

The Democrats have no strategy that can be reduced to such a catchy phrase. Indeed, it remains uncertain whether they have a plan that will work any better. And even if they did, they would face a formidable public relations problem. "People don't believe the Democrats know how to run the economy," admits Tsongas. "We've got to break out of that."

There is a general rubric for what the Democrats envision, though they shy from using it in public. It is called "industrial policy." Neoliberal economic thinkers such as Lester Thurow, economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Investment Banker Felix Rohatyn argue that Government should help economic winners and let losers fend for themselves. The Government would stimulate, with tax breaks and loans, what the U.S. economy does best--design computers and provide services. Heavy industry would be largely left to developing countries, where labor is cheap. But even when dressed up in jargon ("sunrise" and "sunset" industries), industrial policy sounds brutally Darwinian to regions already in deep twilight, like the Ohio River valley. It also sounds like central planning. Like, say, France. Like, er, socialism.

This is not at all a message that the new Democrats want to send. They want to espouse less Government, not more. Protests Neoliberal Wirth: "The fact is, we already have an industrial policy. We already spend $300 billion in subsidies to industry, but it's a crazy quilt of patchwork policies. The Republicans say get rid of it. We say that's absurd. We say don't get rid of it, rationalize it."

A sound industrial policy, the Democratic thinkers hasten to add, would not impose Government's will on business, merely offer assistance. Cooperation is a word frequently heard these days in Democratic think tanks. The model is Japan. In Japan, business, government and even labor all seem to work together for the common good, instead of sparring constantly as they do in the U.S.

But this model is less than a perfect one for the U.S. Japan's success may have more to do with the homogeneity and work ethic of Japanese society than with the wisdom of its Ministry of International Trade and Industry. (Actually, the Japanese and the neoliberals seem to be going in circles: lately, delegations of Japanese businessmen have been poking around Silicon Valley, trying to learn about good old-fashioned American entrepreneurialism. And competition among factories in Japan is often fierce.) Somehow the Japanese vision of happy workers, loyally singing company songs as they program their robots, is hard to imagine in a Detroit auto plant.

Gary Hart likes to say that if he is elected President, he will assemble management, labor and finance leaders of "key" industries such as steel and autos at the White House, where they will jawbone out a deal under Government guidance. Labor would make concessions in wage demands in return for job guarantees, business would promise to reinvest in new equipment in exchange for Government-backed loans, and so forth. It is an interesting idea, until one recalls the exhausting battles that invariably surround a single corporate bailout, such as that of Lockheed or Chrysler Corp. Moreover, an industrial recovery and reinvestment bill could easily become a hopeless pork barrel by the time lobbyists and horse-trading Congressmen finish with it. Such outcomes trouble many new-generation Democrats. "I am not sure Americans respond well to economic plans with a capital P," says Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis.

One increasingly popular Democratic idea would reform, in a massive way, the complexities and inequities of the tax code. The Bradley-Gephardt tax reform bill would eliminate all but the most basic deductions (home mortgages, charity, payments to retirement plans) and offer instead reduced yet still graduated tax rates of 14% to 30%. "It would allow Democrats to argue for economic growth through lower tax rates and fairness through closing loopholes, and it would raise an additional $25 billion to $30 billion over three years," declares Senator Bradley.

The catch-22 of Bradley-Gephardt is that it completely undercuts the Democrats' chief vehicle of industrial policy. Most Democratic thinkers want to use tax incentives and penalties as Government's lever to transform the economy. It is more efficient to fine-tune the economy through the tax code than by subsidies to specific industries. This inevitably leads to a more complicated tax structure, not a simpler one. Asked to reconcile the apparent contradiction, Massachusetts Congressman Shannon shrugged, "You can't."

The Democrats need a persuasive economic program soon if they are to win over the baby-boom generation. Already, 43% of the voting-age population was born between 1946 and 1964. By rallying behind Hart in the primaries, younger voters, especially the better educated, better-off Yuppies, served notice that they are ready to exercise their political clout. Says Republican Consultant Eddie Mahe: "Whoever finds the key to that group is a long way down the road to dominating the political scene for the next 30 to 40 years."

Hart's pollster, Patrick Caddell, ominously warns that Mondale's old-fashioned politics may drive the group into the Republican camp. "The Democrats are engaged in a march of folly," he says. "They are ignoring the key demographic battleground." Though the Democrats have traditionally been the party of youth, says Caddell, "we are losing them--perhaps for good."

Mondale's pollster, Peter Hart, is predictably less apocalyptic. While he concedes that "younger voters are expressing Republican sentiments as never before," he insists that they remain on the fence. Their economic beliefs, he says, are "closer to the Republicans'." But they are closer to the Democrats in their social attitudes--generally pro-choice on abortion, pro-Equal Rights Amendment and proenvironment. Says a Democratic insider: "Yuppies give off emanations of 'screw the poor,' but they can't permanently fit in a party that also contains the Moral Majority. They just can't."

The Democrats' positions on foreign policy and defense also appeal to younger voters. Most do not want to weaken U.S. defense, but neither do they want to give carte blanche to the Pentagon's wish list of new weapons systems. Mondale's defense approach--about 5% real growth this year, compared with 13% originally proposed by Reagan, and no funds for the MX missile and B-1 bomber--seems sound to them.

Many Democrats share the skepticism of the post-Viet Nam generation about U.S. intervention abroad. Reagan's willingness to commit U.S. troops and his past bellicosity toward the Soviet Union have created opportunities for the Democrats. Women, particularly, are worried about the "war-peace" issue; Democrats expect to profit from the gender gap. By pressing hard for a resumption of armscontrol talks, Democrats stand to win the substantial nuclear-freeze vote. "Reagan has gone off so far on the right that he has ceded the center," says Democratic Congressman Leon Panetta of California. "He draws Democrats together to develop a more rational policy."

Perhaps, but the elements of that "rational policy" remain murky. The Democrats can sometimes agree on what not to do: do not overthrow the government of Nicaragua, do not call the Soviets "an evil empire," do not leave troops in Lebanon. But there is less agreement on what to do about the Soviet threat or the Middle East or Central America. Old scars of the bitter battles between Democratic hawks and doves of the Viet Nam era remain. Advocates of a nuclear freeze, for example, are impatient with the old Democratic foreign policy Establishment, which advocates a more sensible, step-by-step approach to arms control. The Democratic approach to foreign affairs these days is more a response to specific events than a policy.

This is true in a general sense as well. The Democrats seem unable to hit common themes that could rally their diverse constituencies behind a single standard. Perhaps that is because they do not have a commanding figure to synthesize and shape the varied ideas germinating within their ranks. Indeed, the party's search for itself is also a search for a unifying leader.

America's watershed elections have revolved around charismatic figures. In 1832 Andrew Jackson made the Democrats a true "people's party." In 1932, it was Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Unless the Democrats find a way to head it off, 1980 may be similarly remembered for launching the Reagan Revolution.

F.D.R.'s strength was that he was able to adapt and change his policies to fit the times. He initially pushed for a balanced budget; his conversion to Keynesian economics came only later, during his second term. But even while casting about for a solution, Roosevelt used his "Fireside Chats" to reach across class and regional lines, to make people identify with larger aims and give them a sense of nation. Television, of course, is an even more powerful medium, as Reagan has shown. Sadly for the Democrats, Mondale is diminished by the tube, not enhanced.

For all their talk of growth, realistic Democrats know that sacrifices will have to be made to bring the federal deficit under control. Specifically, middle-class entitlements will have to be cut. "Since the Democratic Party built up these systems," says Colorado Governor Richard Lamm, "it should take the lead in reforming them." While few are ready to say it in public, many neoliberals believe that some kind of means test should be applied to Social Security to cut out the well-to-do. Says Panetta: "We cannot just play pork-barrel politics with the nation. We are going to have to tell some people that they can't have all they want. Talking about sacrifice is not something politicians like to do, but I think the country is prepared for that kind of leadership."

Up to now, demanding sacrifice has not been Mondale's style. Quite the contrary. Historian and Democratic Activist Arthur Schlesinger Jr. says that Mondale is a practitioner of the Minnesota school of politics: "Don't disappoint anyone in the audience in front of you." Mondale could, of course, shift his tack before November.

Indeed, to run credibly against Reagan on the deficit issue, he will have to show that he can say no, preferably to a union. It is hard to imagine Mondale changing in any dramatic way. "What you see is what you get," he likes to tell voters. Still, Mondale proved himself a resilient, clever campaigner against Hart; he may yet show some vision.

To many Democrats, the party's best hope is its next generation of leaders. "The entire stable of potential candidates for 1988 comes from the new Democratic group of politicians," says Tsongas. Over all, they are impressive and attractive. So far, they have shown a willingness to buck special-interest groups -- though the political price they have had to pay is much less than it would be in a presidential race.

Bradley, Dodd and Joseph Biden of Delaware lead the new-generation Democrats in the Senate. In the House, Gore, Gephardt, Panetta and Wirth all hold promise as national politicians. Many young Democratic Governors have already had to face up to budget deficits. A number of them, including Dukakis, Lamm, Bruce Babbitt of Arizona, Richard Celeste of Ohio, James Hunt of North Carolina and Robert Graham of Florida, could make the step up onto the national stage. Governor Mario Cuomo of New York has the ability to stand for values now claimed by the Republicans: family, neighborhood and love of country. Like the others, he has yet to articulate a succinct vision for the future, but he has been able to make Government sound like the common man's friend, indeed his indispensable ally.

Unlike in Europe, where campaigns are driven by polemics, American presidential elections usually turn on personality and performance in office.

Right now President Reagan is riding high. The economy, especially, is going his way: last week the unemployment rate dropped four-tenths of a point, to 7.1%.

Still, a world debt crisis, a foreign misadventure or a health problem could retire him to his ranch. "If there is enough dissatisfaction with the 'ins,' you don't need a vision," says Political Scientist Norman Ornstein of Catholic University. "You just need to be there to pick up the pieces."

Yet even if Walter Mondale did win, it would probably be the last hurrah for old-style liberalism. In a given election, American voters are apt to worry less about ideas than results. But to retain lasting in fluence, the party will have to frame a new set of governing principles, a coherent plan to meet changing times. The Democrats must find not only a voice but a new identity.

With reporting by Sam Allis, Richard Hornik, Christopher Ogden