Budget Deal Is the New Deal for Democrats

Believing that in the 1990s, just as FDR knew in the 1930s, new conditions are imposing new requirements on government and those who conduct it, President Clinton has set out to transform the remnants of the New Deal party into a diverse and durable coalition capable of dominating American politics and advancing the progressive tradition into the 21st century.

Six years ago this month, in a speech to the Democratic Leadership Council in Cleveland, Bill Clinton first sketched the New Democrat formula for transforming a party that had suffered three straight landslide defeats in presidential elections,a party that many commentators believed would not win the White House again in this century. That formula rejects both the big centralized bureaucracies with which many Democrats have long been identified and virulent anti-government sentiments of many Republicans. It calls instead for a new kind of public activism that is fiscally restrained, reflects the values of most people and empowers people rather than bureaucracies by equipping people with the tools they need to solve their problems.

To be sure, Clinton’s transformation of the Democratic Party is not yet complete--there are still recalcitrant Democrats who don’t accept it--nor is it as clear-cut and dramatic as Roosevelt’s. 1991, after all, was not 1933, and a presidential losing streak is not in the same league with the Depression as a precipitator of radical change.

Yet over the past six years, Clinton and the New Democrats have significantly redefined their party on many of the most important issues of our time: economic growth, trade, taxes, crime, family, welfare, education, the size and role of government and the role of citizens. Grounded in the bedrock Democrat principle of opportunity for all, Clinton said in Cleveland that the New Democrats would demonstrate that “the Democratic Party is willing to stand up for the interests of ordinary people again.”

The most dramatic redefinition of the Democrats has come on fiscal policy. The party labeled as the “tax and spend” liberals for a decade and a half has been recast by Clinton as the party of fiscal responsibility. “Too many Americans have lost faith in our party’s willingness .J.J. to spend their tax money with discipline,” Clinton said in Cleveland. No more.

That’s why the budget agreement is so important for Democrats. While it alone will not transform the party, it does represent a giant step in that transformation. Its passage will isolate the party’s most recalcitrant elements who would like it to revert to the Old Democrat status quo.

More important, it will give President Clinton both the momentum and the credibility to refocus the political debate on four daunting challenges of a new era: ensuring American leadership in the new economy being shaped by technology and globalization; reforming the vast middle class entitlements--Social Security and Medicare--to secure them for generations to come and to prevent backsliding on the deficit; tackling America’s most intransigent social problems, which will require forging new understandings on immigration and race and creating a new work-based system to replace the failed welfare system; and restructuring our public education and training system to ensure that every American has the tools he or she needs to prosper in the new economy.

With bold and innovative New Democrat approaches to these challenges, Bill Clinton can complete the transformation of his party and build in the 1990s what Franklin Roosevelt did in the 1930s: a diverse and durable coalition that can dominate American politics for decades to come.