Clinton's new political geography: renewing the language of equality.

In last fall's election, most Americans allowed themselves to be drawn by hope, but they went wistfully, driven by worries and without much confidence, convinced that they had more things to fear than fear itself.

Change was in the air: for the first time in more than half a century, a presidential election was not framed by war, present or rumored; voters were restless; new concerns and constituencies made themselves felt and the victorious Democrats proclaimed themselves a "new" party. Yet no election has so often or so pervasively been compared to the American past: Americans wanted assurance of comparability if not continuity, looking for old landmarks and fixed stars in the strange new world they confronted. In 1992, confidence did not point Americans to the future, it drew them to the past, and the election, a vote for change, was also a hope for renewal.

The clearest message of 1992 was the majority's demand for active government, engaged to relieve America's discontents and reclaim the future. Even in 1988, opinion had tended to side with the can&date who, on any given issue, supported the use of public power. This time, the tide was unmistakable: 61 percent voted for the differing, but undeniably activistic persuasions of Bill Clinton and Ross Perot. It was a hard year for laissez-faire. Rhetorically, the high point of the Democratic campaign was Mario Cuomo's attack on Bush for relying on "the invisible hand of some cyclical economic god" to save the ship of state. Even conservatives, of course, now accept a considerable degree of economic intervention: Ronald Reagan promised a "safety net," the Reagan and Bush administrations committed billions to protect depositors in failing banks and savings and loans, and the administration took it for granted that the Federal Reserve should manage interest rates to promote growth.

In 1992, the current of activism ran even stronger. Among economists, there was something of a generational shift, reminiscent of the advent of Keynes. Clinton found no shortage of economists willing to agree, for example, that government is needed to promote saving and investment, especially since Reagan's version of supply-side economics had proved misplaced. By itself, moreover, investment may not be enough: counter to much conventional wisdom, there is good evidence that American productivity is not low; the problem may be that relative efficiency is being purchased at the price of employment, so that government is needed to link investment, productivity, and work.

Although Americans turned to government in 1992, they still distrusted it and were apt to despise politics; a year earlier, Peter Hart and Douglas Bailey found that, although voters "desperately want to believe in government," they were deeply disillusioned, so that there was a "dangerously broad gulf between the governors and the governed." Clinton's great challenge, and the republic's, lies in the need to strengthen the dignity of citizenship and the quality of democratic consent. Knowing this, Clinton seems to be pursuing something approximating a permanent campaign, but the media, a part of his intended solution, may be an even bigger part of the political problem.

In contemporary America the dominant forms of the press are media by which information is communicated to us, but without any serious element of reciprocity or accountability. We depend on the media and recognize their power, but our dependence is a mark of voicelessness and indignity. Today's media reach us in private settings and address largely private concerns and feelings, relying on images more than words. Where radio, as Russell Baker remembers, "intoxicated us with voices," the contemporary media discount speech, continuing the grand modern impulse, initiated by Machiavelli, to exalt the visible and nonverbal, the deed as opposed to the word. To the extent that they are treated by the media at all, political speech and deliberation are presented as a kind of theater of deception, in which content matters only as clue to covert forces and schemes.

In 1992, American resentment of the media turned explosive, so that suddenly the campaign was dominated by "new" news--"weird media," Bush said--the talk shows and tabloids, Don Imus and Arsenio Hall, Larry King and the "informercial." Ross Perot was the first to see the advantages of the new vehicles; Clinton, damaged by the more orthodox media, soon followed.

The "new" media have undeniable benefits: they are apt to be free and they allow candidates to develop positions in-depth, or at-length, at any rate. Clinton turned to them in some relief: after a frustrating, much-trivialized primary in New York, Clinton sought to use his victory speech to direct public attention to the substance of his campaign. But after four minutes, all the networks except for CNN and C-Span stopped their coverage, and CNN dropped out after nine minutes. Network news reduced the speech to soundbites, and the next morning, on the "Today" show, Clinton's remarks had been reduced to "I love Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Kansas, and I really love New York."

The talk shows, by contrast, allowed Clinton to display his virtuosity and command of the issues. The new media, moreover, worked to diminish the advantage the party in power draws from its ability to dominate TV news, and Republicans can be expected to cultivate them in force in 1996. For viewers, what mattered in the "new news" was face-to-face interaction with hosts and with audiences, or hearing candidates field call-in questions, an approximation, even if weak, of townmeeting democracy. But as Harvard's Ellen Hume observes, "the media are our new political bosses--the direct filter that parties used to be." The media audience cannot hold its studio "representatives" accountable, nor can the individuals who make up the "community" of questioners speak to one another without the assistance of the media themselves. The "electronic town hall," Gerald Marzorati wrote, is what passes for civic community when people live among strangers and the "friendliest colleagues are the computer, database, and the fax." The new media, in sum, did not renew American citizenship, although they may have made citizenship seem interesting; as political columnist David Broder noted earlier in the campaign, they offered only the "catharsis" of "highly contrived dramas."

The candidacy of Ross Perot epitomized many of the themes of 1992, but it would have been impossible without the media. On their battlefield, Perot proved a master strategist. Week by week, he spent more money purchasing time for his interrupted campaign than any previous candidate. Perot showed that with grand salesmanship and enough money it is possible to become a major force without passing through the primaries or the parties, and--dodging the press where he could not dominate it--he avoided almost all of the scrutiny that goes with a traditional campaign. Of course, even Perot couldn't entirely sidestep the old modes, and Perot the candidate repeatedly undermined Perot the strategist, revealing too much of his testy, autocratic, and paranoid streak.

Recognition that ending the deficit would call for taxes and for sacrifice of a high order helped persuade Perot to quit the race. When he returned, he retained the image of "can do" forcefulness, now combined with a "message" that--vague in so many details--was presented as complete and tied to Perot's person. The common thread of Perot's two campaigns was his demand for quick solutions and his unwillingness to do the prolonged work of persuasion and compromise within institutions. Hostility to institutions, in fact, was a major part of his appeal. In May, the great majority of Bush and Clinton supporters, while critical of Congress generally, approved the job being done by their own House members, but 55 percent of those supporting Perot disapproved. That unhappiness fit neatly with Perot's discounting of representative government and his disdain for conflicts of interest and party, the messy charms of democratic politics. The instinct of the entrepreneur, Michael Schrage observed, is the desire to create new forms, and hence to reject established institutions, and Perot had the special attraction of an "outsider" who was knowledgeable about the system, one who did not offer to dismantle government but promised to make it stronger and more effective. In addition, the nationalization of his antiforeign themes amounted to a pledge to restore the American imperium as a part of America's inheritance.

Repeatedly, Perot's campaign was linked to the "tradition of prairie populism,"but the stark differences between his movement and the old populism illustrate the difficulties of contemporary democratic life. The Populists of 1892 grew out of and were composed of a dense forest of membership groups and face-to-face communities, so that the People's Party was a federation of localities and associations, held close to the grass roots. The party abounded in policies, many spelled out in detailed plans: the Sub-Treasury system, free silver, the graduated income tax, the government ownership of railroads, telegraph and telephone were only the most prominent.

By contrast, Perot's movement was constructed from the top down, its organization at least inspired and certainly sustained by Perot's money. It offered few policies; only the deficit-reduction program, the centerpiece of the second campaign, had much solidity. Above all, Perot's movement was centered on and defined by its candidate. Even Perot's version of the "electronic town hall," George Will pointed out, involved citizens giving information to the leader, not discussing or making decisions among themselves--an image, Will thought, shaped by the mystique of leadership with which Woodrow Wilson had invested the presidency.

"I'm doing this for the American people," Perot often declared, "because they can't do it for themselves." Just so: whatever the legacy of Perot's candidacy, it pointed to our distance from Populism's promise and to the endangered status of democratic citizenship.

Clinton's victory, I think, hinted at broader possibilities for redefining the Democratic coalition. On election night, Al Gore asserted that the election demonstrated the "end of sectionalism," and in a sense, it did confirm sectionalism's long decline. But Clinton's Southerness still made him seem alien to many Northern audiences, and even Gore's argument pointed to the special sectional character of the Democratic ticket. As the nomination of two border states, it was not unprecedented: rather, it turned away from Michael Dukakis's effort to recreate the successful Kennedy-Johnson, Boston-Austin axis of 1960 toward an earlier success, the Truman-Barkley ticket of 1948. But unlike those predecessors, Clinton and Gore came from states that were members of the Confederacy: the 1992 nominations were a strong symbolic gesture to the South, part of a successful effort to dent that now-Republican bastion.

The geography of the election was suggestive in another way. Sweeping the Northeast and the West Coast, Clinton and Gore also were almost universally successful in the broad, Middle American region that Meredith Nicholson once called the "Valley of Democracy." Except for Mississippi, Clinton carried every state bordering on the Mississippi River, and every state on the Ohio except Indiana, equaling Lyndon Johnson (who took Indiana but lost Louisiana). Only on the upper Missouri did Clinton's pluralities disappear.

Our stereotypes associate the two areas with the Democratic party's fundamental agon. We think of the coasts--somewhat unjustly, of course--as the homeland of liberals and neoliberals, a diverse grouping uniting partisans of high-tech industry and the cultural elite, mostly internationalists disposed toward free trade, almost all secular and inclined to relativism, people who defend policies in the idiom of rights. Middle America, by contrast, symbolizes the middle sectors who "do the work, raise the kids, and pay the bills," the people to whom Clinton offered himself as champion and who probably gave him his margin of victory. For all their variety, these Middle Americans are often tied to place and apt to be religious, not often moralists (at least, not those who voted for Clinton), but concerned with decency and justice--with families and safe communities and fair taxes--at least as much as they care about rights. And less confident about international politics, they include many unashamed patriots who sympathize with protection.

The nagging problem of guiding principles was exemplified in the debate over "family values." When they responded to Vice-President Dan Quayle's attacks, Russell Baker observed, liberals too often sounded "as though they' re against love, marriage, and family."

Clinton avoided that ideological trap. He defused a good deal of the Republican appeal to "family values" by observing that--apart from restrictions on abortion and on gays--it was largely talk. And in his soft way, he was just as clear about the defects of liberalism: "Family values alone won't feed a hungry child, and material security can't provide a moral compass. We must have both." Yet Clinton's shrewd claiming of the sensible middle ground left his family policy vague, and even three months into the Clinton administration much is yet to be defined.

As a campaigner, Clinton kept his coalition pretty much together, but the presidency is a harder test. More or less united against Bush and the Reagan legacy, Democrats are more apt to squabble when the question is what they are for. Even during the campaign, many of Clinton's Middle-American supporters were bothered by the exclusion of Robert Casey, Pennsylvania's anti-abortion governor, from a convention rostrum which had been opened to prochoice Republican women. It was an example of the abiding fear of Middle-American Democrats that liberals will be more at ease in the corridors of power and that, in the Clinton administration, the "new" Democratic party will be swallowed by the "old."

It does not help that some items high on the liberal agenda, including many aspects of abortion and gay rights, can be achieved fairly easily by executive order, while the hopes of Middle Americans call for structural solutions, a long process of legislation, and considerable pain.

Judged by the campaign, Clinton can be expected to attend to such feelings and to the demand that burdens be shared fairly. His February State of the Union address gave ample attention to both concerns. But sacrifice calls for more than a gift for conciliation and the brokering of interests. It demands a scale of justice and the conviction that our dignities and destinies are bound up with the common good.

Clinton's first months as president show every sign of a concern to strengthen the government's title to rule and its claims on our allegiance. If he is wise, he will promote the use of public policy to rebuild the links between citizens and their government, not simply media gimmicks, but local governments, parties, and associations with the "power of meeting," where citizens can learn the habits of democracy and the arts of politics.

Yet ultimately, both in relation to his party and the country as a whole, Clinton's success will depend on his ability to articulate measures of public purpose and policy. For a Democrat, equality is the enduring grail, and in his best moments, Clinton's rhetoric of citizenship points to equality's vital contemporary meanings. Civic equality is no prescription for uniformity, not even in the form of enforced diversity: as Barbara Jordan told the Democratic Convention, equality and equal fights are the conditions of civil variety. For Americans, their differing faiths and cultures are sources of strength, but no one needs to be told, these days, that cultures are not always easily compatible with each other or with democratic politics, that cultures often include racism and sexism, or that some nurture a hunger for dominion or are otherwise at odds with democratic life.

America's version of multiculturalism accepts diversity, but only on the understanding that all cultures yield any claim to rule that runs counter to equality and equal fights. From an egalitarian point of view, cultures are not "separate realities," but more or less adequate answers to the human problem, to which equality and the fights that go with it are qualitatively superior because, unlike stories and legends, they rest on the stark truth of human nature.

Clinton's excellent campaign slogan, "Putting People First," also hints at broader meanings, just as the reconciliation with nature to which A1 Gore calls America implies more than a relation to the nonhuman environment. From its Columbian beginnings, America has been caught up in the modern quest for the mastery of nature, the rejection of whatever humans have not chosen or made. It becomes ever clearer, however, that technological mastery subordinates us to the things we have made and, left to itself, tends to dispense with human craft and devotion. Yet the United States also began by asserting the proposition that both our equality and our rights are things that we did not make and about which we have no choice, an unalienable heritage from nature. If people are to come first in public policy, human nature must be given its due. Human beings are more than consumers and their dignity--their need to be needed-must be afforded at least equal status with the pursuit of abundance and mastery.

Equality implies more than rights: it suggests that, within the limits of our circumstances, we can and should be held accountable to equal standards, offered and expected to live up to the opportunity to contribute to the common life. For Americans, Bill Clinton's promise of a "new covenant" and a "new direction" sounded chords of memory. It remains to be seen how far he can take Americans toward a rediscovery of the republic.

WILSON CAREY MCWILLIAMS, a frequent Commonweal contributor, teaches political science at Rutgers University. This article is adapted from The Election of 1992: Reports and Interpretations, which also includes essays by Gerald M. Pomper, F. Christopher Arterton, Ross K. Baker, Walter Dean Burnham, Kathleen A. Frankovic, and Marjorie Randon Hersey. Copyright (C) 1993 by Chatham House Publishers.