Election returns.

The only people busier than politicians over the past couple of months were the pundits eager to explain President Clinton's amazing comeback. How did a president left for dead in November 1994 achieve so substantial a victory two years later? The popular explanation is that the president jettisoned his earlier commitment to "big government liberalism" and finally became a genuine New Democrat. Resisting the excesses of progressives within his party and the arch-conservatives of the Republican Party, Clinton "triangulated" his way to victory. To borrow the language of an earlier era, he discovered the "vital center" of American politics.

I find this explanation very misleading, especially as portraits of Clinton as a liberal in his first two years will hardly bear detailed examination. After quickly abandoning a modest stimulus package, the president embraced the classical Republican priority of deficit reduction. He spent far more time courting Alan Greenspan than labor or the middle class. The capstone "success" of his first two years was congressiohal approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement - an act that deeply embittered traditional Democratic constituencies.

Clinton's failures during these first two years are equally instructive. His health-care initiative is often cited as the kind of liberalism that troubled voters. But the vast majority of Americans wanted and still wants government-sponsored health-care reform. One could just as easily argue that the package he offered became so convoluted and unpersuasive precisely because he wished to preserve a major role for the large insurance companies. Ironically, the Canadian-style alternatives that the Clinton administration refused to consider would have required less intrusion into medical-practice decisions and delivered health care more efficiently.

Clinton's party went into the 1994 election having failed to improve the quality of life for most working- and middle-class Americans. Nor did most Democrats have a plausible scenario for future progress. During the administration's first two years, real wages continued to fall for 80 percent of working men and 70 percent of working women. Studies by Jeff Faux, president of the Economic Policy Institute, provide cogent reasons for attributing Republican gains in the 1994 election to "the decline in real wages and opportunities for the vast majority of those who made up the traditional Democratic coalition," While some of these voters switched to the Republican Party, many others just stayed home, contributing to the exceptionally low voter turnout in 1994.

Clinton's triangulation, in short, began shortly after he took office and contributed to his first electoral setback. That setback, paradoxically, may have been his salvation. The new leadership of the House, advocates of an unregulated corporate economy, interpreted 1994 as a mandate to return to the 1920s. Moves to cut Medicare drastically and to virtually liquidate a range of programs on the environment, education, and even small business became the daily talk of the Capitol.

Clinton, always the cautious New Democrat, was slow to see his opening. Privately in the thrall of Concord Coalition types, who regard "middle-class entitlements" as our major economic problem, he embraced the cause of protecting these only when it became clear how popular they were. Similarly, after two years of failing to act on the minimum wage when Democrats controlled Congress, the president became a defender of minimal economic rights for the most exploited elements of the working class. As with Medicare, Clinton acted only once he was convinced that the idea was popular and that many Republicans would oppose it.

Republican attacks on universal and highly regarded forms of income and bealth security excited enough of the traditional Democratic coalition to assure Clinton's reelection. Even so, half of all eligible voters - disproportionately concentrated among poor and working-class Americans - could not see any reason to vote at all. The very large and growing party of nonvoters is perhaps the most significant and most neglected story of the 1996 election. While endless dollars are spent on "exit polls," hardly anyone makes an effort to analyze why legions of Americans don't vote.

A major reason for nonvoting likely lies in the Democratic Party's triangulation strategy - a tactic that attracts big money but offers very little to ordinary citizens. The loss of the party's traditional constituency, in turn, makes the party more and more dependent upon big money. A vicious circle ensues. Turnout trends downward and political cynicism grows. Clinton's tepid support of most citizens' interests and his obvious debts to big money make him and his party dubious champions of economic justice. It is thus not surprising that, even as he was winning reelection, many Americans had little interest in giving his party a congressional majority. Rather than finding a new moderate center, our politics manages to alienate increasing numbers of us.

Only in the area of social issues does the triangulation thesis have a certain measure of surface validity. Unfortunately, Clinton's retreat on the one genuinely liberal initiative of his first years - a defense of the rights of gays and lesbians - will only sow further division and bitterness rather than build a new majority for democratic renewal. It is probably correct to argue that a majority Of Americans are relatively conservative on social issues and that the president could make some short,term gains by backing off this cause. Nonetheless, a progressive president could raise the issue of employment and health care for minorities, including gays and lesbians, if the administratiolis poficy agenda was also making it easier for all cl,tl,zens to carve out more economic Security and family time.

Even on such emotional issues as crime, President Clinton might have stressed how economically secure communities, more family and community time for parents, and more responsive local schools and governments could identify and assist troubled youths long before they become hardened and violent criminals. Unwilling to pursue such an agenda, Clinton assuaged mainstream anxieties and prejudices by giving us family protection on the cheap. He offered us school uniforms and curfews as ways to restore community. His rhetoric and agenda tacitly encourage the institutionalization and vilification of large numbers of the poor and minorities. He thereby fosters bitterness between many working-class families on the one hand and the poor and other minorities on the other hand.

How can these vicious circles be reversed? Clinton could build upon successful resistance to the Republican excesses with a proactive agenda of his own. He could demand that cuts in food stamps and Aid to Families with Dependent Children be matched dollar for doffar with funds for job training and job creation. He could challenge the standard conservative orthodoxy that budget deficits are always bad. In times of economic distress, only government spending can get the economy started again. In addition, just as households borrow money to purchase a home, it is entirely legitimate for governments to borrow money for long-term improvements in transportation, energy production, and education. Clinton could build upon the commitment to a minimum wage with a defense of labor's rights to organize at home and abroad.

Of course, the Bill Clinton we know isn't about to do any of these things And a party or movement wishing to raise these issues isn't likely to attract much funding. Nonetheless, popular cynicism about politics has reached a all-time high and does give us an opening to attack the vicious circles of American politics. As Maine has demonstrated, progressives can receive some hearing for far-reaching campaign, finance reforms. Nationally, progressives must fight to eliminate or at least limit the role of political action committees, to make public financing available for candidates with demonstrated threshold levels of public support, and to widen access to the media.

Campaign-finance reform would give progressives some means and incentives to build a grass-roots party - a genuinely democratic party that could circumscribe corporate power. Such a party would need to recruit potential candidates, foster means of ongoing education of its members, and mirror in its internal organization its broad political principles. It would need to work with supportive elements in the Democratic Party when possible but also be willing to run candidates on its own when necessary. Ample pouing data over many years suggests that there is a large constituency for such a party among the ranks of the voters and nonvoters. New Party and Green Party ad many states are beginning organizational efforts along these lines and deserve more attention.

The issues of wage stagnation, welfare, the budget, Social Security, and Medicare were not solved in the last four years, nor was any means offered for assuring the social and economic viability of local communities. As our internationalized corporate economy becomes more vulnerable and insecure, these topics will have to be revisited. Whether Clinton owes his success to retreat from government or to his modest and reluctant defense of government's role in fostering economic opportunity is thus more than an idle question. Ultimately, polls and pundits can't fully resolve it. The real test of any political analysis is whether or not attempts to foster widespread political participation and a new working majority around it are successful. I'd like to see us try to put a few more options into play.

John Buell is a freelance writer with a special interest in labor and environmental topics. He most recently coauthored Sustainable Democracy: Individuality and the Politics of the Environment (Sage, 1996).