George W. Clinton?

The me-too kids.

The primaries and conventions have yet to be held, but the first shots have already been fired in the 2000 general-election campaign. The Democrats, having decided that their opponent will be George W. Bush, have begun testing various attacks on him and his philosophy. Their best campaigner, President Clinton, recently lit into "compassionate conservatism" as (a) insincere gesture politics, (b) a front for the hardline Gingrichian conservatism of congressional Republicans, and (c) his own idea.

It could be all three, of course. Indeed, the problem that "compassionate conservatism" poses for the Democrats is not that it is a particularly strong Republican slogan but that all the arguments against it evoke too many embarrassing memories of the Clinton years. Take, for instance, criticism (a). The president gave it as follows:

This "compassionate conservatism" has a great ring to it, you know? It sounds so good. . . . And as near as I can tell, here's what it means: "I like you, I really do. And I would like to be for the patients' bill of rights, and I'd like to be for closing the gun-show loophole . . . I'd like to do these things, but I just can't, and I feel terrible about it."

Rattling good partisan fun, to be sure, and the audience loved it. After the laughter, however, doubts creep in. It is Clinton, after all, who is famous for feeling other people's pain and even more famous for doing nothing about it (ask those few overt gays who want to join the military) or even piling on yet more pain, which he subsequently feels all the more keenly (recall those rich people whose taxes he later admitted raising "too much"). After seven years of compassionate liberalism, the roster of Democratic constituencies that feel betrayed by Clinton adds up to the entire party, with the sole exception of the feminists, for whom he has reserved his single act of fidelity-keeping infanticide legal.

Then there is criticism (b), that "compassionate conservatism" is a thin disguise for the hard stuff. In the president's own words: "Are the architects of the revolution in 1995, the Contract on America, the heirs of Newt Gingrich who are still basically in control of the Congress, all of whom were early endorsers of Mr. Bush-is this an umbrella under which they can be protected from the rainstorm of public opinion until they get to where they can do what they want, or is it something different?"

Or is this the voice of conscience speaking? Almost the only issues that Clinton has not betrayed are the balanced budget and welfare reform he adopted in cooperation with Gingrich's Republican Congress. The president has doubtless convinced himself by now that, as a good New Democrat, he has always been in favor of these reforms, but in fact he wanted to postpone balancing the budget to 2002 and he twice vetoed welfare reform before embracing it enthusiastically for the 1996 election. (Oh, yes: Hillary spurned the pleas of the Children's Defense Fund and went along too.)

Finally, there is criticism (c)-which rather touchingly reveals Clinton's pride of authorship: "The rhetoric of compassionate conservatism . . . half those speeches sound like I gave them in '92 . . . It's very flattering in a way, you know, because it replicates the rhetoric." And his point here is about more than merely rhetoric. A conservatism that is situated midway between the congressional Republicans and the Democratic party has a strong whiff of Clinton's 1996 strategy of "triangulation" about it.

The Clinton attack drew a curiously defensive response from George W. and his campaign. The governor had done things, such as signing into law higher penalties for gun crimes and ending social promotion in schools (both conservative ideas but, if anything, commendably uncompassionate). He did have a philosophy-that solutions were to be found in people and local communities, not in Clinton's centralized Washington. Why, he had even forced Vice President Gore to address Latinos in Spanish by speaking in that language first.

Bush then tried to make these cautious noises sound courageous by striking a bold stance: "I welcome the label ["compassionate conservative"], and on this ground I take my stand." But this defiant platitudinarianism (e.g., "I am not frightened to say, sir, that I love this great country of ours") cannot disguise the fact that Clinton had a good point in criticism (c): Compassionate conservatism is a form of what used to be disparaged as "me-tooism" by conservatives. Then again, Clinton's various political stances-the Third Way, triangulation, New Democratic politics-are forms of "me-tooism" as well. Both parties are now maneuvering to occupy the same political territory while denouncing each other as extremist.

How did things come to this pass? After Reagan and Thatcher forged a new post-socialist politics in the Eighties, the parties of the Left accepted capitalism ("Me too") but claimed they could run it more compassionately than the Right. Now the parties of the Right are claiming that they can run compassion more effectively than the Left ("Me too too"). Imagine a debate conducted between two ventriloquists each of whose dummy is sitting on the other ventriloquist's knee.

It is, indeed, hard to see what Election 2000 will be about. One candidate will propose a policy, and the other will respond with either more or less of the same. Take environmentalism. Bush has already signaled his acceptance of global warming and thus removed any real prospect of mounting a serious intellectual attack on the vice president's ecological hysteria. Or taxes. If Bush proposes a tax cut, Gore will respond with a "more responsible" one. And so on. The likelihood is that the election will be won by the candidate who most soothes the voters. That would seem to favor Gore.

But no one can at this distance really predict who will win the election. And it is what happens after elections that is truly important. In a "me too" political environment, the winning party in the election usually turns out to be the losing party in government.

Consider President Clinton himself-the great "me too" candidate of modern times. Set aside for a moment the fact that he is personally a sleazebag and a mountebank, and ask, Which party-the Republicans or the Democrats-has most cause to regret that he was elected in 1992 and reelected in '96? Which party has done better in state and congressional elections since then? Which party has seen its most cherished principles on welfare and economics abandoned? Which party has actually seen its natural constituencies grow most rapidly in prosperity-the Party of Wall Street or the Party of Social Work? And which party has been forced against its will to save the political skin of a leader who has done nothing for it?

Given the above, a dispassionate computer, programmed with conservative opinions but lacking conservative loyalties, would probably urge Republicans to vote for Al Gore over George W. Bush next year. And consider this: Why would it be wrong?