But don’t give soccer moms the boot so fast. Historians may find that a lot more was going on politically in 1996 than met the eye. A new, ““vital center,’’ as Clinton calls it, quoting Arthur Schlesinger Jr., did indeed begin to cohere. The institutions of that center–family, faith, work, community–are the same ones Ronald Reagan evoked 15 years ago, but the politics of those institutions have been feminized and transformed in the great American suburbs, where presidential elections are decided and most of us live.
From the Summer Olympics to the political conventions to car ads on TV, the marketers who shape our tastes have finally tuned in to the sensible, compassionate, nonideological women who run so much of the country.
AND THE SALESMAN WITH THE BEST UNDERSTANDing of women turns out to be Bill Clinton. (It’s all quite logical when you think about it.) Now the president is connecting his deep knowledge of women with his other loves: politics and history. Beginning in 1992 and accelerating in 1996, he has exploited a powerful undercurrent: the old politics of resentment against minorities and liberals is dying; a new kind of values politics is struggling to be born. He is–yes–the bridge between the two. Whatever happens to Clinton himself, his presidency may end up spanning not just technological ages but basic approaches to understanding the American electorate.
Clinton’s first important insight–confirmed by his constant reading of polls–is that Americans are not nearly as divided as we sometimes think. Most of us happen to agree with each other on most issues right now, blending left and right and common sense. The extremists get the attention, while the rest of us are, in the phrase of former Clinton aide William Galston, ““tolerant traditionalists.’’ Clinton knows, perhaps from personal experience, that sometimes a family fights and fights again and wakes up one day to realize that it has forgotten what it’s fighting about.
That’s because most of us do share a set of basic values about where we are as a country and where we want to go. The trick politically is to find where to mine those values, and Clinton did. He found his mother lode in… mothers. In November, fathers, like men in general, went comfortably for Dole. Single women and blacks are already overwhelmingly Democratic. It was married white suburban women–some of whose children play soccer–who held the balance of power in 1996. They voted 55 to 45 for congressional Republicans and 49 to 42 (almost Clinton’s exact overall margin) for the president. These mothers felt Clinton was connecting to the stresses of their lives: paying for college for their kids, caring for older parents (which always seems to fall more to women), teen smoking, lax discipline in schools, harmful TV, insensitive bureaucrats who chase new mothers out of the hospital 24 hours after they give birth.
With men, too, some of these home-and-hearth issues strike a chord. Gender is only part of their importance. Their very ordinariness also distinguishes them. Today’s values issues are the opposite of the hot-button suburban issues of the past like race and patriotism. Instead of inflaming and dividing people, they aim to pacify on common ground. In the same way Americans will never really agree on a subject like abortion, we will never really disagree on a subject like family and medical leave. Or early-childhood education. Head Start, for instance, is no longer a ““liberal’’ issue; it’s an apple-pie issue. Messing with ““Sesame Street’s’’ Big Bird, as House Republicans learned, is now almost like messing with the flag.
All year Washington wise guys derided Clinton’s strategy (cooked up in part by the infamous Dick Morris) of stressing V-chips, school uniforms, reading tutors and the rest. ““Small-time,’’ ““palliative’’ and ““platitudinous’’ were among the friendlier descriptions. The media, which live for conflict and drama, loathed the campaign’s lack of them. So we mostly missed a big story sitting right under our noses, one of the great acts of political theft in recent memory. In 1996 Bill Clinton–that’s right, Bill Clinton–grabbed family values for the Dem- ocrats, and he’s not about to give them back.
To understand how much has changed in the swing-vote suburbs, think back to the 1960s. Lyndon Johnson knew that pushing through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would cost the Democratic Party its stronghold in the South. But he didn’t anticipate that the suburbs would also start voting solidly Republican. From the 1950s through the 1980s, the children and grandchildren of turn-of-the- century immigrants increasingly fled their old neighborhoods for a new life and a new set of political ideas.
These Americans tended to vote for candidates who most convincingly promised to keep the problems of the cities–especially race and crime–at bay. They resented the elitism of the liberals they believed had wrecked their old neighborhoods. And they stayed sore over what they considered to be the anti-Americanism of their children’s generation, the baby boomers. For years, so-called ““wedge’’ issues like abortion, busing, gays, welfare and the death penalty pried them away from their historic roots in the Democratic Party.
Overlaying this structure was a national politics heavily conditioned by nearly half a century of cold war. Strength and toughness trumped everything else. At one military briefing during the 1980s, Reagan was shown models of American missiles. The American power phalluses were long and white; the Soviets’, shorter and black. We were still safely ahead, but only by the margin of our machismo. The politics of masculinity extended through the 1988 election, when Michael Dukakis lost by seeming soft on flag burning and Willie Horton, and by looking on TV like Snoopy in a tank. After that, the lens changed. John F. Kennedy had predicted that the century would end with ““a long twilight struggle’’ with communism. It’s ending instead like a long talk show.
Bill Clinton entered national politics with a therapeutic bent that fit his personal history and campaigning style. But before he could feminize American politics, he had to immunize it against the powerful old resentments. In 1992 he distanced himself from Jesse Jackson and backed the death penalty and welfare reform. Then, in his first two years in office, the new president was all over the lot: Immunized by reducing the federal payroll and maintaining a cold-war defense; exposed on an intrusive health-care plan. Immunized with the crime bill and NAFTA; exposed on tax increases and gays in the military.
After the 1994 loss of Congress, Clinton vowed to blunt any wedge. Returning to his roots as a New Democrat, he signed welfare reform and backed the Defense of Marriage Act, which bars gay unions. By submitting a balanced budget and declaring that ““the era of big government is over,’’ he closed the Democrats’ window of vulnerability on fiscal issues–and opened the possibility of connecting on values issues that have eluded his party for a generation.
The result was that in November the white suburban mother–the soccer mom–came around to doing something she had never thought she would: she trusted Bill Clinton. The polls showed that she still didn’t trust him personally, but she did trust him politically. He would address her concerns about raising her children, but not give away the store. He would devolve power closer to her, but use his bully pulpit to make sure that state and local authorities were as responsive to her as they claimed they would be. He would complete a historic transformation from a centralized Washington power structure to a slimmed-down federal government, but remain committed to giving her–and other Americans–““the tools’’ to help themselves, with education and welfare reform as the test. That was Clinton’s promise, anyway, and he would be held accountable to history for it.
Some argue that it was merely Bob Dole’s incompetence as a campaigner that prevented him from carrying that message. Perhaps so. But the hard truth for the GOP is that its most reliable electoral strategy of recent years–essentially, shouting ““Liberal, liberal, pants on fire!’’–largely failed in 1996. The party’s top strategist, Arthur Finkelstein, focused on liberal-baiting in six Senate races and lost all six. The only way many House Republicans salvaged their seats was by parroting Clinton’s suburban appeal, insisting, for instance, that they are strong supporters of education and the environment.
In 1997 the GOP faces an important choice that will hardly be boring. It can try to win back pivotal suburban voters the old-fashioned way: by making them angry at Clinton and liberals. Or the party can acknowledge that a new politics is indeed being born in the 1990s–a politics not of antigovernment revolution but of hardheaded compassion and tolerant traditionalism. The new American mother lode is there for Republicans, too, if only they will learn to mine it.
