Chapter One

New Democrat Strategy

Crafting a Vital Center for the 1992 Presidential Campaign

It’s not enough to just to say you have moved to the center, trust us. You have to lay out a rationale that says, “This time you can trust us.” It’s the difference between Bad Godesberg and Brighton.1

Then-Governor Bill Clinton offered these words on what makes for effective centrist rhetoric at a particularly significant moment in his presidential candidacy. Britain’s Labor Party had just suffered an unexpected loss to Conservatives in the parliamentary elections of April 1992, a defeat that crushed their hope to take back power after years of Tory rule. Having prepared a speech commemorating Labor’s expected triumph as the first gust in “a wind of change sweeping across the Atlantic,” Clinton was forced to scrap the speech and to wonder, instead, why he could not count on such a “wind” to lift his own party to victory in the coming months. Like Labor in the United Kingdom, Democrats in the United States were deep into a process, led in large part by Clinton himself, of revamping their national image after a string of rebukes from voters who had once loyally supported them. And, like Labor, the focus of the Democrats’ strategy for renewal was its claim to have moved beyond the ideology of its left wing and toward a “center” that transcended existing political division. As Clinton saw it, however, Labor’s centrist rhetoric was ineffective primarily because it lacked credibility. His interpretation is not merely speculative; its practical and strategic qualities are strongly implied. Clinton hints, in other words, that he, as the one soon to become the Democrats’ nominee, has the missing ingredient, the one that could make the Democrats’ move to the center seem less like a temporary feint and more like a substantive and lasting change whose messengers could be trusted.

By favoring Bad Godesberg (the town by the Rhine where West Germany’s Social Democrats dramatically renounced Marxism in 1959 to regain their electoral footing) over Brighton (the town near London where Labor had recently tried to establish a similar break with its past without the same success) Clinton suggests two things about what would be required to make centrist rhetoric work for his own party. First, its effectiveness would depend on Democrats using rhetoric to establish a new identity. They had to learn to define themselves as trustworthy through a “rationale” that could somehow match (and thus help to prove) their claim to have “moved to the center.” Those who speak on behalf of Democrats must seem like those who have genuinely moved from one place to another—and will not be going back. Second, this attention to credibility as creating the impression of closeness to, if not identity with, the center would also involve effecting a certain distance not only from the left, but from the past. The line from the left to the center is also one from yesterday to today. The “this time” in Clinton’s remarks highlights the importance of appeals that could rearrange wider perceptions of the Democrats’ relation to their own history. Clinton seems to argue that openly recognizing the errors of the party’s past could become the first step in learning how to convince others of the sincerity of the Democrats’ transformation.

In this rhetoric of promises involving movements from one (bad/past) place to another (good/future) one, the “rationale” for gaining trust would thus try to bring together these two elements to make the move to the center seem real, timely, and attractive. It would focus on the ethotic dimensions of its political discourse in order to advance the “new” Democrats’ claim to be suited for democratic governance. Their claim to have moved to the center, an act whose success Clinton himself makes synonymous with gaining the trust and support of the electorate, needed to base itself not merely in new policies or personalities, but in the project of reconstituting party identity to become a more effective resource for argument. The main institutional site of such a project in the 1980s and 1990s was the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC).

Chaired during much of this period by Clinton, the DLC was the organizational home for the “New Democrats,” a term which identified its members with the party, while distinguishing them, via a temporal metaphor, from those allied with its more liberal factions. Indeed, as Jeff Faux wrote at the time, “the spine of the New Democrats’ argument is this: the Democratic Party has been dominated by its extreme leftwing, which is out of touch with middle-class America.”2 The group defined itself, then, in terms of specifically addressing the party’s eroding national standing, while offering a strategy to win the presidency for a Democratic candidate amid such conditions of erosion. To achieve these aims, the DLC argued against a continuation of the liberal politics of the 1960s and 1970s and sought to supplant memories of Jimmy Carter’s failed presidency with a new vision of Democratic, national-political leadership. It was an alternative that, born in the attempt to pinpoint what had caused the party’s series of electoral routs and missteps, nevertheless found solace in the belief that though voters no longer confided in Democrats, they were nearly as skeptical of Republicans.

As a DLC proposal that appeared several months before Clinton’s entrance into the presidential race saw it, political opportunity could be found in the ability of Democrats to harness voter “dissatisfaction” with both parties:

The declining fortunes of the Democratic Party, however, have not yet produced a decisive shift toward the Republicans—and therefore the future for Democrats is not unrelievedly weak. Voters are increasingly dissatisfied with both parties. . . . And rightly so, for neither alternative addresses the real national challenges of the 1990s. This is the opportunity we urge our fellow Democrats to seize. The hard work of revitalizing the Democratic Party begins with the dismal truth of analysis, but it ends with a hopeful new politics that moves our party and our country neither left nor right, but forward.3

To seize such an “opportunity” would therefore be to recognize something specific about voters—their frustration with both parties—and to identify with—“and rightly so”—the basic reasonableness of this frustration. To alleviate such “dissatisfaction,” in turn, would be to give voters what they want by occupying those discursive spaces where the potential for political “opportunity” might dwell alongside voter frustration with both left and right. But if Democrats were to do this, argued the DLC, if they were to come out on the other side of this frustration with partisan division that defines American politics, they needed to start with the facts. They needed to come together around, if not a single conclusion, at least a shared belief in the power of “analysis” to unfold the kind of political and empirical “truth” that should, regardless of its “dismal” implications, be accepted. What entices amidst this yielding to analysis is ultimately the presumption that the truth it produces will set off a process that ends with hope and forward movement. A “hopeful new politics” was the DLC’s promised outcome to a painful labor of reappraising what before was accepted as political truth. If this work of “revitalization” is trying, it is also civically virtuous, because it transcends the partisan in its move forward, and electorally rewarding, because it has the potential to bring the party back to power. In this scheme, to move left or right is to remain in the world of voter dissatisfaction with democracy; to eschew left and right by moving to the center, in contrast, is to invent a politics that “addresses the real national challenges of the 1990s” while winning back the presidency.

This chapter looks at how and to what ends the basic inventional process that defines these two passages structures the larger centrist discourse of the New Democrats from the same period. I examine two texts—a landmark critique of Democratic politics produced by the DLC in 1989 and a widely heralded speech delivered by Clinton at a DLC gathering in 1991. I show how as the New Democrats sought to revitalize the party and “move” it to the center, they relied on overlapping modes of contrastive, ethotic proof. In doing so, I argue, they sought to produce the vision of a new politics beyond left and right by using the center as a figure of ideal democratic representation and innovation, while at the same time selectively constraining both qualities for their own strategic objectives of garnering the financial support and influence necessary to elect a New Democrat to the presidency in 1992. I start by contextualizing my analysis in terms of the DLC’s emergence amidst internal Democratic conflicts. By sketching a broad outline of how the DLC defined itself in terms of such conflicts, I set the stage for my subsequent textual analysis of the rhetorical moves that structure the DLC’s claim to the center.

Back to the “Mainstream”: The DLC’s “Bloodless Revolution”

The New Democrat message appeals to the vast political center . . . it is a new public philosophy—a synthesis of progressive ideas and non-bureaucratic approaches to governing, grounded in mainstream values.”4

The newness of the New Democrats’ “new public philosophy” is somewhat complicated, since the DLC formed at the intersection of an array of existing and differently situated grievances that can be traced to struggles for power that had begun years earlier. In the aftermath of George McGovern’s landslide loss in 1972, the remains of the Democrats’ urban-labor New Deal coalition, its emerging (if fragmented) federation of liberal activist groups, and its white Southern bloc—that is, those who had yet to leave the party—vied for influence. This turmoil created what Bruce Miroff calls “the identity crisis of the Democratic Party” from which the DLC emerged.5 The symbolic field of such an identity crisis defined the backdrop of the DLC’s early rhetorical history. Regional, class, racial, and ideological division within the Democratic Party, recrimination over the blame for such divisions, and related clashes over how to redress the party’s resulting electoral slide—all of these conspired to open the way for the DLC’s formation.

In an essay documenting its history, Jon Hale describes a process that started in 1981 soon after Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan. In January of that year, thirty-seven House Democrats, under the direction of Louisiana Representative Gillis Long, formed the House Democratic Caucus Committee on Party Effectiveness. Hale calls this group—largely Southern and on the whole more conservative than the House Democratic caucus as a whole—the “first organizational embodiment” of the New Democrats. Its main focus was to win back previously reliable Democratic constituencies that had been swayed by Reagan’s campaign against liberalism and drawn into the wake of the country’s growing conservative movement.6 After Reagan was reelected in 1984 with even greater support from these voters, Alvin From, Long’s chief advisor and executive director of the committee, joined a group of Southern senators and governors to form the DLC in February 1985.

As one of its members later told the New York Times, the basic purpose of the DLC was “to get out from under the false image that Democrats are weak on defense, have weird lifestyles and are big taxers and spenders.”7 Or, as one of its founders Georgia senator Sam Nunn said in announcing the formation of the DLC, the idea was to “move the party—both in substance and perception—back into the mainstream of American political life.”8 What this purpose demanded was a rhetoric that could effectively name the forces behind the party’s drift away from the “mainstream,” as well as charting a new identity in contrast to these forces. Both “getting out from under the false image” and moving “the party—both in substance and perception back into the mainstream” describe acts of concentrated redefinition, in other words, the posing of clear rhetorical divisions between false and true “images” of the party, between values and identities deemed within the “mainstream” or outside it, and so on. The group had some early success in proving the electoral savvy of this approach—for example, in 1986, seven of the eleven Democrats who helped their party recapture the Senate were DLC members. They also attracted media coverage, gained the support of elected officials beyond the group’s Southern base, raised significant funds by attracting unrestricted corporate dollars, and succeeded in pushing through major changes in the presidential nominating process.9

At the core of this plan was what From, in a memo to Clinton, called, a “bloodless revolution”:

Make no mistake about it, what we hope to accomplish with the DLC is a bloodless revolution in our party. It is not unlike what the conservatives accomplished in the Republican Party during the 1960s and 1970s. By building their movement . . . with Ronald Reagan as their standard bearer, they were able to nominate their candidate for President and elect him, and in the process, redefine both the Republican Party and the national public policy agenda.10

Aimed at weakening the influence of liberal activists and interest groups in the party, this hoped-for “revolution” imagined a “standard bearer” presidential candidate who could put their centrist stamp not only on the party, but, like Reagan had ostensibly done, on the nation’s politics as a whole. And so it is unsurprising that Michael Dukakis’s defeat in 1988—the Democrats fifth presidential loss out of the previous six presidential elections—created a singular opportunity for DLC principals, including Bill Clinton. After Dukakis lost in the fall elections, the DLC found a party more eager than ever to find a clear message that could explain its decline and make the critique of such decline into a spark of resurgence. The DLC could offer both things, and in terms of both policy and strategy. As Kenneth S. Baer points out of the Dukakis aftermath, “Almost overnight, the DLC went from the brink of irrelevance to the center of a debate on how to rejuvenate the Democratic Party.”11

Baer’s history of the DLC, Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton, picks up where Hale’s earlier essay left off, giving readers a comprehensive account of the group’s evolution from its earliest days to the end of the Clinton presidency. In a review of the book, however, the rhetorician and Clinton scholar John M. Murphy offers a lament that I share: Baer should have “studied some rhetoric in order to explain” crucial moments in the evolution and success of the DLC’s strategy to “reinvent” the party. As an illustration of one such rhetorical moment, Murphy cites the publication of the “Politics of Evasion: Democrats and the Presidency,” which he rightly asserts “played an enormous role in setting the course of the DLC . . . and outlined the rhetorical strategy to be followed by Governor Clinton” in his 1992 presidential campaign. Judging the document “a powerful piece of political rhetoric” that Baer fails to explain as such, Murphy closes his review by calling for a perspective that would ask, in his words: “How, indeed, does one rhetorically invent a Democrat?”12

Though offered somewhat in jest, this question intrigues because it directs us to a larger one that plays on the term “Democrat” itself. For while explanations like Faux’s, Baer’s, and Hale’s yield nuanced insight into the personalities, as well as the institutional and historical factors surrounding the DLC’s rise to power, they leave undiscussed the actual arrangements of meaning and appeal that fueled this rise. They ignore, in short, the rhetorical effort it takes for a Democratic identity to emerge, if only partly, “reinvented” and thus how this identity could later serve as a resource for persuasion. In particular, they leave out how these arrangements aligned with deeper claims about the ideal character of democratic political representation in the 1990s. Composed of six sections that take up just over nineteen pages, “The Politics of Evasion” offers a good look into this process of alignment.13

Debunking the Left from the Center: “The Politics of Evasion,” March 10, 1989

A rather insular text, the length, tone, and diction of this document suggest that it was written not for direct consumption by the electorate, but to influence the constituencies the DLC had long targeted for persuasion—for example, the media, corporate lobbyists and donors, party members seeking direction in a time of turmoil, and Democratic elected officials faced with the prospects of a damaged national “brand.” Published with an appendix and over forty-seven footnotes, its central claims are supported by evidence culled from contemporary survey data, statistical forecasting methods, and political science research more generally. It seems, at first blush, to rely solely on such proofs. Appropriately, then, its authors, William Galston and Elaine Ciulla Kamarck, define the purpose of their paper as primarily expository. They promise to “explore three pervasive themes in the politics of evasion” that have contributed to Democratic losses.14 These “themes” are identified as “myths,” which, over the course of the document, the authors promise to describe and debunk in some detail. There is “The Myth of Liberal Fundamentalism” (Democrats have failed because they have comprised their liberal principles); “The Myth of Mobilization” (Democrats could succeed if only they focused on getting more of their natural supporters to the polls); and “The Myth of the Congressional Bastion” (Democrats still control the majority of offices below the presidency, and so they merely need to find better presidential candidates and improve their tactics).

The answer the text offers as to why and how these myths have sustained themselves is ultimately contained in how it conjures an image of party leadership against which to establish its own. As the authors state at the onset, the Democrats have failed because “in place of reality they have offered wishful thinking; in place of analysis, myth.”15 This start, with its quick portrayal of Democrats as fundamentally deluded, as a “they” given to irrational wishes and myths, and thus incapable of sound judgment, reveals another truth about the “Politics of Evasion”: a realist, empirical sensibility enlivens the spirit of a keen polemic focused on discrediting its adversaries’ ability and worthiness to lead. Such a polemic trains its fire in terms of characterological antithesis, with the failings of its chief antagonist working to define the virtues of its own implied author by contrast. It seeks to establish the primacy of its “analysis,” and thus of the DLC, by making the “myths” it debunks a function of the ethical, political, and even psychological flaws of those who ostensibly believe them. The goal of such debunking is an openly confrontational one. As the document reveals at one point, it aims to spark an “active public controversy that begins today, led by Democrats who are able to move beyond the politics of evasion” to convince voters that the rest of the party has done the same.16 With the “New Democrats” placing themselves in the category of the “able to move beyond,” the Democrats unable or unwilling to do the same were ready to be defined not simply as those caught in “evasion,” but as the reactionary, defensive, and self-interested defenders of the status quo.

Contemporary accounts of the initial presentation of the “Politics of Evasion” by Galston on March 10, 1989 (Kamarck would join him as a coauthor when the piece was published a few months later), at the DLC’s annual meeting in Philadelphia suggest that the group’s desire for a public controversy was satisfied almost immediately. Galston’s presentation was well-covered by major newspapers—for example, the Washington Post and the New York Times—and network news shows—for example, PBS’s the “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” and ABC’s “World News Tonight.” It also provoked an immediate, on-the-scene response from a leading liberal, African American Democrat, thus underscoring a visible rift between the DLC and sectors in the party it had long sought to isolate as politically problematic (more on that response in the subsequent chapter).

At the same time, the “Politics of Evasion” is as interesting for the political fireworks it set off as for how, in Baer’s words, “it quickly became part of the New Democratic canon” and, in particular, the DLC’s increasingly “adversarial stance toward the national party” at the time.17 In line with this shift, we see acts of contrast and dissociation working in the text, with named and unnamed sectors of the party playing a consistently negative role. And yet, these acts are not simply negative, but harness negativity instrumentally for a larger constructive enterprise. The authors aimed to reinvent a term—“Democrat”—associated with a failed approach to politics and governance and with those who represented this approach. In turn, they needed to provide both themselves and their audience the rhetorical resources to imagine a transformation in party identity. By putting this implicit rhetorical objective into the foreground, we can see one way that language works in the text. We can see how it unfolds and then follows in strategic ways the politically divisive implications of the topos of “evasion” contained in its title in order to establish, via negative example, its claim to the center. Working through a series of recurring maneuvers that draw from evasion’s associations with subterfuge, bad faith, and denial, the text equates its own truth with a more democratically legitimate and strategically wise perspective on democratic representation than that held at the time by the party. Along these lines, a certain kind of authority emerges at the start from the relationship of the text’s implied and actual authors.

Written by two political scientists, each with a foot in the world of party politics, the document presumes throughout that proper answers to questions of political strategy belong to those with the best and most recent survey research on the trends of the national electorate. Such answers belong, additionally, to those with the basic discernment and honesty to confront the ostensibly self-evident implications of this research for public policy and party identity in a democracy. Conversely, the problem the text seeks to solve dwells in those Democrats who are said to lack these qualities. Following this logic, a hard skeleton of binaries concerned with describing the mechanics of evasion supports the body of the text. Evidence of this strategy of invention through polar division is apparent throughout the document. But it is most apparent in five particular rhetorical maneuvers that create vivid contrasts between the ethos of the center the DLC attributes to itself and those faults attributed to the perpetrators of “evasion” on the left.

The first (and most important) such maneuver is hinted at in the text’s opening declaration that some in the party—in fact, an unspecified “many”—have been deluded for years. The widespread hope that “once Ronald Reagan left the White House” the party’s problems would “disappear” has proven false.18 In the next sentence, the “many”—which is, notably, not a “many of us”—then becomes substituted by a more general term—“Democrats”—in an exhortation that covers the party as a whole and that defines the moment it finds itself in as a confrontation of sorts with the illusions of its own self-understanding: “Without a charismatic president to blame for their ills, Democrats must now come face to face with reality.” Encapsulated in this sentence is a judgment that puts into close proximity two allusions. The first is to character—leading Democrats are the kind to place responsibility in the wrong place, to look for easy scapegoats “to blame for their ills.” And the second is to perception—because of this character flaw they cannot see reality properly until its true nature is forced upon them. In a word, Democrats engage in a “systematic denial of reality” that defines their political worldview. Denial circulates throughout the party’s basic system of self-understanding. It encourages Democrats to “manufacture excuses for their presidential disasters—excuses built on faulty data and false assumptions, excuses designed to avoid tough questions.” Evasion means that “Democratic nominees . . . and their advisers continue to embrace myths about the electorate that cannot withstand either empirical analysis or political combat”; it has the power to “thwart sober reflection on the relation between means and ends” for seeking racial quality; it “leads its proponents to believe things about the electorate that do not stand up to empirical tests.” Conversely, indeed by definition, the DLC is the “sober” agent that can not only see “reality” in its proper state in these cases—how else to notice another’s “denial” of it?—but also whose character is such that it does not need to “manufacture” anything. Rather, its very disposition is to ask “tough questions” in search of reality by using an approach that will “address the party’s weaknesses directly” rather than evasively.

To “evade” something, of course, is not merely to escape it for the sake of doing so. It is to dodge something for a purpose that can range from the abstract to the concrete. Tax “evasion,” for example, or “evading” arrest, each mark attempts to dodge the enforcement of state law. The end of each may carry a private “reward,” albeit one exacted at a public cost and with risk. As such, to enter into this term’s field of associations invites and creates space for the depiction of what is supposedly to be gained through evasion and whose aims it serves. To charge someone with evasion, in other words, is to raise questions about his or her motive for evading the truth.

In this vein, and in a second recurring maneuver, Galston and Kamarck define evasion as serving “the interests of those who would rather be the majority in a minority party than risk being the minority in a majority party.” Such interests are not only fundamentally divisive—indeed, doubly so, since they spring from a faction within a faction—but also implicitly small bore, petty. The practitioners of evasion evade, the authors assume, not for any valuable cause beyond themselves but for the sake of mere self-preservation within the institutional structure of the party. Worse, in trying to protect their status in the party, such a cohort adheres neither to norms of democratic accountability, nor to those of open debate; they believe “it is somehow immoral for a political party to pay attention to public opinion” and defend their status by charging skeptics with “heresy,” rather than by engaging them in arguments that can be disproven. In discussing the “Myth of Liberal Fundamentalism,” for instance, Galston and Kamarck write: “The perpetrators of this myth greet any deviation from liberal dogma, any attempt at innovation with the refrain ‘We don’t need two Republican Parties’” and have imposed “ideological litmus tests” on voices of dissent. In the service of dogma and ideology, “evasion” becomes an instrument for enforcing cohesion and quelling detractors.

A third maneuver that Galston and Kamarck rely upon involves shades of something similar. Except on this path, the emphasis stays on placing evasion in opposition to various forms and symbols of the “new.” Insofar as evasion constitutes a means to serve the interests of some over others by stifling dissent and discussion, it tends to obstruct change as a corollary of this same purpose: “The most serious effects of the politics of evasion, however, is that it tends to repress the consideration of new ideas . . . suggestions that the traditional Democratic goals may require untraditional means are greeted with moral outrage.” Oriented so defensively toward dissent, liberal fundamentalism bases itself in a mindset that “enshrines the policies of the past two decades as sacrosanct” in order to ward off change. It is, by definition, the opposite of innovation: “Whether the issue is the working poor, racial justice, educational excellence, or national defense, the liberal fundamentalist prescription is always the same; pursue the politics of the past.” Importantly, Galston and Kamarck effectively ventriloquize this same line of critique at crucial points. They put their critique into the mouths of others not only to corroborate it, but also to give it an additional kind of credibility. They cite, for example, the judgment of a college senior from Louisiana State University who told the New Orleans Picayune that “Democrats seem to be too bound to the solutions of the past. All the creative thinking—for better and for worse—is coming from the right.” As the synecdoche for a prized sector of the electorate—what the document defines as “politically active college students”—that drives party growth and innovation, this student expresses a perception that “spells real trouble for Democrats, if it is as some think widely held.” Clearly, the authors themselves suppose that such a perception is not only “widely held” but also justified.

And yet, the kind of hedging they offer here—“if it is as some think”—is more than a perfunctory gesture of qualification. It hints at a fourth maneuver that reappears throughout the text and regulates a central facet of its inventional structure. One finds traces of this maneuver right from the onset, when Galston and Kamarck make a foundational claim they will later support with considerable data: “Too many Americans have come to see the party as inattentive to their economic interests, indifferent if not hostile to their moral sentiments and ineffective in defense of their national security.” The division here between “Americans” and “the party” is then split again with a subsequent claim: “A recent survey shows that only 57 percent of Democrats have a favorable image of their own party.” What is important here is not so much the obvious point about the dismal state of the party’s “brand” among Democrats and non-Democrats alike. Of greater significance is the delicate manner in which the DLC becomes aligned in its critique of party decline with the sentiments of those whose quantifiable aversion to the party—the “too many Americans” and the sizable portion of disaffected Democrats—are its cause. They offer their strategic advice to the party not as members of “the leadership of the Democratic Party [which] has proven unable to shake the images formed by its liberal fundamentalist wing”—but in the name of what the authors later call “the Democrats’ ‘disappearing middle.’” I will return to the question of how and what exactly this “middle” signifies in its absence. But to do that, I first need to explain what is encouraged by this productively ambiguous, reciprocal relationship between the text’s seemingly objective observations about the electorate’s perceptions and its powerful suggestion that these perceptions do not merely exist, but are entirely warranted at the level of value and policy.

Such an ambiguity creates opportunities for the DLC—via the political scientists writing in its stead—to occupy the position of an objective observer of the party’s declining public perceptions, on the one hand, while reinforcing the deeper authority of these perceptions, on the other. To both describe and identify with (and thus to give credence to) the perceptions of “the people” in this case creates a circuit through which rhetorical authority passes back and forth between these two spheres throughout the text. Contrast, for example, the authors’ eagerness to define and “come face to face” with the reality that Democrats allegedly misperceive through evasion, with their lack of interest in the distance between the voter perceptions they track (as measured by survey and exit poll data) and the “reality” these perceptions are said to approximate. To the contrary, on this question, such a distance seems not actually to exist.

Take, for additional examples of this maneuver, the following passages. After claiming that liberalism once commanded a strong and vibrant governing coalition that has since atrophied, Galston and Kamarck lament that “worst of all, while insisting that they represent the popular will, contemporary liberals have lost touch with the American people.”19 The “worst of all” works to transform “evasion” into an offense against democratic governance. The folly is not that of a mere ignorance of “the popular will” by Democrats—that is, the fact that the party appears ignorant of how far it has fallen out of favor—but of their misleading claim to speak in the name of the many in spite of so much evidence to the contrary that theirs are the views of the few:

Since the late 1960s, the public has come to associate liberalism with tax and spending policies that contradict the interests of average families; with welfare policies that foster dependence rather than self-reliance; with softness toward the perpetrators of crime and indifference toward its victims; with ambivalence toward the assertion of American values and interests abroad; and with an adversarial stance toward mainstream moral and cultural values.

The DLC here, as elsewhere, offers rejection by “the public” of “liberalism” as a true statement of the “popular will,” in contrast to the “insisting” of liberal Democrats that they represent this will. Stating the truth about the negative things “the public” associates with “liberalism” is, furthermore, a way of aligning with that same public. Like “the public,” that is, the DLC itself becomes identified with this truth; both represent, in different ways, a reality the party denies and that is inherently tied to its capacity to earn the trust of citizens.

We see a similar move near the end of the document, in a section on the role of “racial reductionism” (i.e., the idea that “the major themes of the past two decades, which Republicans have exploited so effectively, are all products of—and codes for—racial divisions”) in the “politics of evasion”:

By concentrating on race alone, Democrats avoid confronting the fact that for years they have been perceived as the party that is weaker on crime and more concerned about criminals than about victims. The institutional tendency of the Democratic Party to be out of sync with mainstream values exists on other issues as well.

Here the nation’s perceptions of the party (which presumably can be changed and may be mistaken) are grounded in the much firmer and more enduring notion of its “mainstream values” (which presumably reflect the historically accreted and reasonable moral horizon of the electorate). It is the focus “on race alone” that has allowed the party to avoid the relationship between these perceptions and the values that inform them.

There are multiple levels at which the underlying charge of having “lost touch with the American people,” of being “out of sync with mainstream values” assumes significance. It can do so as an observation about what certain surveys suggest with regard to what the party must do to increase its dwindling electoral support. Or it can seem a populist objection to the “politics of evasion” based in the notion that in a healthy democracy governed by majority rule it is precisely a nation’s “mainstream values” that all parties should strive to reflect. Or it can seem a principled complaint about the moral valence, regardless of popular perception, of the actual policies and values embraced by the party.

On each level, however, what is always key is how conventionally positive terms—“American people,” “popular will,” “average families,” “self-reliance,” “victims” of crime, “American values and interests abroad,” and “mainstream moral and cultural values”—are dissociated from the party as a matter of popular perception, but never only as a matter of popular perception. Indeed, the entirely positive value of these terms remains intact—again, without commentary on matters of definition or value—as they are celebrated by the DLC and denied to the Democrats. On each level—be it of empirical accuracy, of democratic accountability, or of moral propriety—the authors undermine the Democrats’ claim to represent anyone but the narrowest of partisans, and position the DLC as arbiters of facts, definers of democratic value, and upholders of the nation’s moral middle ground.

We can see in the text’s fifth maneuver how these levels come together. This maneuver is predicated on various ways of putting that “disappearing Democratic middle” I referred to earlier to explicit and subtle rhetorical use. The broader, and somewhat ambiguous, discursive function of such a “middle” depends, in larger part, on its combination with (and opposition to) other terms.

For example, the phrase “middle class” appears nine times in the document as a constituency defined by family incomes between $20,000 and $50,000 (and thrice associated with “white” citizens) that has left the Democratic Party and that must be brought back into its electoral column. At another point, the authors ask whether the party can prove to “the great middle of the American electorate” that it still has something to offer.20 In this case, there is a valorization of the “middle” that can be taken to mean its numerical superiority (and thus its prize as an object of electoral competition) and/or its status as the quintessence of the nation, as something irreplaceable that balances and orients all the other parts, that exists beneath any and all political division. Elsewhere, this maneuver works via the fungibility of certain metaphoric qualities of the “middle” which allow it to work functionally even when it is not named as such. In other words, these qualities emerge in semantically analogous terms—for example, “the center”—symbolically resonant images—for example, “the heart of the electorate”—and synonyms that share the middle’s associations with being flanked by extremes—for example, “average.” In all these cases, the middle is put to use as the rhetorical device through which the empirical, political, and moral objections of the DLC to the “politics of evasion” can express themselves in a distinct yet internally consistent manner. It serves as an abstraction that allows political discourse to move beyond partisan identity and categorization, while also serving as the mark of something concrete that the party can and must recapture in order for Democrats to “turn around their fortunes in the 1990s . . . [and] set aside the politics of evasion.”

I use the term “recapture” deliberately because the verb is used twice by the authors in this exact way in the final section of the text, titled “The Road Ahead.” At one point, after lamenting the party’s presumed tendency to believe empirically false things about the electorate, and thus to lose elections as a result, they ask: “How can the Democratic Party recapture the center?” At another, in response to doubts about what a move to the “middle” might mean for traditional party principles, they promise that the “Democratic Party can recapture the middle without losing its soul.” In both cases, what matters is the tension between the center as an abstract site of transcendence and a particular site in which an electoral prize dwells. On the one hand, as an abstract site, the center excludes extremes, and thus potentially includes all since it is, in principle, unaffiliated from any party or ideological position. On the other hand, as a particular site, it can be approximated, defined, and demographically targeted for effective “recapture” away from the opposition party. Indeed, it is in how the center is invoked to advance a contrast between a losing, fringe Democratic Party of the past and a winning, centrist Democratic Party of the future that these reinforcing qualities come together with particular relevance in the conclusion of the “Politics of Evasion.”

In the text’s second to last paragraph, the authors warn of a very specific kind of risk if Democrats fail to heed their warning. If the party cannot move beyond evasion, the GOP will “be able to convince the electorate that the Democratic Party of 1992 is the same as the Democratic Party of 1972,” win the presidency again, and further cement their hold on power. Conversely, what stands in the way of this outcome is a certain kind of rhetorical transformation in which the anti–“Democratic Party of 1972” will emerge in 1992. Electoral victory becomes contingent upon averting the possibility of a Republican rhetorical maneuver in which identities that are both different and similar are made to seem interchangeable. The suggestion is that to “recapture the center” will be to preempt this maneuver at every turn. In this light, Galston and Kamarck’s blunt concluding lesson to Democratic candidates might be stated as follows: say things to encourage perceptions of the party that forcefully cut against this invidious (and historically successful) conflation with the liberal insurgency of 1972. To return to the issue I opened with, the “Politics of Evasion” therefore counsels effecting clear distance from the party’s recent past as a way to signal the sincerity of its transformation in the future.

And yet, the rhetorical maneuvers that circulate throughout the text, however sharp in their tone, are neither direct nor uniform in what they tell us about the DLC’s effort to break with this past in the lead-up to the 1992 election. Bruce Reed, one of the architects of the DLC, defines two strains in the group, each of which resided in the different senses held by its Southern leadership. On the one hand, recapturing the center was understood by some in the DLC—such as Georgia senator Sam Nunn—as an effort to prevent, in Reed’s words, a recurrence of “the mistakes that have hurt us so badly over in the last 25 years” with distinct constituencies and in particular regions. For this strain, creating distance from party liberals was an effort primarily of political survival; attacking liberalism was the chief means of this effort, and figures such as Nunn were both ideologically and temperamentally suited to the task. The second strain, however, was made up of younger Southern Democrats—Reed mentions Clinton and Al Gore in particular—who saw themselves less as opposed to party liberals, per se, than as the forerunners of what Hale calls “an ideas-based movement” to expand the reach of the party beyond its base.21 For this strain, the party’s liberal identity was to be subsumed by a new, broader one; “newness” at the center would come through “innovation” rather than though running against the “mistakes” of other Democrats.

The “Politics of Evasion” shows traces of both of these strains, but tilts strongly toward meeting the political purposes and needs of the first. It draws from the center to call for a new direction for the party, but does so largely in terms of a rhetoric of accusation. By attempting to fix its readers eyes on Democrats for whom “evasion” had ostensibly become a way of life, the document’s polemical qualities gave the DLC and its allies a sharp and compelling language with which to distinguish their ethos as the reasonable stewards of the party’s future. It was thus especially well suited for those such as Virginia Senator Chuck Robb, who used the occasion of its unveiling at the DLC meeting in Philadelphia to engage Jesse Jackson, one of the party’s most visible liberal voices, in a public debate about the main reasons for the Democrats’ power ebb. Headlines for the next two days—in the New York Times, “Party Told to Win Middle-Class Vote”; in the Washington Post, “Jackson, Robb Tussle over Democratic Strategy”—confirmed the success of the DLC’s desire to stage “an active public controversy” over the party’s future with liberals.22 With the Post’s story leading with the observation that “Jesse L. Jackson and key southern Democratic leaders went toe to toe today,” the image was one of Democratic dissension along somewhat familiar ideological lines, albeit with a new organization now in place to redefine, and perhaps resolve, the terms of such disagreement.

In contrast, the speech Bill Clinton would give two years later, on May 6, 1991, to the DLC’s annual meeting in Cleveland marked more clearly the influence of the DLC’s second leadership strain, the one Reed described “as frustrated with the course the party had taken but want[ing] to find a new course that everyone could support.”23 In this strain, we find a muting of the internecine aspects of centrist rhetoric within the Democratic Party and an attempt to claim an ethos of the center in terms of a broader problem of partisan division that implicated both left and right in a similar “evasion” of popular opinion.

See from the Center, See beyond the “Particular Myopias of Left and Right”

The same month that Clinton went to Cleveland to speak before the DLC in his role as chair of the organization and in what was billed as a presidential pageant of sorts, E. J. Dionne’s book Why Americans Hate Politics appeared in bookstores calling for a “new center” in American politics. An essayist and journalist who had covered the DLC for the New York Times, Dionne wrote of the “particular myopias of left and right [through which] American politics came to be mired in a series of narrow ideological battles at a time when much larger issues were at stake.”24 Political factions, said Dionne, had become too short-sighted to see beyond their own limited domains and grievances. Left and right had waged combat in ways that had frozen—“mired,” as if in partisan muck—politics, making deliberation increasingly difficult. The leadership of both parties had come to embrace an unsustainable conception of democracy, argued Dionne, that “fails us and leads us to hate politics because it insists on stifling yes/no, either/or approaches that ignore the elements that must come together to create a successful democratic civic culture.”25 Calling to our attention the existence of a public “weary of a politics of confrontation,” Dionne senses in their exhaustion an

inchoate demand for a new center that will draw on the lessons of the last thirty years by way of moving the country forward . . . a demand for an end to the ideological confrontations that are largely irrelevant to the 1990s. It is a demand for steadiness, for social peace, for broad tolerance, for more egalitarian economic policies, for economic growth. It is the politics of the restive majority, the great American middle.26

In his 2004 memoir, Bill Clinton would recall the initial impression made on him by Dionne’s “remarkable” book. He wrote that it had helped him to crystallize a message for the Democratic Party based on “breaking through all the either/or debates that dominated national public discourse.”27 While Dionne’s book did not openly align itself with any candidate or party, his notion of a “new center” that was “progressive in its view of government’s capacity” to remedy social and economic inequalities, while still “moderate in its cultural attitudes,” was far more plausible as the platform for a Democratic agenda in 1992 than for a Republican one.28 And his verdict pronouncing the “inability of liberals to articulate a coherent sense of the national interests” or to address “legitimate sources of middle-class anger” was echoed by a host of books published around this time that supported the DLC’s diagnosis of the Democrats’ central task in the 1990s.29

The importance of these books resides in how each helped to build a context of discourse to validate and bring greater recognition to the premises about the party and the electorate that underwrote the centrist rhetoric that Clinton would later carry into the primary. Indeed, as the players in the struggle for the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination began to make their intentions known, the DLC’s message was gaining increased exposure and credibility. Distinct in emphasis, each book nevertheless helped to validate and magnify in multiple ways the DLC’s concerns about the future of the Democratic Party. Most importantly, however, each presented a scenario whereby a diagnosis of the Democrats’ particular problems could give way to something far larger.

As From put it in 1990, the goal of the DLC was “to make the Mainstream Movement the dominant force in national politics. The first step towards that goal is to make it the dominant force in the Democratic Party.”30 This work of using the center rhetorically to offer a new politics apart from the partisan, and apart from existing doubts about the party itself, dominates Clinton’s speech at the DLC’s Annual Convention in Cleveland on May 7, 1991.

Bruce Reed remembers Clinton scrapping his prepared remarks just moments before taking the stage to deliver what was the meeting’s keynote address. In place of a formal text, “he simply wrote down 20 key words on a piece of paper and built his speech around those 20 words.”31 While we do not have access to these words, we know that Clinton would later recall their finished, oratorical product as

one of the most effective and important [speeches] I ever made. It captured the essence of what I had learned in seventeen years in politics and what millions of Americans were thinking. It became the blueprint for my campaign message. . . . By embracing ideas and values that were both liberal and conservative, it made voters who had not supported Democratic presidential candidates in years listen to our message . . . the speech established me as perhaps the leading spokesman for the course I passionately believed America should embrace.32

As proof of the “rousing reception it received,” Clinton offers how “several people at the convention urged me to run for President” after hearing it and that this response convinced him that he “had to consider entering the race.”33 Coverage of the speech suggests the accuracy of this assessment. In an otherwise skeptical story on the success of the DLC’s meeting overall, for example, the Economist declared that amidst a range of other possible presidential contenders, Clinton emerged as the “unquestioned star of Cleveland,” adding that to his “boyish charm he has now added the ability to deliver a rousing speech.”34 The Associated Press quoted a “major party fund raiser” who called the speech “toe-tingling” and a Democratic strategist for a former presidential candidate who judged it “the best Democratic speech I’ve heard in 10 years.”35

Such accolades were not isolated. They attest to how the DLC keynote speech effectively drew positive attention to the prospect of Clinton serving as the party’s nominee, making him an early favorite. In his role as the chair of a group openly critical of the party, however, this prospect would take on a distinct character in the emerging narrative defining Clinton’s political identity as a major party candidate. When coverage in the New York Times called Clinton “the man most clearly in the spotlight” at the event, for example, it was in terms of his rhetorical ability to propose something “new” for Democrats. He had, reporter Robin Toner put it, “argued eloquently throughout the session for a ‘new choice’ that does not abandon the party’s traditional commitment to the poor . . . but that is able to sell itself as the advocate of the middle class as well—and thus return to power.”36 Clinton is here distinguished by the ability of his eloquence to balance “commitments” made to potentially opposed constituencies in the Democratic Party, while doing so in a winning way. This is, of course, a version of the DLC claim that, as Galston and Kamarck put it, the “Democratic Party can recapture the middle without losing its soul.”37 And yet, Clinton’s answer in Cleveland to the party’s electoral problems revealed, in fact, an expansion of this vector of centrist rhetoric, one that made “recapturing the middle” less into an ostensibly simple matter of more accurately assessing and tapping into the preferences of the electorate than of saving the nation from a kind of partisanship that had degraded its political culture and alienated citizens from their government.

A Centrist Blueprint for Renewal: “Address to the DLC Annual Convention, May 6, 1991”

Clinton begins by defining the occasion of his discourse as one that offers great promise for the party and for the nation: “We are being given the chance to shape a new message for the Democratic Party, and to chart a new course for our country.”38 And yet, those gathered—the “we” that is the DLC and its allies—are immediately reminded that this “chance” is slim. Clinton grants, for example, that his audience has surely “read all the people who say that the Democratic Party is dead.” He then uses a recent New Republic magazine headline (“Democratic Coma”) as a sign of this pessimism, hinting at its dramatic pitch. Clinton manages to call such pessimism into question, however, with an interesting set of proofs that say little about the Democratic Party per se (and that might even serve to bolster existing doubts about it) but that actually serve to juxtapose, and so perhaps to accentuate, its weakness against the strength of the DLC as a political force based on a “new choice.”

Clinton rejects such despair over the future of the Democrats as the leader of the DLC, of “our DLC.” This positioning in defense of the party places him—like the organization itself—in a locus of address that is neither too close to the party to be implicated in its current failures, nor too far from the party to seem untouched by them, unable to reverse them, or unauthorized to define a new course of action. Thus, Clinton rejects this despair not because of anything the party has done, but because of the DLC’s strong membership base—“over 600 Federal, State, and local elected officials, people who are brimming with ideas and energy”—and because though the current Republican president is popular, “all is not well in America.”

This start inspires a set of related movements. Clinton will go on to define the DLC’s centrist approach as the single answer both to the electoral problems of the Democratic Party and to a series of partisan divisions that have hindered national politics. He arranges an argument that makes the latter—national political renewal—seem irresolvable without effecting the former—the birth of a “new” Democratic Party—and, furthermore, that makes the former seem destined to lead to the latter. But this rhetorical sequencing cannot gain traction without an appropriate and effective narrative to give exigency to these problems without inviting identification with the various motives of concern, anger, and frustration that underscore Clinton’s case for what he will call a “new choice.”

Thus the first major movement of the speech segues from a lament about the Democrats to an account of national decline or, more specifically, of growing weakness in comparison to America’s peers. Many countries “do a better job than we do” in ranking after ranking, from infant mortality rates to education to health care. And yet, such troubling truths go undiscussed because the nation’s politics is now “a fantasy world” in which major problems cannot be acknowledged. Thus, Clinton argues, while the fate of the Democrats has preoccupied the press, what is far more important is “the future of America.” Serious questions about this future are what Clinton “joined the DLC to find answers to,” thus reinforcing national renewal as the predicate of Democratic renewal, while making the DLC the active subject of both.

At the same time, as the speech begins to fill out its narrative of national decline under the leadership the Republican Party in the 1980s—for example, CEOs cheating their workers, exploding numbers of “poor women and their little children”—Clinton quickly injects another question into the mix: “Why in the world haven’t the Democrats been able to take advantage of these conditions?” This question would seem to assume the at least partial validity of the very criticisms Clinton had earlier said were exaggerated. And it does, except that Clinton raises it not to express panic or alarm with the “comatose” state of Democrats, but to direct attention to a specific answer that, in turn, will suggest a specific solution, one that will be of strategic value to the Democrats and of transformative significance for the nation’s politics.

Much like in the “Politics of Evasion” the first answer offered for the Democrats’ failure involves paying more attention to “the people that used to vote for us, the very burdened middle class.” Such voters have lost trust in the party on issues of defense, social values, and fiscal policy, and this loss demands an immediate effort to “turn these perceptions around, or we cannot continue as a national party.” Still, Clinton insists that such an effort is actually not the most important issue that faces those gathered in the audience. What is most important is that the country needs “at least one political party that is not afraid to tell the people the truth . . . one political party that does not want to be the hunter or the hunted on those 30-second negative ads that have turned so many people off.”

There are two items of note in this arrangement of priorities. First, Clinton reinforces the DLC’s “neither too close, nor too far” position relative to the party with the suggestion that Democrats and Republicans have both failed to be the party of truth. Second, in placing the strategic imperative to win back support alongside the moral one to “tell the truth” and to stop the “negative ads” that presumably lead to apathy, Clinton seems to be saying two contradictory things. On the one hand, there is a kind of “truth” that strikes fear into ordinary politicians, for to tell it would be to risk their chances of reelection. On the other hand, he claims to have a way to approach this same “truth” that will bring back the very voters who had long since fled the party. To resolve this implicit contradiction, Clinton will chart a path of turning “these perceptions around” based in a certain way of addressing the “truth” of the nation’s challenges that promises access to a new, and unmediated-by-partisan-politics, civic reality.

Along these lines, Clinton’s speech will demand not merely a courageous owning up to the “truth” of the nation’s problems by those who have caused or ignored them. It will call, more subtly, for a new way to define, communicate, and propose solutions to such problems that transcends the reigning categories and paradigms of political division:

We have got to have a message that touches everybody, that makes sense to everybody, that goes beyond the stale orthodoxies of left and right, one that resonates with the real concerns of ordinary Americans, with their hopes and their fears. That is what we are here in Cleveland to do.

While Clinton earlier applauded the party chair’s attempt to “reach out to the middle class,” this particular call for a new “message” reaches beyond any specific group. Nor does the hoped-for “resonance” of such a message with “everybody” or with the “real concerns of ordinary Americans” depend on any clearly defined principle or discovery. Such a “message” will gain support because it will offer all voters a different kind of politics than that to which they are accustomed. Such a politics will be fresh, not “stale,” heterodox, not “orthodox,” centrist, not “left” or “right.” Grounded in a certain assumption about the nature of the problem they face, Clinton thus calls for a recalibration of how Democrats imagine themselves and their goals. This reassessment requires his audience to put labels like “left” and “right” behind them and to reevaluate the appropriateness of the party’s tie to any single location on the ideological grid.

After setting out the nature of his party’s “message” problem as its allegiance to “stale orthodoxies of left and right” that no longer matter, Clinton quickly points the way forward: a “new choice that is simple, that offers opportunity, demands responsibility, gives citizens more say, provides them responsive government—all because we recognize that we are a community.” The priorities—from “opportunity” to “community”—that comprise the solution are necessarily vague. Though ostensibly unmoored to any specific ideology, this vagueness makes such priorities vulnerable to a range of insertions into a left/right or liberal/conservative political scheme. This is a concern, because the existing “message” problem that the “new choice” is supposed to resolve focuses on a similar kind of vulnerability. If Democrats have proven so susceptible to caricature, one can surmise it is partly because they have ineffectively tailored the discourse that defines their identity to hold back such caricatures. A brief consideration of how Clinton defines and arranges the components of the “new choice” therefore can reveal how his rhetoric aims to narrow its range of possible responses, to forestall being locked into left or right, and to align each term with another into a kind of systematic coherence that one could call a “choice” among other possibilities.

With the claim that “opportunity for all means first and foremost a commitment to economic growth,” Clinton begins to move between two levels of address. On one level, he repeatedly affirms the DLC’s commitment to broadly accepted principles of economic and social thought in the United States. For example, the belief that “growth” is the foremost way to ensure greater “opportunity” speaks to an enduring tenet of liberal capitalism largely embraced by both parties. On another level, however, Clinton defines the terms that comprise the “new choice” in contrast to (and in light of possible objections from) left and right. This movement between levels gives his centrist alternative the ability, presumptively, to synthesize and balance the best of both left and right, while ferreting out the worst, including those elements that exacerbate political division.

For example, against possible charges from the right that “opportunity for all” means simply redistributing wealth to the poor, Clinton counters that the DLC believes that “the government ought to help the middle class as well as the poor.” Against charges from the left that the DLC’s economic policies threaten Democrats’ commitment to labor and to the environment, Clinton suggests that these are not mutually exclusive commitments. Thus, although making increased international trade a centerpiece of the DLC’s “opportunity” agenda might encourage labor instability or incur negative environmental consequences, Clinton argues that we need not sacrifice growth for fairness or for a clean planet. Rather, we “ought to demand that when we expand [trade] our workers get treated fairly and the global environment is enhanced, not torn apart.” A similar pattern of strategically arranging values and policy ends in opposed pairs that are then transcended emerges in what follows. Clinton’s exposition of key terms through example and anecdote, as well as his arrangement of their meanings sequentially and inferentially, will strive for a transcendence of left and right that will also be an apparent harmonizing of the best of both.

For in addition to the various meanings used to calibrate the individual terms that comprise the “new choice”—that is, “opportunity,” “responsibility,” “responsive government,” and “community”—the text relies upon additional operations of contrast, qualification, and comparison between them. These operations work to arrange the terms so that each will complement the other in order to form a coherent picture of the party’s new identity. Thus, Clinton issues the following caveat as he segues from “opportunity” to “responsibility”: “opportunity for all is not enough, for if you give opportunity without insisting on responsibility, much of the money can be wasted, and the country’s strength can still be sapped.” In this passage, the success of “opportunity for all” hinges on the political ability to manage and distribute properly “responsibility” among this “all.” The advocates of the “new choice” will have to find ways to encourage the adoption of one value in order to keep the other in tune, so to speak, rather than pushing for one at the expense of the other. The skill of balancing potentially competing aims apart from their insertion into a partisan frame is what seems to be at stake. For instance, Clinton argues that while “we should invest more money in people on welfare to give them the skills they need,” and while he has supported “budgets for the division of children and family services . . . for every conceivable program” for over a decade, these kinds of “opportunities” must entail matching movements associated with “responsibility”—for example, greater limits on eligibility and an insistence that parents who receive aide “assume their responsibilities” or else be “forced to do it if they refuse.”

As Clinton finishes elaborating his “new choice” using similar operations to define the terms “choice,” “government,” and “community,” he abruptly turns to his audience with both a declaration and a question:

Our new choice plainly rejects the old categories and false alternatives they impose. Is what I just said to you liberal or conservative? The truth is, it is both, and it is different. It rejects the Republicans’ attacks and the Democrats’ previous unwillingness to consider new alternatives.

Key to this passage is how it ties together all that precedes it in terms of an ethic of centrist defiance. Said otherwise, a conviction in the rightness and value of defying conventional political labels is what sustains what Clinton earlier calls the “choice that Democrats can ride to victory on.”

Standing in the way of this centrist “choice” is not any specific proposition or group that Democrats can unite against. The adversary consists instead of the existing framework of habits and classifications through which propositions in the political world achieve salience. If such propositions threaten to remain hemmed in by the “old” categories we typically use to assess them, ones that in their ostensible failure to adjust to new circumstances tend to leave citizens with only “false” choices, Clinton’s argument is meant to offer a “different” option. In subsequently offering debates about “civil rights” and “poor children” as examples of controversies for which partisan hardening has lead to polarization and predictability, Clinton suggests that each is amenable to the DLC’s approach. In each case, it is precisely how these issues become “either/or” matters of partisan identity—for example, either you support helping businesses fight costly and frivolous lawsuits or you support expanding individual rights to sue businesses for discrimination, either you support “family values” or you support more funding to feed hungry children—that the “new choice” defies, and in this defiance seeks to bolster its case both for its “newness” and for its potential as a governing philosophy and electoral strategy.

Aside from grounding a stance against our continued reliance on the “old” partisan categories, the center assumes additional importance in the speech: It motivates and moralizes scenes of survival and hardship that seem to defy partisan explanation or resolution. Such scenes serve to testify to the need for a “new choice.” The warrant for connecting the need for a “new choice” to the need to reject the “false alternatives” of left and right achieves presence through Clinton’s ability to bring together two narratives. Each narrative provides a distinct proof for the practical irrelevance of stock answers from either major party to the problems of actual people, and each is key to enhancing Clinton’s ethotic power.

From the principle that what is needed is an approach to policy that goes beyond these stock answers, since, for example, “family values will not feed a hungry child, but you cannot raise that hungry child very well without them,” Clinton segues directly to a story of his own impoverished childhood:

When I was a little boy, I was raised by my grandparents, with a lot of help from my great-grandparents. My great-grandparents lived out in the country in about a two-room shack up on stilts. The best room on the place was the storm cellar, which was a hole in the ground, where I used to spend the night with a coal oil lantern and snakes. And they got government commodities—that is what we called it back then—help from the government. They did a heck of a job with what they had. My granddaddy ran a country store in a black neighborhood in a little town called Hope, Arkansas, and there were no food stamps, so when his black customers, who worked hard for a living, came in with no money, he gave them food anyway and just made a note of it. He knew that he was part of a community. They believed in family values. They believed in personal responsibility. But they also believed that the government had an obligation to help people who were doing the best they can. And we made it.

What can we make of the function of this story in the speech? Clearly, it involves the use of a first-person narrative for political effect. And yet while this kind of move usually entails the speaker’s establishing some kind of identification with an audience, things seem different here. Indeed, it would seem odd to imagine Clinton deploying the tokens of his poor and rural upbringing (the “two-room shack,” the snake-filled “hole in the ground” that Clinton used to sleep in as a boy, the magnanimous “granddaddy [who] ran a country store,” etc.) in order to say “I am like you” to those gathered or to create an “ideal” auditor with which they can relate. Rather, Clinton’s family story provides him with the canvas for a specific political thematization that is quite different.

First, the quotidian character and earthy tone of the images seem abrupt given what has come before; such an account thus quickly diverts the speech into a territory in which the speaker’s authority springs not from his political standing, but from an intimate knowledge of his own childhood. From this starting point in the vividly personal, in the interior world of a speaker who asks us to consider how he lived as a “little boy,” Clinton will then make two related moves. The first involves making the “help from the government” received by his great-grandparents lead into the business successes of his grandparents which have presumably afforded Clinton himself the means to rise above his station. The second involves interpreting this intergenerational story of progress in terms of the exact kind of synthesis and balancing of values contained in the “new choice.” Clinton himself becomes the product of transcendence, insofar as his immediate forebears were recipients of “opportunity” who valued their place in a “community,” all the while believing in “family values” and “personal responsibility.” In this way, the story serves to transform the inhabitants of Clinton’s past into the coin of his message. They are asked to demonstrate via illustration a certain principle: the beliefs increasingly held by partisans to be exclusive can and must be reconciled and, further, such reconciliation is precisely what has allowed the most vulnerable Americans in the past to succeed against difficult odds.

At the same time, when seen not simply as the punctuation that follows what has come before, but as the prelude for what will follow, another aspect of Clinton’s narrative comes into relief. For while the story of Clinton’s ancestors and his childhood may seem a curiously anachronistic way to make the case for a “new choice,” its importance makes sense once we see it as one side of a rhetorically salient contrast. Indeed, after finishing his first story, Clinton pivots immediately to this one:

If you contrast [my childhood] to the situation that exists in so much of America today, it is truly shocking. My wife and I were in Los Angeles a year and a half ago, in south-central L.A. in one of the drug-dominated areas, and we spent an hour and a half with a dozen sixth-graders, most of whom had never met their grandparents, could only imagine what a great-grandparent was, and one of them even told me he thought he may have to turn his own parents in for drug abuse. And do you know what those kids were worried about? They were worried first about getting shot going to and from school, and second, they were most worried that when they turned 13 they would have to join a gang and do crack or they would get the living daylights beat out of them.

The “shocking” contrast Clinton evokes by juxtaposing these two narratives raises both a question of cause—how did the dire “situation that exists in so much of America today” come about?—and a question of response—how can this situation be repaired? Along these lines, Clinton’s artfully crafted picture of his youth works as the setup for a jarring reminder that things are not so anymore. Having established himself in the first story as one who knows the pain of poverty, Clinton offers his second story with the implicit suggestion that he can identify with its subjects, and therefore can uniquely grasp their plight. And what Clinton sees is that rather than being cared for like he was, these children are alienated from their families, vulnerable, and hounded by drugs and violence. The implication is that while Clinton’s family hardships were eventually vindicated as difficult chapters in an otherwise inspiring story of progress, American politics at the dawn of the millennium offers no such hope for these children. On the contrary, it fails them, and though one might alight on any number of cultural or social reasons for this failure, Clinton chooses to focus on one that seems to trump them all.

The specific failure Clinton points to concerns the intensification of a perennial problem in any representative democracy—the gap between representatives and the people they are tasked to represent. And yet, Clinton does not simply call on Democrats to address this problem by listening more to their constituents, but by listening differently. He implies that they have become prey to a partisan language which cannot measure up to the challenges faced by the struggling citizens they claim to represent:

Now let me tell you something, friends. Those people do not care about the rhetoric of left and right and liberal and conservative and who is up and who is down and how we are positioned. They are real people, they have real problems, and they are crying desperately for someone who believes the purpose of government is to solve their problems and make progress, instead of posturing around and waiting for the next election. . . . Those people do not care about the idle rhetoric that has paralyzed American politics. They want a new choice, and they deserve a new choice, and we ought to give it to them.

This passage weaves together several distinct characterizations of partisan rhetoric in order to discredit its value and relevance. First, such rhetoric is seen as foreign to the concerns and the cares of the people it claims to serve. Indeed, they do not care about it at all. Second, the passage arranges the master terms of this rhetoric—“left and right and liberal and conservative”—into a compact list with no internal differentiations or stipulations, suggesting that each is as good or as bad as the other. This calls into question the motives behind, and even the purpose of, partisan debate in the first place. Composed of interchangeable parts with little purpose except to distract from solving problems, such debates seem to make problem solving harder than it otherwise might be. Third, Clinton continues questioning the relevance of such debates by playing them against the needs of “real people” with “real problems,” implying that the problems that are deemed important in the agon of left and right are somehow made up or else pale in comparison to those experienced by people in the real world. Fourth, this disconnect from “real people” is linked to a kind of callousness; if “real people” are “crying desperately” for solutions, one can assume that these cries have gone unheard amidst the clamor of politicians “posturing around and waiting for the next election.” Fifth, whereas the image of short-term posturing for electoral advantage at least suggests action of some kind, the notion of an “idle rhetoric that has paralyzed American politics” hints at a dangerous affliction—a paralysis—caused by the rhetoric itself.

From this account of the meanings that cluster together to define what is clearly a climatic passage in the speech, we can extrapolate the speech’s answers to those questions of cause—what is behind the increasingly dismal state of American public life?—and of action—what is to be done?—raised earlier. On the one hand, the cause recalls the earlier “fantasy world” that Clinton blamed for the inability of politics to address the nation’s decline relative to its global competitors. This “fantasy” prevents leaders from seeing “real problems,” allows for their “posturing” to count as debate, and underwrites their deafness to the cries of the people themselves. On the other hand, the action that is required involves puncturing this “fantasy” by making visible and unacceptable the habits and structures of partisan division that maintain it. For if they persist, Clinton argues, it will mean that “we [have permitted] national politics to continue in its present irrelevant track for 10, or 20, or 30 years,” placing the American Dream itself at risk. And yet the confidence that such fate can be avoided, Clinton argues, is itself a distinctly American attribute. It blends a fundamental belief that the future can always be better with the conviction that “every one of us has a personal, moral responsibility to make it so.” A reaffirmation of this American creed, for Clinton, “is what the new choice is all about. That is what we are here in Cleveland to do. We are not here to save the Democratic Party. We are here to save the United States of America.”

With this return to his initial statement of the dual purpose of the Cleveland meeting, Clinton closes his speech with the suggestion that the “we” of which he speaks has a unique obligation to carry it out. This closing, which enmeshes its “we” in a mix of partisan and national identities, raises questions about the character of the transcendence it promises. In a word, how did the DLC’s rendering of the space beyond left and right—its use of the center as a ballast to define its political identity against partisan division—match with the organization’s more immediate goal of securing greater leverage in the party by electing one of its own to the presidency in 1992?

Defining the Center: Strategic Tensions in the Production of Transcendence

There’s a hole in our politics where our sense of common purpose used to be.39

The “Politics of Evasion” and Clinton’s keynote address at the Cleveland convention each argued for a revitalization of the United States’ oldest political party. From a waning institution weakened by infighting and ideological stagnation, the Democratic Party would become a force for political leadership beyond left and right. By abandoning “myths” about the electorate and by moving beyond the categorical nature of partisan political thinking, the revitalized Democrats would help Americans recover “our sense of common purpose.” While the precise meaning and end of this “purpose” was ambiguous, Clinton’s use of the image of a “hole” to give urgency to its absence suggests that this ambiguity stems mainly from the differing character and consequence of the imagined center deemed missing in each text.

In the first text, the center was lost because the Democratic Party, since the McGovern landslide loss of 1972, had ostensibly retreated from the reality of national politics into a world of “evasion.” By allowing partisan dogma to supplant a proper grasp of the desires, perceptions, and values of the majority, party liberals had revealed themselves to be unsuited to the task of winning elections, according to Galston and Kamarck, and to the task of governing. Grounded in a distinction between liberal “myths” and empirical “reality,” between those Democrats who are subject to the former and those who are in command of the latter, the “Politics of Evasion” evokes a center marked, in the end, by its fidelity to political reality. The labor to produce transcendence is accomplished contrastively. The core charge of “evasion” works to undermine Democrats’ credibility on a host of questions, thereby positioning the DLC in the realm of the “reality” being evaded. As debunkers of partisan “myths,” Galston and Kamarck’s claim to the center, in effect, is a claim to speak for reality itself in the midst of its ostensible distortion by others. Against a party leadership whose character for honesty, good faith argument, accuracy, and moral judgment they found wanting, the New Democrats defined their centrist identity in terms of truthfulness, openness to disagreement, empirical analysis, and identification with “mainstream values.”

In the Clinton speech, the loss of the center is described in a more historically and civically expansive manner: It becomes an event that jeopardizes the future of U.S. democracy, not simply the future of the Democrats. And while Clinton faults his own party for this loss, the contrastive “other” against which he builds his credibility as a centrist is more abstract than in the first text. Clinton links the binary divisions of political discourse—right/left, liberal/conservative, and so on—to increasingly negative, political, social, and economic effects. In opposition to this structure that threatens the nation—“We are here to save the United States of America” is the closing line of the speech—Clinton introduces notions about the political character of those who would move “beyond the stale orthodoxies of left and right” to embrace the DLC’s “new choice,” and those who would not. Clinton’s speech evokes a middle peopled by those who have the perceptual clarity to grasp a new kind of political complexity, “who are brimming with ideas and energy . . . actually solving problems, and somehow getting the electoral support they need to go forward,” and who have the sense to see that “we really are all in this together.” By contrast, what he calls “the idle rhetoric that has paralyzed American politics” is mastered by those who cling to simplistic partisan-based approaches to problems and thus, instead of being good at responding to the cries of the people, are good at little more than “posturing around and waiting for the next election.” In each text, however, we find clues to lurking problems that arise alongside this ethotic trajectory, ones that tie back to the means of using the center to picture a clear, undistorted mode of democratic representation.

In its attempt to reassure voters who had become skeptical of the Democratic Party, the DLC made an explicit rhetorical commitment to turn away from the Democrats’ recent past. This attempt to reassure pulled in two directions. On the one hand, to construct a Democratic ethos consistent with the “move to the center” meant relying on proofs that conjured the fiction of a univocal, mainstream electorate with which the party had “lost touch.” As an object of discourse, this fictional unity takes shape indirectly in both texts through the use of public opinion survey data, analyses of shifting demographic trends, narratives of historical-political processes, civic exemplars, and personal anecdotes. Manifesting itself specifically in terms of a “forgotten middle class” that is “crying desperately” for representation, a “people” in whose name a New Democrat presidential candidate will speak comes forth in this rhetoric. On the other hand, creating an ethos to match the “move to the center” also involved operations at a different level of discourse. These operations used the center as a topos from which to construct a politics based less on its identification with a singular voice of the people than on its emphasis on contingency and ideological diversity as civic goods. Pulled in this direction, the ethotic requirement entailed constructing a party identity that seemed amenable, unlike the existing one, in Galston and Kamarck’s words, “to adjust to changing circumstances by adopting new means to achieve traditional ends.”40 In contrast to remaining caught in an obsolete left-right configuration of political difference in which every public statement can be classified as advancing one side or opposing the other, to “move to the center” could signify a collectively “upward” civic movement away from the anxieties, frustrations, and looming dangers of increasing partisanship. If, as the DLC’s 1991 convention platform stated, “the old ideologies on the right and left are no longer sufficient to realize the aspirations of the American people,” such a claim suggested that these aspirations required a different kind of politics, one that promised Americans a form of political deliberation with partisan transcendence as its hallmark and consensual agreement as its core purpose.41 Centrist rhetoric’s mode of accruing credibility was grounded in how the DLC constructed its vision of enhanced democratic representation in terms of bringing together these two discursive paths. And yet, it is exactly in this convergence, that problems arise.

We can begin to understand the origin of these problems functionally, by noticing how centrist rhetoric’s transcendent democratic vision for the Democratic Party frequently intermingled with—and served as the crucial variable for achieving—the DLC’s primary goal from its inception, indeed the one that From and others used to convince Bill Clinton to lead the group in the first place: find a way for a Democrat to win a presidential election. From recalls telling Clinton in 1989: “Have I got a deal for you. If you take the DLC chairmanship, we will give you a national platform, and I think you will be the President of the United States.”42 Centrist rhetoric emerged from, and was constrained by, a distinct set of exigencies and incentives related to this goal.

In terms of material exigencies, the DLC needed to secure financial backing appropriate to its aims, and yet had to do so apart from any widespread popular support or even recognition of its existence. The flight of white voters from the Democrats demanded, too, that appropriate and efficient solutions be offered to this problem for any prospective potential candidate. In turn, such exigencies carried with them corresponding incentives. For instance, in terms of securing financing for its efforts to support a New Democrat “standard bearer” for president, there were certainly incentives for the DLC to favor appeals tailored to business interest lobbies—not quite the image of “real people with real problems” suggested in its rhetoric—because such groups could efficiently and immediately provide the kind of dollars that could bolster the group’s capacity for greater influence and sway among elected officials. And, in terms of race and culture, one obvious incentive for highlighting the party’s ostensible neglect of white voters or its “obsession with race” is that such framing resonated with a powerful narrative of white grievance that had played a significant role in the presidential losses the Democrats had sustained.

As rhetorical constraints and incentives operating at the time, these contextual elements were not merely functionally determinative. They were constitutively important; meeting them meant the explicit and tacit imposition of boundaries on the scope and breadth of centrist rhetoric’s democratic vision. In order to achieve the New Democrats’ electoral and ideological goals, the space beyond left and right had to be defined accordingly. Considered in relation to such goals, we see how the “hopeful new politics” for the DLC did not mean one defined by voters—there was, in reality, no “mainstream movement”—but for them. What this obvious, yet crucial, truth directs attention toward are the rhetorical limits placed on identification with this “new politics” and on the extent of the DLC’s institutional commitment to enhancing the quality and authenticity of democratic representation.

Such limits can become visible, first of all, by noticing how members defined and described what they were actually trying to do. What one later touted as their “intellectual leveraged buyout” of the Democratic Party, implied that, as one reporter put it in an apt extension of this analogy, the New Democrats were acting as arbitrageurs trying to sell “off unprofitable mind-sets to produce a lean and efficient philosophy” for the party to run on.43 Indeed, the language of high-stakes finance is itself quite appropriate here, for it accurately characterizes the centralized manner in which the DLC operated as an organization.

While the DLC used appeals to the center to push change in a vital and historically significant institution of U.S. political culture, it did so almost entirely from the top down. While its members spoke often of the insularity and out-of-touchness of the party’s liberal interest groups, they were themselves part of a political operation steered by elites. From its inception with seed money from a small cadre of lobbyists, to its multimillion dollar annual budget by 1992, the DLC’s sources for monetary support were also quite narrow. They came largely from interests in the financial sector, as well as from the defense, pharmaceutical, and tobacco industries.44 Free from the regulations on donor reporting and maximum contributions that governed official parties, the New Democrats forged intimate ties with leading business interests who not only funded the DLC, but whose representatives were granted the privilege—much like delegates to a party convention might be—to vote on the group’s platform during the same annual meetings at which these texts were delivered.45 Thus, as John Murphy has argued, the case of the DLC’s success illustrates a “troubling feature of contemporary democracy” in which a small group of privately funded political operatives managed to “take over a major political party absent any sort of widespread support.”46

There is clearly a strategic tension at work here. The DLC’s principal claim to be more “in sync” with the electorate than both major parties implied substantive distance from political elites of both left and right. At the same time, it was not only an organization built by and for elites struggling to maintain power, but also one whose very reason for being was tied to developing a national political strategy for achieving this end—in particular, for electing a president. For example, in 1991 the DLC chartered several state chapters and then organized them under the rubric of a “mainstream movement” whose basic purpose was, according to one DLC staff member, “to provide ‘the troops’ to elect a New Democratic candidate to the presidency.” The idea, according to Baer, was not to expand the DLC into “a large, broad-based popular movement” but rather to present the “appearance of grassroots support for the organization and its public philosophy” in time for the 1992 presidential election when, in fact, such popular support was more hope than reality.47

This kind of activity, the kind in which tropes of mass support are being used in suspect ways, leaves the group vulnerable to the charge that its promotion of a more democratically responsive politics beyond left and right was itself a major “evasion” of its own contradictions. Such an evasion can be understood as a mechanism for furthering elite power, a way to obscure the DLC’s ties to a small group of economic and political interests for whom the “move to the center” was less about democratic renewal or effective representation, and more about simply “rebranding” the Democratic Party as if it were a hamburger for voters to consume, rather than an engine for political renewal. As a DLC member and then–U.S. senator from Florida put it of the Democrats’ troubles at the time, “People are increasingly forming their partisan identifications by what they see on television. . . . And when they look at our fast food franchise and they look at the Republicans’ fast food franchise on television, their selecting to buy their hamburgers from another stand.”48 From the angle at which claiming to have “moved to center” and claiming to have the better of two hamburger stands become interchangeable, we can begin to see the particular problem in centrist rhetoric in these cases that exists, nevertheless, in the service of a political solution.

The DLC’s vision of a politics beyond left and right was compromised, in short, by the manner and mode in which it was advanced. Given rhetorical presence and urgency in the service of redefining the identity of the party, and thus the quality of its rhetorical ethos, this vision becomes hedged significantly as it strives to serve this objective in both the texts. To be clear, what I have in mind is a contradiction, less than a concealment. It is not that centrist rhetoric disguises the DLC’s particular political motives behind a façade of concern for the general well-being, or that this rhetoric might serve as pseudo-democratic ornamentation for a democracy under strain. Such charges can lead one to surmise, along with Normon Solomon, that centrism was merely part of a “politics of illusion in the Clinton era” that celebrated moderation in the interest of a “national politics that absolutely relies on deception as a mode of governance” and thus serves to underwrite political alienation and an economic system that benefits the few over the many.49 Rather, I see the claim to the center in these texts less in terms of the contradictions such a claim disguises, and more in terms of the contradictions it unleashes for rhetorical effect and then asks audiences to resolve in the name of the DLC’s move to change the party and take back the presidency. I want to conclude with an elaboration of this point.

Conclusion

In late 1999, founder Al From published a piece in the New Democrat magazine urging reflection on the group’s accomplishments. He claimed that after “decades in the political wilderness, President Clinton and the New Democrats now define and occupy the vital center of American politics, where presidential elections are won and lost.”50 A text aimed at arguing the case for the continued viability of the New Democrats’ centrist political strategy, it resonates with the two I have already analyzed. What is interesting and distinctive, however, is how this particular construal of the “vital center” disengages the trope from the presumptively nonrhetorical status it carries most often in New Democrat discourse, and instead acknowledges its rhetorical character.

The “vital center” elsewhere is presumed to escape partisan manipulation because of its independence from the politics of left and right. In such a “neither left, nor right” space the center itself occupies an exceptional space; it is beyond such struggle. What From’s celebratory passage recalls, however, is that the acts of definition and occupation that strive to make the center seem beyond politics must themselves be purposed for rhetorical struggle toward certain ends. The ethotic requirements of the “move to the center” laid out by Clinton reflects one implication of such a purposing. It encouraged centrist Democrats to invent a character suited to a “new politics” of more responsive and effective representation of the electorate, while also arguing as if the electorate were simply awaiting representation from those who could hear its cries. By appealing to a preformed, univocal political subject—for example, the “forgotten middle class,” the “real people with real problems,” and so on—in terms of the partisan failure to represent it fully, centrist rhetoric could, as a result, make deliberation appear either a secondary or an ancillary facet of democratic governance. As its presumptive consensus formed in opposition to partisan politics, the DLC invoked not only a polity beyond left and right, but also one seemingly detached from the need to engage in political debate in the first place.

As a defining discursive strategy of the New Democrats’ effort to create a winning presidential ethos for a Democrat in 1992, centrist rhetoric worked on the premise that going beyond partisan divisions could spark a renewal of democracy. Thus, on one level it equated certain rhetorical dispositions—for example, the ability to see complexity in the electorate, the capacity to think apart from established categories, and so on—with political transcendence. And yet, this path was enabled and given a sense of practical possibility by using the image of a consensus already beyond politics. In short, the implicit answer to a better form of representation was one with less deliberation toward achieving consensus and more approximation of an already-existing one. As such, the ethos involved in claiming a “move to the center” can merge with one suited more to advertising than to political debate.

To grasp what makes such an answer so problematic, however, is also to see the power of its allure. For its persuasiveness relies on citizens learning to reconcile a vision of their own capacity for achieving consensus with the static image of a presumptive, existing consensus claimed by elites for representation. Seen in this way, centrist rhetoric reveals itself to depend on an imagined public that exists beyond rhetorical controversy, rather than one that exists through rhetorical controversy. Or, more accurately, centrist rhetoric reveals in these cases how the promise of effective democratic representation through transcendence can make voters themselves seem superfluous as agents of such transcendence, since they are presumed to have already arrived at such a place. To think in this way, though, is to risk denying political discourse spaces for accepting the legitimacy of controversy; such thinking seems ill-equipped to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate forms of disagreement, instead lumping them all together. Dionne’s plague of “false polarizations” in which “the ideals and interests of the great mass of Americans in the political and economic center” have been hijacked by the “mischiefs of ideology” are only “false,” that is, from the vantage of a decidedly nonpolitical perspective in which the distinction between genuine and fabricated disagreements is deemed self-evident.51

The finer points of Dionne’s phrasing—“mass of Americans in the political and economic center”—are therefore telling. They suggest how appeals to the center can serve to simplify the rhetorically complex and contested nature of public opinion into something seemly obvious and empirically plain. This rhetorical simplification invites individual voters to see themselves more in terms of a public will defined by elected officials and party operatives than as active participants in the formation of such a will. From this vantage point, we can see how the two texts above proceeded via an interplay that affirmed both the pliability and the fixity of the political center.

Speaking in the name of a national, post-partisan consensus, Clinton and the New Democrats both celebrated and strategically limited the connotations of openness and flexibility associated with the center. An idealized locus of political exchange in which partisan identities are left (at least in principle) at the door and compromise can be found, the center in these also becomes a demographic “reality” to be researched and reached. Based in this particular understanding of the center as a static object, notions such as Clinton’s “new choice” become susceptible to a recurring split between their ability to produce arguments that seem to expand the range of democratic discourse beyond existing categories of division, and their corresponding tendency to underwrite political arguments that can move in the opposite direction as well. In the subsequent chapter, I explore this tendency by looking at how centrist rhetoric defined Clinton’s presidential candidacy as one that could, at once, appeal to whites disaffected with the Democratic Party, while helping the nation to overcome the politics of racial division.

Notes

1. Cited in Martin Walker, “Launch of a New Model Democrat,” Guardian, July 19, 1992, p. 22.

2. Jeff Faux, “The Myth of the New Democrat,” The American Prospect, September 21, 1993, pp. 20–27.

3. William A. Galston and Elaine Ciulla Kamarck, “The Politics of Evasion Revisited: Which Road for Democrats in 1992?” May 2, 1991, www.ndol.org/documents/evasion_92.pdf.

4. Al From, “Hey Mom—What’s a New Democrat? From the DLC, a Policy Primer for a Centrist Clinton,” Washington Post, June 6, 1993, C1.

5. Bruce Miroff, The Liberals’ Moment: The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007).

6. Jon F. Hale, “The Making of the New Democrats,” Political Science Quarterly 110 (1995): 207–32. National-House Democratic Caucus, Renewing America’s Promise: A Democratic Blueprint for Our Nation’s Future (Washington, DC: National-House Democratic Caucus, 1984), v.

7. E. J. Dionne, “Democrats Fashion Centrist Image in New Statement of Party Policy,” New York Times, October 20, 1986, A1.

8. Greg McDonald, “Nunn Is One of Leaders of New Democratic Political Group,” Atlanta Constitution, March 20, 1985, A3.

9. For a fuller account of the organization, see Kenneth S. Baer, Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001).

10. Stanley Greenberg, Middle Class Dreams: The Politics and Power of the New American Majority (New York: Times Books, 1995), 204.

11. Baer, Reinventing, 121.

12. John M. Murphy, “Review of Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton, by Kenneth S. Baer,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 4 (2001): 326–28.

13. William A. Galston and Elaine Ciulla Kamarck, “The Politics of Evasion: Democrats and the Presidency,” September 1989, www.ppionline.org/documents/Politics_of_Evasion.pdf. All references to “The Politics of Evasion” in this chapter come from this searchable version of the text, which is available freely online.

14. Galston and Kamarck, “The Politics of Evasion,” 2.

15. Galston and Kamarck, “The Politics of Evasion,” 2.

16. Galston and Kamarck, “The Politics of Evasion,” 19.

17. Baer, Reinventing, 130.

18. Galston and Kamarck, “The Politics of Evasion,” 2.

19. Galston and Kamarck, “The Politics of Evasion,” 3.

20. Galston and Kamarck, “The Politics of Evasion,” 19.

21. Hale, “The Making,” 209.

22. Thomas B. Edsall, “Jackson, Robb Tussle Over Democratic Strategy,” Washington Post, March 10, 1989, A4; E. J. Dionne Jr., “Party Told to Win Middle Class Vote,” New York Times, March 11, 1989.

23. Hale, “The Making,” 209.

24. E. J. Dionne, Why Americans Hate Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 331.

25. Dionne, Why Americans, 354.

26. Dionne, Why Americans, 345.

27. Bill Clinton, My Life (New York: Knopf, 2004), 366.

28. Dionne, Why Americans, 15. Because of Dionne’s work on this theme before his book was publicly cited by Clinton in his early campaign speeches, privately, the candidate sought the journalist’s advice. See Tom Rosenstiel, Strange Bedfellows: How Television and the Presidential Candidates Changed American Politics, 1992 (New York: Hyperion, 1993), 50–51.

29. Dionne, Why Americans, 144, 330. For related themes, see Peter Brown, Minority Party (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1991), and Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: Norton, 1991). Echoing similar themes was future Clinton speechwriter David Kusnet who published Speaking American: How the Democrats Can Win in the Nineties (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992).

30. Greenberg, Middle Class Dreams, 204.

31. David Maraniss, “For Man of May Words, the Power of ‘I Accept’; According to Top Aides, Clinton Is His Own Best Speechwriter,” Washington Post, July 16, 1992, A11.

32. Clinton, My Life, 366.

33. Clinton, My Life, 366.

34. “The White Men in Suits Move In,” Economist, May 11, 1991, p. 21.

35. John King, “Clinton’s Star Rises, as Does Cleveland’s,” Associated Press, May 8, 1991.

36. Robin Toner, “Democrat Session Previews ’92 Race,” New York Times, May 8, 1991, A18.

37. Galston and Kamarck, “The Politics of Evasion,” 19.

38. Bill Clinton, “Keynote Address of Gov. Bill Clinton to the Democratic Leadership Council’s Cleveland Convention,” May 6, 1991, www.ndol.org/print.cfm?contentid=3166. All references to keynote address in this chapter come from this searchable transcript of the speech.

39. Bill Clinton, “The New Covenant: Responsibility and Rebuilding the American Community,” October 23, 1991, www.ndol.org/print.cfm?contentid=2783.

40. Galston and Kamarck, “The Politics of Evasion,” 4.

41. “The New American Choice Resolution: Resolutions Adopted at the DLC Convention,” May 1, 1991, www.ndol.org/documents/cleveland_proclamation.pdf.

42. Baer, Reinventing, 165.

43. Lloyd Grove, “Al From, the Life of the Party; The Head of the Democratic Leadership DLC, Finding Victory in Moderation,” Washington Post, July 24, 1992, D1. On one hand, it seems a stretch to overstate the power of the DLC in this way. Even at the peak of its power, the DLC’s sway (intellectual and otherwise) over Democrats was never complete, but always limited by competing forces in the party, not to mention the protean political nature of its leading spokesman.

44. As William Greider points out, the DLC generated considerable support from companies such as Dow Chemical, Prudential-Bache, Martin Marietta, and others. At the 1991 convention in Cleveland, lobbyists from such companies were allowed to vote on resolutions brought before the group. Baer reports, too, how, as a 501(c)3 corporation funded largely by the tax-deductible contributions of its board of trustees, the PPI was financed by the likes of Michael Steinhardt, a hedge fund manager who “committed to donate $500,000 annually for three years. . . . In return, Steinhardt was made chairman of PPI’s Board of Trustees.” See William Greider, Who Will Tell the People? The Betrayal of American Democracy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 263. Baer, Reinventing, 137. On the Cleveland convention, see “The White Men in Suits Move In,” Economist, May 11, 1991, pp. 21–22.

45. Charles Babcock, “Democratic Conference Bankrolled: 100 Lobbyists Underwrite Annual Session of Moderates, Conservatives,” Washington Post, March 9, 1989, A11.

46. Murphy, “Review,” 327.

47. Baer, Reinventing, 176

48. MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, Educational Broadcasting and Greater Washington Educational Television Association, March 10, 1989, www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic.

49. Norman Solomon, False Hope: The Politics of Illusion in the Clinton Era (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1994), 160–61.

50. Al From, “The New Democrat Decade,” November 1, 1999, www.ndol.org/print.cfm?contentid=1008.

51. Dionne, Why Americans, 326.