10 to 20 more years

[excerpts from The Agenda]
"If you let 10 to 20 more years go on where the middle class keeps losing ground,...this won't be the America any of us grew up in."
--Bill Clinton. May, 1991

The Soviet threat was evaporating, and foreign policy would not play a big role in the campaign, he predicted. Instead, the economy would be the decisive issue. America's economic system was out of whack -- great for the wealthiest 20 percent, who were getting richer, but lousy for the other 80 percent, who were sinking or treading water. The working- and middle-class alienation could help him win in 1992. These groups constituted the vast majority of voters, and they felt insecure.

...Hillary Clinton watched the forces and ideas at work on her husband. ...He was indignant about what the Republican policies had done to the average person -- little or no wage increases, job insecurity, the fraying of the safety net. As governor, he had paid the price. He had told his wife once with some bitterness, "It would be great to be the president like Reagan, who cuts taxes so that every governor, including Republicans, had to raise them."

During a trip to Japan several years earlier, Hillary Clinton had overheard a conversation between her husband and a Japanese executive. "You could do a lot to stimulate your economy," the executive told Clinton, "if your executives in American industry weren't so greedy." Her husband replied that American executives were being given permission to grab the most at the top by the Reagan economic policies, which were designed so wealth would allegedly trickle down....

Professor Stanley B. Greenberg was devoted to studying the crisis in the Democratic Party and the defection of middle-class and working-class whites -- the so-called Reagan Democrats -- to Republican presidential candidates in the 1980s. These voters held the balance in national elections, and Greenberg argued that they wanted to return to their party, to come home. Party leaders had to reach out to this disaffected and forgotten middle class, which saw itself squeezed -- paying for programs for the poor and tax breaks for the wealthy, while getting little in return from government. The middle-class crisis presented an opportunity for the Democrats. Buried in the article, Greenberg also invoked the magic phrase "tax relief."

Later, when he asked Clinton for his reaction, the governor replied, "I've read it three times."

Clinton told Carville and Begala...that he was personally shy of a populist label. Populism seemed to him too anti-government and anti-business. He wanted to chart a course without reference to old labels. ...
----------- Begala had studied the strategies of Republican operative Lee Atwater and agreed with Atwater's analysis that politics was divided into populist and elitist issues. On social issues, Begala believed, the Democrats tended to take elitist positions and the Republicans populist ones; on economic issues, it was the reverse.

Both parties had nominated their elites in 1988 -- Dukakis and Bush. Neither man nor his ideas had been embraced by the public. The 1992 campaign had to be fought on economic ground....

When Clinton announced his presidential candidacy on October 3, 1991, at the Old State House in Little Rock Arkansas, he said that his central goal was "restoring the hopes of the forgotten middle class." He made ten references to the middle class in his seven-page announcement and promised a middle-class tax cut. "Middle-class people are spending more hours on the job, less time with their children, and bringing home a smaller paycheck to pay more for health care and housing and education," he said.
---------------- [end excerpt]

{The Agenda, by Bob Woodward.
Copyright 1994. Simon & Schuster,
New York.}

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