The Politics of Give and Take

Through four years of twists and turns, triumphs and reversals, President Clinton has remained remarkably true to a cluster of core themes that have defined him since his emergence on the national stage.

Expanding opportunity. Demanding responsibility. Invigorating community. These ideas have driven virtually every major speech he has ever delivered, and Monday’s inaugural address is likely to be no exception.

But behind that thematic consistency, Clinton’s policy agenda has evolved significantly since the chilly January day in 1993 when he first took the oath of office. The 1994 Republican takeover of Congress--following Clinton’s own miscalculations in his first two years--has forced the president to reexamine and recalibrate, producing a second-term agenda that has carried him further away from conventional liberalism into a tenuous balancing of the traditional priorities of both parties.

Compared with congressional Republicans, Clinton still advocates a much more activist role for the federal government in enlarging opportunity, regulating business and providing economic security. But measured against the agenda he carried into office four years ago, he has ceded significantly more ground to the conservative vision of limited government, a change encapsulated in his declaration last year that “the era of big government is over.”

“We have learned two lessons from the last four years,” said Bruce Reed, the chief White House domestic policy advisor. “One is just how important it is to constantly reassure the American people that we’re reforming government, not just spending their money. The second is an extension of the first: that there just isn’t much money to go around.”

Clinton’s concessions to conservative priorities--such as his decisions to offer his own balanced-budget plan and to sign a Republican bill ending the federal entitlement to welfare--lead many to claim he has capitulated to their cause. But the picture remains much more complex.

Although he has identified with the cause of smaller government, Clinton during the last two years has twice vetoed Republican budget plans, arguing that they would impose unacceptable reductions on programs such as Medicare and education and would provide excessive tax breaks to the affluent.

At the same time, the president has pushed to expand federal authority in carefully targeted areas--such as limiting tobacco advertising, ensuring the portability of health insurance and raising the minimum wage. In a second term, he hopes to increase access to college through new tax breaks, ensure temporary health insurance for the unemployed and expand health care coverage for children.

Clinton argues that his revised synthesis amounts to a “fundamentally different view of government”--a watershed in which Washington shifts its focus from constructing centralized solutions toward providing individuals and communities “the tools to help themselves,” as he put it in a recent interview.

Clinton’s new direction has disrupted both parties.

Republicans who just two years ago pledged no compromise now appear much more uncertain about how to proceed after Clinton’s success in simultaneously denying them a sharp ideological contrast and in turning public opinion against their proposals to cut spending and regulation.

His approach has incited even more intense debate among Democrats. His backers--like the centrist Democratic Leadership Council--believe that he is negotiating the best deal possible in an era suspicious of government and pursuing reforms desperately needed to update ineffective federal programs. His critics--mostly to his left--maintain that he has conceded too much to the GOP agenda and has locked himself onto a fiscal course that denies the money to meaningfully address social problems.

“The pledge of a balanced budget by 2002 has ruled out programs proportionate to the problems,” complained Princeton University sociologist Paul Starr, editor of the American Prospect, a liberal magazine.

Clinton’s agenda always has been so nuanced that it amounts to something of a Rorschach test: People take out of it what they bring into it. The “new Democrat” agenda of his 1992 campaign tried to update liberalism by pursuing new means to advance traditional Democratic goals. In political terms, he sought to meet the needs and priorities of core Democratic voters in ways that would be more acceptable to swing voters who had abandoned his party over the previous quarter-century.

In policy terms, that meant he attempted to strike a balance between “reinventing” and unleashing government. In his 1992 campaign, he promised to cut the federal budget deficit in half, while increasing “public investment” and guaranteeing universal health care. He would demand work from welfare recipients but provide them with more day care and guaranteed public jobs. On cultural issues, he would marry traditional values like demanding personal responsibility with tolerance on issues like abortion and gay rights.

In his first two years, Clinton accomplished many of his specific goals--from reducing the deficit to expanding the North American Free Trade Agreement and subsidizing the hiring of 100,000 new police officers. But the inherent tensions in his approach led to fiery reversals that eclipsed his successes and bled support from his administration.

In Congress, liberal Democrats resisted many of his promised reforms--like requiring work from welfare recipients--while party conservatives bridled against his efforts to expand government’s reach, such as the health care plan. In his budget and health care proposals, Clinton overestimated the public tolerance for new government programs. And his centrism on cultural issues like crime was overshadowed by his nods to the left, particularly his effort to allow homosexuals to serve openly in the military.

All these missteps contributed to the 1994 Republican landslide that swept into power young congressional conservatives intent on dramatically rolling back Washington’s influence over national life.

Facing that powerful challenge, Clinton steadily rethought his agenda. Where he once had hoped to bridge all differences in his party, after 1994 Clinton set out in a direction that accepted greater risk of confrontation with the left.

“It’s not that the president has changed so much . . . as that his understanding of how many of these tensions he can bridge, how many he can reconcile, has been altered by experience,” said William A. Galston, former deputy director of domestic policy in the White House.

On cultural issues, Clinton struck a more consistently traditionalist note after the 1994 election, signing legislation to discourage recognition of gay marriage and accepting new limits on death row appeals. Most important, he took the debate over family values into new terrain by proposing a series of moderately sized initiatives intended to provide parents with “tools” to fortify their families.

These tools, which proved to be some of his strongest selling points in the ’96 campaign, are difficult to place ideologically. Some involved more-activist government (like the regulations limiting tobacco advertising). Others identified Clinton with cultural conservatism (such as support for teen curfews and school uniforms). And still others blended the two--using activist government to pursue culturally conservative ends (such as the legislation requiring television manufacturers to install a V-chip that parents can use to block offensive programming).

In other ways, the loss of Congress also freed Clinton to pursue more ambitious reforms that defied traditional ideological categories. With Republicans pushing school vouchers, he talked more about charter schools. At the Labor Department, he proposed a massive conversion of job-training programs into vouchers--a change far bolder than his earlier proposals for reform.

“The circumstances . . . drove a Democrat like Clinton, who believed government was a legitimate expression of community, to accept the current business notion that you must achieve more with less,” said Doug Ross, the assistant secretary of Labor for education and training during the first half of the administration.

But in other respects, the Republican onslaught forced Clinton to tilt toward a more unambiguously limited view of government’s role. Among the key changes:

* The deficit: Upon taking office in 1993, Clinton focused on reducing the deficit at the cost of scaling back his campaign promises to increase public investment. After the Republican takeover of Congress, he bent much further in that direction, offering his own plan to balance the budget by 2002.

That has forced him to contemplate reductions in the growth of federal spending about four times deeper than proposed in his first budget plan. And it has meant much slower growth than he hoped in favored programs such as Head Start, national service and advanced technological research. As a candidate, he proposed to fully fund Head Start so that all eligible children could participate; in his latest budget, he hopes to enroll half of eligible children by 2002.

* New means: After the defeat of his health care plan, Clinton shifted from proposing direct federal programs to providing incentives to state and local governments and the private sector to take the lead. As one example, he is proposing tax breaks for businesses that hire welfare recipients--a far cry from the public jobs program he advocated in 1992.

* Faster federalism: As a former governor, Clinton has supported greater freedom for states to set their own course. But under pressure from congressional Republicans, he has moved much further along that line, signing legislation to overturn the federal highway speed limit and the historic bill ending the federal entitlement to welfare.

For all its concessions to conservative notions, this revised Clinton agenda still starkly diverges from the Republican blueprint for Washington, which would slash or kill programs such as national service and Head Start. And Clinton’s repeated vetoes of Republican initiatives--a ban on so-called partial-birth abortions, rewritten product liability laws and, above all, the two GOP balanced-budget plans--underscored his enduring differences with the right.

Clinton’s revised agenda amounts to an effort to reinterpret and redirect the anti-government sentiment that powered the Republican ascent two years ago. His plan does not seek to reverse the drive toward smaller government, but it does clearly seek to bound that impulse and affirm continuing responsibilities for Washington.

Just as Republicans have compelled Clinton to scale back his ambitions of enlarging government, so is the president forcing his political opponents to moderate their ambitions of reducing it. Republicans are much less likely today than two years ago to talk about eliminating the Education Department or other Cabinet agencies, converting Medicaid into a block grant or repealing the progressive income tax.

From that angle, Clinton’s progression can be seen as only one half of a larger trajectory encompassing both parties. In an age of sharp divisions in public opinion and tenuous partisan loyalties, both sides are being forced to moderate their ambitions to the reality that neither now commands a stable majority of public support.

“Both have had to take a step back and reassess how they can move more incrementally toward their objectives,” Starr said. “They have had to adjust to the situation that the parties are at a position of parity. That is the reality right now--that both sides are not able to go full throttle toward their aims.”

* INAUGURATION EVE: Washington prepares for festivities. A14

* DIVIDED THEY STAND: Democrats, GOP adjust to role reversals. A14