Speech Accents a Split Clinton May Not Bridge

With his acceptance speech Thursday night, President Clinton vigorously crystallized the themes that have carried him in less than two years from an abyss of political despair to a commanding advantage in his drive for reelection.

What is less clear after this week’s convention is whether he has truly convinced his party to follow him beyond election day on the course he laid out.

Ironically on the day when chief campaign strategist Dick Morris was forced to resign amid allegations of sexual impropriety, Clinton reached the apotheosis of the political make-over he has engineered with Morris’ advice since the 1994 Republican electoral landslide.

In a speech that subordinated poetry to the prose of specific policy proposals, Clinton confidently claimed the terrain of the future, underscoring the unprecedented 23-year age gap between him and his Republican opponent, Bob Dole. Whereas Dole declared in San Diego that he could be a “bridge” to an earlier “time of tranquillity,” Clinton organized his speech around a repeated promise “to build a bridge to the 21st century.”

In an energetic, at times virtually headlong, presentation, Clinton offered himself as a forward-looking centrist, focused on providing tools to help parents meet their daily concerns and committed to cutting taxes and reducing government, even while defending popular social programs like Medicare and finding new ways to help ordinary Americans advance.

Taking Credit

Claiming credit for strengthening America over the last four years, while insisting that there is much work to be done, Clinton combined an incumbent’s prerogative to take credit for good news with the kind of densely specific--if sometimes small-bore--agenda usually put forward by challengers. Clinton, in fact, offered so many proposals that he may, in the end, engender doubts about his ability to deliver on all of them.

Morris’ forced resignation cast a shadow over Clinton’s crowning moment. The days ahead will tell whether the scandal will allow Republicans to inflame old questions about Clinton’s own character. On this night, though, Clinton showed the strength of the arguments that have allowed him to seize the center of the political debate from the GOP and sustain an advantage over Dole of 13 to 17 percentage points in public opinion surveys taken even before his speech last night.

The rapturous applause that greeted Clinton as he arrived on the podium reflected the gratitude that Democrats feel toward him for leading them out of the ditch of 1994. But in the very persistence of its effort to redefine the party, Clinton’s speech only underscored the strains between his message and the priorities of many of the Democrats assembled here this week.

Though the convention demonstrated Clinton’s progress at shifting the party’s center of gravity on some issues--like crime--on core questions like welfare and balancing the federal budget, speeches from the Rev. Jesse Jackson, former New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and even paralyzed actor Christopher Reeve revealed the strong remaining sentiment for a more liberal course. At times, the convention suggested that Clinton’s remains a revolution from above that has left much of the political countryside in the hands of the party forces still suspicious of his direction.

Subtle signals from the crowd Thursday night underscored that tension. When Clinton declared “let us proclaim to the American people we will balance the budget,” the audience was silent. But it erupted one moment later when he added that “we will do it in a way that preserves Medicare, Medicaid, education [and] the environment.”

Likewise, he drew applause not when he argued that poor neighborhoods would be strengthened by requiring work from welfare recipients, but when he proposed tax credits to create jobs and pointedly challenged business to hire those forced from the rolls.

Internal Conflicts

This internal division may not be enough to derail Clinton’s drive toward reelection--though Dole strategists believe that they can exploit these conflicts to raise questions about the sincerity of Clinton’s moderation--but it raises ominous questions about Clinton’s ability to govern if he wins, especially if Democrats regain one or both chambers of Congress.

The Democratic convention stood as an odd bookend to the GOP gathering earlier this month in San Diego. With their eyes on the centrist swing voters who decide elections, each party muted its most ideological elements, focusing its prime-time TV presentation on messages of unity, inclusion and moderation.

But both gatherings simultaneously demonstrated the centrifugal pressures that make it difficult for either side to hold the center. In San Diego, social conservatives forced Dole to retreat from efforts to express “tolerance” toward voters who support abortion rights. In Chicago, Clinton felt compelled to share the stage with an array of Democratic leaders far to his left who minimized their direct criticism but emphasized priorities markedly distinct from his own.

Clinton himself struck a resolutely moderate tone in his no-nonsense, policy-laden speech, which at times threatened to become a greatest-hits compilation of the tax breaks, regulations and legislative proposals that have poured out of the White House during the last year as if from an open fire hydrant. He emphasized his initiatives to help parents--from the V-chip to family leave--declaring “no parent can do it alone, and no parent should have to.” He took credit for shrinking the federal work force and the federal deficit and promised to reduce the red ink to “zero.”

Looking Back

At great length, he recounted his efforts to crack down on crime, to reduce access to guns, to reform education, to convert job-training programs into new vouchers. He stressed the environment (another priority of the suburban families that his strategists covet) more than earlier in his presidency and reached for credit for putting his signature on several ideas initiated by Republicans, including the line-item veto and legislation requiring Congress to abide by the laws it passes.

In all, Clinton claimed in an echo of the “New Democrat” language he frequently employed in 1992, “we have changed the old politics of Washington.”

During the week, convention planners allowed little that clashed with Clinton’s message to surface in prime time. Indeed, the party will work mightily to mute public disagreements through November--though Jackson broke the silence by criticizing Clinton in a newspaper interview Wednesday.

But the week’s proceedings made clear that the passion at the party’s base for a more orthodox liberal agenda would be difficult for Clinton to contain indefinitely if he wins reelection. Even though national television audiences saw few of them, the messages most lustily cheered from the floor all week were traditional Democratic messages that equated spending with compassion: Cuomo’s description of the nation as a “family,” Reeve’s defense of spending on “programs people need,” First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s insistence that “it takes a village” to raise a child.

Other than a fleeting reference by keynoter Evan Bayh, the Indiana governor, not a single prime-time speaker before the president himself defended Clinton’s signing of the welfare reform bill last week. Indeed, while appearing before a woman’s group at the convention, Hillary Clinton pointedly omitted the welfare bill when she praised her husband for his flurry of bill-signings and regulatory initiatives last week.

Even the virtually euphoric reaction among many liberals to Morris’ demise Thursday testified to the hope in the party base that Clinton will tilt back toward the left after the election. In the weeks ahead, Dole hopes to convince Americans that is, in fact, Clinton’s intention.

Clinton made Dole’s job much tougher last night, with a speech that staked out the boundaries of a potential new center in American politics--one that balances the demand for smaller government with the promise of targeted government support to help families “succeed at home and at work,” as the president put it.

But if the convention complicated Dole’s task, it also complicated Clinton’s. It showed that Democrats are united behind him in the quest to hold the White House and reclaim Congress. But it also revealed how divided they remain over what should happen next if they succeed.