Why Our Game Plan Worked

Pollsters Mark Penn and Doug Schoen began work for the Clinton campaign three months after the Republican victory in the 1994 congressional election. Their research and strategic analysis guided the President's successful shift to a centrist position, wherein he embraced a balanced budget and traditional values

By Mark J. Penn and Douglas E. Schoen

(TIME, November 21) -- The President's overwhelming re-election victory reflects more than just Bill Clinton's return to his centrist, New Democratic roots, and more than his opponents' failure to stake out alternative positions. Instead the Clinton victory represents a fresh and indeed a novel approach to politics that could well change the way both major parties appeal to the electorate in the future. Congressional Democrats, who failed to retake Congress after losing control in 1994, would do well to study the differences between their approach and the President's if they are to regain majority-party status.

President Clinton won not only because he recognized that the American people want a limited government and fiscal prudence, but also because he understood that they have not retreated from a desire for government to play an affirmative, if discrete, role in their lives.

There are four basic ways in which the President altered the positioning of the Democratic Party--at least on the presidential level:

--First, by endorsing a balanced budget and declaring that "the era of big government is over," he rejected the New Deal liberal view that government can solve almost every problem and that redistribution of wealth remained a fundamental principle of the Democratic Party.

--Second, by rejecting class-based politics, he accepted the notion that the way to appeal to the American people was by seeking common ground among disparate groups.

--Third, he shifted the focus of his appeal away from the interests of the individual to those of the community.

--Fourth, he embraced traditional American values--hard work, responsibility, decency and respect for others.

The magnitude of the Republicans' 1994 sweep of Congress suggested to us that voters were rejecting not only President Clinton but also the Democratic Party's philosophy. Presented with a choice between big government (as embodied in the President's large-scale health-care proposal) and the Republicans' commitment to fiscal conservatism, a balanced budget and tax cuts, voters overwhelmingly preferred the Republicans' priorities. They were simply not prepared to listen to much of anything Democrats had to say without a commitment from Democrats to the majority view of government's proper role--a view that the President would reflect as he shaped his policies during 1995.

The critical date was June 13 that year, when President Clinton outlined on national television his commitment to a balanced budget. For the first time ever, a Democratic President explicitly and clearly rejected deficit spending and embraced a balanced budget--a goal endorsed by some 80% of Americans. By doing this, the President began the process of reconnecting himself with the American people, in particular the 19% that had supported Ross Perot in 1992.

In embracing a balanced budget, however, the President did not reject the notion that government has an affirmative role to play in people's lives. Indeed, our analysis suggested that the 1994 election was not a rejection of government per se; it was a rejection of big, intrusive government. The President emphasized a view endorsed by well over two-thirds of the American people: a fiscally prudent government can still provide decent medical care for senior citizens and children, a high-quality educational system for young people and protection for the environment.

But while President Clinton was discussing these issues in the context of responsibility, congressional Democrats were relying on a more traditional class approach, arguing that proposed Republican cuts in Medicaid and education would only be used to pay for G.O.P. tax cuts for the rich. The President explicitly rejected these class-based appeals for several reasons. First and foremost, he understood that even if attacks on the rich are superficially popular, class-based appeals only divide the American people. They are more concerned about economic growth and opportunities to advance themselves in the future than they are about redistribution of wealth.

Further, the President had endorsed a tax cut for middle-American families as a means of helping them pay for college, and he did not want to appear to be against the general principle of relieving the tax burden Americans face. Indeed, in 1996, within the context of his balanced-budget proposal, the President did endorse a wide array of tax cuts designed to help families pay for education, child care and home ownership--cuts that were fully paid for within the President's budget plan. In contrast, most Americans felt that the more ambitious, across-the-board tax-cut proposals Senator Dole and the Republicans outlined during 1995 and 1996 would increase the deficit and jeopardize essential social programs.

There was a still more fundamental reason why Clinton rejected class-based politics. As part of his attempt to unify the American people, he argued that it was important to protect such programs as Medicare and Medicaid and those that support education and the environment because they preserved and protected precious American values. Education meant opportunity; Medicare and Medicaid fulfilled our responsibility to one another; protecting the environment was protecting our community.

This values orientation was critical to the President's repositioning and represents a clear change in how Democrats can succeed in further reinvigorating the party in the future.

President Clinton was hardly the first candidate to inject values into the debate. The religious right and conservative Republicans had used the term "family values" with some degree of success. The genius of the President's new approach was that he couched an array of government and political issues in values-based terms that connected with voters more deeply than the social issues used by Conservatives. Our polling demonstrated overwhelmingly that voters judge policies and events less in economic terms than in moral terms of right and wrong. We found, for example, that people preferred to support Head Start, not because of whatever impact the program might have on the national economy, but because it was right to give a child a chance to get an education and go to college.

We found that more than two-thirds of the American people explicitly agreed with President Clinton's values-based justification of his fight against Republican attempts to cut Medicare, Medicaid and education and environmental programs. Time and again, our polling showed conclusively that three basic values unified the American people: preserving and promoting families (community), the duty we owe to one another (responsibility) and providing opportunity for all Americans (equality).

The use of these three values achieved a number of important strategic goals. It allowed the President to avoid divisive politics that pit group against group and interest against interest. It provided a clear opportunity for him to make a direct appeal to the common ground, which poll after poll shows voters prefer to the partisan divisions that many believe have infected our political system. Specifically, independents and moderate Republicans often preferred this values-based appeal to the more strident rhetoric adopted by Newt Gingrich and his colleagues during the 1995 budget showdown. Our polling also demonstrated conclusively that while voters preferred the Republican version of limited government in 1994, by 1996 they favored President Clinton's fiscally prudent values-based appeal over the Republican alternative by better than 3 to 1.

The use of values rhetoric allowed President Clinton to do something else that has dramatically changed the image of his party. For the past 20 years, Democrats have been seen as the party most closely associated with the counterculture and the Hollywood and New York cultural elite. Republicans from Spiro Agnew to Newt Gingrich have used this image to attack the Democrats for their presumed distance from the basic norms and ideals most Americans live by.

But the 1996 campaign changed that. While President Clinton was hurt early in his Administration by his association with the gays-in-the-military issue, by 1996 he was seen as being in the American mainstream. While many in the media derided his emphasis on what they regarded as small-bore issues like school uniforms, curfews and expanding family leave, our surveys showed that voters were frequently more interested in these issues than in Travelgate and Filegate.

By neutralizing the fiscal issue and embracing tax cuts of his own, President Clinton took away the Republicans' major weapon. By embracing a values-based critique of social policy, Clinton was able to pre-empt the social and cultural issues that had so emboldened the Republican right in 1994. This political approach also made it possible for the President to neutralize the other key political issues the Republicans hoped to exploit: crime, welfare and immigration. By taking these issues, as well as the fiscal issues, out of play, President Clinton succeeded in taking away virtually every potentially effective issue that Dole and the Republicans could have hoped to use. One of the reasons why commentators are now busily writing stories about the inept Republican campaign is that President Clinton simply took away each and every issue the Republicans had used successfully over the past four presidential elections. Dole's weakness was not that he was unpopular--his favorability rating stayed in the mid-to-upper 50s throughout the fall; it was that he lacked the issues and the rationale needed for a challenger to unseat an incumbent President during good economic times.

While the President redefined his party's approach at the presidential level, however, congressional Democrats never enthusiastically rallied behind his values agenda. They supported him on such issues as the ban on tobacco advertising aimed at our children, placing V chips in televisions to help parents control what children watch, and a TV-rating system. But they failed to transform them into the values-charged issues that our polling showed appealed to key swing voters.

Throughout the year, our polling suggested that Americans understood that the nature of the challenges facing the country was changing. President Clinton also understood that the American people were rejecting the old labels and divisions of the past in ways that many in the media and politics were slow to pick up on. This is precisely why Clinton's lead was never seriously challenged throughout the fall campaign, and why salvo after salvo from Dole fell on deaf ears.

The task now for the Democrats in Congress--and for the Republicans who squandered the advantage that was in their grasp after 1994--is to learn the lessons of the Clinton victory and develop a broad-based, centrist philosophy that seeks to build on the fiscally prudent, values-based agenda that President Clinton began to articulate during the 1996 campaign.

Copyright © 1996 AllPolitics
All Rights Reserved

Terms under which this information is provided to you