Lurch to The Left? You're Kidding

By Barbara Ehrenreich

The autopsy results are in. At first they thought the Clinton presidency had expired by addressing more than one issue at a time and hence going terminally "out of focus." Now they're saying he succumbed to that rare disease, virtually unknown among recent Presidents -- the deadly "lurch to the left." Look at the bleeding heart, the conservative coroners are saying; the yellowish liver, the jerky knee. Maybe poor Bill spent too much time holed up in the White House with Hillary.

Or maybe it was one of those Jurassic Park deals: a fossil mosquito left over from the Johnson Administration must have bitten our fine young "new Democrat" and turned him overnight into a paleoliberal, crashing through the jungle taxing and spending.

A neat parable, but it never happened. The lurch to the left is like the "stab in the back" invented by right-wing Germans after World War I: an instant myth designed to discredit all one's political enemies in one fell swoop. Ask anyone who hangs out in left field -- columnists for the Nation, for instance, or resident thinkers at Washington's Institute for Policy Studies -- and they'll tell you there hasn't been any lurching in their direction. A few tentative little steps perhaps -- abolition of the "gag rule" on abortions, the signing of the "motor voter" and family-leave bills, some vague reformist intentions here and there -- followed by an inexorable stagger to the right. Even after all the bean counting, for example, and despite the near appointment of Lani Guinier, Clinton is surrounded with moderate white fellows like Bentsen, Rubin, Panetta and Christopher; and his Cabinet contains more millionaires per capita than either Reagan's or Bush's.

Maybe it's been so long that we've forgotten what "left" is and how to tell it from right. At the simplest, most ecumenical level, to be on the left means to take the side of the underdog, whoever that may be: the meek, the poor and, generally speaking, the "least among us," as a well-known representative of the left position put it a couple of millenniums ago. Thus it is not leftish to have a $200 haircut while planes full of $20 haircut people circle overhead; nor would a leftist contemplate selling the President's favors at $15,000 a plate fund raisers. Such behaviors belong way over on the right, along with supply-side economics, capital-gains tax reductions and other efforts to pamper the pate-eating classes.

True, Clinton came to office with support from underdogs of all descriptions -- gays, women, minorities, union members and those of the poor who manage to vote. They were hoping he might arrest the upward flow of wealth and generally take a stand with the oppressed and the harassed against the bigots and the bullies. But this never, even in a rhetorical sense, became a consistent Clinton theme. He dropped the gays like a flaming potato, suggesting they might serve in special lavender units; he abandoned the Haitians on their leaky rafts; he snubbed the unions by sticking to NAFTA and forgetting to raise the minimum wage; he cowered before the mining and timber interests. He felt for the underdog, as he never tired of telling us, but whenever the overdogs began to howl, he obediently rushed back toward the right.

So, there hasn't been a theme at all except for the soothingly content-free notion of "change." The much battered economic program, for example: What is the theme, if any, of that? It maintains military spending at cold-war levels, thus foreclosing any serious new spending on domestic programs. It proposes to raise taxes on the six-figure crowd, though by no means up to pre-Reagan rates, while imposing a grossly regressive energy or sales tax on the average consumer. It offers earned-income tax credits for the poor but makes up for this leftish move with a surfeit of new tax breaks for business. It's an attempt, in other words, to mix L.B.J., Reagan and Ross Perot -- which is why it comes out as such a flavorless gruel.

A political realist would argue that Clinton had no choice but to oscillate rightward of the political center. He was elected by a mere 43% of the voting public, hardly a mandate for sweeping change in any direction. Once he was in office, Perot and Dole attached themselves to his ankles with the tenacity of rabid terriers. Plus there's the sad fact that underdogs, numerous as they are, tend not to make big campaign contributions, certainly not compared with bankers and lawyers and CEOs.

But if Clinton had been a man of the left, that is, if his notion of change was genuine and progressive in the old-fashioned sense . . . and if, furthermore, his populism was more than a campaign affectation . . . and if he was, in addition, able to speak in something other than that weirdly uninflected mumble, he might have gone straight to the public and said:

"I intend to do the things you elected me for, but I can't do them all by myself. For every positive change I propose -- in health, in education, the environment, whatever -- powerful interests will stand in our path, and the lobbyists will swarm around each Congressperson like flies. Therefore the only way we will move ahead is if you, my fellow citizens, will get involved and mobilize a mighty force for change. You will have to lobby and petition and otherwise raise a fuss in order to make up with your numbers what you lack now in power and wealth. Thank you, and let's get moving!"

It is still remotely possible for Clinton to wake up, send Gergen back to Shields and utter words to that effect. But until he does, the cry from the left will have to be: Don't dump the corpse in our backyard.