The US media did get one thing right about this election. It was, as the Washington Post dubbed it, ‘a landslide victory for confusion’. Even without the drama of votes prematurely called, concessions given – and retracted – ever-flexible deadlines and multiple recounts, the true meaning of the 2000 election would be difficult to discern.
The results, though, simply reflect the campaign itself. George Bush and Al Gore have constantly jockeyed for position over the past year, passing the frontrunner’s baton back and forth, each seeing their political obituaries written, swiftly followed by news of Lazarus-like resurrections.
And the campaign is, in turn, a wider symptom of the finely balanced nature of American politics in the 1990s. The electoral pendulum has swung steadily between left and right in America over the past sixty years; the eras of Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson slowly giving way to those of Nixon, Reagan and Bush. With Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, it looked like the dawn of a new liberal age, albeit of a distinctly moderate variety.
But then something strange happened. Two years after Clinton took office his political allies in Congress were routed and replaced by Newt Gingrich and his cohort of hard right ideologues. Having been written off as a failed, soon-to-be one term president, however, Clinton achieved a feat accomplished by no Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt in 1936: he won a second term. The sudden, erratic swings of the pendulum during the 1990s were, therefore, the perfect prelude to the 2000 campaign.
Looked at another way, though, the behaviour of the American electorate over the past decade has not been so strange. In 1992, Clinton correctly sensed that voters were tired of Reagan-Bush conservatism, but didn’t want a return to old-style liberalism. Hence his decision to run as a ‘New Democrat’, who would play to his party’s traditional strengths and tackle its weaknesses.
Clinton supported the long-established Democratic goals of equal opportunity and civil rights for all. He pledged to invest in education and skills, tackle poverty and ease the plight of the millions of Americans without healthcare. At the same time, the Democrat candidate vowed to keep taxes down for working families, cut the budget deficit, reform welfare, crack down on crime and support a strong national defence. It was a centrist message, but one from the radical, rather than mushy, middle.
Once in office, however, Clinton appeared, to many Americans, to abandon his centrist campaigning agenda. Thus the election of the Republican Congress in 1994 can be seen as an attempt by voters to push Clinton back to the New Democrat agenda he’d advanced in 1992. By 1996, the President’s policies of cutting the deficit and reforming welfare, combined with a staunch defence of health, education and environment spending against conservative assaults, made his re-election a virtual foregone conclusion.
Sadly for the Democrats, the promise of Clinton’s second term has been frustrated by the President’s own personal failings and, more importantly, the determination of some on the right to drive him from office at any cost.
Nonetheless, the advances of the last eight years are remarkable. Thanks to Clinton’s policies a booming economy has helped to lift the fortunes of all Americans. Poverty rates have fallen, most sharply amongst minority groups, welfare rolls are down and crime is at its lowest for over thirty years. Health and anti-poverty programmes have been expanded, the minimum wage raised and spending on education increased.
Politically, Clinton’s New Democrat course put his party in a strong position to retain the White House. The election was so close because, while Gore failed to exploit this, Bush partially understood both the reasons for Clinton’s success and the mistakes made by his own party during the 1990s. That’s why the Texas Governor moved to present himself as a ‘New Republican’, a ‘compassionate conservative’, and talked about issues like healthcare and education, which his party’s presidential candidates have largely ignored over recent years. Bush also tried to soften the Republicans’ rougher edges: speaking of the need for inclusion, he avoided harsh anti-immigration and anti-minority rhetoric and downplayed his conservative positions on issues like abortion.
Bush did not, though, manage to reinvent his party as successfully as Clinton did in 1992. He shamelessly pandered to the Christian right during the primary elections and never managed to entirely escape the less compassionate aspects of his own record in Texas (see grey box). Moreover, Bush’s support for huge tax cuts and his apparent indifference to the concerns of the outside world – exemplified by his positions on issues ranging from Bosnia to the environment – reflected the prejudices of the Republican right.
If Bush imperfectly mimicked Clinton, so, too, did Gore. The Vice President never recognised that while there may have been a case for distancing himself from Clinton the man – although even this is questionable – there was never any sense in putting space between himself and the policies he had helped the President advance since 1993.
Gore may have talked incessantly about the prosperity of the 1990s, but he failed to get across that this was the result of the choices the Democrats made in office, not an accident or something preordained. The consequence of this failure was that Gore didn’t reap the benefits of the strong economy as he should have. The Vice President, like Clinton in 1996, crushed Bush amongst those voters who rated the economy as ‘excellent’. However, those voters who viewed the economy simply as ‘good’ gave the Republican candidate a five percent edge. Four years previously, Clinton hammered Bush’s predecessor, Senator Bob Dole, two-to-one amongst this group.
Gore also failed to understand that the New Democrat agenda – which today includes such radical goals as cutting the poverty rate by half and reducing by two-thirds the numbers of Americans without health insurance – helped to sustain Clinton during his difficulties in office, and was in no way besmirched by them.
Gore’s strategic errors cost him dearly. In both 1992 and 1996, Clinton successfully assembled ‘metro-wide’ coalitions, which recognised the importance of both traditional Democrat voters – for instance, in urban areas – and floating voters in the suburbs.
The Vice President failed to do so. He managed to hold on to ‘core’ Democrat voters, including African Americans, union members and those on low incomes. (Interestingly, given his perceived tilt to the left, Gore did not poll as well amongst some of these groups – for instance, those Americans who earn £10,000 to £20,000 – as Clinton did in 1996). But, perhaps crucially, the Vice President gave ground to the Republicans amongst those ‘swing’ voters – suburbanites, political moderates and Catholics – which the Clinton-Gore ticket so successfully wooed in the 1990s.
It’s not surprising, therefore, that the American people appeared to reserve judgement last month. With both candidates tiptoeing around the radical centre ground, but neither willing to leap right in and claim it, the country found itself split right down the middle. One thing is for sure: the winner in 2004 is unlikely to make the same mistake.