Six months after Labour’s bitter defeat in the 1992 general election, Bill Clinton’s victory in the US presidential election offered the dispirited party a potential path back to power. Some, of course, balked at it: John Prescott, for instance, loudly warned John Smith off the ‘Clintonisation’ of the Labour party. And the former leader himself was barely more impressed, reacting to an enthusiastic presentation about the lessons of the campaign by pollster Philip Gould with the words, ‘this is all very interesting, but I think you’ll find that it will be our turn next time.’
The party’s impatient modernisers, however, had no such reticence. While Gordon Brown and Tony Blair hastened to Washington, Gould and Patricia Hewitt urged Labour to forge ‘a populism of the centre rather than the left’. Under Blair’s leadership, the Clinton template was unwaveringly embraced. The president’s New Democrats, the Times’ Anthony Howard noted on the eve of the 1997 general election, ‘lighted the path’ down which New Labour travelled.
A decade on and Barack Obama’s victory is being breathlessly hailed in some quarters as an opportunity for the left to embark on a radical change of direction, breaking free of the supposedly narrow constraints of Clintonism. After all, didn’t the American people just elect a Democrat with the Senate’s most liberal voting record; a man who – echoing the ‘share the wealth’ campaign of the Depression-era populist Huey Long – talked about ‘spreading the wealth around a bit’? And didn’t they do so emphatically: Obama’s 53 per cent share of the popular vote represents the Democrats’ second best performance at the polls since Franklin Roosevelt’s reelection in 1944, with the Illinois senator outclassed only by Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide?
For some, the message from across the Atlantic is clear. ‘He has changed everything: triangulation is dead,’ wrote the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee days after the election, ‘saying what you mean and meaning what you say has won the day for progressive values, with no feinting to the right. Can Gordon Brown grasp how many of the old rules Obama has broken?’
Triangulation – in reality, a tactic employed by Clinton only after the Republicans’ spectacular victory in the 1994 midterm elections forced him to share power with his political enemies – may well be dead. But let’s not forget that Obama’s search for the American centre ground led him to stray some way outside the comfort zone of many liberals, let alone the British centre-left.
Unlike Al Gore and John Kerry, for instance, the president-elect was unswerving in his support for the constitutional rights of gun owners. Like Clinton, he explicitly supported the death penalty. And, while supporting civil unions, Obama also came out against gay marriage. For the first time since Clinton, Obama also reintroduced the language of values and personal responsibility into Democratic presidential politics, preaching to black men about the duties they owed their families. In an echo of the ‘Sister Souljah’ moment of the 1992 campaign, the candidate’s remarks earned him an electorally useful rebuke from the veteran civil rights activist and former presidential hopeful Jesse Jackson.
What of the other ‘old rules’ supposedly broken by Obama? Exhibit two called by Toynbee is Obama’s tax policies. ‘Here is an American president – repeat, an American president – elected on a platform well to the left of Labour’s. Obama is pledged to take 10 million of the lowest paid out of taxation, paid for by higher taxes on earners over $250,000,’ she argued. ‘He broke the spell that said any centre-left party threatening to tax the rich would be dead in the water.’
There is, though, a fundamental flaw with Toynbee’s assertion: Clinton got there first. In 1992, Clinton and running mate Gore explicitly stated in their campaign manifesto Putting People First: ‘we will lower the tax burden on middle-class Americans by asking the very wealthy to pay their share.’ Clinton’s promised tax increase on the top two per cent of earners was subsequently passed by the Democrat-controlled Congress in 1993 and not reversed until George W Bush entered the White House in 2001.
The key lesson, however, is to be found in how Obama presented his tax plans; not simply as boon for the lowest paid funded by the very rich, but as ‘a tax cut for 95 per cent of Americans’. As Scott Rasmussen of the polling company Rasmussen Reports noted in his post-election analysis: ‘Down the campaign homestretch, Obama’s tax- cutting promise became his clearest policy position. Eventually, he stole the tax issue from the Republicans.’ Thus by election day, 31 per cent of voters thought a President Obama would cut their taxes, while just over one in 10 expected a tax cut from John McCain. And nearly 60 per cent of Americans opted for tax cuts over new government spending to stimulate the economy. Rasmussen’s conclusion: ‘The last Democratic presidential candidate to win the tax issue was also the last Democratic president – Bill Clinton. In fact, the candidate who most credibly promises the lowest level of taxes has won every presidential election in at least the last 40 years.’
More broadly, while Obama’s victory represents a clear rejection of conservatism as practised by the Bush administration and its congressional allies, it does not represent a cue for the Democrats to embark upon a wave of liberal activism akin to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Indeed, an October Rasmussen poll found 59 per cent of voters – and 44 per cent of Obama voters – agreeing with Ronald Reagan’s famous dictum ‘government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.’
Noting that, like the last Democrat administration, Obama will take office with the public’s faith in government at ‘rock bottom’, Clinton’s former policy adviser, William Galston, offers a cautionary lesson for both the incoming administration and Labour: ‘Grudging public support of the financial rescue plan does not imply broader confidence in the government as the agent of honest and effective public purposes. As with the financial markets, there are limits to what the political markets will bear, and President Obama should be careful not to overstep them.’ Recognising always the need to earn, and retain, trust in government is vital, argues Galston.
Just as importantly, like Clinton in 1992 and New Labour in the mid-1990s, Obama is a believer in ‘big tent politics’, appealing to those wanting a new kind of politics, which, as he wrote in The Audacity of Hope, ‘accepts the possibility that the other side might sometimes have a point’. Describing his governing style as ‘visionary minimalism’, Cass Sunstein, coauthor of Nudge and an informal adviser to Obama, suggested earlier in the year: ‘He is unifying and therefore able to think ambitiously. The challenges of health care reform, Iraq, economic growth, climate change and energy independence cannot possibly be met well, and perhaps not met at all, without cross-cutting coalitions. Real transformation requires a degree of consensus.’
Thus while urging radical action on climate change, Obama has also shown an interest in nuclear power and called for ‘a market-based strategy that gradually reduced harmful emissions in the most economical way’. His education plans embraced the Clinton-pioneered ‘charter schools’ and, much to the consternation of the unions, endorsed performance-related pay for teachers. And, perhaps most surprisingly, Obama rejected the more sweeping healthcare plans of his two principal rivals for the Democrat nomination, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, in favour of a more incremental approach which, he admits, will still not guarantee universal coverage.
The historic nature of Obama’s election has already guaranteed him a future place in the Democratic party’s hall of fame, but, for now, it may well be outside the party’s ranks that the president-elect will look for inspiration. The success of Reagan’s presidency was built far more on his appeal to the ‘Reagan Democrats’ than to the religious right. Unlike the current president, Reagan knew when to play and when to fold, when to compromise and when to stand firm. In so doing, the 40th president built a coalition which the Democrats have only just succeeded in unpicking; occupying the centre ground, while remoulding it in his image as he did so. As Labour looks enviously to the new dawn breaking in America, this may be the most valuable lesson for the party to learn.