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PARTISAN REVIEW
whether this time the rhythm of the cycles will conform to history. It
may. Professor Schlesinger has been right in the past, and he may be right
in the future. But I'm skeptical, and here's why. When I look at the ads
Bill Clinton is running, I see that he's not running on the basis of John
Kennedy or the Great Society; he's running away from all that. The
main ad that is running now begins by saying that welfare should be a
hand up rather than a handout. He's running away from
all
those pro–
grams . The next shot in the ad is of him supporting the death penalty.
The third shot, depending on which ad he runs, shows him with police–
men. This is not building on traditional Democratic Party themes. Nor is
it building on traditional Democratic Party constituencies. The unions
have not been a major part of the Democratic constituency, as they were
in the thirties; nor are the racial minorities the core of its constituency,
as they
wen~
in the sixties. This is going to be the first fully suburban
presidency. You can argue that Reagan was partially a suburban presi–
dent, but the next one will be the first completely suburban presidency.
One of the marks of Clinton's shrewdness, as
The Wall Street Journal
has
noted, as well as a number of black friends have pointed out to me, is
that when Clinton appears before suburban black audiences, he gives ex–
actly the same speech that he gives before suburban white audiences,
about job growth and so on. He does not strike narrowly racial themes.
To the point about entrepreneurship: The entrepreneurial quality of
politics today, the inability of Congress to cooperate in the most basic
matters, suggest that the real divisions ahead are not those between Bush
and Clinton, which in many ways are exaggerated. If you look at what
Bush is supposed to believe if he listens to what his smarter handlers tell
him, and at what Clinton says he believes, you see there is not a great
deal of difference. Clinton gave up on "payor play" health care; he has
gone to a kind of market-oriented health care reform. On school
choice, there are differences, but they are both in favor of choice - this
was inconceivable four years ago. I think the real difference is between
Clinton and the barons of the Democratic Party in Congress. That is
where the fight is going to occur. And if Clinton is not to end up los–
ing, and I hope for the sake of the country he isn't, then that is where
the real differences are going to show up. The difference will be between
Clinton and the traditional Democratic Party in Congress which never
met a bureaucracy it didn't like.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.:
I agree with much of what Fred Siegel has
said, though I would disagree on the line or direction that a Clinton
administration is likely to take. The real difference between the two par–
ties, at least since 1912, when the Republicans expelled Theodore
