Working the System: Memo to the Community Tom Hayden ill Clinton has raised the expectation that his "New Covenant? will be a resurrection of the un- known and unfulfilled promise of the New Fron- tier and the early sixties. He has proved what seemed impossible a year ago: that the Democratic Party could be shifted to the pragmatic center and win back the White House. In light of this political miracle perhaps anything is possible. Yet the question remains whether in the three decades since 1960 America has become irreversibly un- governable. Can Clinton?s shifting pragmatism succeed in governing as it did in campaigning? Campaigning, after all, involves creating coalitions around promises to voters; governing means extracting reform from entrenched interesrs. In Bush?s perspective, governing was reduced to a night-watchman function. But Clinton has pledged to replace the old order with new priorities. He knows he must deliver. As Arkansas? governor, he could blame Washington for his state?s problems. But who can a consensus-oriented president blame if the country?s crisis deepens? What if Bill Clin- ton is just an adroit captain with good sea legs steering a sinking ship? The danger is that Clinton could become another Lyn- don Johnson, whose brilliance at politics and compro- mise could not save him from the deepening quagmire of Vietnam. Not even Johnson?s ?best and brightest? could think their way to victOry. Indeed, the New Fron- tiersmen were fascinated with counterinsurgency and Green Berets; their arrogance prevented any under- standing that the war was immoral and unwinnable. On the domestic front, Johnson?s ?war on poverty" yielded the battle to big-city mayors. In those days, Democratic presidents relied on Harvard; now the talent pool is ex- panded to include Yale and Oxford but the ?best and brightest? always seem to be slow learners. Instead of focusing the White House ?war room? ex- clusively on a successful offensive in the ?first hundred days, I would suggest a sixteen-year perspective?two terms of Bill Clinton and two terms for Al Gore?~a re- alistic amount of time to recover from the present cri- Tom Hayden, afounder of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), was elected to the Cataromz'a State Senate in November; 1992. sis and move toward a sustainable future. When you first assume the presidency, it must be tempting to believe that you will be able to shape Amer- ican society and government to your will. Then reality sets in. I once asked President Carter if he felt that the unelected heads of multinational corporations were more powerful than our elected president. He replied learned that my first year in office.? The crisis of institutional paralysis is graver than the partisan gridlock that could be solved by having a Demo- crat in the White House. The real crisis is the emergence of the Special Interest State, a permanent, insulated state within the democratic state. It is informal, a political pro- tOplasm of interests who exercise virtual veto power over issues such as health care reform that garner over- whelming support among the electorate. This is not an enlightened establishment. Its defining obsession is with immediate interests at the expense of future welfare, making it the chief impediment to deficit reductions or any policies of sustainability. The inner core of this phenomenon is a bureaucracy based on the notion that human behavior must be sub- ject to uniform administration and regulation. There is little or no incentive for bureaucrats to reduce their ad- ministrative empires. Budgets are based on body counts rather than performance, for example, on how many warm bodies you have kept in the classroom instead of how many minds you have educated. Typically this bud- geting is "xerox-based? rather than zero-based; that is, the previous year?s budget is simply photoc0pied as a baseline for the next year?s calculations. Surrounding this administrative core is the legisla- tive/ political realm, which is subsidized by contributions from special interests seeking to gain competitive ad- vantage through tax breaks, obscure amendments, and the loosening of regulations. The lobbyist corps grows annually, its inbred ranks increasingly ?lled with former politicians, Capitol staff, and party officials willing to sell their intimate knowledge of the system to manipulate and lobby their former colleagues. Supporting, ratio- nalizing, glossing, indeed feeding off this structure is a Beltway culture in which insider gossip by well-con- nected talk-show pundits passes too frequently for in- 19 - .. . dependent journalism. More than simply a distinct ?other? party that can be defeated and removed, this is the Party of the Status Quo, the Beltway version of the Berlin Wall. ill Clinton was right years ago to refuse to be- lieve the sixties radicals, like me, who were skep- tical of working within the system. As his 1969 draft-board letter indicates, he believed it was possible to Oppose the war and keep ambition alive. And his cal- culation was confirmed by the reforms of the subsequent decade. The electoral syStem corrected itself in the Mc- Govern-Fraser reforms, allowing a future candidate Clinton to win presidential primaries at the grass roots. Voting rights legislation enfranchised millions of Amer- icans who had been barred by age or color from voting at the beginning of the 19605. But that era of reform, which peaked in the aftermath of \Y/atergate, clearly has exhausted itself, and America?s deeper dysfunctions have resurfaced, made more in- tractable by the passage of time, by racism, by economic competition, by the ruSting of idealism, and by the loss of a younger generation to despair. By now, the Water- gate-era campaign reforms are virtually meaningless and forgotten, twisted by the special interests into the ever- metastasizing cancer of political action committees (which ironically were created as a compromise to pass those very reforms]. Bill Clinton and Al Gore have struck an essentially Faustian deal that says they can force the interest groups to change. No doubt there are such opportunities for Clinton when certain special interests coincide with his public-policy agenda. For example, many large corpo- rations may support Clinton on health-care cost con- tainment, and natural gas utilities will want to promote their interests against coal companies. It is sometimes possible to seize power and then change conditions? what Clinton is trying to do and what Franklin Roosevelt did before him?instead of following the traditional grass-roors idea that conditions have to change first. But it is also true that Bill Clinton?s presidency can be frustrated if he concentrates too much on building a con- sensus among Washington interest groups. In order to achieve his campaign promises, Clinton needs the sup- port of the Street interest groups far less than he needs to inspire and rekindle a grass-roots populism. Clinton can begin to stir enthusiasm by making bold appointments and executive orders that are dramatic de- partures from the past twelve years? status quo. He could appoint Anita Hill to the Equal Employment Opportu- nity Commission; eliminate the notorious ?gag rule? on family-planning funds; appoint an AIDS activist to chair the war against the epidemic; create a majority at the 20 VOL. 7. NO. 6 Federal Communications Commission who will restore the fairness doctrine; appoint real environmentalists at the Departments of Interior and Energy and the Envi- ronmental Protection Agency, but also at the National Security Council and the Council of Economic Advis- ers; place a visionary entrepreneur at Commerce, one who also believes in industrial policy and the priority of new technologies; end the AID program that subsidizes the export of jobs; appoint a human rights advocate as ambassador to China. There is little doubt that Clinton will institute an emergency jobs program aimed at rebuilding the infras- tructure. The question is, what sort of infrastructure does he envision? Will the spending prop up traditional priorities or be a visionary investment in an energy-effi? cient, community-based future? Los Angeles, for exam- ple, doesn?t need more spending on freeways; it needs federal support to become a center for environmental technology such as electric vehicles (before Japan cap- tures that emerging industry), employing both diSplaced aerospace workers and hopeless inner-city citizens. or the right sort of infrastructure investment to occur, Clinton?s economic advisers will need to commit the ?heresy? of trying to reconnect work to meaning. The economic historian RH. Tawney ob- served that ?economic ambitions are good servants [but] bad masters. Yet the philosophy that human beings can be reduced to 507720 economz'cus nevertheless remains economic orthodoxy. But, as Tawney pointed out, ?even quite common men have souls, [and] no increase in ma- terial wealth will compensate them for arrangements which insult their self-respect and impair their free- dom [economics] must satisfy criteria that are not purely economic.? Societies, like individuals, are not moved to be ?com- petitive? or ?productive? or ?winners? unless they are fueled and sustained by a meaningful vision or goal. Any economic recovery plan has to be more than the ex- pansion of McJ'obs; it must rethink the market so that values such as environmental preservation and commu- nity begin to be internalized. Clinton intuits that eco- nomics and environmentalism and community values need to be melded in his ?new paradigms? and ?covenants.? He needs to reread Gore?s Earth in the Balance and Herman Daly and john Cobb's For the Com? mon Good, since the writings of his chief economic ad- visers offer scant evidence that they have gone beyond seeing the ecosystem as a disposable resource to be de- veloped for high-technology export products. DeSpite conventional economic reasoning, the ec05ystem is not infinite. The environmental issue is not secondary to the economic issue except in the old paradigm. The crisis of America's economic stagnation arises from over-de- pendency on Persian Gulf oil, over-investment in the nuclear arms race, addiction to gas-guzzling automo- biles, skyrocketing cancer and health costs due to toxic pollution, and the catastrophic depletion of resources that are no longer cheap and abundant. ike the environment, the idea of community is often reduced by government programs to that of a laboratory where individuals are fit into pro- grams administered from the outside. Bill Clinton?s ?New Covenant? contains an implicit image of an obli- gatory contract between the individual below and an om- nipotent order above, not one of humbler government and more powerful citizens. Recent history is littered with the debris of these failed notions. The ballyhooed plan to ?Rebuild L.A. similar dreams of ?enter? prise zones? and ?urban simply im- possible in South Central Los Angeles without a transfer of power and creativity from political, business, and fi- nancial elites to peOple still outside the mainstream. Bill Clinton?s strategic vision should blend the quest for economic renewal with this new thinking about the importance of the environment and community. His cen- tral priority should be to move America away from de- pendence on Persian Gulf oil, nuclear power, and coal, and toward independence and decentralization through a rapid transition to natural gas, renewable resources, and conservation, toward locally produced, energy-effi- cient technologies that can be exported to the world. A Specific goal could be to put the unemployed to work converting two hundred thousand cars to electric power, a goal mandated by California law by the year 2003 (and copied in nearly twenty other states). The danger is that Clinton?s campaign waffling on reaching a fuel-efficiency standard of forty miles per gallon has already set a prece- dent of yielding to the powerful automobile industry. Health care is another issue that tends to be reduced to economics in the narrowest sense, without address- ing the environmental causes of disease and the role of community in prevention. Clinton might succeed in bat- tling the Special interests only if he redefines health care more broadly in a pOpulist crusade to improve human health and thus bring costs down. That would require broader benefits packages, to be sure, but also increased taxes on alcohol and tobacco, universal immunization programs, and much tougher sanctions against that cause cancer, respiratory illnesses, and birth defects. In the late 19805, Proposition 65, which attempted to ban cancer~causing chemicals in our water supply, and Proposition 99, which tripled tobacco taxes to be used for health care, were passed overwhelmingly by Cali- fornia voters deSpite massive interest-group opposition. \onuld Clinton even consider measures with that kind of muscle on the national level? Similarly, his proposed education reforms will be bogged down in interest-group rivalries unless Clinton finds a way to engage the energies of the people with a positive, empowering set of goals. For instance, he could make the centerpiece a new Service Corps mobi- lizing thousands of idealistic Americans to inner-city tu- toring (a Teacher Corps) and earth-restoration projects (a Green Corps). In essence, Bill Clinton will have to paddle through the special interest swamps as best he can, while look- ing for a fresh current in American politics to move his presidency forward. For a precedent, there is the early 19605 case of the New Frontier. John Kennedy won with 49 percent of the vote and was politically indebted to reactionary southern Dix? iecrats. It was the emergence of the student, civil rights, and peace movements that created an opening for Kennedy to iniplement a broader vision.]ust as Kennedy enabled those movements to have hOpe for change, they enabled the president to broaden his p0pular base be- yond the traditional ethnic political machines. Like Kennedy, coming after Eisenhower, Clinton has raised expectations and hepes that have been buried for over a decade. The tragedy of the 19903 may be that there is no progressive movement today that can be compared to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Martin Luther King?s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the early Students for a Democratic So- ciety. \We cannot blame Bill Clinton for that, but we can encourage Clinton and Al Gore to remember that his- tory often shows that idealism at the grass roots can move the mightiest establishment. After all, the civil rights movement created the space for the emergence of Bill Clinton and Al Gore from the ?New South.? Each of us must do more than lobby Bill Clinton with our pent-up frustrations and demands. We must ask what we can do to reawaken the idealism that accom? plished so much and seemed to make all things possible in the early 1960s, when Clinton?s journey to the White House really began. Cl Tikkun Subscribers are cordially invited to an Inagural Reception in Washington, D.C. Sunday Afternoon, January 17 For more information: send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to Tikkun, Inagural, 251 W. 100th, 5th floor, New York, NY 10025, not before Dec. 10 and not afterJan. 3. MEMO TO TIKKUN 21