How Four Democrats Who Saved the Party Before Would Do It Again

New York Times

24-04-2025

Patrick Healy, the deputy Opinion editor, hosted an online conversation about the future of the Democratic Party with four veteran strategists and reformers who spearheaded the New Democrat movement that helped elect Bill Clinton to the presidency in 1992.
Patrick Healy: I caught some heat this winter from Democrats when I raised the idea that the party is in deeper trouble with voters than its leaders are admitting — perhaps even the kind of existential trouble that the party had in the 1970s and 1980s, when it lost four out of five presidential races to Republicans. Back then, many Americans saw the party as too liberal, untrustworthy on inflation and spending, and out of touch — culturally and economically — with middle-class and working-class Americans. The Democrats needed a big reset. And that's what happened after they lost the presidency again in 1988, with the rise and victory of Bill Clinton in 1992. The four of you played key roles in pushing for that reset and advising Clinton. I want to discuss how the Democrats got their groove back and what lessons there are for the party today.
Let's start with this question: How would you describe the Democrats after the 1988 election, when George H.W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis, and how would you compare that to the state of the Democratic Party today?
William A. Galston: People weren't buying what we were selling. Losing to Donald Trump the second time is a sign, I'm afraid, of exactly the same thing. Voters don't want what we're offering. We need a new offer.
Healy: Why weren't Americans wanting what Democrats were selling?
Al From: Democrats stood for weakness at home and in the world, big government and special interest groups, special pleadings.
Elaine Kamarck: We had cultural issues hanging over us, as we do today. And the problem is that because culture evokes emotion, if you are on the wrong side of a cultural issue, nobody hears your economics. Doesn't matter how many CHIPS programs you have or how much money you've put into education — nobody hears it.
Galston: I think a lot of ordinary Americans are asking themselves: Do the Democrats know how to draw lines anymore, or are they just pushed into extremes? You saw one of those issues figure pretty centrally in the 2024 election, when Republicans said Kamala Harris is for 'they/them' and Donald Trump is for you. That ad contained one of the most devastating tag lines in the history of American political advertising. And a lot of Democrats are pretending that that ad didn't make any difference.
Kamarck: Look, over 41 percent of Trump's ad spending was on anti-trans ads over about two weeks in October.
From: All you had to do was watch an N.F.L. game. You saw that ad.
Healy: Bill and Al brought up identity politics, 'special pleadings' — this notion that the Democratic Party becomes captive to certain groups or to a wing of the party.
Will Marshall: Everything was mediated through the desires and demands of 100 worthy interest groups. What we said was: Look, we were not winning these elections for a reason. So the first thing is to let the public know you've heard their message. Then: What are the new ideas?
Kamarck: Let me give you a perfect example. Bill Clinton's most frequently run commercial was 'End welfare as we know it.' It was a bumper sticker and it did two things simultaneously. It spoke to the people in the country and said: Yeah, we heard you, we got it — this welfare system rewards people for staying home, rewards people for having more children when they don't have any support for the children, this welfare system is a mess. But then he said 'as we know it' — so in other words, he wasn't doing a Reagan imitation, he was not throwing the whole thing out. He was saying: Let's change it. That was such a brilliant combination, and I think we need that again.
Galston: I was Walter Mondale's policy director during his 1984 presidential campaign. I got to see from the inside how honorable the New Deal tradition was — and how exhausted it was. In order to have a future, Democrats had to accept the fact that appeals about Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman no longer spoke to the present and could not chart a path to the future. I think that created an opening for a movement dedicated to a new kind of politics and a new set of ideas.
Healy: Why was it difficult to get the Democratic Party establishment to open up to reform, innovation, new ideas?
Kamarck: I'll speak to two issues: welfare. The African American community was, and rightfully so, hypersensitive to racism. Hypersensitive to a group of white people, as we are, saying this had to change. Now, we did focus groups on this. African Americans saw the same problems as white Americans did with welfare. So there was that hypersensitivity, which we still have with us in the party. And as somebody who's on the Democratic National Committee, I live it every, every time I'm at a D.N.C. meeting.
The second thing was the government itself. Ronald Reagan started the big critique of government. Bill Clinton was the one who famously said 'The era of big government is over.' F.D.R. created the modern government — that was sort of deep in the Democrats' DNA. They didn't want to let go of it. So a movement that would say: Hey, you know, we can do government differently, we can cut the cost, we can streamline it, et cetera, which is what reinventing government was. People were suspicious and nervous about it. It went against our roots.
Healy: Bill, why were Democrats so concerned about looking at their own problems? You had the 1980 loss. You had the '84 loss. Then '88. You had a big idea back then called the politics of evasion. Why was that such a part of what was going on in the party then?
Galston: Well, just in simple human terms, change is hard. It's one of the hardest things in the world. Changing ourselves as individuals with habits and vices is enormously difficult. Institutions aren't all that different.
Here I will be blunt, but I'll try not to be harsh. In every political party there are people who would rather be the majority in a minority party. Not a minority in the majority party. It is a question of power within the party. Giving up power that you've accrued over decades is enormously difficult. To which I would add there are, to steal a phrase from Elaine's old boss, inconvenient truths. And rather than acknowledge these inconvenient truths, you'd rather tell yourself stories. We called them myths. Joan Didion famously said, 'We tell ourselves stories in order to live.' Parties are like that, too.
Healy: How did Democrats manage to let go of such a foundational part of their DNA? Is it simply just losing three elections in a row, Elaine?
Kamarck: Clinton did a lot for that. Because Clinton stuck to reinventing government. He actually did it. I think a lot of people in the party thought that was a good campaign line and he wasn't going to really do it. And then we started cutting jobs. So in eight years we cut 426,000 jobs from the federal government. We did all sorts of modernization and cutting regulations, and I think people realized that it wasn't the end of the world, OK? The government still functioned — in fact, functioned better in some places because of the changes that we did.
So I think it took getting a president actually doing what he said he would do, and having it work out all right. Which, by the way, in the current situation, we have a president who's doing what he said he was going to do, but it may not work out all right.
From: Government ought to be the agent of our common endeavors and to help people and to help ourselves. But it's got to work. And if it doesn't work, then we're going to be ineffective politically.
Marshall: We got a lot of mileage out of just the simple idea that there was a brain-dead politics of left and right that we had to get beyond, and that we needed generational change. Something fresh. Ending welfare as we know it. National service. Public school choice. Reinventing government. All that generated energy and excitement, and it helped that we had a next-generation team with Clinton and Al Gore. To redefine a failing party you need to capture imagination, and it's got to be with a new offer, and it's got to be with creative ideas.
Galston: I just want to add a couple of points that I think are pertinent to our current circumstances. You don't have to be Frederick Douglass to believe that power never concedes without a struggle. Change is always a fight. You may win it, but that means somebody else has to lose. The party as a whole will never say, Huh, and fall in love. That's lesson No. 1. Second, the party redefines itself. Party reform may begin in Congress, but it can never end there, right? It ends when a leader, hoping to speak for the country as a whole, stands for the nomination, stands for the general election and enacts a new set of ideas.
Kamarck: Let me add one little angle here that I think is missing. You can't rebuild a party if you lose the base of the party. OK? So the question was: How did Bill Clinton manage to revolutionize the party but hold its base? And his secret weapon there, frankly, was Hillary. Hillary Clinton was deeply in the liberal wing of the party. She was one of the most important people in the Children's Defense Fund. The Children's Defense Fund didn't agree with anything we were doing right on welfare reform or family policy or anything like that. They were against us, but she was there and very active and very much a part of that campaign. While Bill Clinton was out there redefining, Hillary was reassuring. She was saying: Look, this guy's heart is in the right place, and we need to do a couple of changes.
From: His civil rights record was really important in that.
Galston: What drives history, I think, is individuals meeting their moment. And it's a very interesting speculation. Suppose that we had done all of these things but there had been no Bill Clinton, because he was a politician with extraordinary gifts. He is the single most persuasive human being that I've ever met. I do wonder, if we'd done everything right but hadn't had a leader like Bill Clinton, what would've happened?
From: It wouldn't have happened without Bill Clinton or a comparable talent.
Healy: Which idea was the most crucial, do you think, for Bill Clinton winning the primary and ultimately the general election in 1992?
Kamarck: It was welfare reform. Welfare reform cut to the cultural issue and allowed people to look at everything else.
From: It was clearly welfare reform. But it was another Progressive Policy Institute idea that made welfare reform possible, which was the expanded earned-income tax credit, so that we could make the argument that nobody who worked full-time in America should be poor. And the earned-income tax credit made that credible.
Marshall: Well, you're asking me to choose among my children. Welfare reform said, this is a different kind of Democrat. But let me just mention two others. First was reinventing government. The second one's national service. People hadn't been used to hearing the idea that you should serve something larger than yourself for quite a while, going back to Jack Kennedy. This idea was explicitly aimed to help us solve a particular political problem: the politics of entitlement. Any group that came along that demanded government benefits because they were oppressed or discriminated against could get them. People just hated this. It was at the root of the tax-and-spend disease that they also didn't like. So no more something for nothing.
Healy: Bill, what was the key?
Galston: Well, I am not going to break with the consensus. I do think it was welfare reform. Welfare reform was to the 1992 election what the 'they/them' Trump ad was to the 2024 election. But I want to add something. It speaks volumes that Bill Clinton, having run and to a substantial extent won on ending welfare as we know it, could not persuade the party to lead with it or to do anything about it for the first two years of his presidency. It wasn't until mid-1996 that he finally got it done.
Healy: What should today's Democratic Party learn from welfare reform?
Galston: I think people are going to have to take a deep breath and be willing to say things that previously were regarded as unsayable.
Healy: Elaine, what are some of those things today that are regarded as unsayable among Democrats but might actually resonate with Americans?
Kamarck: Well, I think that the new emergent issue is the transgender rights issue. And I think there the party needs to look for a way of doing both things that Clinton did with welfare. On the one hand, saying we get it to the public — you think this is very strange, you think this is frightening, you think that people, maybe children, are going to be hurt. We understand your worries. And yet at the same time they have to say: Look, there are people out there who are really hurting because they're born gender dysphoric. You cannot abandon your base. You can't stick a needle in the eye of your base. But you also have to say to the broader public: We understand your fears.
Marshall: Through four years of President Joe Biden, we spoke to white college graduates incessantly on almost every dimension: economic, cultural, foreign policy. We stopped talking to the 62 percent of the electorate that doesn't have a college degree. I think this is the hardest cultural challenge for the party right now. We don't know how to address their economic aspirations in a way that doesn't sort of throw government benefits at them. We're terrified if we do we'll somehow be crossing the line, becoming racist or nativist or xenophobic. We are now in this class configuration that was mercilessly revealed by this election. We have lost the knack of hearing, listening, going to working-class people and speaking the language that they understand. So you see the party retracting geographically, demographically. We're a shrunken party now.
From: You know, there's just something about having paid for two daughters to go through college — my view is that it's just wrong to ask the three-fifths of the country that doesn't have a college degree to pay for the tuition of those who do. If they would've just said: OK, we'll give a certain amount of forgiveness, but in exchange you have to spend a year or two in national service. It goes to that free lunch. And the problem is now the free lunch is often for this very small, highly educated class. I mean, it's us, too, but it sure doesn't represent a majority of the country.
Healy: I think about when Bill Clinton talked about shared sacrifice and national service in a sense of: We're all in this together. We're all giving and we're all receiving. What are the things now that Democrats need to speak about to voters who might be skeptical or don't see the party as credible?
Kamarck: Well, the first thing is immigration. I mean, we were simply on the wrong side of this issue. The country was being overrun and the interest groups — who did not have the backing of their members — were saying something that was easily translatable into open borders. So Democrats have to get right on immigration. They've got to figure out the cultural issue. And then inflation — they just didn't get it because, again, it goes to the class bias.
I think this is why the Democrats are so completely screwed up. We are now the party of well-to-do people. Look at that billion dollars Kamala Harris raised. Why? Because there's lots of upper-middle-class people in the Democratic Party. And so when you're upper-middle-class, you miss the impact of inflation. Because you are not the person who's going through the grocery store counting up in your head or on a piece of paper the cost of what's going into your cart.
Healy: How do you figure out how to talk about immigration or cultural values or inflation in a way that feels authentic to what regular people are experiencing? How do you figure that out as a party?
Kamarck: It's a product of politicians out there on the stump. And one of the things we learned in the 1980s was that the Washington-based politicians were much further away from this reality of what was happening to the party than were the governors and the county commissioners. Look at the Andy Beshears of the world. Look at the people winning in red states and say: What are they saying? How do they talk?
Galston: Let's take inflation as an object lesson for the party. Why do you think we got this bout of inflation? The Democratic message was price gouging by corporations. But that's not what the majority of the people say when you ask them that question. They say government overspending. If we're going to look at hard truths and try a 21st-century version of fiscal restraint — not slash and burn but some sense of limits, some sense that the Democratic Party knows how to draw the line — that's what people believe, and we never spoke to that. We never even tried to speak to that. And if we don't speak to that in the next four years, we may end up with the same result.
From: I mean, if people think that overpriming the pump causes inflation, you've got to slow down the pump.
Healy: What are some of the concrete lessons from your experience from 1988 to 1992 that apply to today? That the party should consider, that leaders should consider?
Marshall: The first message is change is possible. We're a minority party now. We've lost territory. We're not competitive in broad swaths of the country. We've lost 37 points with non-white working class voters since 2012, since Barack Obama's last election. If we can't reorient our economic thinking in general around everyday struggles of working people, we're not going to reach them.
Kamarck: I'll be short and simple. Don't be afraid of an intraparty fight. Don't be afraid of a fight because it's the fight that breaks through to the public and says: Oh, that party's still alive. They're not as brain-dead as I thought they were.
Healy: What do you think the most useful or productive fight would be over for the Democrats?
Kamarck: I think we've got to start with the cultural issues. 'Pregnant people'? 'Pregnant people'? Give me a break. I never heard of a pregnant people. When you start doing this hyper-, hyper-politically-correct language, people think you're crazy. You start with that and no one will hear the economic issues, the economic plan, no matter how good it is.
Galston: Without a fight, you get no change. But let's look at what preceded our fight. There was a statement of principles in 1990: the New Orleans declaration. There was the creation of themes: opportunity, responsibility, community. There was a development of compelling ideas, thanks to Will and the P.P.I. There was a master of persuasive communications and there was an ability to understand the public mood, getting the mood right. And 2024 was not the year for the politics of joy any more than 1968 was, when Hubert Humphrey, who invented the phrase 'the politics of joy,' tried to practice it in one of the least joyful years in American history.
Healy: Why didn't people buy it, Bill?
Galston: Why didn't people buy it? They weren't in a good mood. They weren't joyful. It looked like denial. It looked like you were tone-deaf.
From: We need ideas that break the mold. That's what welfare reform and national service did. They were defining ideas. On the cultural issues, identity politics — we all believe in diversity, but the way you get diversity is by having an agenda that attracts all kinds of people. And finally, you've got to find a leader, and it'll take a while to find that leader.
Healy: What leaders do you see as at least having promise? Who's open to having that intraparty debate that Elaine talked about, or the kinds of ideas that Will was getting at?
Galston: Well, let me just give you an example. One thing that really cut through the muck was Gov. Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania rebuilding that highway in 12 days. OK? Eleven days. What that said to a skeptical public is we can make government work. It doesn't need to take 10 years to get a permit. We need to think about a government that works efficiently and effectively for the people and can accomplish jobs in real time.
Marshall: Josh Shapiro would've been my first choice for the same reasons that Bill's articulated. Josh Stein in North Carolina's a good guy.
Healy: The new governor there.
Marshall: He just fought the Republican legislature successfully. They're trying to do the big expansion of universal vouchers and privatize public education. Those Democrats governing in red states are people we should be looking at because they know how to compete in difficult environments. I'm very taken by the Colorado Democrats. In 2004 this state was red, very substantially red. And there was an amazingly conscious effort, sort of like a mini Democratic Leadership Council effort in Colorado, all the big interest groups, but also a lot of change-oriented thinkers got together, and donors, and they turned a red state blue and yielded a bumper crop of really pragmatic, thoughtful people. Senator Michael Bennet. Jared Polis is one of the best governors in the country.
From: I like people who are willing to step out and say things that everybody knows are true. I think Gavin Newsom's been doing a good job. He has a disadvantage of being from California. Rahm Emanuel has been terrific. Josh Shapiro. Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland. I love Elissa Slotkin. Basically, to me, it comes back to one word. And that's courage. Because if you say the things you need to say to begin to change the party, you're going to get a big backlash. As Bill Galston said, change is never easy.
Kamarck: I like the idea of Democratic governors from red states because they have lived this and they've got sensitivities. One of the problems I think we have is that as the party has shrunk back to its base, we've got a lot of New York and California thinkers. They may think they're trying to get the mood of the country, but they've grown up politically in places that are just far left of the center that I think we're trying to capture. I think Josh Shapiro's great. Andy Beshear is great. I have a soft spot for Wes Moore — this is a man who has the cool of Barack Obama and the warmth of Bill Clinton. I've never seen this combination in one person.
Healy: In the end, how did the Democratic Leadership Council help get the Democratic Party establishment and leaders to be open in ways that they weren't through a lot of the 1980s? What's one lesson that you want Democrats today to take away from that?
Kamarck: We won the primaries, right? We won the primaries. Think about how different this 2024 election might've been had Joe Biden stepped down from the presidency at the end of 2022, allowed for a wide open 2023-24 primary with all these different people that we've mentioned — the new generation running. Imagine if, first of all, if Harris had won the primary, she would've been in a much better position. She would've looked like her own person. The primaries are where you test these things. And that's where it'll happen in 2027.
From: We won the war of ideas, but most importantly, we had a candidate who beat him in the primaries.
Marshall: We have to aim higher. We have to aim at building a bigger majority. There are a lot of Democrats who are tempted today to say: Well, look what's happening to Trump. He's underwater on his tariffs. He's underwater on his mauling of government. People are not happy about abandoning Ukraine. I heard this argument the other night with a bunch of Democrats — we shouldn't be debating each other. We should be keeping the spotlight intensely on our opponent in hopes of eking out a 49.3 percent victory next time that leaves us in this Ping-Ponging back-and-forth situation in American politics. A virtual tie that we've been in since 2012. We've got to break out of this syndrome, and it's in everybody's interest that we understand that we have a big job of reaching working-class voters. And that's just going to require a completely different orientation of our ideas and our political strategies.
Galston: F.D.R. sparked a revolution inside the Democratic Party that lasted for three generations. Ronald Reagan sparked a revolution inside the Republican Party that lasted for two generations. We gained, at best, an incomplete victory. After Bill Clinton, it became clear that the party had accepted only some of the change that he stood for. And so I agree with Will — we have to think bigger this time, a larger and more enduring majority. And whoever will carry the torch for the next generation of Democrats will have to be even bolder than we were.