“Ronald Reagan may have forgotten names, but never his goals. He was a great communicator . . . mostly because he had something to communicate.” And “it would be foolish to deny that his success was fundamentally rooted in a command of public ideas.”
So said a leading senator in a 1989 Yale University speech entitled “Politics and the Power of Ideas.” Bob Dole? Phil Gramm? No. Ted Kennedy. Unlike many on the left who patronized Reagan intellectually because they went to Harvard and he went to Eureka, Kennedy understood that Reagan’s success was not a matter of illusion but of ideas.
Conservatives might learn from Kennedy’s realism. They patronize Clinton’s character the way liberals once patronized Reagan’s intellect. Clinton can be weak and wobbly, easily rolled. Yes, but he is passionate, and passion can move a country.
To watch what Clinton did with his State of the Union address, a hopeless jumble brought to life with fluency and emotional power, is to see a man who ranks with Reagan and John Kennedy as the great rhetorical presidents of the half-century.
Moreover, Reagan’s core idea-government does not work, free individuals can do a better job-was easier to sell. Clinton’s idea that government can solve all manner of social problems is far more counterintuitive; yet he delivers it with such obvious conviction that, however wobbly he gets on implementation, the message gets through.
On health care, for example, Bob Dole, who gave the Republican response to the State of the Union, had the far better brief, with the chart and facts to show the president’s plan is a disaster in the making.
Yet Dole appeared the nitpicker and the naysayer. His declaration that there is no health care crisis (that the problems of the system are not such as to warrant its reinvention), a position heavily supported by the facts, appeared cold and insensitive beside Clinton’s passionate recital of individual suffering under the current system.
Dole had the facts. Clinton the anecdote of a family driven into bankruptcy by medical bills. The anecdote is an argument for a modest reform: making health insurance portable. It is by no logic a rationale for a total overhaul of the system.
But Clinton has passion and, on his core issues, obvious conviction. And he knows how to shape the debate. On its merits, the Clinton plan should have been dead on arrival. Yet it is the axis around which the entire national debate will revolve.
Clinton has shaped the welfare debate with equal skill, putting the focus on getting people off welfare, when the real issue, the only way to really break the welfare cycle, is keeping them from getting on in the first place. The real issue is the culture of entitlement in which having a child out of wedlock automatically gets you on the dole. Government then has to spend years and dangle huge inducements-free child care, education, job training, medical care-to get you off.
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So we will now have a debate about whether it should be two years on welfare and out or one year and out; whether, when your time is up, the government owes you a job or whether finding a livelihood should be your responsibility, as it is for everyone else. Neatly sidestepped is the basic question of why people who wantonly start families they cannot support have a claim on the Treasury purely by dint of their irresponsibility.
On crime, too, historically another Democratic weak point, Clinton’s passion and forcefulness have taken control of the debate. For the first time in a long time, polls show that people trust Democrats more than Republicans to deal with crime.
The president’s performance Tuesday night tells you why. He talked tough. He showed anguish with just the right mix of anger. He brandished the living prop: a New York City beat cop who stood up and took a bow for his president’s commitment to fighting crime. Corny, but, as it was for Reagan (who invented this shtick), effective.
Sen. Gramm can complain that Clinton’s budget last year “actually cut prison construction by $580 million.” But complaints of this kind fade beside a president who talks the talk and who can harness the office and the occasion. Little wonder he’s won six elections in a row.