The New Yorker, June 17, 1996 P. 45
LETTER FROM WASHINGTON about Bill Clinton's new set of conservative campaign promises & positions... Clinton won the 1992 election by conflating in his New Democratic self the brilliant, vague, tenuous promise of both traditional "liberal" Democratic populism, which is rooted in issues of class in the economic sense, and modern "conservative" Republican populism, which is rooted in issues of class in the social sense. During his first year in office, the President presented a deficit-slimming budget that pleased the bond market and ginned up the economy, but did so by abandoning his promise of a middle-class tax cut, increasing the gasoline tax, and raising taxes on upper incomes. Simultaneously, he put forward a $16-billion spending program that was greeted by conservative critics as classic old Democrat vote-buying and by liberal critics as a miserly failure to deliver on his campaign promises of big-money, big-government activism... On an immediate political level, the Clinton-Dick Morris strategy is undeniably clever. It allows the President to deploy the wedge issues of economic populism against the Republicans while blunting the Republicans' ability to use the wedge issues of social populism against him. This is the mirror image of the strategy that Ronald Reagan and the late Lee Atwater crafted to reshape the G.O.P. into a majority party... Ann Lewis, Clinton's deputy campaign manager, calls Reagan's '84 campaign "the model for how to reeled a President"... In other areas where public opinion is passionately one-sided, Clinton deviates from the talk-right-govern-left tactic. On issues of criminal rights and liberties--what might be called Willie Horton issues--the President has, in recent months, gone so far to the right that he has been willing to back measures of dubious constitutionality. Describes his passage of a federal version of Megan's Law, his opposition to changing cocaine law; his desire to be attacked by the ACLU, his opposition to gay marriage; you vote for Dole, and you get what you get. You vote for Clinton, and who knows what you'd get? Maybe he'll turn again--back your way.