Clinton's search for the center.

• Author: Bresler, Robert J.

At the beginning of his presidency, Bill Clinton seemed unclear whether he would pursue the politics of change or of the center. His decision to appoint former Reagan adviser David Gergen as a senior White House aide was meant to signal Clinton's turn toward the center. If this is to be more than a cosmetic makeover, the President must understand that he can not pursue change politics and centrist politics simultaneously. Presidents who have tried it have stumbled over their feet. The former requires building a coherent political coalition, possessing a working majority in Congress, and having a clear, compact, and understandable political agenda. Only three modern chief executives have possessed such mastery and then only during a part of their presidencies: Franklin Roosevelt during the New Deal period 1933-38, Lyndon Johnson at the outset of his administration during 1963-65, and Ronald Reagan in 1981-82. These politics are exceedingly difficult as Congress balks, coalitions fragment, international crises intercede, and agendas are exhausted.

If Clinton intends to be a reformer in the mold of FDR, he must have a clear agenda that has a chance of success. Or, to put it another way, he must be able to craft another act for American liberalism. The first was Theodore Roosevelt's New Nationalism and Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom and the development of the regulatory state; the second, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and the creation of the welfare state; and the third was LBJ's Great Society and the introduction of the entitlement state. Jimmy Carter struggled with this problem and basically advanced a laundry list of ideas that had no coherence and no durable constituency.

Clinton's reform agenda has strong Carteresque overtones. Welfare reform, infrastructure funding, national service, and increased taxes on energy and the rich are not new ideas, but variants of old ones. The liberal giants of the past (the Roosevelts, Wilson, and Johnson) organized their programs around major reforms that addressed the needs of a substantial portion of society - the Food and Drug Law, Federal Reserve Board, Social Security, civil rights law, Medicare, and Federal aid to education. They did not stitch an amalgam of small targeted programs together.

Clinton's strategy, as William Schneider of the American Enterprise Institute describes it, is an effort to put together a coalition of groups that have one thing in common - they are looking for help from the...