Mandate for Change.

• Author: Dilulio, John J.

A student of mine once asked me to distinguish liberals and conservatives from progressives. She was in a big hurry, so I answered half-jokingly as follows: Most thinking people of good will believe that human reason can fashion responses to social maladies such as poverty, crime, and racism. But liberals believe the responses are likely to prove humane and effective. Conservatives believe they are bound to be perverse and futile. And progressives believe that everything would be just fine were it not for the existence of liberals and conservatives. As a corollary, I added that, in thinking about how to solve complex public problems, liberals put governments first, conservatives put markets first, and progressives put themselves first.

The publication of the Progressive Policy Institute's (PPI) Mandate for Change marks a watershed in the evolution of the ABLC (Anything But Liberal or Conservative) tradition of policy progressivism. The PPI was rounded in 1989 as the policy think-tank of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which Bill Clinton chaired from 1990-1991. The preface to Mandate for Change proudly notes that Clinton "encouraged PPI's efforts to develop new policies that challenge both liberal and conservative orthodoxies." Clinton's own big-type quote on the front cover (complete with a presidential seal embossed behind it) promises that the book "charts a bold new course for reviving progressive government in America" and "really looks beyond the old Left-Right debates of the past and tries to move us toward a better future."

The new blurber-in-chief is not all wrong. By any measure, Mandate for Change is an impressive, illuminating, and wide-ranging book and has many important and novel things to say about the nation's most pressing domestic and international policy challenges. Having gotten off to a rocky start with Zoe Baird, Kimba Wood, gays in the military, and attacks on Social Security benefits, Clinton can still re-read chapter 14 on how to effect a foolproof transition and hit the ground running. The book is required reading for Kempish Republicans who want a good point of intellectual departure for their own DLC-like comeback efforts. And as policy blueprints for new administrations go, PPI is every inch a match for the Heritage Foundation, producer of the now ancient Reagan administration document, Mandate for Leadership.

But Mandate for Change certainly does not deliver what contributors William A. Galston and Elaine Ciulla Kamarck herald as "an agenda for action that transcends the stale options of the Left and Right." Rather, it is a book that deserves to be taken seriously even though its editors and contributors often substitute rhetorical flights for policy analysis, caricaturing liberal or...