Revenge of the hollow man.

• Position: Reelection of Pres. Clinton

So here we are, facing four more years of Clinton. It's Clinton II. Revenge of the Hollow Man.

But the sequel will resemble the original, only less daring, if that's possible. All those progressives who went to the polls and voted for Clinton, hoping that he would suddenly find his progressive bearings in the second term, think again. There's a sign up at the White House: NO LEFT TURN.

Here's why: Clinton's grand plan has been to remake the Democratic Party as a moderate Republican Party. He set out to build a new governing coalition not of the poor and the disenfranchised, but of suburban voters, the new hi-tech industries, and Wall Street. He thinks he's found the Rosetta Stone of a new Democratic coalition.

Christopher Dodd, the Democratic Party head, says, the Party's moving in the right direction"--which is the literal truth. And Clinton talks fatuously about "the vital center," a phrase that guarantees the continual blurring of the differences between Democrats and Republicans.

Gone are the promises of change. Gone the hope for universal health care, gone the hope for a peace dividend, gone the hope for rebuilding our cities, gone the hope for a more just economy.

Clinton's new appointments to his cabinet and his staff show no hint of progressivism. It's the same old establishment crowd, only more so. No one should be surprised. The expectation that Clinton would wake up the day after the election and say, "Fooled you, I'm a leftist after all," never made any sense. He's been a corporatist since his second term as governor of Arkansas. A corporatist he shall remain.

Some on the left have kidded themselves that their access to Clinton--when added to his willingness to please and his lame-duck status--would translate into a more liberal second term. This is delusion squared. It doesn't even make sense at the level of pop psychology: If Clinton so desperately seeks approval, he'll be able to get more of it--and from much more powerful people--by governing from the right.

And while it is true that Clinton won't have an upcoming campaign to make him act opportunistically, his heir apparent, Al Gore, has one, and Clinton won't do anything to prevent Al from getting his due. Gore's motto, as John Nichols reported in The Capital Times of Madison, is Clintonesque in its vacuity: "Not to the left, nor to the right, but to the future."

So forget about fixing up the welfare mess. Clinton knew that dismantling welfare was a move calculated to haul...