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Subject: After Exile, Democrats Reenter the Ideas Business<By E. J. Dionne
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 92 04:53:56 EST
Message-ID: <46.1992Nov18.045356@AmeriCast.com>

After Exile, Democrats Reenter the Ideas Business<By E. J. Dionne
Jr.=Washington Post Staff Writer=

The plotting and scheming began long before Bill Clinton knew he
would be president-elect - and, in some cases, long before anyone
even knew the Arkansas governor would be the Democratic nominee.
In exile for years, small groups of Democrats gathered to dream
about what a new administration would look like.

No, the meetings were not about Washington's current obsession,
who would get which jobs. At least not directly. These plotters
and schemers were concerned with ideas and what a Democratic ad-
ministration might actually do with four years of power.

As a result, hundreds of pounds of paper have been dropped on
Little Rock, and much more is on its way. Some of the proposals,
notably the Carnegie Endownment's Commission on Government
Renewal, focused on the structure of government.  Other groups
have organized conferences to push specific policies, as the li-
beral Economic Policy Institute did this week. And it just hap-
pened that Gov. Mario M. Cuomo's Commission on Competitiveness
chose this week to release its report on the country's economic
future.

Mark Green, New York City's consumer affairs commissioner and a
close ally of Ralph Nader's, headed the Citizens Transition Pro-
ject, which put together one of the biggest (and heaviest) docu-
ments released so far, a 1,200-page, agency-by-agency review of
what could be done over the next four years.

It's the second transition report Green has helped put together;
the first came in 1988 for a Michael S.  Dukakis administration
that was not to be. The theory, he said, was that "if we did a
transition report often enough over a century, some friend of
ours would be elected."

The major competing document in heft and clout, which went to the
printer on Friday, will be issued soon by the Progressive Policy
Institute (PPI), the think tank of the centrist Democratic
Leadership Council.  Will Marshall, PPI president, said his tran-
sition book is organized around major policy areas: the economy,
crime, welfare, education and health care, along with foreign and
defense policy.

Beyond its content, the PPI document will have a lot going for
it: Clinton is a former DLC chairman and PPI was close to being
Clinton's private think tank during his campaign.<

Like many innovations in progressive and Democratic politics, the
idea of transition blueprints originated among conservatives.
Green said his group's study is "clearly and unashamedly" modeled
on the massive 1980 study by the conservative Heritage Founda-
tion, "Mandate for Leadership."

The Heritage report was aimed at giving conservatives an agency-
by-agency blueprint on how to reshape government. Adam Meyerson,
editor of Heritage's quarterly magazine, Policy Review, argues
that the "process" of assembling the original Heritage report may
have been as important to the Reagan Revolution as the document
itself.

"Each chapter was put together by a task force that had 15 or 20
people working together," Meyerson said. "That meant that there
were a lot of people ready to go into the administration at low-
to-middle levels who were already thinking about the departments
where they might work. . . . It got a lot of conservatives think-
ing about both their policy goals for each department of govern-
ment and it also got them working together."

Green's document, "Changing America: Blueprints for a New Demo-
cracy," is close to the Heritage document in form and, to some
degree, in spirit. Although Green is associated with the Demo-
cratic Party's liberal wing, he was careful to include work from
the party's center. Two authors in the Green collection, PPI Vice
President Rob Shapiro and PPI fellow Elaine Kamarck, also have
essays in Marshall's book.

Green said he did not want his group's work to be seen as a sec-
tarian document. "Who the hell were we to propagate the Democrat-
ic catechism?" he asked. "We wanted a menu, not an edict."

The idea, Green said, was to make the project "so broad and so
inclusive that it would include people that a Democratic
president would inevitably reach out to."

Beside Shapiro, other Clinton advisers connected with the Ci-
tizens Trasition Project included Samuel "Sandy" Berger, head of
the transition group on foreign policy; Derek Shearer, a Clinton
economic adviser; Stanley Greenberg, Clinton's pollster; Marian
Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund, and Robert Reich,
head of Clinton's economic transition group.

Not surprisingly, some of the ideas in the Green report are al-
ready Clinton gospel. The report, for example, suggests the crea-
tion of an Economic Security Council, an initiative Clinton has
proposed, higher taxes on the wealthy, greater government "in-
vestment" in "roads, bridges, mass transit, water and communica-
tions systems and environmental controls."

Also familiar from the Clinton policy litany are suggestions for
tougher enforcement of child support payments, universally avail-
able college loans, a system of national service and expanded
help for the working poor.

But the Green document could also provide clues about impending
policy debates - and, perhaps, fights - within the Clinton ad-
ministration. For example, there are dueling chapters on fiscal
policy and chapters with different emphasis on the correct ap-
proach to children and family issues.

PPI's book is an expression of a particular strain of Democratic
thinking whose partisans have reason to believe triumphed with
Clinton. "Bill Clinton was the chairman of the DLC when many of
these ideas were gestating and we hope this book will be a guide
to the new thinking," Marshall said.

Marshall added that where his group's book comes closest to the
original Heritage project is in its effort to explain the new
departure in American politics represented by Clinton, much as
Heritage tried to explain Reaganism 12 years ago.

In a sense, the PPI book is the culmination of three years of
work that began when the institute was founded in 1989. It in-
cludes revised and - Marshall hopes - improved versions of some
of the organization's favorite proposals on health care, family
policy, taxation, budget-cutting and national service.

If nothing else, the transition reports give a group that has
spent a lot of time thinking about public problems a chance to
show off its wares, not only to an audience of one in Little
Rock, but also to a larger public. Both books will be on sale in
about a month.

Meyerson of the Heritage Foundation does not usually applaud
Democratic victories, but he does think the Clinton era will be
good for the ideas business. "There's going to be much more at-
tention to ideas in this period, not only among the Clinton peo-
ple, but also among Republicans in Congress," he said. "Republi-
cans in Congress are liberated now that they no longer have to
worry about a Bush agenda."

As for Heritage, the granddaddy of the transition business, it
has no plans to put out a transition report, an indication
perhaps that conservatives really do need to go back to the draw-
ing board. Then again, possibly sensing where the openings for
conservatives now lie, Heritage is pushing a book on congression-
al overhaul.<02:35 11-18C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

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