Hillary Saving the American Dream?
by Donald Devine

Who says Hillary Clinton does not get it? In a cover story for the Democratic Leadership Council’s new Democrat publication, she is launching an “American Dream Initiative.” What could be more in tune with the growing thirst among the people for traditional American values?

Here she is with co-authors Sen. Tom Carper and Gov. Tom Vilsack:

For 230 years, Americans have been united by a simple, common dream that tomorrow will be better than today. The promise of American life, handed on through a dozen generations, rests on this basic bargain: All of us should have the opportunity to live up to our God-given potential, and the responsibility to make the most of it. In the 20th century, that basic bargain built the greatest middle class the world has ever known. The expansion of opportunity in return for hard work and sacrifice made us the richest, safest, strongest nation on earth, and enabled us to defeat fascism and communism.

Hillary’s poetry reaches to tradition and ancestors, looks to a better future, and specifically praises opportunity, potential, work, anticommunism, strength and responsibility—even God! And that is only the opening statement. It is all there. It may not be quite Ronald Reagan’s “God, family, freedom, neighborhood, work” but she is learning; and it is good.

She does get a bit cute. Notice closely that she mentions the 20th century as the good times—and guess who the last president of that century was? Now, she says, “Over the last five years”—guess who was president then—“we've taken a different direction” and it is not good. “For the first time ever, we've had four straight years of rising productivity and falling incomes. Americans are earning less, while the costs of a middle-class life have soared: In the past five years, college costs are up 50 percent, health care 73 percent, and gasoline more than 100 percent.”

While the rhetoric is grand, the proposals are the same old New Deal nostrums. Her initiative promises:

Every American should have the opportunity and responsibility to go to college and earn a degree, and to get the lifelong training they need. Every worker should have the opportunity and responsibility to save for a secure retirement. Every business should have the opportunity to grow and prosper in the strongest private economy on Earth, and the responsibility to equip workers with the same tools of success as management. Every individual should have the opportunity and responsibility to start building wealth from day one, and the security and community that come from owning a home. Every family should have the opportunity to afford health insurance for their children, and the responsibility to obtain it.

It sounds like George W. Bush. Even more: “We propose a plan to produce one million more college graduates a year by 2015—so that within a decade, more than half our young people will finish college with a degree.” It is No Child Left Behind for college students. How novel. How the young people “will” finish with a degree is left unstated. With all of the opportunities available today, only about half of those who now enter college emerge with a degree. She does say people will have a “responsibility to go to college” but she does not say how that responsibility will be enforced, although she does say she will “demand” responsibility somehow or other.

All Sen. Clinton and her compatriots have done is hire a good public relations firm and hit the notes the polls show will appeal to voters. The specific proposals could have come from any politician over the past century. She tried to sound like Reagan but the proposals are pure welfare state. The words are close but the music is wrong. One of the principal architects of the welfare state, Gunnar Myrdal, highlighted her problem long ago. The people want the goods promised by the welfare state but they are unwilling to give the government experts the power they need to carry them out.

Ronald Reagan understood the dilemma and reached beyond the welfare state and its stalemated deadlock between its lofty ambitions and its inability to obtain more power for government officials by taking freedom from the people. His dream went deep into roots of the American tradition and offered a comprehensive solution based on the teachings of the modern philosopher Frank Meyer:

“It was Frank Meyer who reminded us that the robust individualism of the American experience was part of the deeper current of Western learning and culture. He pointed out that a respect for law, an appreciation for tradition, and regard for the social consensus that gives stability to our public and private institutions, these civilized ideas must still motivate us even as we seek a new economic prosperity based on reducing government interference in the marketplace. Our goals complement each other. We're not cutting the budget simply for the sake of sounder financial management. This is only a first step toward returning power to the States and communities, only a first step toward reordering the relationship between citizen and government.

We can make government again responsive to the people by cutting its size and scope and thereby ensuring that its legitimate functions are performed efficiently and justly. Because ours is a consistent philosophy of government, we can be very clear: We do not have a social agenda, separate, separate economic agenda, and a separate foreign agenda. We have one agenda. Just as surely as we seek to put our financial house in order and rebuild our nation's defenses, so too we seek to protect the unborn, to end the manipulation of schoolchildren by utopian planners, and permit the acknowledgement of a Supreme Being in our classrooms just as we allow such acknowledgements in other public institutions.”

Ronald Reagan’s American Dream was based first on the values of our Federalist Founders:

Our Founding Fathers began the most exciting adventure in the history of nations. In their debates with the principles of human dignity, individual rights, and representative democracy, their arguments were based on common law, separation of powers, and limited government. Their victory was to find a home for liberty.

Madison knew and we should always remember that no government is perfect, not even a democracy. Rights given to government were taken from the people, and so he believed that government's touch in our lives should be light, that powers entrusted to it be administered by temporary guardians. He wrote that "government was the greatest of all reflections on human nature.'' He wrote that "if men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government,'' he said, "which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed, and next oblige it to control itself.''

Led by Madison and Jefferson and others, the authors of the Constitution established a fragile balance between the branches and levels of government. That concept was their genius and the secret of our success -- that idea of federalism. The balance of power intended in the Constitution is the guarantor of the greatest measure of individual freedom any people have ever known. Our task today, this year, this decade, must be to reaffirm those ideas. Our Founding Fathers designed a system of government that was unique in all the world—a federation of sovereign states with as much law and decision-making authority as possible kept at the local level. They knew that man's very need for government meant no government should function unchecked.

We the people—and that is still the most powerful phrase— created government for our own convenience. It can have no power except that voluntarily granted to it by the people. We founded our society on the belief that the rights of men were ours by grace of God. That vision of our Founding Fathers revolutionized the world. Those principles must be reaffirmed by every generation of Americans, for freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.

Reagan had a consistent philosophy. In simple terms, it was based on the Founders and was summarized in the Meyer formula of “using libertarian mean to achieve traditionalist ends.” And it had results. His 23 percent tax cut drove down spending from a projected 23.8 percent of GNP to 19.3 percent. Fifty-five countries followed with tax reductions of their own. While he planned to increase defense spending to win the cold war (and did) he decreased non-defense outlays from 17.9 percent of GNP in fiscal 1982 to 16.4 percent in fiscal 1989. He was even flexible enough to support two items originally opposed by his White House—Sen. Bob Dole's proposal to index tax rates for inflation and Sen. Phil Gramm's spending limits--that also helped promote his vision of limited government during his years in office.

True, Reagan’s dream has faded since these historic accomplishments. Much of the old welfare state has grown back and even advanced with the big new prescription drug benefit. But the old welfare state problem of being unable to pay for the promises, especially in the hemorrhaging Medicare program, have returned too and no one offers a better answer than his. Ronald Reagan began a restoration that offered a solution. Hillary Clinton wants more of the same under new packaging. The paradox is, however, if she does win the nation’s highest office, she will not be pursuing any new “initiative” but will be forced to face the Reagan music and provide a solution how to pay the bills come due for the profligate programs of the 20th century she so much admires.

Donald Devine, the editor of Conservative Battleline Online, was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 and is the director of the Federalist Leadership Center at Bellevue University.