President Clinton, the "New Democrat" elected to reflect the mainstream and fix the economy, has instead become a social revolutionary. His first actions, for example, were to rescind the ban on federal funding of abortion counseling, sign the government-regulated Family Leave Act, and try to allow open homosexuals in the military.
Using both power and symbols, he has begun to define the Clinton era--a progressive brave new America.
"In the area of culture and cultural symbols, he seems to be solidly on the left," says David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute on American Values, a New York research organization. "If there's supposed to be a 'new' Democratic Party on culture, his policies and appointments don't reflect it."
With an appeal to the great American center, Clinton was narrowly elected with 43 percent of the vote, winning a three-way contest between candidates who symbolized the establishment (Bush), the counterculture (Clinton), and middle America (Perot). But now he has taken sides in America's culture war.
"What a president does becomes a bench mark for how political debates are carried out thereafter," says Richard Noyes, director of political research at the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington. "Reagan, for example, not only affected the political culture but changed the national mood. Ask what the president does not worry about, and that is what is overlooked by his administration. That will be reflected in a thousand different ways."
America's public culture has been defined in both expansive and restrictive ways, but both presume its bedrock function in a nation's behavior. On the left, sociologist Robert Bellah calls culture "those patterns of meaning that any group or society uses to interpret and evaluate itself and its situation." On the right, former Secretary of Education William Bennett defines it as "the principles, sentiments, ideas, and political attitudes that define the permissible and the impermissible."
Like his predecessors, Clinton has become the "chief priest" of a culture that also is America's civil religion--the nation's idea of the common good and the way it uses its past to define the future.
Clinton has acknowledged his priestly role. He has declared a "new covenant" for the people. In quoting Bible texts, he has amended a vision of "what God has prepared" to "what we can build." Charged with conveying this vision is chief speech writer David Kusnet, the former information director for the liberal People for the American Way, who endorses "the Left wing of the possible."
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