The most important thing I learned from my high-school government teacher was the lesson of the bell curve. Not Charles Murray's dubious intellectual curve, but instead the Political Bell Curve, showing how the nation's electorate falls across the political spectrum. At each extreme lie a few rightist reactionaries or leftist revolutionaries, my teacher said, but the bulk of the electorate forms the huge hump of the bell in the middle. With a map of the curve in hand, winning an election is easy: simply position yourself one step closer to the top of the hill than your opponent, and a majority is yours. The only real challenge to this game is knowing the precise shape of the hill a candidate has to climb.

Throughout his career in politics, Bill Clinton has shown himself to be a master political cartographer. He seems to have an inborn feeling for the hopes, fears, and desires of America's Great Middle. Following this feeling got him elected in 1992, and looks to be getting him elected in 1996. Bob Dole can only look on in consternation as Clinton repeatedly outflanks him, leaving the Republicans few issues with which to make an attempt on the Middle. When Dole complains that Clinton has stolen his issues, he's right: the problem is that he doesn't know how to regain the lost ground.

On balance, most liberals have observed Clinton's maneuvering with approval. The last two years of Republican rule in Congress have made it quite clear that we need a Democrat in the White House to protect us from the cruelest excesses of the right. Yet many wonder if, in order to maintain his seat atop the hump of popular opinion, Clinton has had to move too far to the right, compromising on bills which a true-blooded liberal would find unconscionable. His signing of this summer's welfare bill provides the most notorious example.

The Right Time for the Wrong Bill

Viewed in isolation, the welfare bill that President Clinton signed in August is simply wrong. The main provisions of the bill replaced federal welfare guarantees with a set of block grants to the states. While the number of Republican governors who have built a career on vilifying welfare recipients makes the prospect of giving them more control of those recipients' livelihoods troubling, some good may come of letting the states experiment with various arrangements of welfare, child care and training programs. (Some progressive states, such as Wisconsin, already have innovative programs in place which have shown promising results.) Far less acceptable is a $56 billion decrease in overall welfare spending, including a cut of $24 billion in food stamp funding over the next six years. At the same time, welfare recipients will be able to receive payments for only two consecutive years and five years over a lifetime. The bill thus restricts both the amount of time a welfare recipient is supported in her search for work and the amount of training the states will be able to provide her in the process. In New York, the amount of money that the federal bill will force the money-strapped state to add to its annual welfare expenditures has prompted calls to remove the state constitution's guarantee of support for the needy. Finally, the bill prohibits legal immigrants from receiving most federal benefits. Policy analysts estimate that, all told, the bill will land over one million children in poverty.

These provisions were as offensive to the President as they were to most liberals; he is reported to have declared that, "This is a decent welfare bill wrapped in a sack of s--." Yet it was also clear well before he announced his decision on the bill that his political sense would force him to sign. Despite public agreement that the welfare system needed reform (ninety-nine percent of respondents told a 1994 CNN/ USA Today/ Gallup poll that the welfare system needed to be fixed) and his own campaign promise to "end welfare as we know it," Clinton had already vetoed two welfare reform bills this year. He was being pressured not only by Republicans in Congress but also by many Democrats to sign the third bill sent to him--once he assented, fully one-half of the Democratic House contingent and over one-half of Democratic Senators voted for the bill. Finally, and most importantly, this particular bill had the clear support of the electorate. Fifty-two percent of respondents told a New York Times/CBS News Poll that the President was doing the right thing in signing the bill, while only six percent felt that signing was "the wrong thing to do". In an election year, Clinton's aides felt that these numbers would translate to a five percent drop in the polls were Clinton to refuse to sign.

And so Clinton's signature was dismissed by liberals as another sacrifice of principles for polls. Yet such a dismissal avoids a number of troubling issues. Among these is the problem of what it should mean to liberals that the proponents of this bill outnumber its opponents in our nation by more than eight to one. We must wonder how we can support and have faith in a popular democracy that sanctions such inhumanity. While journalists, pundits, and leftist idealists may escape this dilemma by condemning the populace as temporarily wrong-headed or misinformed, the popular mood creates a thornier problem for progressive politicians. Forced by their positions to be both followers and leaders or face eviction, liberal politicians must confront a public that is increasingly conservative fiscally and decreasingly tolerant socially. And from this tenuous position, Bill Clinton's New Democrat ideology seems an exceedingly attractive option.

The Hybrid Heart

Make no mistake: despite detractors who see the title "New Democrat" as a code for "soulless vote-chaser," there is a coherent New Democrat ideology. It involves using fiscally conservative means to achieve socially liberal ends. For instance, the Earned Income Tax Credit uses tax incentives rather than government giveaways to encourage work over dependency. In the same spirit, magnet schools and vouchers attempt to improve education through market forces as much as through funding changes, and "reinventing government" involves an effort to improve social services by making the agencies that deliver them more responsive and efficient. These sorts of policies address typical Americans' desire for social justice while acknowledging their reluctance to pay for it with debt and higher taxes. Mixing the liberal and conservative strains of traditional American policy puts Clinton in tune with the hearts of Middle America.

It is this mix which allowed Clinton to break the Republican hold on the White House, and which will allow him to become the first two-term Democratic President since FDR. It is also the mix, with the popular support that it garners, that has maintained his credibility and political clout in Washington. And it is that credibility which is critical for the one thing which can provide any lasting solution to the crisis of American poverty: the creation of jobs.

For Clinton and his New Democratic agenda have proved remarkably capable of creating jobs and taking people permanently off welfare. The ten million new jobs created during Clinton's first term have contributed to a decrease in the welfare rolls from 14.1 million to 12.8 million since Clinton took office (a sharp contrast to his two predecessors' tenure, during which the welfare population increased from 10.6 million to 14.1). Further, an average of 650,000 welfare parents worked each month last year, 140,000 more than in 1992.

Paradoxically, then, the Presidential ideology which abandoned the poor and their liberal defenders by signing the welfare bill may be their best and only hope for now. What Bill Clinton has taught us is that because of our nation's political situation--the current shape of the American Bell Curve--the problems of the social liberal may be solvable only by the fiscal conservative. And so, while we have a moral obligation to sway, cajole, or even push that curve toward a more compassionate future position, we cannot refuse to assist those who need our help now in whatever way its topography permits us.

Still, the bitter taste of forced compromise remains. I learned my government teacher's lessons well, and I'll vote for Bill Clinton this fall, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.