WASHINGTON -- The message in President Clinton's awkward confrontation with the Democratic Leadership Council is that he faces a tricky balancing act in dealing with his own party over the next two years. His success or failure may well determine whether he can be re-elected in 1996.
The president was uncharacteristically blunt when he told the DLC to "join me in the arena, not in the peanut gallery" -- meaning that it is time for these conservative Democrats to join in helping the administration rather than simply taking shots from the sidelines.
There has been plenty of the latter from the DLC in the month since the Democrats had their clocks cleaned in the Nov. 8 election. Only hours before Clinton appeared, the DLC chairman, Rep. Dave McCurdy of Oklahoma, had declared that the president had been a "heavy burden" in the election because he was unable to shake off his liberalism in his first two years in office.
"While Bill Clinton has the mind of a New Democrat, he retains the heart of an old Democrat," said McCurdy in a remarkable display of political chutzpah from a certified "New Democrat" who himself had just lost an election for the Senate in Oklahoma. McCurdy suggested that Clinton might prove to be a "transitional figure" in the movement from left to right within the .. party.
But Clinton managed to be both firm and conciliatory in his response. He defended the administration's efforts on health care reform and such leading examples of liberalism as the family leave bill and the national service program. He made it clear that he would continue to press for crime prevention programs as well as those to provide for tougher punishment for criminals.
He also pointed out, however, that many of the things he #F accomplished in his first two years -- the national service program, for instance -- had been part of the DLC agenda. The DLC, he said, "ought to be proud."
The problem for the president, of course, is that there is no way to paper over the differences between the Democratic Party's liberal base and these more conservative Democrats who formed the DLC in 1985 specifically to distance themselves from that liberalism.
The base includes black and Jewish voters, most Hispanic Americans, academics, a majority of older Americans and the remnants of organized labor. These groups are not enough in themselves to win a presidential election, but their enthusiastic support is essential to any Democrat who hopes to win.
More to the point in terms of Clinton's immediate problem, these traditional liberals are still the core of the Democratic Party in both houses of Congress. The DLC might like to see a crime program with less attention paid to prevention programs, but the president needs to fashion one that can hold, for example, the members of the Congressional Black Caucus if he is to have any chance of passing such a program through the House of Representatives.
The DLC, by contrast, is arguing essentially for giving the highest priority to the working-class voters -- independents and the Reagan Democrats whose swings back and forth have made the difference in the last four presidential elections as well as the 1994 debacle. The theory is that the DLC approach is still "progressive" enough to hold the party base while creating a new majority.
That is precisely what happened in the 1992 election. Clinton was successful enough in projecting an image of himself as a "different kind of Democrat" to build just such a coalition. But it shouldn't be forgotten that he won with 43 percent of the vote and might very well not have done so if Ross Perot had not drained off 19 percent.
The answer, Clinton suggested to the DLC, is that the White House and the Democratic Party must make the case that there are things government can do to improve people's lives -- and some things the Clinton administration already has done in its first two years.
That, of course, is obviously what the president failed to do in advance of the 1994 elections. Democratic candidates all over the country found, for example, that their party and president were getting little or no credit for the improvements in the economy in the last year. It was easy for the Republicans to focus attention instead on gays in the military and gun control.
Now Clinton is facing the same imperative under even more difficult conditions with a Republican Congress. He doesn't need the DLC sniping at him from the peanut gallery.