The center holds

As soon as the welfare-reform bill passed last year, advocates for disabled children began lobbying the Clinton Administration over the interpretation of a provision in the bill tightening the eligibility requirements for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits. In recent years, the number of children on SSI had exploded as more and more families bilked the program for disability benefits for their kids even if they weren't genuinely disabled. Republicans wanted to crack down on the abuse, but left the details of how to do it up to the Administration. Here was a perfect opportunity for the Administration, elements of which opposed reform in the first place, to undermine the intent of the welfare bill sub rosa.

That's exactly what the children's groups had in mind. They were pushing for an interpretation that would knock at most 40,000 children off SSI. Congressional Republicans thought a reasonable rule would affect some 185,000 children. In mid February the Social Security Administration wrote regulations that would remove an estimated 135,000 from SSI -- Republicans were satisfied, children's groups apoplectic. The SSI ruling is indicative of a trend. When the Department of Health and Human Services recently interpreted a welfare reform "maintenance of effort" provision in a dubious way to require more spending from the states, Republicans balked. HHS reversed itself.

The cooperation from the Administration on welfare is an after-effect of a bitter internal battle in 1995 over whether the President should sign the bill, a fight Administration New Democrats won in a rout. A group of high-powered liberal policy intellectuals at HHS, including Wendell Primus, Mary Jo Bane, and Peter Edelman, opposed the bill and waged open warfare on those in the White House -- including New-Democrat reformer Bruce Reed --who supported it. In the end, Clinton signed the bill, Primus and Co. quit, and New-Democrat true-believer Bruce Reed now heads the Administration's domestic policy shop.

The first few months of the Clinton Administration have given the lie to a favorite claim of Republicans: that a second Clinton term would be marked by a decisive turn to the Left. The President is still talking conservative on values and still committed (in theory) to a balanced budget, while allowing none of his many micro-liberal initiatives to interfere with this broader message of moderation and fiscal restraint. It makes for a difficult environment for Clinton Administration liberals, many of whom have simply left. Those who remain are mainly ensconced in outlying federal agencies and apparently resigned to accepting the political formula that got the President re-elected.

As one Washington observer says of the Clinton Administration: "It's a pre-Reagan moderate Republican regime." Ed Kilgore, the political director of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), explains: "There are still a significant number of people left in the White House and key places in the Administration whose history is liberal, but they've made it clear, they're there for the whole ride. There are not many dissenters left in any significant policy-making position." Robert Borosage of the Campaign for America's Future, the liberal counter-part to the DLC, agrees: "Clinton puts his team together to do the politics he wants to do, and he always runs more populist than he governs, so he's putting together a very conservative basic management team."

In his book Behind the Oval Office, Dick Morris blames the liberal tilt of the first half of the Administration on the White House staff. The central drama of Morris's book is his struggle with the troika of influential advisors already at the White House when he arrived: Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, "deeply loyal to his Democratic congressional buddies"; Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes, an old-liberal "warrior"; and George Stephanopoulos, who had "an often maddeningly fixed ideology." The key Morris ally in the internal battles was Deputy Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles; according to Morris, the two hugged after they got Clinton to deliver a crucial June 1995 speech endorsing the balanced budget.

Bowles, of course, is now White House Chief of Staff, the most powerful post in the Administration. A North Carolina investment banker, Bowles could easily pass as a country-club Republican. Stephanopoulos has been replaced by Rahm Emanuel, an operative out of the Richard Daley operation in Chicago who has a taste for centrist politics with a wallop. "Wedge issues are truly what Emanuel lives for," an Immigration and Naturalization Service staffer told The New Republic, citing Emanuel's efforts to move the Administration as far Right on illegal immigration as possible. Finally, Ickes was ignominiously dumped from Clinton's inner-circle immediately after the election.

Whether the new personnel and the direction of the Administration constitutes a fundamental shift in American politics and the nature of the Democratic Party, or just canny tactics, remains to be seen. Morris posited that if Clinton triangulated, eventually the rest of the party would follow. Well, maybe. "The Democratic Left in Congress is very frustrated and very combative and deeply worried that they may be politically marginalized," says Will Marshall, president of the centrist Progressive Policy Institute. Administration witnesses at Capitol Hill hearings are familiar with the phenomenon. When an HHS official testified before the House Ways & Means Committee recently about Administration "fixes" to the welfare-reform bill ($21 billion in new spending unlikely to go anywhere in the GOP Congress), she was questioned more harshly by liberal Rep. Pete Stark (D., Calif.) than any Republican.