New Covenant - Definition and Overview

The New Covenant was what President Bill Clinton called for in 1993 to symbolize the new type relationship that he was claiming to establish between the United States Government and its citizens.

Clinton's call for a "New Covenant" was seen as saying that the 12 previous years under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush represented a breaking of the traditional relationship between the American people and their government, presumably because of the close relationship between leaders in those Administrations and "big business" interests, as opposed to traditional Democratic consituencies such as labor unions, womens' groups, and minority group members. Clinton apparently hoped that this term would come to be used to describe the policies adopted by his Administration. The term had distinctly religious, specifically Judeo-Christian connotations. Perhaps at least in part for this reason, it was never widely adopted by the mass media or the American public at large, and thusly is not as widely associated with Clinton and his politcies as is the Square Deal with Theodore Roosevelt, the New Deal with Franklin Roosevelt, the Fair Deal with Harry S. Truman, the New Frontier with John F. Kennedy, or the Great Society with Lyndon Johnson. An alternate explanation is that due to Clinton's pragmatism, many saw his policies as less than a cohesive whole and more of a series of individual reactions to individual events and situations, rather than part of a vast overall plan.