Internet Explorer 7, Clears and Floats?

Working on a project, I'm have a form, where labels (containing fields) are all floated. In order to force a label to a new line, I put a class on it with "clear: left", but that, for some reason, causes the words to be smushed to the left. If there's a label text with a space in it, IE7 renders it as

first
second

instead of

first second

Anyone run into this before? I'm not css problem savvy enough to know what to Google for. I ended up just putting br's with a "clear: both" class on them in between rows, but it's not as clean as it was before.