We are not selecting a moral tutor, or a role model for our children. Nothing in the normal lives of politicians specially equips them for those functions, and nothing in our constitutional order or political tradition assigns those functions to politicians. We are not selecting someone to (in the gaseous language of today’s politics) “control the economy” or “get the country moving.” Presidents can’t control the economy. (Who wants to live in a country where they can?) And since 1776 there has been ample motion in America, thank you.
As the first post-Cold War election, this is the first election in the experience of most Americans in which they need not worry that if they make the wrong choice the world will be at risk. If we make a mistake next Tuesday, we can tidy it up four Novembers from now. Presidents aren’t apt to do all that much damage in four years, and they can’t do much that is irreparable.
A fascinating fact about this election is that the stakes are lower but the electorate’s interest is higher. People have paid attention to the 90-minute debates. A century ago Gladstone could hold the attention of working class audiences for that long in the open air, his voice unamplified, discussing the disestablishment of the Irish church. Back then, political oratory was popular entertainment and there was intense earnestness about public controversies. This year the third debate had the highest rating, which indicates a crescendo of interest almost Victorian.
A correlate of this gravity is widespread impatience with nonsense. Someone once said excessive righteousness is symptomatic of “spiritual diabetes.” Voters detected that disease in the Republicans’ hugely unsuccessful convention. One night in the Astrodome, when the rhetorical fire and brimstone was flowing like lava, a journalist asked a delegate what she thought about the country’s trajectory. “It’s Satanic,” said the delegate. And who, asked the journalist, is to blame? The delegate, looking at the journalist the way an elementary school teacher looks at a backward pupil, said: “Satan, of course.” But Republicans have no monopoly on ludicrous righteousness. Al Gore seems convinced that he, almost alone, has pierced the veil of reality and has espied the environmental apocalypse toward which the rest of us are sleepwalking. (How we sleep through his warning shouts is hard to say.)
Bush, too, has been shouting a lot, trying to summon back the salad days of 1988. Then Michael Dukakis, seeing no need to counter Bush’s attacks on his veto of the Massachusetts flag salute law, said: “The American people aren’t interested in a debate over which one of us loves his country the most.” He was mistaken. So were all those commentators who said that the flag salute veto (and Willie Horton) were not “real issues.”
Jean Bethke Elshtain, a Vanderbilt University political scientist, rightly says voters and candidates are “cocostructors of issues.” Candidates gauge voters’ concerns and win when enough voters share their constructions. “To claim, then, that candidates are trafficking in nonissues because they immerse themselves in weighty symbolism is to presume that which does not exist: a clear-cut division between the symbolic and the real, between issues and emotional appeals.” This is so because elections concern “not just interests but identities, not just what we are to do but who we are and what we have become.”
This year Bush failed to enlist voters as coconstructors of issues about Clinton’s activities during his college days. This suggests that Americans have become focused on the mundane: Which candidate is most apt to do a modicum of good? Fine. Elections are not canonizations. Bush also seemed to be mechanically going through old motions when he warned that a Clinton administration would be “Carter II.” He was trying to do to Democrats what they did for decades to Republicans regarding Hoover. In 1944, 12 years after Hoover was defeated, FDR was still running against him, recalling “the mess that was dumped in our laps in 1933.” And the theme was alive 20 years after that. In 1964, when I tried to convince a crusty steelworker in Donora, Pa., to vote for Goldwater, he snapped, “I don’t like Hoover.” Not “I didn’t” but “I don’t.”
It has taken the Democrats just 12 years to get free from the taint of the Carter years. The unpleasantness in 1992 was quite contemporary. Cynical politicians, and those journalists whose idea of sophistication is the languid acceptance of cynicism as normal, say polities has always been like this. That libels the past in order to legitimize the present. Of course there always have been episodes of unpleasant campaigning. But our politics is unquestionably coarser than it was not long ago. As recently as 1988 Bob Dole seemed stunningly harsh when he said Bush should “stop lying about my record.” Four years later it seems almost decorous to call an opponent a liar. Consider these salvos of ads fired by Rep. Newt Gingrich and his challenger, Tony Center: “Meet Tony Center, a trial lawyer … Center actually sued to strip a four-year-old and a one-year-old of their child support to pay his own legal fee.” “It was Newt who delivered divorce papers to his wife the day after her cancer operation.”
The good news about all the bad behavior by politicians is that the country is well immunized against heady expectations and hence against deep disappointments. Virginia Woolf wrote that “in or about December, 1910, human nature changed.” What had seemed so portentous to her was some exhibit or other of avant-garde art. If, next Tuesday, for only the fourth time in this century, an elected incumbent is chucked out of the White House, there is sure to be a surfeit of overheated overinterpretation. Don’t believe it. Human nature won’t have changed. The head of one branch of one of our governments will be about to change. That’s all. That’s enough.
