They seemed like such nice men.
Not exciting, maybe. Not charismatic or inspiring. But when asked to describe George Bush and Michael Dukakis, people who know them usually use words such as ”decent,” or ”enlightened,” or ”dedicated,” as well as
”intelligent,” ”experienced” and ”reasonable.”
Not one of which describes the presidential campaign the two men have run against each other for the last several weeks. By almost any standard, the campaign has been tasteless, mindless, tawdry and barely related either to the job of the president or the day-to-day lives of the electorate.
Not that political campaigns, even for president, are usually models of honor, decorum and intellect, or that there is anything new about lamenting their lack of substance or excitement. As recently as eight years ago, when Ronald Reagan ran against Jimmy Carter, rank-and-file voters and learned commentators alike bemoaned the choice before them, calling Carter an unsuccessful president and Reagan a conservative ideologue.
And it is clearly true that, in the distant past, presidential campaigns were even rawer and nastier than this one. Abraham Lincoln`s physical appearance, Thomas Jefferson`s religious beliefs and Grover Cleveland`s sex life were all discussed with a bluntness unrivalled even by the roughest of this year`s ”negative” television commercials.
But in what might be called the modern era, this year`s campaign does seem to have been the most negative, the most dishonest and the least substantial. Never before have commercials in a presidential campaign run pictures of murderers and their victims, complete with body bags. Rarely in recent years have the policy positions of candidates been so outrageously misrepresented.
The 1980 campaign was often frivolous, but at least Carter and Reagan debated some of the major issues confronting the country-inflation, recession and arms control-just as Reagan and Walter Mondale debated taxes and the budget deficit in 1984. Most of the discussion this year has been over matters that are peripheral, or symbolic or both.
Who is to blame for this? Probably everybody. The candidates, the political parties, the campaign advisers, the political reporters and maybe even the people themselves all seem to have played some role.
”Number one is that the candidates are basically uninspiring,” said Alvin From, the director of the Democratic Leadership Council in Washington. Another political strategist, preferring to remain anonymous, agreed.
”These are the two weakest candidates that we`ve seen in a very long time,” he said. ”Neither of them could muster a very strong campaign behind themselves, so they had to motivate people by nailing the other guy.”
Even Republicans acknowledge that it was the Bush campaign that began the attacks and their less-than-lofty tone. In fact, the vice president`s own strategists were remarkably candid, if somewhat anonymous, about their plans from the beginning.
”We can`t beat this guy (Dukakis) if his negatives stay below 20,” a senior Bush campaign aide said during the Republican National Convention in August. ”We`ve got to get them up into the mid-30s.”
Nor did the aide hesitate to say how he planned to increase the percentage of the voters who hold an unfavorable view of the Democrat.
”We`re going to call him a soft-on-crime, soft-on-defense liberal with a capital `L,` ” he said.
And so they did, with commercials attacking Dukakis`s record-and sometimes a perversion of his record, with hard-hitting speeches from Bush and other Republicans implying with varying degrees of subtlety that Dukakis was not patriotic, and with mailings so extreme that even Bush campaign officials found it adviseable to disclaim them-but not until weeks after they had been disseminated and had had their impact.
Then there were the rumors-that Dukakis had once sought psychiatric counselling, that his wife had once burned an American flag during a demonstration-for which there was no evidence whatsoever. The first rumor seemed to have been created by some political extremists, not the Bush campaign, but campaign officials made sure as many reporters as possible knew about it. The second was reported, if not created, by Republican Sen. Steve Symms of Idaho.
In recent days, Democrats-though none connected with the Dukakis campaign-have tried to plant stories based on equally spurious rumors concerning Bush and running-mate Dan Quayle.
After several weeks of getting pounded by the Bush commercials, ”Dukakis came under increasing pressure to return the fire,” said Democratic consultant David Axelrod. And he did so with an advertisement linking Bush with violent crime through reasoning even flimsier than Bush`s commercial calling Dukakis soft on crime.
In the view of many political observers, though, the tone of the campaign was determined as much by the situation as by the candidates.
”There is no major defining issue,” said Axelrod. ”There`s no war. There`s no recession. So the race tends to center on relatively minor matters.”
According to the Democratic Leadership Council`s From, the campaign lacked not just a major issue but a meaningful philosophical debate.
”Both parties are grappling with what their agendas for the future are going to be,” he said. ”Nothing new has come out of the Republican Party, and, frankly, Democrats don`t have core philosophy any more.”
The candidates differed on plenty of individual issues-health care, the minimum wage, the Strategic Defense Initiative-and each put forward some limited proposals to deal with problems such as child care and financing college tuitions. But, despite their claims, they did not really offer competing visions of the future. They barely offered any visions of the future.
On the most pressing issue facing the federal government, the budget deficit, both offered only generalities, and they were equally vague about the issue the polls said was foremost in the public`s mind, drug abuse. Perhaps this is because neither problem can be solved in a politically palatable manner.
In their defense, when the candidates did discuss specifics, they were often ignored. In their second and last debate, Bush pointed out that he had discussed agriculture during several Illinois campaign stops, but his proposals got no coverage.
”Why?” Bush said. ”Because you are so interested in a poll that might have been coming out, or because somebody had said something nasty about somebody else.”
Coming from a candidate, that may have been sour grapes, but not all reporters entirely disagree.
”If these guys weren`t saying all these rotten things about one another, would we be ignoring them?” one network correspndent wondered the other day. ”A lot of blame could be spread around,” said Democratic consultant Mark Siegel. ”I have watched Michael Dukakis make a 10-minute substantive speech, and I think the same could be said for Bush, and watched the press pick up the 20-second most inane sentence and deal with that.”
Like so many other areas of modern life, national politics has become a specialty, with its own jargon, its own frame of reference and its own esoterica. Political reporters are part of this ”political community,” and both they and the ever-growing army of consultants and pollsters have a tendency to think more about the internal mechanisms of campaigns than about the country and the government the campaigns are trying to capture.
So the results of any poll, regardless of its quality, are reported without evaluation. Time Magazine does a cover story called ”The Battle of the Handlers,” as though the race were between John Sasso and James Baker. Critiques of the quality of television commercials are more common than critiques of an arms control proposal.
In fact, professors who profess to be experts in the efficacy of television commercials get interviewed more frequently than experts on foreign policy or health care. But then, there is scant evidence that the voters care more about foreign policy or health care than they do about the trivia so often discussed. Especially the voters who matter.
When any general election campaign begins, about 80 percent of the people have made up their minds, roughly half of them to the Republican candidate, half to the Democrat. The battle is over that middle 20 percent, and many of them tend to be not very ideological, not very partisan-and not even very interested.
The campaign between the conventions and Election Day is largely for the allegiance of these voters, some of whom seem to be swayed more by slashing television commercials, slips of the tongue or warm generalities than by substantive discussions of the issues.
One day, a campaign may challenge all this. It will not distort its opponent`s record, or evade the difficult issues, or help spread fantastic rumors. This is not that day.
