Gone to the dogs

(continued)

by Dan Kennedy

Of course, it's easy to sneer at the undecided voters, and, yes, they richly deserve it. But they are a symptom, not a cause, of what's gone wrong in the current campaign. The Bush-Gore snorefest is the entirely predictable outcome of a system that weeds out interesting candidates before the campaign even begins, that deliberately focuses on the least informed, least interested voters, and that requires any candidate who wishes to succeed to raise tens of millions of dollars before the campaign gets under way (see "Game, Set, Match," News and Features, December 31, 1999). Then, too, in a media-driven environment that plays up the importance of individuals and plays down political parties, the fact that one candidate is a Democrat and the other a Republican -- which says more about their political philosophies than a year's worth of sighs and smirks -- is rarely even mentioned.

George W. Bush and Al Gore -- cautious, centrist, establishment candidates -- were anointed by their parties' heavy hitters years before the election. The only people who dared to mount serious challenges -- John McCain and Bill Bradley -- were themselves cautious, centrist, establishment candidates, albeit with a reformist bent. Each was swept away within weeks of the New Hampshire primary.

Ralph Nader, Pat Buchanan, Harry Browne, et al. argue that the problem with this year's campaign is that third-party candidates have been shut out. They're wrong -- although it is regrettable that they weren't invited at least to the first debate. The real problem is that legitimate outsiders such as Nader and Buchanan have been so marginalized by big money and the ridiculously short primary season that they were virtually forced to run as third-party candidates rather than in the Democratic and Republican primaries.

Our presidential, winner-take-all system -- unlike a European-style parliamentary democracy, where small parties can play an influential role -- all but guarantees that the contest will be fought between two major parties. Yet increasingly, only well-funded, noncontroversial, experienced candidates can afford to run. (Unless you're Alan Keyes, in which case you don't care that no one actually votes for you.) Eugene McCarthy, who knocked off Lyndon Johnson in 1968, George McGovern, who won the Democratic nomination in 1972, and Jimmy Carter, who was elected president in 1976, would not have been able to run in the 2000 primaries any more than Nader and Buchanan.

Gore and Bush, then, are the products of a system designed to be as safe and predictable as possible. Given that, it's hardly fair to blame the public for being disengaged.

To figure out what's gone wrong with politics, you need look no further than the October 16 New Yorker -- the "Politics Issue," with a wistful Bill Clinton riding off into the sunset. Inside, Nicholas Lemann pays a visit to Republican pollster Frank Luntz, the focus-group Svengali who, before becoming a star on MSNBC, helped Newt Gingrich put together the Contract with America.

Luntz's methodology, according to Lemann, is to assemble groups of undecided voters, prod them into talking about their concerns, and put their language into the mouths of candidates. In Lemann's estimation, the focus groups put together by Luntz and others like him become the "Word Lab" that manufactures the bland, content-free rhetoric that has come to characterize political discourse -- Bush's "real plans for real people," for instance, or the "risky tax schemes" that Gore has accused Bush of promulgating. "Since the whole point of a Word Lab is to find out what voters already think and then design rhetoric to persuade them that politicians agree with it, the process leads to politicians' being shaped by, rather than shaping, public opinion," Lemann writes.

But whom is this rhetoric being aimed at? Not all voters, certainly. Most people, after all, decided whom they would support a long time ago. According to a recent survey by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News, Bush has the backing of 88 percent of Republicans, and Gore has attracted 80 percent of Democrats. Thus, the poll-driven, focus-group-tested issues Gore and Bush are emphasizing -- prescription-drug benefits, Social Security reform, sex-obsessed TV shows, and the like -- are aimed not at the engaged citizens who've already made up their minds, but at the disengaged independents who wear their lack of party loyalty as if it were a badge of pride, but who in fact are clueless about the single most important difference between Gore and Bush.

You wouldn't know it to listen to them squabble about minor policy differences and talk about how much they agree with each other on certain issues, but Gore -- the last time anyone checked -- was still a Democrat, and Bush was a Republican. Yes, as Ralph Nader never tires of pointing out, each favors so-called free-trade agreements of the sort that have become the subject of international protests, each favors capital punishment, each is decidedly pro-business. Even so, you can discern entire world-views in their party affiliations. Gore wants a limited tax cut targeted toward middle-class families; he favors affirmative action; he would push for stricter environmental regulations; he is emphatically pro-choice; and he has a long record of promoting equality under the law for lesbians and gay men. Bush wants a huge tax cut that would mainly benefit the rich; he opposes affirmative action (or favors affirmative "access," or whatever); his environmental record in Texas is horrendous; he is anti-choice, and has cited ultraconservative Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas as models; and, despite refreshingly inclusive rhetoric from him and especially from his running mate, Dick Cheney, he is exceedingly unlikely to use federal law to break down the legal barriers that still relegate gays to the status of second-class citizens.

The point is that these are not just personal positions; they are party positions, and they define a large part of what it means to be a Republican or a Democrat. Party affiliation and identification, though, have become unfashionable, as even the parties themselves seek to play down their ideological edges -- witness the Republican Party's Disneyfied convention in Philadelphia, where the only partisan moment that took place all week was Dick Cheney's deliciously Darth Vader-like speech. ("It's time, it's time for them to go.") According to news reports, about 15 percent of voters are independent, as opposed to fewer than one percent 40 years ago. In Massachusetts, there are more independent voters (1,909,491) than Democrats and Republicans put together (1,865,939). Yet as recently as 1988, there were more Democrats in Massachusetts than independents.

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Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.dankennedy.net

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

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Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here

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