A splendid political gambit: emotional, self-defining and a deft swat at the hapless baby boomers now running the show. And who knows? It may even be true – although it certainly didn’t sound true the way he delivered it, diffident and constricted, swallowing the emotion, shying away from the rhetoric. It sounded like Bob Dole trying to sound like a new man, the sort of guy who has epiphanies. Then again, his lack of conviction probably didn’t hurt him much: he was among the believers. The crowds were large and enthusiastic as he trudged about, proving his stamina by staging nine town meetings in three days. There was the sense – a powerful atavistic twinge in the Republican Party, where an orderly succession is assumed a virtue – that it was now Dole’s turn; the nomination was his to lose. If he wasn’t quite inspirational or ideologically satisfying, he was authoritative, a certified grown-up, a plausible victor in 1996. “He’s not as conservative as I’d like,” said Bert Boucher, a Londonderry stalwart who attended Dole’s Manchester show, “but it’s close enough for government work.”
Closer, at least, than his opposition – eight lumpen pachyderms who performed their first casting call for the massed New Hampshire GOP on Presidents’ Day eve. Their inelegant, passionless pokiness was a surprising turn for a party that, from Reagan to Limbaugh to Gingrich, has been the prime incubator of vehemence in American politics. Neither of Dole’s two main challengers, Texas Sen. Phil Gramm or former Tennessee governor Lamar Alexander – the first two plausible Republicans to formally announce candidacies – set the New Hampshire activists ablaze that night. Gramm seemed an accountant-ideologue, naked without a green eyeshade, very pure and starkly conservative; but pinched, emotionless. Several nights later, at his obscene $4.1 million fund-raiser in Texas, Gramm uttered one of the more memorable battle cries of American history: “We are one victory away from getting our money back . . .” He also said, “I have the most reliable friend you can have in American politics and that is ready money.” (As Gramm’s own wife said, upon first meeting him: “Yuck.”) And Alexander, preternaturally mild-mannered, appeared a robotic iteration of standard, late-20th-century political tradecraft: the somewhat obscure, quietly egomaniacal, hopelessly relentless Southern governor. “I am not from Washington,” he said. “These other fellows are.” Yuck again.
As for the rest, the other six “hopefuls” – they were so farfetched as to almost seem Democrats. All of which raised a question: given Bill Clinton’s apparently prohibitive lameness, why haven’t the Republicans come up with a stronger field? (Technically, of course, the field may not be complete: Gov. Pete Wilson of California, no barn-burner himself, but possessing a mild California glow, seemed to be edging closer to the race; and there is the eternal Colin Powell rescue fantasy.) But still: one wonders if the fun part of the conservative political revolution is over now, if this next presidential campaign will be a holding action, a footnote to the great congressional upheaval of 1994.
After all, America has just come through two intensely emotional elections. In the process, the federal government and its provident party, the Democrats, have been put to rout intellectually and electorally. The party line shared by Dole, Gramm and Alexander – that we need, as Gramm says, “less government and more freedom” – has become so firmly established as political canon that most Democrats, and especially those running for re-election in 1996, pay it homage. Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa, a classic New Deal liberal, will vote for the balanced-budget amendment. In such an atmosphere, it isn’t so easy to sustain a contentious politics. “I’m not so sure that people will be as angry in 1996 as they’ve been these past few years,” says Frank Luntz, the Republican polltaker, “especially if the Republican Congress succeeds in its work.” And even if it doesn’t, the public is as likely to turn off as turn against the incumbents. We may have had enough politics for one decade.
The job of president itself seems marginally less glamorous these days, though that may be a consequence of the current traumatic incumbency. Still: given the rising tides of devolution and diminution, the presidency is now more concerned with taking things away from people than with doing great works; it is about mopping up Haiti and agonizing helplessly over Bosnia, rather than confronting an Evil Empire or going to the moon. It is about pleasing the bond market. Indeed, “government work” just may not be so crucial in a post-cold-war world, where global commerce seems a more powerful force than statecraft.
Given all that, why bother? “Running for president isn’t very appetizing,” says Peter Wehner, policy director of Empower America and a close adviser of former education secretary William Bennett, who chose not to run. “First, you have to raise the money – which is flat-out humiliating. People told us we would have to do 300 fund-raising events. Then there’s the proctological examination from the media. And finally, even if you win, no one really respects the office anymore. Who wants to spend five years as a punching bag?”
Of course, Bennett probably would have proved a delightfully disastrous candidate – for all the best reasons. He lacks the political gene. He doesn’t glad-hand; he suffers the fatuous not at all. But he was tempted by the promise of strong support from the religious right and “cultural” activists in the party. “We had a series of dinners to talk about it,” he recalls. “At the last one in June, we had Bill Kristol, Rush Limbaugh, Mike Murphy [now doing media work for Alexander], some other people – good friends. Murphy says, “We can set up an unconventional campaign: you only do 180 fund-raisers.’ Yeah, right . . . A lot of people said that if I was serious, I’d have to spend time with this person or that, sometimes whole weekends with money people and others, like Pat Robertson. I thought of Coriolanus, the Roman general they tried to make a politician: “I will [go] to them most counterfeitly,’ he said. I couldn’t do it.”
Bennett’s good friend Jack Kemp, once considered a 1996 front runner, had a more substantive philosophical problem: “I’m beginning to think I’m just not in sync with my party anymore,” he says. His optimistic entrepreneurialism clashed in spirit with straitened, Gramm-style federal diminution. He felt particularly out of touch after he and Bennett issued a statement opposing Proposition 187, California’s anti-illegal-immigrant ballot initiative last fall. The response from the party faithful was enormous, immediate – and deadly. “I had a fund-raiser out in California after that. The first guy gets up and says, “Why are you trying to hurt Pete Wilson?’ It went down from there. I didn’t raise a single penny . . . The thing is, I’m interested in economic issues and the party seems more interested in gimmicks and procedural issues – term limits, balanced-budget amendments, devolution . . . It’s Herbert Hoover redux.”
There is, no doubt, a touch of sour grapes to these laments. Dan Quayle and Dick Cheney probably could hum a few bars as well, lamenting the time and effort and dementia involved in making the race – and Phil Gramm might say, with some cause, that they’re just a bunch of wimps and whiners. A president will be elected in 1996; he may even turn out to be a great one. But a suspicion remains that the electoral process is, finally, reaching some sort of terminal degradation. The public has become so scornful of these ceremonies – especially the bilious 30-second advertisements – that perhaps the moment is approaching when some brave soul can devolve this process to some saner plane: refuse to run advertisements, for one thing – and therefore be liberated from the chatteldom of fund raising; refuse to hire consultants, for another; give the impression of impolitic candor, for a third.
Meanwhile, there will be morbid entertainment watching the current crop. Especially Lamar Alexander, whose campaign seems a model of transparent postindustrial architecture – all the beams, rivets and strategies are not only blatant, but a compendium of the greatest political hits of the late 20th century. This week, Alexander – an outsider, you understand, an outsider – will step off from the porch of his parents’ home in Maryville, Tenn., and, trailed by a camera crew and equipped with a wireless microphone feeding to “a rolling mulch box,” whatever that is, will tell the story of his life as he walks into town, to announce his availability for an office whose reach he would severely diminish. He seems a palpably decent man. He appears to have been a pretty successful governor. But he has preshrunk himself into the perfect tribune for the dreary declension about to unfold, a candidate designed to dwindle painlessly – no sharp edges, no speed bumps – and with a smile. And yet, he seems slightly discomforted, maybe a bit embarrassed, by the shameless race to offer less. “Well, there is going to be a need for inspiration too,” he says. “We are going to have to explain how balanced-budget amendments and orphanages, and doing away with school lunch programs and racial preferences – how all that adds up to hope.”
There is, no doubt, a need for a postmodern Lincoln, a politician who can explain how this next turn might lead to a flowering of freedom, who can turn diminution into a public poetry that will inspire the country. But that will not come easy – making less seem more, seem universal, is the essence of great art – and, one suspects, it won’t come in 1996.
