The great denial - presidential campaign

National Review, Nov 25, 1988

PSYCHOANALYSTS CALL IT denial: the patient's refusal to admit he has a problem. Once again liberals are straining to explain the routing of a liberal candidate without reference to liberalism.

The denial device this year is Negative Campaigning. The media keep chanting the phrase as if it were a fact, rather than a partisan moral judgment. Haynes Johnson of the Washington Post-a prime specimen of the advocate in the robes of a judge-complains that George Bush has waged "a shameful campaign of smears, lies, and distortions." The Post has run a front-page "story" headlined somewhat curiously "Evolution of the TV Era's Nastiest Race" (news headlines usually feature verbs, not judgmental adjectives); it's about Bush, of course. The New Republic accuses Bush of running a "filthy campaign," in part because of the furlough issue (an issue first introduced in April, by the way, by The New Republic's pet candidate, Albert Gore). Newsweek has devoted a cover, NBC and Nightline whole programs, to the same theme. And this is the short list.

All the indignation would carry more conviction if the phrase "negative campaigning" had been heard in connection with the negative campaign of 1987: the concerted defamation of Robert Bork. People for the American Way (a real mainstream outfit, that one) poured megabucks into TV and newspaper ads in an unprecedented attempt to block a judicial nomination. Liberals who fret about what campaign spending does to elections didn't reflect on what Norman Lear's money was doing to the independence of the judiciary. Not to mention the vileness of the actual charges and innuendos heaped on Bork by the Bidens, Kennedys, and Metzenbaums. Nothing Bush has said of Dukakis approaches the scurrility Bork was subjected to. The memory of it makes the liberals' current selfpity simply disgusting.

The Bush campaign has taken pains to keep its attacks on Dukakis accurate, if only because Dukakis's media allies would have pounded endlessly at the slightest demonstrable deviation from fact. As it is, the media-Democratic alliance has had to harp on the theme of tone, pretending a matter of taste is a matter of truth. The losing side is rarely satisfied with the victors' formulation of its position. But the liberals, starting with Dukakis himself, have had a peculiarly hard time getting their act together. Dukakis wavered between shrugging off, denouncing, and finally, embracing the liberal label.

Bush has had no trouble deciding. Trailing badly in the polls, he bet all his chips on the proposition that "liberal" now means "unelectable." This was a bitter pill for liberals who used to claim the mainstream for themselves (even as recently as the Bork fight) and who hoped Bush would remain a "moderate," i.e., a malleable wimp who wouldn't give them too much trouble. Then they saw him gleefully pounding nails into their political coffin. It struck them as a kind of betrayal and they were enraged, enraged as they never were against Ronald Reagan, enragedas they have been only toward Richard Nixon, whom they also regarded as an unprincipled opportunist who could never have beaten them in a fair fight.

The campaign against Negative Campaigning implies that the electorate is utterly passive, manipulable, and responsive to atavistic (including racist) appeal. It's worth pointing out that the voters have probably heard denunciations of Bush's ads more often than they have heard the ads themselves. They deserve some credit for making up their own minds, especially since they seem to be making them up the way they usually do when one of the candidates is a liberal.

But the liberal frenzy has another purpose besides blaming everything except liberalism. It's an attempt to deny legitimacy to the Bush Administration, no matter how decisive Bush's victory. Haynes Johnson is not the only one to issue the threat: Bush's campaign, he warned, "will cost him dearly in his ability to govern if he becomes the next President." Like Nixon, Bush has now made a host of implacable liberal enemies. He will need to keep his conservative friends.