1992 Ad

National Review, April 27, 1992 by Michael Barone

American voters may be mad, but they're not flaky. Nor are they disposed to continue politics as usual. There are signs that the serious candidates are starting to listen to them.

WHAT ARE the lessons, so far, from this first presidential election in our history in which a majority of votes will be cast in the suburbs?

The first is a rejection of left-wing economic redistribution. For all the moaning about the economy, America remains an affluent society, and the 1 per cent drop in GNP in George Bush's term has not had the same consequences as the almost 50 per cent drop in GNP in Herbert Hoover's term. Suburbanites are mostly affluent people, though usually not quite as affluent as they'd like to be; they would be fine if, like congressmen, they could write 13 months of checks in every 12-month year. There is a recession, but it is less an income recession than a wealth recession: the drop in incomes has been much smaller than in 1979-83, but the drop in real-estate values--the major source of wealth accumulation for most Americans--has been much sharper in many regions. In income recessions, voters seek income protections, of which liberal Democrats were typically the most generous providers. In this wealth recession, they are seeking longer-term programs to strengthen the economy. Hence the anger at George Bush's budget-summit agreement, which has not seemed to do that, and the appeal of Bill Clinton's and Paul Tsongas's detailed economic plans.

Hence also the almost total lack of support for Tom Harkin's public-works jobs programs and Bob Kerrey's national health insurance. Harkin and Kerrey were not simply beaten; they seemed to have almost no constituency at all. Organized labor remains an important and sometimes noble (think of the AFL-CIO's work in Eastern Europe) interest group. But labor leaders no longer swing many votes. The argument that there is a large constituency for leftish economic redistribution has been refuted about as soundly as any argument in politics ever is.

The Rematch

THE SECOND lesson is the failure once again, after forty years, of the Republican politics of Robert Taft and Thomas Dewey, represented this year by Pat Buchanan and George Bush. Buchanan's robust campaigning made him a receptacle of protests against various Bush policies. But his attempt to move Republican conservatism back to the isolationism, protectionism, and nativism of Taft's time seems not to have caught fire. Currently almost no Republicans holding public office and no other potential 1996 candidate take Buchanan's line on these issues. Certainly Buchanan has inspired some young activists beyond the Beltway. But my guess is that relatively few if any Buchananite Republicans will sit in Congress in 1993 and that Buchanan himself will not be a strong contender in 1996.

As for the Dewey Republicanism of cutting deficits and backing civil-rights laws and other culturally liberal measures, George Bush has had to jettison Richard Darman's budget-summit agreement and his National Endowment for the Arts head, John Frohnmayer. Those decisions were dictated not just by Buchanan but also by the fact that neither the budget summit nor the NEA had the slightest positive political value for Bush in the fall. It will be remembered that the Dewey forces beat the Taft forces in the 1940s. But it should never be forgotten that both these forms of elitist Republicanism (elitism in the sense of trusting experts over the people, as Jeff Bell defines it in his forthcoming book) were losers in three general elections in the 1940s. It is the populist (trusting the people) conservatism of Ronald Reagan, borrowing the cheerfulness and optimism of Franklin D. Roosevelt, that won three general elections in the 1980s.

The third lesson of 1992 is that both parties' likely nominees have been moved by the political process to come up with reform agendas. Bill Clinton concocted his through some combination of calculation and convictions--in this skillful politician they are interwoven too tightly to disentangle--last summer and fall, and has stuck to them with some diversions; George Bush has been led toward his by the need to say something in response to Buchanan's campaign which could also work for him in November. Both Bush and Clinton are advancing, in recognizably Republican and Democratic variants, proposals to reform public-sector institutions that are plainly not working well--education, health care, welfare.

They are responding to clear demands in the political marketplace. Over the last dozen or so years, other American institutions--private-sector institutions like heavy manufacturing and transportation, public-sector institutions like the military--have reformed themselves so that they are more efficient and responsive. The finance sector is busy reforming itself right now. Such reform is not painless, but in each case it has been plainly needed and has had benign results. Voters in the suburbs, with their small local governments and large shopping malls, but dependent also on their Social Security entitlements and government subsidies, are ready to consider varying mixes of market and government measures to produce reform. Clinton fitfully and Bush despite visible reluctance are moving to offer such measures. And if neither is acting entirely out of conviction, so what? It only means that both are reading sensitively the signals sent out by the electorate; i.e., that the political market is working.