The Paradox of Campaign '82
Barnes, Fred
means to be funny. To take the "Grin and Beirut" piece as an example, we might ask what it means to liken this sukkah to the settlements on the West Bank: does the Review suggest that Jews have...
...Her drift to the right was hardly anomalous...
...well, so were the Democrats, only the cuts should be different ones...
...9L "eople say some pretty 9a mazing things about political campaigns...
...But there is a result here in addition to an intention, and the result in this case is at least of dubious taste...
...A lot of you think that's a contradiction, something like Army intelligence and jumbo shrimp...
...The dialogue of the i982 campaign suggests that conservatives have won the ideological war...
...Yet the press often makes passing mention of them in connection with its reports on the Dartmouth Review...
...Like Conlin, Celeste has a liberal background, having been Peace Corps director during the Carter Administration...
...He lost...
...NonethelesS, the immediate battle in the midterm election was lost, no matter how much Reagan smiles...
...Privately, Democratic strategists rollicked in their good fortune...
...I'm a conservative Democrat," he9 said at the start of his speeches, then repeated the phrase again and again...
...We have the Animal House example, of course...
...Toward the end of the campaign, Democrats started hollering for a new program of public works jobs to stem unemployment...
...The small-is-beautiful and no-growth crowds were not heard from---at allz And remember the big issue among Democrats in 1980...
...First, he snuffed out the Republican claim to be the unabashed party of tax cutters by championing the tax increase last summer...
...Democrat Mark Dayton, the department store heir who narrowly failed in his bid to unseat Republican Senator David Durenberger of Minnesota, was probably the most thoroughgoing liberal seeking a seat in Congress in the 1982 election...
...and so on...
...You don't lose 26 seats Fred Barnes is National Political Reporter for the Baltimore 9 in the House without it meaning something unpleasant for the party that suffers the losses...
...No, surely notmor so the response would ben it is only a joke...
...The House of Representatives will be less conservative, less inclined to go along with the President...
...Most Democratic candidates not only rejected the liberal label but also the dogma...
...The posture Democrats adopted in 1982 should be familiar to Republicans, since it's thesame one they embraced in the 1950s and 9 It is me-tooism...
...Not unexpectedly, voters tended to judge Reaganomics on what it had produced so far, not on its promises...
...I needed to know that...
...Richard Davis, the Democratic Senate candidate in Virginia, crystallized the Democratic pitch in a single sentence...
...But if it's acceptable again, how come so few candidates, even the most liberal of Democrats, were willing to identify themselves as liberals...
...But they were memorable because of their infrequency...
...He advocated changes in Reagan, omics such as delaying (butnot eliminating) the third year of the tax cut, but he made 9 appeal to return to past liberal policies...
...In defiance of his reputation as a clumsy campaigner, Mitchell adroitly took the stance of a finetuner...
...Does the military need to be bolstered...
...It can be argued (erroneously, I think) that Reaga n made the best out of a bad economic situation, that he was able to cut his losses...
...about Student Magazine in Colorado, which is 9 although it allows lengthy "responsible opposing viewpoints" in its pages...
...To take the "Grin and Beirut" piece as an example, we might ask what it means to liken this sukkah to the settlements on the West Bank: does the Review suggest that Jews have no place at Dartmouth, and on the West Bank, and thus should withdraw from both...
...Roxanne Conlin, the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for governor of Iowa, was a product of the antiwar movement of the 1960s andthe women's movement of the 1970s, but while campaigning in 1982 she sometimes sounded like Reagan...
...Sure, it could have been a lot worse for Reagan and the Republicans...
...the Review then denounced the faculty...
...He defeated Governor Edward King in the Democratic primary by emphasizing the corruption issue and then effortlessly glided past liberal Republican John Sears...
...There are page after page of definitions," she complained...
...In addition, faculty members, either individually or as a group, seem to spend a great deal of time denouncing the Review, and in the most extreme of terms...
...One hears very little detail about the Yale Political Monthly, which is neoconservative and slightly academic...
...Richard S. Williamson, one of Reagan's ablest aides, told Republican governors that the midterm election had been "a wash...
...Are taxes too high...
...Nobody was left higher and ~drier than Congressman David Emery of Maine, who was seeking to supplant Democratic Senator George Mitchell...
...Something else happened in the election, though, and it mayhave been more important...
...Virtually every candidate said that military spending should be trimmed, but it was only the inflationadjusted increase in defense bucks they wanted reduced...
...But he wouldn't concede to being a liberal...
...All were horrified at the budget deficits and in favor of spending Cuts...
...Cooper has many Of the trappings associated with upper-class liberalism...
...In Ohio, Democrat Richard Celeste waltzed to the governorship by denouncing "made in Washington" solutions to economic problems, an appeal with a not-so-faint states' rights odor and one t h a t used to be made only by conservatives...
...There is also the example of the Dartmouth administrator who attacked and bit a student, after his victim ignored his command to stop distributing copies of the 9 Review...
...Should it be five percent a year in real growth, or more...
...Cooper adopted the classic Democratic tactic for thwarting Republican gains in the South...
...Reagan made matters worse...
...He responded in a TV spot that he proudly voted "against the biggest tax increase in history...
...or anyone except the people of Maine...
...he referred to his enormous wealth as his "original sin...
...He said he was a "fiscal moderate...
...Nor is the Review representative of them...
...Reagan and the Republicans were for tax cuts...
...It has been stripped from the national agenda...
...But there were losses...
...Those who are sympathetic to them~ even to the fringes~would do well to make this point clear, in the first place, the awareness of real diversity may spread to the press more generally...
...The answer is that "liberal" is still a dirty word...
...Mitchell's jaw did not shatter...
...Democrats were not calling for a full throttle rollback of the Reagan economic program...
...Public opinion surveys may show that people blame past Democratic policies more than Reaganomics for the recession, but that didn't help the Republicans in this election...
...But even if there is such a tradition, the Review is no less responsible for what it prints...
...The choice," he insisted, "is between the made-in-Washington perspective and made-in-Ohio policies...
...Boys will be boys," perhaps, and there will always be sophomoric humor...
...This year, there was no mention of national health insurance...
...In Michigan, Congressman Jim Blanchard was elected governor after campaigning as a supporter of budget cuts...
...Conservatives have won the argument on the military buildup...
...President Reagan showed up in the Rose Garden the day after Republicans dropped 26 House seats and seven governorships to announce that he was all smiles about that outcome...
...Is the government too big...
...Democrats were all for it, though they bickered over whether it should be implemented in one immediate swoop or gradually...
...This slogan wasridiculed by Democrats...
...Dayton said he was a "progressive...
...J t Q Q 41 Q 411 ql Q ill 411 o o Q ii ill Fred Barnes THE PARADOX OF CAMPAIGN '82 The Republicans lost but"'liber~" ~ . a dirty word...
...At the least, however, this yearning for CETA-revisited is more politically palatable to most Americans than the dirty little secret of RePublicans, namely the lust forcutting Social Security benefits...
...rather, its sense of humor places it on the 9f ringe, as even a cursory glance at the others will show...
...Not many...
...A notably bellweather campaign was run by Jim Cooper, who trounced Cissy Baker, Howard's daughter, for the new House seat in Tennessee...
...And who is going to vote, during a painful and lingering economic downturn, for the party in power on the ground that the other guys haven't issued an alternative...
...The press has long been inclined, quite correctly, to notice and comment upon sensational outbreaks of bad taste on campus: thus the Review's national reputation...
...The diversity among them is in many ways more important than the similarity, and they themselves do not think they are parts of a unified whole...
...Believe it or not, i'm living proof there is one...
...According to Iowa's regulations, it's a person who lives in a low or moderate income family...
...The President and the GOP were for budget cuts...
...There was only Reaganomics to vote against...
...He91w4a9s independent-minded, Mitchell said, and "doesn't take orders f~om Ronald Reagan, Tip O'Neill, Ted Kennedy...
...No one, including liberal Democrats, was opposed to economic growth...
...Then, with Republican candidates trying to hide behind mini-issues like constituent service and experience, he obliged them to confront the economic mega-issue by asking voters to "stay the course...
...But deep in the soul of many Democrats, there lurks an unquenchable desire to put folks on the government payroll, despite the evidence that this neither eases the pain of recessions (which usually end before the jobs begin) nor starts the poor on the path to lives of productive labor...
...This was particularly true when she ridiculed Iowa's 12 volumes of regulations...
...It is exactly its flamboyant tone that distinguishes it from the other conservative campus journals (although now it does have one or two imitators, notably the California Review at the University of California, San Diego...
...this affair prompted the faculty to denounce the Review again...
...All this is not to say that there weren't occasional sightings of old-fashioned liberalism...
...Conlin, a former federal prosecutor, also was noisily tough on crime and confessed she might favor lifting the drinking age to 21, long a goal of conservatives...
...and so on...
...in fact there is no movement, and so no leader...
...This is because they are by and large reasonable...
...In Massachusetts, former Governor Michael Dukakis angered many of his liberal supporters by declining to spout liberal rhetoric in his speeches and television ads...
...but the Review goes much too far, much too often...
...there is very little brouhaha to report...
...Desperate, Emery sought to pillory Mitchell for voting against the tax measure--also known as the tax increase--" to close tax loopholes and expose tax evaders," Mitchell, he huffed, was in favor of the three-martini lunch...
...The press sees a movement, and since the press has a great deal to say about the Review, it places the Review at the head...
...well, so were the Democrats, except they would shape the tax decrease a bit differently...
...I believe we should change the course while continuing in the same genera[ direction," he said...
...F] 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1983...
...My favorite definition is of a low or moderate income person...
...And even Teddy Kennedy and Tip O'Neill voted for the tax bill, he said...
...Dayton's political background was as an antiwar THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1983 21 crusader and inner-city school volunteer...
...Republicans complained that Democrats offered no alternative, which was true...
...In fact, there seems to be a tendency toward this sort of thing at Dartmouth...
...about the Harvard Salient, which is conservative without being altogether hard-line...
...The question now is the pace of the buildup...
...I will stand up for Ohio...
...What they offered was fine-tuning of9 , and it was reminiscent of the hoary Republican argument that the GOP could run the welfare state more efficiently...
...Senator Ernest Hollings9 of South Carolina said it should be changed to "stay the execution...
...True, Dayton didn't try to foist himself off as a fiscal conservative...
...The surprising thing was that they waited so long--remember the recession began in July 1981--before trotting out this old panacea...
...The New York Times wrongly concluded, on the basis of Democratic victories over a handful of conservative Republicans, that "liberal" is '9 longer a dirty word...
...Grasping for straws, Mark Tapscott of Conservative Digest said it was " t h e ' t h i r d best performance" by a President's party during a recessiondominated election since the Civil War, On the left, Alexander Cockburn and James Ridgeway of the Village Voice agreed that Reagan held his own, saying "it seems absurd for Democrats to derive great encouragement from the elections...
...It was nationalhealth insurance...
...The political L dialogue kept its rightward tilt...
...Second, it may encourage a reasonable tone among them all, an outcome that would be desirable...
...But the Review is not the leader among these publications, because few of them are much inclined to follow it...
...Mitchell, who once trailed Emery by 36 points in a poll, won in a landslide, 61-39 percent...
...And the answers to these from nearly every candidate were yes...
...The reason for this was the recession...
...He w~/s groomed at a New England prep school and Harvard Law School before going to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar...
...The overriding questions are the ones they have framed...
...Sorry, but what's absurd is this twaddle, Two things happened in the election and one of them was, as Jerry Brown put it, "a mild rebuke" of the President and his economic program...
...The transformation of the election into a referendum on Reaganomics in the midst of a recession was more than they could have hoped for...
...Candidates everywhere, Democrats and Republicans, insisted that they were fiscal conservatives...
...But how could voters get mad at an alternative that didn't exist...
Vol. 16 • January 1983 • No. 1
