Pledging Allegiance, by Sidney Blumenthal
Gold, Victor
Mr. Blumenthal can barely suppress his fury as he describes how Mr. Dukakis squandered his lead and turned a likely Democratic victory into a decisive defeat. —Alan Brinkley, New York Times,...
...not to mention the incandescent liberalism of Miniver's early choice for the Democratic nomination, Gary Hart—a shining Lancelot who worshipped John F. Kennedy: "To Hart, Kennedy was not a figure of ideology, or the end of ideology, but of civic virtue...
...Oh, is he la ever...
...Reagan regnant, the evil empire of a conservative White House casting the best and the brightest of the generation of the sixties into political exile...
...Exit Gary Hart...
...Miniver groaned...
...Especially Camelot...
...The means of campaigning—control over the images *Jim Pinkerton, you devil you...
...Reagan and his...
...George Bush as Darth Vader...
...A far cry from what Blumenthal sees as John F. Kennedy's "open defense of liberalism" in the 1960 presidential campaign...
...But more: beyond Reagan's travail, Blumenthal could take comfort in the obvious vulnerability of George Bush as a presidential candidate...
...And for that—Lancelot having screwed his way out of the contest—what does the party of the left send forth to meet this challenge...
...and yes, even Gary Hart was more the product of Super-media image projection (what else are the Iowa caucuses...
...A cursed decade, the 1980s...
...After thirty years, the presidential campaign chronicle, a genre invented by Theodore H. White, has become something of a post-election literary cliche...
...But, for Blumenthal's polemical purpose, that's beside the point...
...From Nixon's base appeal to the Silent Majority to Bush's making an ugly to-do about the pledge of allegiance, the party of the right has demonstrated, in quadrennial cycles, a pernicious knack for connecting with what Robert Kennedy once called the dark side of the American soul...
...Miniver coughs...
...Twenty years later, Nixon, old and new, may be retired, but for bloodied left-wing ideologues there is still Roger Ailes to kick around...
...Iran-contra, that was the ticket: "Now Reagan had been brought down," writes Blumenthal...
...Ailes and the rest of George Bush's "handlers" in 1988, writes Blumenthal in Pledging Allegiance, "encompassed much of the experience of the Republican party since 1969": It was then, with Richard Nixon's victory, that the permanent campaign system, rooted in post-industrial technology, specifically computers and telecommunications, supplanted the old party system...
...It had everything to do with Max Factor, the Macintosh II, and the malign ability of Republican campaign consultants to bamboozle the American voter in the dismal age of postindustrial technology...
...And there you have it: Bush's victory, no less than Nixon's, had nothing to do with the failure of liberalism, either as a campaign nexus or as a means of governing...
...Enter, of all dreary possibilities, a Democratic front-runner who "did not see the ideological dimension of issues...
...So that's where you got that paradigmatic gibberish —out of Gary Hart's grab bag of New Ideas...
...A bad enough beginning, but things were to get even worse...
...projected by the media—became the means of governing...
...22.95 Victor Gold THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1991 37 Gorbachev in Moscow ("the pinnacle of his campaign and career") was the obvious choice...
...Soviet totalitarianism was never a serious threat to the West...
...But though the journalist who started it all quit the game, others, for their own reasons, persevere...
...Asked by Ted Koppel to define the word "liberal," Dukakis hemmed, hawed, and "instead of restating his party's tradition . . . abandoned it...
...One reason is that, given the outcome of most presidential elections in recent decades—Republicans winning five of the last six—writing a chronicle to explain how-it-all-happened has a certain therapeutic value for despondent liberals...
...but that was not to be, so it remained for Michael Dukakis to rise to the occasion...
...brand of extreme-right anti-Communism had it wrong from the beginning...
...More important, hadn't a sea-change occurred between 1960 and 1988 in the American people's perception of liberalism and what it connotes—a change reflected by the advent of Reaganism and the exile of the best and the brightest to the intellectual sancta of Harvard Yard and the New Republic...
...Ah, the Bourbon Left, God bless: they know everything, forget everything, and remain, as Sidney Blumenthal reminds us in this requiem to a lightweight, the best thing the party of the right has going for it in the post-Reagan nineties...
...But hold on: Isn't that particularinvidious comparison a bit unfair to the Democratic presidential candidate of 1988...
...Mikhail Gorbachev, of course...
...To Blumenthal it followed from this ultimate discrediting of Reagan conservatism that, despite George Bush's perfidious handlers, the 1988 presidential race was there to be won if the right Democrat had come along...
...Not only could the prostrate Reagan be side-stepped, so could his discredited conservatism...
...In fact, wasn't Kennedy, pre-Camelot, distrusted by the keepers of "his party's tradition," who viewed him as Joe Kennedy's playboy son...
...Indeed they do...
...Blumenthal knew it from the moment in Atlanta when Dukakis, in his acceptance speech, "was skeptical of Gorbachev's revolution": He did not take his cue from Kennedy's acceptance speech: "The old era is ending...
...Yet, toward the very end, there was a chance, a glimmer of light...
...The blow that had felled him had not been delivered by the opposition but by Reagan's own men...
...What it came down to, in Blumenthal's view, was the candidate's callow refusal to embrace the L-word...
...White himself recognized that the form had played out as far back as 1972, when he announced that he was bringing his series, begun with The Making of the President 1960, to a close...
...In the permanent campaign, the consultants replaced the bosses as the enduring figures in politics, regardless of who was elected...
...Oh, sure, JFK Victor Gold is The American Spectator's national correspondent...
...It is Sidney Blumenthal's considered judgment that the end of the Cold War, far from confirming the wisdom of Ronald Reagan's hard-line approach to dealing with the Soviets, proved just the opposite...
...next thing Miniver knew, instead of his candidate's theorizing about "a new framework for American politics—a revolutionary 'paradigm shift,' " * Hart was aboard the Monkey Business, his religious enthusiasm transmuted into loose-zipper trouble...
...But, sad to say, however "discredited" their conservatism may be, Republicans just seem to be better at this sort of thing...
...Like some Miniver Cheevy of the Bourbon Left, he weeps and sighs for what is not and dreams of Thebes and Camelot...
...Who could have predicted that Hart would carry his down-pat impersonation of Kennedy a step too far...
...38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1991...
...True, Hubert Humphrey made his presidential run with a full complement of PR/advertising specialists and cosmeticians, the first to shine his dull image, the second to dull his shiny forehead...
...The old ways will not do...
...Not a chance...
...By the time Reagan arrived at the White House, argues Blumenthal, it was an infirm ideological edifice, waiting for a man of vision to bring it down...
...Consider the first of this sub-genre, Joe McGinnis's The Selling of the President 1968, which explicated, in terms that manic Nixonphobes could both understand and chuckle over, how their nemesis managed to beat Hubert Humphrey: he cheated...
...I mean—just to keep the historical record straight—wasn't Kennedy's embrace of the L-word a matter of strategic urgency, an effort to shore up his base with Democratic liberals...
...A petty little technocrat with an "ideology of managerialism...
...It might be 1976 all over again—the Watergate disaster, the Democratic triumph...
...would have understood, but in a political age conditioned by Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, Lancelot was a goner...
...First, he began moving in the company of a Louisiana high-roller, a pal of Governor Edwin Edwards known as "Billy B...
...Hart, who had actually spent four hours with PLEDGING ALLEGIANCE: THE LAST CAMPAIGN OF THE COLD WAR Sidney Blumenthal/HarperCollins/386 pp...
...than his paradigmatic new ideas...
...By contriving, with the aid of sinister public-opinion manipulators like Roger Ailes, to wear pancake makeup to cover his five o'clock shadow...
...Alas, young Lancelot...
...ut wait: Don't Democratic presidential candidates, as much as Republicans, operate within a post-industrial campaign structure, surrounded by "handlers" whose aim it is to "control . . . the images projected by the media...
...Alan Brinkley, New York Times, October 14, 1990 Q id Blumenthal is pissed...
...His appearance enabled Hart to see how to transmute his religious enthusiasm into a political calling...
...Voila, the "new Nixon...
Vol. 24 • February 1991 • No. 2
