Wake Us When It's Over/The Quest for the Presidency 1984/On the Campaign Trail/Canarsie

...She was pained to discover that black violence at her children's school had made them bigoted...

...In fact, campaigns tend to have a very limited impact on the outcome of elections...

...The overriding issue of violent street crime, says Rieder, produced a "growing disassociation between the principled force of a liberal tradition on the one side and the demands of everyday life on the other...

...The Stanley Greenberg Analysis Group conducted a series of extensive interview sessions with small gatherings of white Michigan Democrats who had voted for Reagan...

...THE QDEST FOB THE PRESIDENCY 1984 Peter Goldman & tony Fuller A Newsweek Book, Bantam, $17.95, 468 pp...

...In 1984 the politicians Mondale interviewed for vice-president were representatives of the party's balkanized constituencies, none of them yet having attained a broad appeal or national stature...

...Germond and Witcover are on target in their criticism of media-dominated campaigns...

...Candidate Hart, a man described as "having been born in law school," lacked either the need or the political savvy to make such a move...

...What good were constitutional rights if danger made it impossible to use them...

...Why, when the numbers obviously ran the other way, did the Democrats deceive themselves...

...Goodman and Fuller mention John Anderson but once in passing, yet Hart's appeal was virtually identical to that of the 1980 independent presidential candidate...

...In the ten post-FDR elections the Democrats have been able to win more than 50 percent of the vote only twice...

...A few stalwarts like Tip O'Neill aside, the party Walter Mondale led is a product of the McGovern campaign and the Carter years, when liberals maintained their post-New Deal peace with big business while the administration was staffed below the top level almost entirely by representatives of the New Politics...

...In 1976 when the Democrats won, Jimmy Carter interviewed for vicepresident a group of broadly representative politicians of national stature like Frank Church, Henry Jackson, and Edmund Muskie...

...It's unlikely that a Hart candidacy would have done much better than Mondale in the general election, despite the obvious advantage of not having the Carter albatross around his neck...

...Having earned their rightful place in the party's inner ranks by successfully picking fights to demonstrate their clout, they spent the 1984 campaign shadowboxing with their own rhetoric...

...Reagan won the male vote by 19 points, the female by 5. In 1984, with Geraldine Ferraro on the ticket, the women's vote for the Democrats dropped 3 points while the Republicans surged by 10...

...In 1968, for inCommonweal: 472 stance, Nixon had 43.4 percent of the vote after getting the nomination, and finished with 43.4 percent...

...They had settled for an empty contest of images on the television screens that told them essentially nothing about the decisions that would be made for their future...

...The question is, why did voters prove unwilling to support the Democrats even in the instances where the voters did agree with the party on the issues...

...The tablets brought down from the New Deal by the prophet Roosevelt, we are solemnly told, have finally been broken...

...Between 1976 and 1980, well before the Republicans' appeal to men could be misexplained in terms of Reagan's macho qualities, Republican support among men jumped 8 points...

...A party can try to win either by drawing in all those around its fringe or by trying to massively mobilize its core...

...Did Nixon win in '72 because he was inspiring...

...For those interested in family resemblances, however, its provenance may seem more closely related to another Newsweek special, its now infamous issue in celebration of the yuppies...

...But the Democrats, as Mark Shields points out in his witty little book, On the Campaign Trail, a collection of his Washington Post columns, are a "glandular party that needs to feel emotionally attached to its candidates...

...But like virtually all of his neighbors, this Orthodox Jew "saw the contraction of safe and usable space as a mockery of a liberal society...

...But this is the same "news" we have received in the aftermath of every election since 1972...

...By Labor Day 1984, Hart found that only 5 percent of the electorate remained undecided...

...It's not that the Republicans were not seen as serving special interests — they were seen as tools of big business — but it was widely assumed that while prosperity for business would be broadly beneficial, gains for, say, feminists or blacks, would come at someone else's expense...

...The rule changes designed to democratize the party have ended up concentrating power :n the hands of media consultants and fund raisers...

...The Quest for the Presidency 1984 is a collective effort of the Newsweek staff which expands on Newsweek's special post-election issue...

...This was a point made by everyone, from conservative Italian Republicans to the remnants of Jewish socialism...

...Their book on the 1980 election was entitled Blue Smoke and Mirrors...

...The picture a party presents to the electorate is always set well before the campaign begins, which may be why so much of the commentary in these three books, focusing almost entirely on the mechanics of the race, misses the underlying bases for voting...

...In spite of their deathbed repentance in San Francisco when the Democrats repeatedly evoked family, flag, and...

...A party's selfgovernance is the best indication the voters get of how it would govern the country at large...

...The very idea of the gender gap on the national level was based on two misconceptions...

...Both times, in '64 and '76, white Southerners were at the head of the ticket, and in '76 Carter just barely got a majority with 50.1 percent of the vote...

...There are ideological racists among them, but for most, particularly those Jews with socialist backgrounds, the issues are not so much ideological as a day-to-day pragmatic fear of crime...

...Dismissed as racists, the Canarsians have in fact had a more sophisticated understanding of the underclass than that encompassed by the official liberal pieties...

...They've discovered that for a good deal of the public and even some of the up-scale baby boomers, yuppiehood is synonymous with selfishness, smug self-satisfaction, and unfettered appetite, however refined...

...Initially the groups of voters wandered over a variety of topics — inflation, taxes, economic management...

...So says Richard M. Koster a long-time member of the party's National Committee...

...As Blaine Kamarck, Mondale's director of delegate selection, has put it, "Setting aside homosexuals as an affirmative action target group may make good sense in California, but it's political suicide in Alabama...

...For the Democrats, the proliferation of primaries, set off by the McGovern reforms, and the decay of the local party machinery have produced a mad scramble for media dollars...

...religion, the party was unavoidably tainted by its association with professionalized reform...

...The fact is that the New Deal party with its core of Northern working people and white Southerners has long ceased to exist...

...That set the pattern for the protest movements to follow...

...Turning these numbers around has led to the joke that the Republican rainbow is "white, off-white, bone-white, ivory, and French vanilla...

...People would start telling stories of how opportunities in their lives had been blocked by special privileges given blacks — promotions they didn't get, small business loans they didn't qualify for...

...Both the CBS-New York Times and the ABC- Washington Post polls showed that on the issues of the arms buildup and social fairness Reagan enjoyed large majorities...

...Why...

...There are several problems with this analysis...

...Groups that were once at the periphery of the party like blacks and women are now among its core constituencies...

...To read either Wake Us When It's Over: Presidential Politics of 1984, written by veteran journalists Jack Germond and Jules Witcover, or The Quest for the Presidency 1984, written by a team of Newsweek reporters led by Peter Goldman and Tony Fuller, you would have to believe that the blame lies squarely on the shoulders of Walter Mondale and the ever-dying New Deal tradition...

...They were driven from their beloved Brownsville with its teeming Pitkin Avenue on to East New York and finally to Canarsie where, bordered by still decaying slums, they're determined to make a stand...

...More than two-thirds of all Black babies in New York are born out of wedlock...

...The children of one of Rieder's respondents, a woman with left-liberal sentiments, were among those victimized...

...It was also argued that Reagan won because Mondale was uninspiring...

...Reform itself had become tainted as both self-interested, in the case of the professionals who lived off it, and extremist in its exotic formulations...

...Jerry Brown, who also goes unmentioned despite being an obvious prototype for Hart, had the good sense to clutch Cesar Chavez to his political breast when accused of lacking heart...

...And most important of all, for the first time since Herbert Hoover, Republicans were heavily favored as the party most capable of managing the economy...

...The children of the sixties shall lead you, as expounded by Pat Caddell...

...The author, Jonathan Rieder, is a self-described liberal who is trying to understand why liberalism has fallen into such disrepute in the very kind of union and blue-collar neighborhood that was once at the heart of the Democratic coalition...

...Because liberal reformers have insisted on an imposed uniformity regardless of circumstances, she goes on, they "may have lost the ability to accurately reflect grass roots sentiment in the nominating process...

...There was for example, no secret women's vote in 1984 despite all the books and articles explaining how women would defeat Ronald Reagan...

...It's yet to happen because the baby boom generation is sharply divided...

...Similarly, in those same ten post-FDR elections, only once — in 1964 against the clearly crankish campaign of Barry Goldwater — have the Democrats been able to win a majority of the white vote...

...Mondale's pollster, Peter Hart, was dismayed to discover that Reagan's standing was unchanged over the last six months of his term...

...The Republicans have no reason to face up to the problem of racial division...

...For the past quarter-century Democrats were told that the party's mission of racial justice was essential for America's survival as a free nation...

...The answer goes back to Vietnam when the protesters succeeded in discrediting both the war and their own opposition to it...

...They've failed each time...

...CANARSIE THE JEWS AND ITALIANS OF BROOKLYN AGAINST LIBERALISM Jonathan Rieder Harvard University, $22.50, 290 pp...

...Advertisers operating on the same broad assumption as the Hart campaign, namely that this yuppie ideal is so attractive as to approximate the American ideal, have recently backed away from making direct appeals to the "Me Generation...

...In 1984 Democrats won only 31 percent of the male vote, 26 percent among white male Protestants...

...In 1980, after months of campaigning and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on TV ads and consultants, he went from 40 to 41 percent...

...The Democratic candidates, as Germond and Witcover effectively describe it, threw themselves into meaningless straw polls long before the formal primaries, solely to gain TV coverage which would allow them to raise moriey in order to buy more TV coverage...

...Greenberg subsequently discovered that in-depth polling around the country turned up similar results...

...But 6 September 1985: 473 not even the most ingenious industrial or fiscal policy is likely to reach down to the underclass...

...They tell me 'I hate the niggers.' You see," she explained to herself, "they've had frightening experiences...

...The problems of the campaign were those of a deeply divided party, not a particular candidate...

...It would start with one person raising the subject almost apologetically...

...But they retain the habits of insurgency which brought them to prominence...

...Carter in 1976 moved from 50 percent postconyention to 50.1 on election day...

...TO UNDERSTAND Reagan's victory, we have to move away from campaign ephemera to what may have been the most important political book of the year, an ethnographic study of a lowermiddle-class New York neighborhood, entitled Canarsie: The Jews and the Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism...

...Germond and Witcover are almost exclusively preoccupied with exposing the pseudo-reality of mediabased campaigns...

...Where liberals have been locked into the sterile formulations of the Kerner Commission, viewing everything simply in racial terms, Canarsians make a distinction between underclass and middle-class blacks, between, in local parlance, the parasites and the producers...

...So far, so good...

...Reagan capitalized on that fear...

...Whatever their differences they shared an ethic of accountability and self-reliance deeply at odds with fashionable university notions of environmental exculpation...

...An Orthodox Jew whom Rieder quotes never read Montesquieu to the effect that "in order to have . . . liberty, it is requisite that government be so constituted that one man need not be afraid of another...

...In fact so much of the book is dedicated to uncritically presenting Caddell's "brilliant" ideas on generational politics — more than 100 of its 455 pages of text are given over to him — that it might be best retitled as Pat Caddell's History of the 1984 Election as Told by Goodman and Fuller...

...Hart, like Anderson, was the candidate of the East and West coast "Granola Belts" and the professional upper-middle class...

...The public at one and the same time supported equal rights for women but distrusted feminists, endorsed the freeze but remained wary of freezniks, and so on...

...For nearly twenty years the Democrats have been steadily losing support in the South, in 6 September 1985: 471 the West, from white males, from Roman Catholics, and from blue-collar workers...

...The book is a wide-eyed paean to the notion of generational salvation...

...From his first shot at the California governorship, running against the Berkeley student movement, down to the present, Reagan has made his living off the distrust of professional reformers...

...The position of the candidate, particularly incumbents shortly after their nomination, is almost always virtually identical to their standing on election day...

...but implicit is the unjustified assumption that had Reagan not been the master of the airwaves, Mondale would have been able to win on the issues...

...Not only do they attract few black voters, they are indirectly political beneficiaries of the underclass's impoverishment and violence, which has driven former Democrats into their arms...

...The only recent exceptions are 1964 and 1972, when the heavily favored incumbents dropped all of twoand-a-half points in the period between the convention and the election, with literally no effect on the outcome...

...Fred Siegel THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY is "morally, spiritually, and intellectually dead...

...In fact the appeal of the yuppie ethos in general is far more limited than either Goodman and Fuller or their ventriloquist, Caddell, lets on...

...The racial dividing line within the Democratic party is by no means confined to New York...

...But it's one thing for women's groups to push their agenda and another for the party to swallow it whole...

...Second, the baby boom is divided between those born before 1954, the people of The Big Chill, and those born after 1954, who generally didn't take part in the "Great Refusal" of the 1960s and for whom the Hart campaign had a far more limited appeal...

...OH THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL Mark Shields An Algonquin Book, Chapel Hill, $5.95 paper, 108 pp...

...In the absence of trust and mutuality, each group sees itself as vulnerable, except where its privileges are enshrined in the party regulations...

...Neither the Germond/Witcover nor the Goldman/Fuller accounts, though they are 567 and 468 pages respectively, takes up the problem of the Democrats' self-deceptions...

...But sooner or later the conversation turned to race...

...The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has just hired Phillip Kotler, a marketing expert from Northwestern University, to do a massive poll in order to find out what the party ought to think...

...Geraldine Ferraro's response to the Rieder book is emblematic of the Democratic party's ostrich-like posture on the question of the underclass...

...and it ignored the differences between married women who tend to be more Republican and single women who tend to be more Democratic...

...When asked what should be done to help the underclass, most were in favor of government aid, but they insisted that the key was the revival of the black family, a view again becoming acceptable after having been driven underground for twenty years...

...This underlying racial feeling infuses everything they think about government and party...

...If only Hart had been the nominee" — or so goes the refrain repeated in Goldman and Fuller's The Quest for the Presidency 1984 — "then things would have been different...

...That is as true now as when it was first said...

...Given the opportunity to review the book in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, she ducked the issue and talked about how Democrats could unite the country through forward-looking economic policies...

...It has been predicted in every election since 1972 that children of the baby boom were going to transform American politics...

...This is like saying that a bicycle moves because its wheels turn...

...He goes on despairingly, "It's just lying here like a piece of hamburger on the griddle...

...Who is responsible for this sad state of affairs...

...The idea that people really agreed with Mondale but were bewitched by Reagan's personality is a half-truth elevated to the conventional wisdom...

...In so far as the Democrats had an advantage among non-black women voters it was with young unmarried professionals, the group most actively involved in the Democratic party's system of interest-group caucuses...

...First of all, the very notion of generational politics is deeply flawed...

...They've been unable to hold onto their old friends while making new ones...

...The reasons for the Democrats' failure is plain to see...

...The pattern held true for 1984, an unusual year in that it was virtually a race between two incumbents...

...This is more than an internal party matter, an "inside the Beltway" problem as Germond and Witcover would put it...

...First of all Commonweal: 470 it failed to note that statistical measures of Democratic support among women reflected the extraordinary party attachment of black women, a loyalty that is quite real but which cannot be projected to the female voters in general or attributed to "women's" issues...

...Who is going to reshape this doleful patty...

...Hart, we are breathlessly informed — imperfect vehicle that he was — could have revived the Democratic party if only those bad old bosses, a la 1968, hadn't stolen the nomination from the rightful Prince...

...Since 1960 Rieder explains, "The Jews and Italians of Canarsie have embellished and modified the meaning of liberalism, associating it with profligacy, spinelessness, malevolence, masochism, elitism, fantasy, anarchy, idealism, softness, irresponsibility, and sanctimoniousness...

...According to a spokesman for DNC Chairman Paul Kirk, the Democratic leadership will not even have a role in formulating the questions to be asked...

...While college-educated youth were rallying to the flag of the McCarthy and Kennedy campaigns in 1968, blue-collar youth were the backbone of the Wallace campaign, particularly in the North...

...What is different is that the survival of the Democratic party on the national stage is now at stake as well...

...Misled by interest-group activists, the Democrats have consistently tried to win by bringing out the "hidden vote," first of youth in 1972, of blacks in 1980, and of women in 1984...

...THE MUTUAL distrust of the Democratic party's competing elements is reflected in its mania for rules...

...Raised in fatherless, desperately poor families, they are victims who in turn victimize others...

...The short answer is that these people live in proximity to the black underclass...

...By insisting on the uniformity of national rules, Democrats not only trample over the political traditions of the various states, the regulations embody the very specter of Big Brother government...

...The real losers" in the election, Germond and Witcover argue, "were the people of the United States...

...Democratic party procedures, with their tortured rules establishing rigid numerical quotas, are an affront to traditional American notions of individualism and pluralism...

...We're not even making the assumption that we know what questions to ask anymore...

...And once they started you could hardly stop them.'' Greenberg concluded: "Democratic defectors have deeply felt racial sentiments that are formative of their views of government and the Democratic party...

...Then it just opened up...

...Finally.what is wrong with the bluesmoke-and-mirrors argument is that all the trends have been pointing in a Republican direction since 1966...

...Many of the people of Canarsie have already twice fled from crime and urban blight...

...If recent developments are any indication, the Democrats are likely to turn to motivation and marketing experts...

...There was a gender gap in 1980 all right...

...Polling showed Hart doing only slightly better than Mondale for a simple reason, the Coloradan's almost total lack of appeal to blue-collar and black Democrats...

...Comforting as this notion might be, it is almost certainly wrong...