Oh, to be a Hoosier:
Jr, David R Carlin
OH, TO BE A HOOSIER WHY THE DEMOCRATS KEEP LOSING In the final weeks of the presidential campaign Michael Dukakis valiantly tried to live down the ' 'L-word'' by living up to it. Yes, he confessed...
...It was no answer to the pledge issue to say, "How dare you impugn my patriotism...
...Why bother responding to such inconsequential attacks...
...He could have said: "I'm an old-fashioned liberal, not a new-fangled one...
...Of course Dukakis could in principle have attempted to turn the liberal charge to advantage by redefining liberalism...
...But no one in politics is totally free of ideology...
...I'm a liberal in the pre-1964 sense of the word, not the post-1968 sense...
...the new liberalism thinks in terms of race and gender...
...he seemed to think...
...Dukakis, however, was not trying to deceive anyone when, in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, he had declared that this presidential election should be about competence, not ideology...
...The old liberalism thought in terms of social class, its litical base being the working class and that class's near neighbors in the social hierarchy...
...Then, like Dan Quayle, I too could have been a Hoosier, and not (God forgive me) a liberal...
...otherwise why give a weekend pass to a nasty guy like that...
...he's a manager...
...The fact is, it's too late in the day for Michael Dukakis or any other Democratic candidate for president to make a plausible renunciation of the newer liberalism...
...In other words, there is no way Dukakis could have answered the liberalism charge...
...But how much better off I would have been if my father had gone directly from the Aegean to the Wabash, settling in an all-American state like Indiana...
...The old liberalism was nationalistic, having led the nation through World War II and into the Cold War...
...The old liberalism was sympathetic to traditional family values, its goal being to make it possible for a man (sic...
...And the ACLU issue told voters that liberals are enthusiasts for abortion, gay rights, and other manifestations of unlimited individualism...
...Yes, he confessed (or rather, boasted), I'm a liberal-a liberal in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John Kennedy...
...This election is about how to run USA, Inc., not about Willie Horton and the American flag...
...to support his wife and children...
...It was no answer to the Willie Horton issue to say that Massachusetts has a relatively low crime rate...
...it was rather the post-1968 liberalism in the tradition of George McGovern, the candidate who, appropriately enough, had taken only Massachusetts among fifty states in the 1972 election agajnst Richard Nixon...
...And at least for the time being, liberalism- liberalism, that is, of the post-1968 variety-is a serious drag on Democratic candidates for president...
...The Bush campaign was shamefully demagogic, it is true, but its dema-goguery was adroit...
...This is what the logic textbooks call ignoratio elenchi: the fallacy of triumphantly proving a point that isn't in dispute while ignoring the point that is in dispute...
...For the charge is true...
...It was a nice try, but the trouble with this move was that the liberalism Bush had pinned on Dukakis wasn't the liberalism of the FDR-HSTJFK variety...
...But how could he respond...
...The Willie Horton issue told voters that liberals, in this respect latter-day disciples of Jean Jacques Rousseau, tend to believe in the innate goodness of human nature...
...for instance, it had the good sense to execute Sacco and Vanzet-ti...
...In this respect he is the opposite of Ronald Reagan...
...Some might even say that Dukakis committed yet a third fallacy, the ad misericordiam, when he argued we should elect him president because Bush was unfairly picking on him...
...Yet ideology is so secondary an issue for Dukakis that he was nonplussed when George Bush started beating him about the head and shoulders with the liberalism charge...
...But how could he have said that in practice...
...In attacking Dukakis, the Bush camp found just the right symbols to arouse the latent fear and loathing millions of Americans have for the newer school of liberalism...
...the new liberalism is radically individualistic, and when, from time to time, it proclaims itself to be pro-family, the word "family" covers a bewildering variety of institutional arrangements...
...And it was no answer to the ACLU issue to explain that that worthy organization has performed many fine services in the course of its long history, e.g., defending Nazis and even Republicans...
...He was the candidate of the national party that long ago passed from the old liberalism to the new...
...and to the extent that Dukakis has one, it is liberalism of the post-1968 type...
...The pledge of allegiance issue told voters that liberals, with their universalistic values, are at least a bit embarrassed by patriotic sentiment...
...Poor Michael Dukakis...
...Of course, my father's mistake is understandable, for in those days the commonwealth had a few redeeming features...
...the new liberalism is soft on nationalism, strong on cosmopolitanism...
...Talk about the fallacy of equivocation...
...Even though he made the second-best showing any Democrat has made in the last five presidential elections, he's being blamed for not having responded quickly enough to these attacks...
...and some people are just no damn good, so we ought to lock them up and throw away the key ." For good measure Dukakis should have added: "My chief regret in life is that my father, when he left Greece and came to America, had the bad fortune to settle in so questionable a state as Massachusetts, thus forcing me to spend my formative years in what Bill Bennett has so well described as the moral filth of Brookline and Cambridge...
...Dukakis is not an ideologue...
...The only response that would have deflected the Bush attack was one along these lines: "I renounce the ACLU and all its pomps and all its works...
...Paired with this fallacy was another, that of equivocation, as Dukakis used the term "liberalism" in a sense different from the sense given it in the Bush indictment...
...and, oh God, how I love that grand old rag, that high-flying flag...
Vol. 115 • December 1988 • No. 21
