What liberals haven't learned & why

...A "new charge" after the 151st time...

...But whatever his weakness, the Dukakis disas-ter was far more than the failure of one indi-vidual...

...Does anyone assume for a moment that these same lawyers would apply the same standards to their own lives...

...My friend, a political activist, who was handing out palm cards for Dukakis and local liberal candidates, struck up a conversation with a middle-class voter...

...It has redefined civic rituals like the Pledge of Allegiance, written by a reformist socialist as an expression of mutuality, as a dangerous infringement on individual liberty...

...If the system is fair, or so goes the assumption, all must submit to it, though the product itself looks distinctly fishy...

...was the product of a party that has been preoc-cupied for two decades with procedural reform...

...Liberalism has a proud history of defending individual rights...

...But liberalism, wrapped as it is in the defense of personal autonomy, is unable to speak to the social breakdown which increasingly plagues us...

...It points to the decisive break between New Deal liberalism, whose mild economic egalitarianism was based on a sense of shared values, and the moral relativism of post-New Deal lifestyle liberalism which is grounded in individually held rights...

...A puzzled George McGovern captured this problem in a comment he made shortly after his devastating 1972 defeat...

...He doesn't care if shit comes out the other end...

...Congressional liberals seized the agenda with much needed long-term health care and plant-closing legislation...

...Only after the election was it permissible to discuss openly the deep racial divisions which dog the Democrats...

...and CBS...

...The nonvoters, most of whom were young, poorly educated, footloose whites, favored Bush far more heavily than did the rest or the electorate...

...It sends out a series of contradictory messages...

...But the lawyers and legal academics who dominated the Dukakis campaign come from a very different mold...

...And if anyone among rival Democrats (the unelectable Jesse Jackson excepted) or the liberal media thought otherwise, they kept it largely to themselves till well after the triumphant Democratic convention...

...The obvious answer is Michael Dukakis...

...The upshot is that only 15 percent of all Americans now describe themselves as liberal, about half the number of those who call themselves conservative...

...How did the Republicans turn the election into a referendum on legali-tarian liberalism...

...While Gephardt and Simon placed all their hopes on Iowa, Dukakis understood that the first primary was financial and not electoral...

...It becomes a bread-and-butter issue, he argues, when a family has to spend money on private schools to spare its children "from public schools that cannot expel troublemakers or fire incompetent teachers...

...The survey found that Bush, who won by 8 points, would have won by 11 if everyone eligible had voted...

...In fact, liberalism's reputation outside the universities and the social service agencies is so bad that a friend was recently startled by the following exchange...

...Seasoned observers pronounced Dukakis a "formidable" candidate...

...And if the citizens of the city suffer as a consequence of that legal nihilism, well, that's just the price that the public has to pay for civil liberties...

...In 1980 and 1984 Carter and Mondale, each faced with tough primary fights, were running far stronger in April than their eventual finish in November...

...The cumulative consequence of thousands of disputes like the one I just described in Cleveland has, as public opinion polls make clear, been to fritter away liberalism's accumulated moral capital...

...Bush won, also with 61 percent, largely by garnering the white Protestant voters Dukakis had been able to ignore in the primaries...

...Dukakis, the candidate of competence, gave the party exactly what it thought it wanted and needed...

...Not surprisingly, after defining himself as a "card-carrying member of the ACLU," the voters he won in the Iowa caucuses were disproportionately more likely to call themselves liberal than those Democrats who voted for other candidates such as Gephardt and Simon...

...The man who from March to July was praised for representing the kind of low-keyed alternative likely to appeal to a risk-adverse electorate was lambasted in October for his lack of boldness...

...In what was perhaps the most crucial contest of the campaign, he out-organized his rivals and won the crucial Hollywood "pri-mary" for the big money contributors needed to ru,n a marathon...

...In Florida, where Dukakis won, he and Jackson combined for 61 percent of the primary vote consisting largely of Catholic, Jewish, and black voters...

...The Democratic party had lost to a man of whom it was said: "If the Democrats can't beat George Bush, they ought to find another country...

...It is not a home for its citizens...

...No matter which way he turned, presidential candidate Cuomo too would have been caught up in the civil rights/civil liberties minefield...

...Governing on the state level, Cuomo has largely sidestepped the kind of divisive issues he would have had to face head-on in a national campaign...

...Dukakis has been blasted, and rightly so, for walking away from his own liberal heritage...

...Businessmen may be selfconsciously part of an elite, but they make a career of both responding to and engineering shifts in popular taste...

...But biracialism has little chance presidentially unless it speaks directly about the underclass, because the fear that the underclass evokes speaks directly to millions of voters...

...Harvard Law's Estrich wasn't alone in being blind to the pledge issue...

...And to suggest even mild pressures to curb, say the suicide lyrics of some rock groups is, as Tipper Gore found out in the campaign, to invite charges of McCarthyism...

...Not likely...

...Meanwhile, the Republicans were trapped on a treadmill of free-market abstractions...

...Sometimes the same anecdotes that had been used in the primaries to describe the governor's virtues were refurbished as examples of his vices in November...

...All well and good, you say, but couldn't another more eloquent candidate have surmounted these difficulties...

...Jackson, for instance, increased his strength from 84 not so much by increasing his support among white voters as by incorporating the black voters who had supported Mondale...

...The L-word," noted Fred Barnes, "was all but banned from the Democratic convention...

...George Bush fanned those embers and there was little Michael Dukakis or any other Democratic candidate could have done to put them out...

...Instead, after a campaign in which the Democrats refused to raise against each other the type of issues they would have to face in the general election, Dukakis was forced to give further attention to Jackson's seemingly insatiable drive for self-promotion...

...Success in their circles derives from the degree to which they are insulated from popular pressures...

...Donna Leisinger...

...Pumped up by the success of their own convention and convinced in their own hearts that they were still the natural majority party, they underestimated George Bush...

...Had Jackson's ego allowed him to withdraw after repeated defeats and had both Dukakis and Bush stood unopposed in the California primary, not only would Dukakis have had far more time to reorient himself for the general election, he would have had, in effect, a practice run against the Republican assaults whose outlines were already clear...

...No one among the Democrats, and least of all the network reporters, thought at the time that Bush could attack effectively...

...Contemporary liberalism leaves many Americans bewildered...

...The endless search for the perfected process-the Democrats have been faithfully revising their rules every four years since 1968-is, like Jackson's hope for a different electorate, a great evasion...

...You can be sure that, hypocritically or not, they will be quite concerned with the past history of the people they hire as babysitters...

...First off, said Stokes, Ms...

...The Jackson Democrats are animated, much as were the Goldwater Republicans, by an almost mystical quest for electoral treasure in the form of a vast cache of hidden votes which, if only they could be found, would ensure political happiness forever after...

...On the one hand it trumpets a"do your own thing" moral free market and then turns around and calls upon people to pull together in shared pursuit of common social and economic goals...

...What happened...

...defeat, since virtually all of Dukakis's weaknesses they pointed to in the post-mortems were ones they had earlier identified as sources of strength...

...That's the difference between us...

...The last Democratic nominee who could be called a regular guy replied: "You know there are two kinds of liberals...

...After talking for a few minutes the voter asked my friend if he were a liberal...

...While an aging Ronald Reagan, who seemed to have finally failed his luck, was losing popular support, the homeless crisis once again made compassion common sense...

...Jackson's appeal, by contrast, is to black voters who are not only one-third the size of the Catholic vote but who are already very heavily Democratic...

...Leisinger is the city's most active prostitute with over 150 arrests and 114 warrants for soliciting rides in the past year alone...

...Not anything...

...Their quest is an elaborate end run around the problems of social disintegration now inextricably associated with liberalism...

...Secondly, when the attacks began they were quite reasonably seen as an example of Republican bankruptcy...

...Even Reagan's success in curbing inflation undermined the Republicans by restoring some confidence in government so that it was harder and harder to conjure up the Ghost of Failed-Big-Government Past...

...Liberals were outraged because Bush campaigned on what were described as "peripheral issues...

...The danger for the Democrats is that they will believe the cliche-"it was simply Dukakis's fault"-which has come to define the election...

...This is the last of a series on the '88 presidential election...

...The governor came off at times as more of a Brahmin than Bush...

...Dukakis won because, like McGovern, Carter, and ' Mondale before him, he mastered the process...

...Can anyone actually live in this moral vacuum...

...His persistence, possibly as late as the Ohio primary in early May, served the Democrats well since it framed Dukakis as a flaming moderate...

...He could have trumpeted what is truly a great history of struggles for social and economic justice, and thus partly redefined the terms of the debate...

...The post-1968 rules eliminating winner-take-all primaries don't require a candidate to put together a broad biracial coalition...

...Let me give Hubert Humphrey the last word on Dukakis and the Democrats' failure to build a post-New Deal presidential politics...

...The turnout of voters making less than $35,000 a year dropped 21 points in Illinois, 20 in Massachusetts, and 19 in New York between 1984 and 1988...

...Instead, responsibility is turned over to a system, a process...

...Take, for example, the impact of a recent dispute in Cleveland between Carl Stokes, the nation's first black mayor of a major city and now a municipal judge, and the legalitarian liberals of the Legal Aid Society...

...The upshot, as Michael Walzer has explained, is that "Liberalism...offers...few emotional rewards...

...Similarly, while McGovern cadged only one of five white Protestants in 1972, the victorious Carter won half of those votes...

...Dukakis would have helped himself if he had openly and imaginatively embraced liberalism...

...Dukakis survived Super-Tuesday by focusing on Catholic voters in a few key Southern states...

...In effect, the procedural purity of legalitarian liberalism insures that the past be seen to have no pattern, let alone meaning...

...If liberalism seems irredeemably tarnished with the brush of permissiveness on the crime issue, it is less a matter of what a particular candidate says and more a reflection of the numerous moral dramas inspired by fears of social disintegration which have been acted out across America...

...It extols all forms of individual expression, no matter how misplaced, including, for example, the wearing of "Fuck-You" teeshirts in schools and the fight for the rights of Detroit Tiger fans to shout obscenities as long and loud as they like...

...Stokes has set off a storm by asking that the Legal Aid Society, which is funded by the city to represent indigent clients, be barred from continuing to represent a Ms...

...The personality of Michael Dukakis is an almost perfect expression of the emotional hole at the core of contemporary liberalism...

...I don't think anyone's criminal record," said a Legal Aid spokesman, "has anything to do with their guilt or innocence in connection with a new charge...

...He constantly reminded us that while Dukakis stayed behind in New England, he had, in classic frontier fashion, "lit out for the territories" to prospect for oil...

...But liberalism has self-desiructed in part on "peripheral issues" like school prayer and constitutionalized as opposed to legislated abortion...

...In the general election, however...

...Dukakis, said Hayden, was a winner, "a button-down Democrat, a tough administrator...a Democrat who is efficient," in short "not the New Deal...

...But even this seems doubtful in light of a survey of 1988 nonvoters conducted by the New York Times...

...Like the great nineteenth-century rationalist, John Stuart Mill, who has been described as "the patron saint of the ACLU," Dukakis seemed to have to think his way to feelings...

...The conventional wisdom assumed that Bush, already an unpopular figure, couldn't afford to go negative because, in the words of Democratic media consultant Jim Buckley,"he can't go after Dukakis and look small...

...All he cares is that the pipeline is neat and shiny and clean...

...The fact is they had good cause to be embarrassed, and not just by the FRED SIEGEL, author of Troubled Journey: From Pearl Harbor to Ronald Reagan (Hill and Wang), teaches in the humanities department of The Cooper Union in New York City...

...Marvin Wattenberg, surveying the Democrats' long history of destructive primary clashes, predicted a 53-47 Bush victory, even as Dukakis was riding high...

...Even Ted Kennedy shied away from it, and when Jesse Jackson did use the L-word, the reference was pejorative...

...Workers displaced by foreign competition were told to be patient and wait until the market equilibrium was restored...

...The Democrats in July were almost giddy with overconfidence...

...Four months later George Bush was still actively disliked by 40 percent of the electorate but he was also president-elect...

...The word liberal is a killer," said Dan McClung, a Lloyd Bentsen adviser: The Democrats, he went on, "have finally learned that you can be a liberal, but you can't say you're a liberal...

...Old-time Democratic pols who made a living off politics were similarly attuned...

...A major difference between Stevenson's loss in 1956 and Kennedy's victory in 1960 is that while Stevenson won a little more than half of all Catholic voters, Kennedy won four out of five...

...In fact, despite Jackson's presence and populist appeal there was a. disturbing drop in primary voter turnout among those who made less than the median income...

...When government is widely understood to have failed in its primary task, the protection of public safety, it is unlikely to be fully trusted with additional responsibilities...

...Implored to go negative against Gephardt for the upcoming New Hampshire contest, he refused, telling his advisers, "1 am what I am...

...In that sense the Democratic party's proceduralism is a faithful reflection of contemporary liberalism's unwillingness to pass judgment on what is or isn't good...

...Tom Hayden caught the tenor of the optimism when he expressed his "relief at "the Duke's" selection...

...But as anyone who has attended a neighborhood meeting on crime can tell you, their embers, the coals of cynicism, emit a steady glow...

...Critics of the Rainbow approach have argued that nonvoters weren't all that different from voters, but that since a higher income correlates positively with a higher likelihood of voting, an increase in turnout would produce some marginal gains for the Democrats...

...It's a means of avoiding a Consensus on at least a core of substantive issues...

...Bush by contrast worked hard at being "jes folks...

...In fact, among the legal academics., prestige accrues to those who are best able to change public policy by using the courts to bypass public opinion altogether...

...By continuing to campaign after he was decisively defeated, Jackson created an undertow that dragged Dukakis away from his impending clash with George Bush...

...Couldn't Cuomo have brought the party together under the liberal banner...

...The breadth of religious and personal freedom we now enjoy is an expression of its successful struggles...

...Those assertions of rights which serve to trump the claims of a common morality make it difficult and often impossible for cultural liberals to pass judgment on even the most obviously destructive behavior...

...Dukakis, the premier process liberal...

...The Republicans had run out of "new ideas," so the argument went, and were reduced to desperation tactics...

...Legal Aid replied with a statement of the principled ignorance which has done so much to discredit liberalism...

...How right you were, Hubert...

...The problem is that this really is a fairy tale...

...But me, I don't care if the pipeline is cracked and rusty and shitty so long as the right results come out the other end...

...In the now famous interview with Ted Koppel where Dukakis self-destructed on national television, the Massachusetts governor seemed to say that while he couldn't tell the audience what contemporary liberalism was he ought to win nonetheless on superior "form...

...We've got this Supreme Court decision...

...This was more than just a good intuition on McClung's part...

...And when, as in the Bork hearings, liberalism is seen as still further expanding personal freedom without substantial social cost, it remains immensely popular...

...Dukakis was surely a flawed candidate, but much of the advice handed out by both friendly TV journalists and Democratic party politicians was flawed too...

...Leisinger, who admitted to an income of $25,000, was far from indigent...

...The problem is that the obvious answer is at least half wrong...

...In 1975 Humphrey was told that his brand of liberalism had been criticized as passe by the newly elected governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis...

...The Democrats, he said, had tried to open their "house" to as many new people as possible, but the voters had jumped out of almost every available window...

...All this is not to suggest that Dukakis was not a flawed candidate...

...Events," said the acerbic Karl Kraus, "enter the world as journalistic cliches...

...This was foolish because insofar as liberalism has been increasingly defined in the public mind in cultural rather than economic terms, Dukakis ' was indelibly marked with the liberal label...

...If, as Mark Shields points out, Jackson could increase black turnout by an incredible 20 percent and win every black vote, that would add only two points to the Democratic party's total...

...For the Rainbow, the hidden voters are the minority and nonminority poor supposedly ignored by the Democrats...

...The problem is that even a new breed "tough administrator" isn't as likely to be in tune with the popular pulse as the businessmen who run the Republican party...

...Analysts expressed surprise when they noted that on a state-by-state basis the swing to the Democrats was almost always inversely correlated with the size of the black population...

...But the racial caesura was there to disrupt the Dukakis campaign in September and October, even if it hadn't yet been given official status...

...Nor are legalitarian issues "peripheral" as Lars-Erik Nelson points out hyperbolically, to the family that has to spend money "to avoid the drug-dealers who cannot be jailed for more than twenty minutes at a time...

...It's now forgotten but recreational drug use was for many years defended as a "victimless crime...

...Lloyd Bentsen, a Tory Democrat, came off as far more of a "man of the people" simply by speaking in the vernacular of Texas politics...

...Dukakis is a process liberal, and I'm not...

...But the cowardice was not Dukakis's alone...

...The fires of resentment the social issues once fueled have, it is true, died down...

...But beginning with the month between the Ohio and the June 7 California and New Jersey primaries, Jackson's campaign began to have a devastating effect on his own party...

...No," my friend replied, "I'm a democratic socialist...

...Like the Brecht poem about the East Berlin uprising, the theorists of the Rainbow want to dismiss the electorate and appoint a new one...

...The Stokes/Legal Aid exchange describes much more than the way the law, once the cornerstone of ordered liberty, has been trivialized, turned into a game for lawyers...

...Instead they place a premium on the sort of narrowly targeted campaigns, which both Dukakis and Jackson ran, that succeed by doing the best job of mobilizing their potential core supporters...

...This was how the world looked when a euphoric Democratic party stood at its July 1988 national convention and mocked George Bush, a candidate actively disliked by 40 percent of the American electorate...

...It is mute before abuses of liberty...

...Anyone's...

...Impressed by his measured response to a third-place finish in Iowa, the media talked of the imperturbable "cool-hand Duke" and his long-range plans for victory...

...Jackson hurt the Democrats and his own claims to be not just a protest candidate by refusing to bow out of the primaries when it was clear that he had lost in eight consecutive states...

...Finally and most importantly, the consensus that the social issues had lost their bite was only half right...

...The hard reality is that in the postwar era the Democrats have won not by drawing in new voters but by bringing back voters who had turned to the Republicans...

...At the same time it refuses to countenance any expression of common or public sentiments...

...Therefore, argued Wattenberg, Dukakis should be spared some of the blame for what was an inevitable defeat...

...Jesse Jackson has been rightfully credited with running a far more biracial campaign than he did in 1984...

...What went wrong...

...He explained that in the postwar era the longer a party's primary fight the weaker it was likely to be in the general election...

...Or in the words of Dukakis campaign chief Susan Estrich, faced with the Pledge of Allegiance issue, "If Bush thinks he's going to get anywhere with mis pledge stuff, he's crazy...

...After November 8, however, that same "I am what I am" statement was dredged up to prove that an inflexible Dukakis had been unfit all along...

...But more importantly, the taxpayers, Stokes argued, shouldn't have to subsidize "an illegal activity that helps make slums of our neighborhoods...

...Only 2 percent of the primary participants hadn't voted before, and 90 percent of the Jackson voters in the big industrial states had voted in 1984...

...Jackson pulled in very few new voters this time around...

...That's okay," the fellow responded, "just as long as you're not one of those God-damned liberals...