THE ELECTION: LESSONS & REWARDS?
Walzer, Michael
After Vietnam and Watergate, years of racial conflict, sad stories of apathy, party disintegration, the breakup of traditional alliances, media domination, the United States has had its...
...This was true even in our colleges, only a few years ago the home of upper-class radicalism...
...many Americans seem to have forgotten it even before they entered the voting booth...
...blacks voted Democratic, by an even greater margin...
...The stakes were too high, the issues too complex, for this sort of contest...
...And that's a mistake, even if it serves to undermine local bosses and to reduce financial corruption...
...For the same reason, party politics is better than media politics...
...the big cities once again provided large Democratic majorities (not quite large enough in Chicago, however, where Mayor Daley, having lost his spiritual power to vote the dead, seems to have lost his political power as well...
...q 6...
...the unionized working class voted Democratic, by a margin of almost two to one...
...Hence there was a noticeable decline in local political activity and a greater-than-ever sense of the election as a spectator sport...
...Carter himself may or may not have a mandate, but the Democratic party clearly does have one...
...The world seems right again...
...The audience, with hardly a clue as to their policy commitments, was left to worry about how they looked, the "images" they managed to "project...
...Following the advice of their experts, they hoarded what they had for the mass media...
...Carter won because: • registered Democrats voted Democratic: party loyalty turns out to have been a more significant factor this year than in the recent past—despite Carter's antipolitical, antiparty primary campaign...
...Direct communication can never be authentic in a country as large as ours: it is all imagery, manipulation, sloganeering...
...After Vietnam and Watergate, years of racial conflict, sad stories of apathy, party disintegration, the breakup of traditional alliances, media domination, the United States has had its most conventional, its most "normal" election since 1960, perhaps since 1944...
...By the time this note appears in print, the campaign will 5 probably have been long forgotten...
...I would rather have a torchlight parade than a TV debate...
...Democratic politics requires state, city, township, ward, and precinct organization, and all that must he paid for...
...there will he men and women with some positive commitment to the campaign, who can then mediate between the rest of us and the new Administration...
...As it turned out, it was a spectator sport hardly worth watching, and the League of Women Voters made it literally unbearable by arranging the first television debates since 1960...
...Catholic voters ("white ethnics") returned to the fold after the massive desertions of four years ago, giving Carter close to 55 percent of their vote...
...THE PRESIDENTIAL...
...But even if both of them were men of verbal wit and liveliness, the debates would probably not have been enlightening...
...The reason lies in part with the misguided efforts of well-meaning people...
...One survey showed students whose parents earned more than $25,000 a year going for Ford by a significant margin...
...What is most amazing is that all this made for only a hare majority...
...Staging TV events for the evening news is degrading for everyone involved, those who do the arranging and those who merely watch, and it would not he necessary if the candidates were tied to their followers in some structured way...
...A comforting statistic...
...Throughout the country, the correlation of lowincome and Democratic voting was as clear as any marxising sociologist could wish...
...It is a silly kind of reformism to try to cut off the money, for then the candidates are driven to substitute direct communication with the voters for local party organizing...
...And it leaves us with a winner who is insufficiently connected to the people he has to lead...
...They were desperately afraid of some crucial mistake, and so they aimed for a kind of wooden earnestness, a stiff and cautious resolution (and they generated excitement only when they did make mistakes...
...I confess immediately that I don't understand it, but a few days after the voting the facts seem clear enough...
...Here is where the fight begins, and it will be first of all a fight among Democrats, inside the old New Deal coalition...
...The campaign financing laws, a triumph of liberal reformism, seem to have left the candidates with much too little money...
...Inevitably, the candidates fell back on their practiced routines and ended by reciting their advertising copy...
...CAMPAIGN itself certainly held out little hope for social change of any sort...
...It is, above all, a mandate for economic reform, and the critical test of the new Administration (as Michael Harrington argued in the last Dissent) will come in the areas of employment, taxation, and welfare...
...Jews voted Democratic, by huge margins, apparently, in the critical state of New York, by margins smaller than in the old days in other parts of the country...
...The old ways were better...
...The intellectual level is not so different, and the parade will at least have a local organizing committee...
...In fact, however, the Democratic coalition is much larger, more cohesive, and more stable than the presidential vote suggested--as it has been all along, consistently producing huge congressional majorities (even in the year of the Nixon landslide...
...and so did large numbers (though probably not a majority) of white Southerners...
...I suppose the candidates themselves must accept some responsibility for the awfulness of those encounters...
...But it is fresh in my own mind now as a dismal moment in American political history, and it seems worthwhile to try to say why it was so dismal...
Vol. 24 • January 1977 • No. 1
