About the Election
Mills, Nicolaus
Comments and Opinions About the Election A little symposium among some Dissent editors, each of whom speaks for him or herself. Nicolaus Mills There is something fundamentally wrong in...
...The GOP may be able to explain the Crash of '87 as a necessary correction in the stock market and Irangate as a diplomatic initiative...
...It is a feeling that the Republicans are trying to deny, and it may well cost them in 1988...
...This election isn't about ideology...
...More than a quarter century ago, John Kennedy, insisting that it was time to get the country moving again, used such a strategy to defeat Richard Nixon...
...Comments and Opinions About the Election A little symposium among some Dissent editors, each of whom speaks for him or herself...
...They feel it in suburbs where second salaries are cut in half by the cost of day care...
...Can the same kind of managerial approach turn around America in 1988...
...The 1988 election is about laying the groundwork for that change...
...He is avoiding the identification with "special interests" that won Walter Mondale 91 percent of the black vote, 57 percent of the union family vote, and 64 percent of the voters with a grade school education but lost him 49 out of 50 states...
...But for George Bush, nostalgia won't work...
...He is still the resume candidate as far as the country is concerned...
...Dukakis has said...
...In a society in which every ten-year-old knows how to use a computer, Dukakis is speaking the right code words for 1988...
...They feel it in supermarket parking lots where Toyotas outnumber Chevrolets...
...They feel it in cities where they pass the homeless sleeping in doorways...
...that a well-run Environmental Protection Agency can stop ocean dumping...
...It is not that families sit around the dinner table talking about deindustrialization and federal deficits and the new underclass...
...Only after the country has begun to trust him—if all goes well, sometime in the early 1990s — will Michael Dukakis be in a position to make fundamental change...
...But the country's gut feeling that something is wrong is not going away...
...And so far he shows no sign of losing it...
...The fear of downward mobility—of farms too in debt to pass on, of private colleges too expensive to attend—is real...
...If the Republican candidate were Ronald Reagan, it still might be possible to get away with insisting America is "standing proud...
...that a 60-day plant closing law can buy workers the time to look for new jobs...
...Nicolaus Mills There is something fundamentally wrong in the country, and the country knows it...
...Competence means going after the irrationalities in the system and changing them without new taxes, without special quotas for minorities, without upsetting the equilibrium of an imperiled middle class (Reagan Democrats trying to make ends meet on family incomes between $25,000 and $50,000...
...The result is that the 1988 election is Michael Dukakis's to win or lose...
...Reagan could run as if 1988 were 1980 and the choice was between him and Jimmy Carter...
...It is an election about showing that America can spend less on defense and remain secure...
...People don't like him, and he has a gender gap that has been made worse by his opposition to abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment...
...The answer is, of course, no...
...it's about competence...
...It is rather that people feel what is wrong in their daily lives...
Vol. 35 • September 1988 • No. 4
