The Election
Gitlin, Todd
Remarkably few recent presidential campaigns forecast the course of the following four years. Kennedy ran on the "missile gap" and generational vigor, not civil rights or the nuclear test ban....
...Arguably, though, Clinton was nearly as consistent as Ronald Reagan, perhaps the only recent president to deliver the main goods he offered—armament, tax cuts, unleashing the market—and even Reagan did not anticipate the Iran-contra revelations...
...The new AFL-CIO leadership seems to know that its hopes are doomed unless unions become a popular cause...
...Thus did the election continue the trend that has been at work since the beginning of the century— the almost inexorable decline of the voting proportion...
...In Tennessee, it was even possible to vote during a fifteen-day period ending on Halloween, but the percentage of registered voters who turned out still fell below the 1992 level...
...Johnson ran seeking "no wider war," not seeking to send half a million troops into Vietnam...
...Never heard of it, as long as the outlying expressways run on time...
...Times of left-wing upheaval, in other words, are times WINTER • 1997 • 7 Comments and Opinions when the hitherto bitter and withdrawn mobilize for citizenship...
...Foreign eruptions are the obvious jokers in the pack...
...In California, a union-financed ballot measure to restore top income tax brackets for families reporting taxable income of more than $220,000 failed by less than three-tenths of 1 percent...
...No wonderAl Gore is panting in the wings...
...One is the South's continuing prominence in American politics...
...Vietnam, the oil shocks of the seventies, and Iran-contra cracked presidential fortunes...
...If Minnesota's righteous Scandinavian-based liberalism gave Wellstone an easier time breaking ranks, and arguably a Kerry or Harkin nay might have proved decisive against them, embarrassingly opportunistic yea-voters Joe Biden and Carl Levin have no such excuse, having won their own reelection campaigns by twenty-two- and eighteenpoint margins, respectively...
...Still, unions, however newly invigorated, are hampered by Washington policies and a generation of corporate onslaughts...
...Another detrimental force in the general climate, by and large, is suburbanization...
...The young legions of Union Summer did well enough to serve as a model for future recruitment, and some campus strikes, like Yale's and Barnard's, were popular enough to dent recalcitrant administrations...
...The moral is plain: a first-class candidate in a historically liberal state can sometimes survive on principle...
...On Long Island, Carolyn McCarthy wins the Frank Capra Ms.-Smith-Goes-to-Washington Award for defeating the National Rifle Association on her way to Congress...
...The South is the poorest and least unionized part of the country, its politics still colored—how many more generations, 0 Lord?—by slavery, Bourbon politics, and their aftermath...
...As long as the unions enroll fewer than one in six American workers, the limits to their influence are plain...
...Progressive measures didn't do badly...
...Democrats also regained control of the California assembly and gained in many another state legislature...
...Alas, as Minnesota goes, so does not go the country...
...The unions' results in congressional races were mixed, but union voter turnout was arguably one of their victories, all the more useful because many Republicans seem to have stayed home to vote their displeasure with Dole...
...Whether or not the Morris strategy of Republicanism Lite can be credited with Clinton's famous victory— surely the feeble Bob Dole would have been a gift to handlers of any and all proclivities—the coloration of Congress is, to put it mildly, not conducive to substantial advances on a leftish agenda...
...Still, even on the suburban front, all is not lost...
...panned out...
...As for the man of the hour, Bill Clinton certainly does know how to thread a needle into the twenty-first century...
...Sean Wilentz...
...Weirdly, though, an amazing 15 percent of the voters said they supported affirmative action and still voted for the initiative that will kill it...
...On the upside, Senator Paul Wellstone (DMinn ) showed that a lefty can win handily even when voting not to kick welfare mothers around...
...Lacking the former, we lack the latter, too...
...Wild history—in Richard Slotkin's felicitous phrase—has a way of blowing out election candles...
...The debate about whether Bill Clinton is (a) liberal-hearted but self-protective, (b) conservative but duplicitous, or (c) opportunistically ambivalent with his luck about to run out, is beside the point, really, because the results won't vary much one way or the other...
...Now the burden is on the left wing of his party to push him as far as he can go—not very far, most likely, given his propensity for minimalist programs...
...Since Bob Dole opted out of the Senate in his futile quest for a gesture of nobility, the country's four leading elected officials have all been southerners— President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, Speaker Newt Gingrich, and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott...
...There may well be more to be learned from her success...
...In a usually Republican district, this widowed nurse turned Democrat to protest her opponent's tenderness toward assault weapons, and won handily...
...There are demographic basics distinctly injurious to the health of the left, or liberal, or progressive wing...
...The master calculator's calculations (or Dick Morris's: who cares who thought of them first...
...Against predictions of conservative inevitability, in fact, Democrats did well on the Northeast and West coasts, and in the upper Midwest...
...Although the suburbs are not all gated communities, and not all lily-white, as a bloc the outlying areas persist in exploiting the city for its services, draining away tax revenue, and furthering their advantages...
...Congress remains steadfastly Republican, more fiercely, it would appear, than during the first reign of Newt...
...With almost a quarter (23 percent) of votes for the House coming from union households, up from 14 percent in 1994, the AFL-CIO has a fulcrum in place to move at least some of Congress...
...But California passed another measure making it harder for local governments to raise taxes, and the notorious and 8 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions vilely named California Civil Rights Initiative showed how much life remains in the politics of resentment...
...Turnout was a meager 49 percent, the lowest in any presidential election since 1924...
...In other words, history invites modesty in predictions...
...Conservative impulses prevail as long as majorities don't see what governments can do to improve the conditions of life...
...Either because Bill Clinton inhales the climate around him or because he himself is more instinctively cautious than anything else, it would be foolish to expect strong initiatives from him...
...The constituency that might be expected to vote Democratic should the Democrats offer something to the most alienated continues to hold itself out of play...
...But even short of global convulsions, presidential initiatives over the next four years are likely to be severely circumscribed...
...Nixon ran on law-and-order and vague pacific noises, not the aerial bombardment of Vietnam or environmental reform, affirmative action, wage-and-price controls, or burglary...
...Jimmy Carter ran on honesty, not deregulation, stagflation, or arousing the wrath of the Ayatollah Khomeini...
...America is allergic to metropolitan government, hence "edge cities" are sucking up resources while tax bases flee huge swaths of urban society...
...Still, if Wellstone was, in the words of his opponent Rudy Boschwitz's campaign ads, "embarrassingly liberal," a certain embarrassment now shifts to the Republicans, who discover there is nothing automatic about their ascendancy...
...To be relevant on this shriveled landscape, the left needs a medium-run agenda that is not only worthy but winnable...
...Despite the motor voter law and the rapid registration of former noncitizen immigrants, mainly Hispanics, not enough new voters rushed to the polls to offset the fallers-away from national balloting...
...That infusion is not on the horizon...
...There were two, and only two, decades of uptick—the thirties and the sixties...
...The Senate's only running incumbent to cast a vote against the new welfare bill, he pulled out a nine-point victory, stronger than those of John Kerry (a seven-point victory in Massachusetts) or Tom Harkin (five points in Iowa), both of whom voted to throw disagreeable poor folks on the mercy of state houses...
...George Bush ran on the flag and "no new taxes," not Persian Gulf policy or recession.And in 1992, Bill Clinton split the difference between "putting people first" and "ending welfare as we know it," but dwelt little on balancing the budget...
...Ever since Kevin Phillips worked up the southern strategy for Richard Nixon in 1968, the Republicans have been following in the footsteps of William Tecumseh Sherman, and the Democrats' only national winners have been centrist southern governors...
...Infrastructure...
...Campaign finance reform, health care, day care, more progressive taxation, and livable wages ought to be at the core...
...Only a strong infusion of new fact is going to move American politics off its rightcentral course...
...Indeed, they gained everywhere but the South...
...Thanks to Dick Flacks, Michael Kazin, Jo-Ann Mort, Richard Rothstein, and Lee Siegel for comments on an earlier draft...
...During the months to come, nothing would open up more space for this sort of agenda than to boost the prospects of the AFL-CIO...
...The unions expect no help for labor law reform from the new Congress, so uphill runs their—and our—struggle...
...In heavily Republican Orange County, the raving six-term Republican Robert Doman was narrowly defeated by the newcomer Loretta Sanchez, who benefited from a spurt of Hispanic registration...
...Its Democrats are the most Republican and its Republicans the most reactionary...
Vol. 44 • January 1997 • No. 1
