George, Mike and Adlai
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union GEORGE, MIKE AND ADLAI BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS "I am easily swayed by emotion until· I think, which I occasionally do." —FROM A VOTER'S LETTER to Adlai E. Stevenson In...
...According to his own testimony, he hasn't read a novel since his freshman year at Swarthmore, and the omission shows painfully whenever he reaches for eloquence...
...The Democrats have nominated a decent candidate, but one unlikely to galvanize nonvoters...
...Who knows...
...Dukakis, after all, is not running against a war hero so popular he could win on either ticket (or on both...
...Hespokeof" the vaporous anxiety of people to vote themselves out of trouble...
...It is true that Stevenson's own peerless eloquence got him nowhere, but the challenge back then was much tougher...
...That vision need not be especially imaginative (see Reagan's speeches), but it ought to be clear and within most people's grasp...
...However we care to phrase it, the kid has got to go...
...Maybe, just maybe, people don't feel as prosperous as they look...
...In some conservativecircles, of course, liberal Democrats are portrayed as sentimentalists who pamper criminals, consort with Communists and encourage indolence among the poor...
...Bush seems to be counting on it...
...In fairness, the Vice President is only doing what has come naturally to Republicans ever since the Great Depression, when they became a (permanent...
...That so unattractive a candidate may actually win the election is testimony to the plight of the Democrats, who do not know which way to turn...
...Personally, I liked him better when he was a wimp...
...Dukakis the Vice President has had a largely unknown opponent and thus a clean slate on which to splatter all manner of damning graffiti...
...Yet Dukakis' quiet integrity may be inadequate to the task at hand, which is getting elected...
...Only Jesse Jackson seems to care, but all Democrats suffer the consequences...
...Still, the words we use do not always reflect our intentions, much less our needs...
...In short, they are the worst kinds of wimps...
...Despite his mentor's hesitations, George Bush knows enough to come in out of the acid rain...
...If scatology embraces a vocabulary we cannot abide, it also refers to functions we cannot do without...
...If the 1988 election can be said to be a test of anything, it is of whether the nation's Rightward shift under Ronald Reagan represents a permanent transformation or a passing fancy, an ephemeral salute to the Great Communicator or something we shall have to live with the rest of our days...
...Apparently George Bush and his touchy minions can't tell the difference between a footstool and a catbird seat...
...Just as polls showed that voters tilted toward Reagan by 52 per cent over Carter's38 percent, sodidnonvoters tilt toward Carter by 51 per cent over 37 per cent...
...Thousands of voters, Stevenson marveled after his first loss to Eisenhower, wrote him "gracious, flattering letters...
...In a democracy, Stevenson added with a characteristically hopeful flourish, reason must inevitably triumph...
...They seemed to feel that they owed me an explanation...
...If they eventually turn into appropriations and titles in the Federal canon, it will be because their logic never lets up: "It presses always in the same direction...
...minority party and therefore aperpetual underdog given to nastiness...
...Just as Harry S.Truman's surprising triumph in 1948 tended to confirm the durability of New Deal reforms, a George Bush victory in November would certainly ratify many of the changes wrought in the '80s, especially the upward redistribution of wealth and the consequently widening chasm between rich and poor...
...Few opportunities have been lost...
...Many of his strong points resemble those of a competent bank teller—honesty, good manners, an ability to keep track of other people's money and, not least, an emotional barometer that won't go haywire under pressure...
...Adlai Stevenson understood the unreliable tendencies displayed by an edgy electorate...
...Maybe those insecure Reagan Democrats will come home at last...
...It is possible this Presidential year, even in a campaign beclouded by irrationality, to discern one or two Jamesian silver linings...
...What he lacks is the theatrical punch that comes with a political vision...
...Bush has called Dukakis "a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union...
...It remains to be seen whether a majority of voters will sit still for so ancient and far-fetched an assessment...
...As Freud noted, the big thing about paranoia is its sealed-tight in vulnerability, even to good news...
...In his anxiety to shed his own reputation for wimpishness, he has turned unexpectedly mean...
...he's " the quarterback...
...The best he can summon on most occasions are metaphors from the corporate or sports worlds: He's a "competent manager...
...He has even accused the Massachusetts governor of presiding over a weekend furlough program for prisoners that unleashes "those who rape, pillage and plunder...
...These are not occasional insults hurled in the heat of debate...
...They tell us something we ought to know about this stiff-necked yet ideologically elastic candidate, who only eight years ago seemed the Republican's last best hope for common sense and moderation...
...What is astonishing in all this is that the Republicans, who in the last two decades have been locked out of the White House for only four years, still feel like underdogs...
...The Reagan victory of 1980," according to Piven and Cloward, "was literally made possible by large-scale nonvoting...
...These are relatively new items on the bipartisan national agenda...
...As usual, they are hoping to be all things to all people...
...In his treatise on The Democrats (1976), the liberal historian Herbert S. Parmet writes of "the common tactic of Republicans...
...Like Bush's superpatriotic references to the Pledge of Allegiance, the sneers and the leers seem part of a carefully crafted script designed to emasculate Dukakis, to define him as weak, permissive, unpatriotic, and soft on Jane Fonda...
...To pursue this embarrassing metaphor just a step further, it does not stretch credulity to envision our body politic cranking out liberal measures without once uttering "the L word...
...It has inspired hardly any emotion and only occasional thought...
...That faculty, James conceded, was "the very feeblest of Nature's forces, if you take it at any one spot and moment...
...Nowadays they have to eke it out—a few votes here, a few more there...
...In Michaels...
...to move to siphon off Democratic strength by appealing to the jingoistic instincts of supernationalism and the internal fears of the insecure...
...Their gleeful allusions to "the L word" suggest that in our civic glossary "liberalism" has become vaguely scatological and thus unmentionable in polite society...
...The Republicans appear to be betting that they have finally soured the nation's 200-year-old love affair with liberalism...
...Left or Right...
...Both candidates, for instance, have proposed day care programs for the children of working parents, and both have called for stronger measures to protect the environment...
...Such traits are not to be dismissed lightly...
...He has voiced a suspicion that "my opponent thinks naval exercise is something to be found in Jane Fonda's workout book...
...They stoop to such stratagems, says Parmet, because they are "unable to compete on the basis of domestic economic and social welfare issues...
...Meanwhile, broad elements within the party's natural constituency of minorities and the working poor remain disenfranchised, either voluntarily or by virtue of restraints imposed by the states...
...In those days, at least, he wasn' t constantly trotting out his family as proof of his own dubious virtues, a ploy best described as hiding behind the Bushes...
...Stevenson found the explanations touching, and yet: "I confess the thought occurred to me now and then that a little 'X' in the right place on the ballot would have been so much easier than a long, thoughtful letter...
...That may not be the candidates' fault...
...Maybe women voters will prefer Lloyd Bentsen's fatherliness to Dan Quayle's sexiness...
...In the interim he has developed a talent for innuendo that must rank him now among our all-time minor demagogues—still far behind Joe McCarthy, to be sure, but closing in fast on Spiro Agnew...
...Compare Dukakis' brave refusal to forswear a tax increase to Bush's cowardly no-tax pledge...
...Do you have to go number one or number two...
...As of this writing, though, he has not found the words to share it with us...
...Deep within his soul Michael Dukakis may actually harbor such a vision...
...That alone should separate the man from the preppie...
...Itmay be a case of post-Reaganmelancholia, a suspicion among voters that the fun is over: Both the Reagan revolution and the accompanying entertainment have run their course...
...that its activity never lets up and that it presses always in one direction, while men's prejudices vary, their passions ebb and flow...
...Bush's sneak attacks do more than trivialize the proceedings...
...FROM A VOTER'S LETTER to Adlai E. Stevenson In compiling his 1952 campaign speeches for publication, Adlai E. Stevenson chose for the epigram one of William James' encomiums to reason...
...Black or white...
...By and large, though, the present campaign gets low marks in both drama and reason...
...we ask a child...
...But "it has the unique advantage...
...In the end, one fears, Dukakis' lackluster language may consign him to the fate of his more eloquent predecessor...
...explaining why they did not vote for me...
...As Francis Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward make clear in their recent analysis of Why Americans Don't Vote, modern voter registration obstacles continue to function "as de facto equivalents of the poll tax, literacy test and other class- and race-oriented restrictions on the suffrage of an earlier era...
...The poor or the not-so-poor...
...The trouble is that the Democrats can no longer count on a solid middle class majority...
Vol. 71 • October 1988 • No. 17
