The Demagogue President
The Demagogue President The Republican presidential campaign has stripped its poorly tooled sprockets in the effort to illuminate Bob Dole's advantages over Bill Clinton as a guide and steward for...
...But even that stuff is "just politics...
...The demagogue makes war on this deliberative space...
...A Clinton-Gore television ad scores Bob Dole for being "against vaccines for children," a reference to Dole's vote against an almost universally derided and counterproductive public-health initiative...
...Notoriously so, where this president is concerned...
...Low intrigue" and "the little arts of popularity...
...A certain space was established between the people and their government...
...His god is Popularity...
...And to ensure that democracy might be just and virtuous, they gave it republican form...
...Those differences alone are reason enough to cast a vote for Bob Dole...
...Another series of commercials does much, much worse...
...It once meant more...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...He calls this process "leadership...
...And our president constantly and compulsively responds, as no president has ever responded before, with a charismatic smile, or a close-set jaw, or an empathetic touch to the knee for some victim of tragedy...
...Along with aristocracy, demagoguery was one of the evils the Founders drafted our constitution to help forestall...
...Bob Dole has never mastered the liturgy...
...The Founders did not mean for Americans to be demagogically "led" by their own passions like this...
...My daughter Polly was only 12 years old," Marc Klaas says at the beginning of another, but someone "kidnapped her and took it all away...
...If that was ever true, it is no longer...
...Something still grander is at issue in the Dole-or-Clinton choice, something hinted at but never fully captured by the Dole campaign's lurching, nervous assaults on the president's "character...
...The institutional independence of American government from its citizens—its republican character—has eroded more than a bit...
...Some have been known to use the occasional dead-baby-style emotional slam as a tool for electoral victory...
...The term has come simply to connote a politician's use of expansive dishonesty to frighten the public about his partisan opponent...
...The country would be too big for that: "Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State...
...And so a vote for Bill Clinton is a vote, in effect, against the very soul of America's constitutional order...
...The Demagogue President The Republican presidential campaign has stripped its poorly tooled sprockets in the effort to illuminate Bob Dole's advantages over Bill Clinton as a guide and steward for the next four years of American public life...
...We now vote every day, for all intents and purposes, in the polls that control political news...
...Federal policy is not the only thing in question on Election Day, however...
...This difference between them will likely defeat Dole...
...His government, remember, is a "permanent campaign...
...Other politicians do a slippery to-and-fro from time to time...
...Ironically, it is the strongest possible reason why he deserves to succeed...
...Bill Clinton is a high priest of political popularity...
...He seeks power purely through the manipulation of mood—by encouraging people to believe that their instantaneous and shifting wishes can and should be realized in the instantaneous and shifting decisions of his government...
...The American political system was not designed to function this way—with its executive administration permanently and biorhythmically attached to popular sentiment...
...And no major American politician has ever bragged about it...
...The future direction of conservatism, on the one hand, and of the Republican party, on the other, will be affected, too...
...It is a "moral certainty," Hamilton wrote, "that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed by the requisite qualifications...
...He's right, but each week brings fresh examples of the infection, each more outrageous than the last...
...but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States...
...Bill Clinton brags about it...
...It's something, in our view, that commands support for the Republican ticket of Bob Dole and Jack Kemp...
...That something is this: The current president of the United States is a self-conscious demagogue...
...It was a space intended for deliberation...
...Melissa lived every moment," the grieving mother of a childhood cancer patient says at the beginning of one...
...And they believed they had done much to address this central risk of democracy...
...But few American politicians—certainly no modern presidents—have ever employed classical demagoguery's dark arts to such great and complete effect...
...A vitally important distinction was made between momentary popular will and reasoned public judgment...
...It is fundamentally un-American, this presidency by Q-rating...
...Our colleague Charles Krauthammer calls the "against vaccines" charge "vintage Clinton...
...A series of Clinton commercials on welfare reform, gay rights, abortion, and campaign-finance reform all spin slowly around the truth—none of them ever actually touching it...
...It remains possible, nevertheless, through the smoke generated by the GOP's gunning but motionless engine, to discern meaningful policy differences between a Dole presidency and a second Clinton administration...
...Demagoguery is a shrunken word in modern discourse...
...In place of aristocracy, the Founders made an electoral democracy...
Vol. 2 • November 1996 • No. 8
