The Substance Deficit
THE SUBSTANCE DEFICIT On August 14, the Iowa state GOP's presidential straw poll produced the obvious winner. In George W. Bush, Republicans have the two-term governor of an electorally significant...
...He cannot even coherently describe what the moment is...
...All politicians are like this, the average barroom blowhard will explain: so much impenetrable double talk and vanity and vapor...
...He also runs consistently ahead in national preference polls, by a wide margin, against any likely general election opponent...
...Not so much by the prospect that Al Gore might ultimately be retired and a Republican elected president, which needless to say hardly bothers us at all...
...What alarms us instead is Gore's challenger and the campaign he is conducting...
...Then there is the other party...
...No, Eric, actually it shouldn't...
...For a second term, he would be all empathy, mood, and personality to the virtual exclusion of anything resembling an agenda one might wrap one's mind around...
...Then, with the 1994 Republican congressional takeover, the whole symposium came crashing down...
...Gore's candidacy, too, has a good bit of standard logic on its side...
...Perhaps voters have been conditioned by Clinton to have their pain felt once in a while—and otherwise expect to be completely excused from thought...
...Bradley dismisses the question as beneath his dignity: "People think policy means legislation, a bill, but that is not connected to deeper yearnings...
...He is, of course, Bill Bradley, the former professional basketball player and senator from New Jersey...
...He wants to share with us the revelations of his "journey into myself...
...John McCain, candidates with vastly more imposing records, have so far proved maddeningly cautious about revealing their explicit designs for the country's future...
...Vice President Gore, by contrast, makes a poor empath and campaigns the old-fashioned way, with an endless stream of position papers and weighty speeches...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...But that is quite wrong, or at least it used to be until very recently where majorparty presidential candidates were concerned...
...Not when you're 56 years old, have 18 years in the Senate under your belt, and are advancing yourself as the next president of the United States...
...and his aides were pleased to brag that Clinton's first and most important victory had come in the "substance primary...
...For hope...
...They, too, have an obvious choice for president: the incumbent vice president, Al Gore, an experienced, knowledgeable, and serious man who has served in an administration neatly synchronized with a period of uncommon peace and prosperity for America...
...Maybe let's ask his staff for a more earthbound account of the senator's ideas...
...For love...
...But in the late 1980s and early '90s, by his own account, Bradley grew bored and disgruntled with his job, and almost disappeared from view...
...But oddly enough, this front-runner unsettles his party's professionals...
...And in August 1995, he announced his retirement, having concluded that "politics is broken...
...Perhaps the electorate no longer wants such stuff from its candidates...
...Adlai Stevenson and Gary Hart were famously disdainful of the vulgarity of daily politicking and held themselves apart as a better breed of man...
...In every meaningful respect, Bradley is the post-1994 Clinton all over again: a deliberately blank slate of sentiment and concern onto which voters are invited to project all those "yearnings" he talks about...
...It seems not yet to have hurt them, either...
...And the president abruptly reinvented himself, through emergency "triangulation...
...It seems not yet to have hurt her...
...In George W. Bush, Republicans have the two-term governor of an electorally significant state, a man with a famous name, a formidable organization, considerable charm, and a putative platform broadly congenial to the party's voter base...
...It would be a delicious irony, and a kind of rough justice, if the vice president's career wound up crippled this way: by another politician's adoption of the nothingness strategy pioneered by Bill Clinton, whom Gore has so resolutely defended...
...The Democratic high command is alarmed...
...the 1986 tax reform bears his stamp...
...that, in his alienation, he contained a multitude of Americans ("each of their stories has now become a part of my story...
...vigorWHAT ALARMS US IS GORE'S CHALLENGER: THE CLOSER YOU LOOK AT THE "WIDELY RESPECTED" BRADLEY, THE MORE HE APPEARS ANEAR TOTAL CIPHER.NEAR TOTAL CIPHER...
...Here's Eric Hauser, the Bradley campaign press secretary, sheepishly responding to the New York Times: "[Bradley] spent the last 18 months teaching and writing, not building a policy base to run on...
...Bill Clinton, we would argue...
...And so, to some extent, are we...
...Which is pretty much all we know about him— and all he seems prepared or able to tell us...
...And nothingness is not supposed to be a legitimate position in our national discourse—let alone a program sufficient to knock off a sitting vice president...
...But each also knew the practical Ps and Qs of his plan for government, and tried his best to make sure we knew them, too...
...Bradley is back and running for president because he thinks "my ability matches the national moment...
...Clinton once was eager to be known as a straight-A student of the policy grind...
...ously engaged primary campaigns in either party often provide a service to the entire country...
...Only he is just as aloof from the national moment as he was when last we saw him...
...Who might be the senator's model, here...
...An altogether extraordinary pose for a democracy's would-be leader, you would think...
...As it seems to be working for Bill Bradley just now...
...The primary campaign has months to go, of course...
...Apparently, the time is now and he is the man to do it...
...Shouldn't it be just as a child learns arithmetic or learns to paint...
...And if it isn't arrested soon, it will inevitably hurt us all—not just Al Gore...
...He wants us to "see the collective whole...
...Nor does it trouble us that a "logical choice" like Gore might lace some serious primary opponent on his way to the nomination...
...Even Gov...
...All at once, Bradley fashions himself superior and keeps secret from us the details of his special wisdom...
...All of which would be so much atmospheric trivia, but for the additional and unignorable fact that not six months before the first primary votes are counted, a full quarter of Democratic voters remain undecided whether they will support Gore, and another quarter— or more—seem inclined to support his only real challenger...
...Where does he propose to lead us...
...Early in his Senate career, Bill Bradley was a hardworking backbencher of some accomplishment...
...Bradley is different...
...Elizabeth Dole, for example, is the Republican Bill Bradley, only worse: a presidential candidate of truly shocking and unprecedented vacuousness...
...He does not inspire, they complain...
...The avoidance or outright rejection of substance is now an entirely bipartisan technique...
...But it's safe to say that the Republican party establish-ment—and no doubt a fair number of ordinary Republican voters, as well—would be perfectly happy if it somehow ended right now...
...Bush and Sen...
...And if that were all that was going on—if the phenomenon were restricted to the Democratic party, just this once—we wouldn't much care...
...And what does that mean, exactly...
...But there are signs that Bill Bradley's recent success represents a broader, glacial shift in the nation's political landscape...
...But it is alarming, just the same, this slow regression of our political debate from relative clarity to calculated haze or even silence...
...And it worked...
...Largely through his efforts, the 1992 Democratic nominating contest was a veritable festival of programmatic wonkery (remember Putting People First...
...and that "big ambitions" and "my own concept of service" must soon be restored to our public life...
...The closer you look at the "widely respected" and "decent" Bradley, the more he appears a near total cipher...
...His campaign is plagued by staff squabbles and minor public missteps...
...He hardly participated in the health care, welfare, or budget debates of the first Clinton administration...
Vol. 4 • August 1999 • No. 47
