Campaign ’88 Is So Vapid We’re Not Even Getting Empty Promises

Ronald Reagan ran in two presidential campaigns, yet the current crop of candidates seems to have absorbed the lessons of only one of them--the vacuous “It’s morning in America” campaign of 1984, which proved that mindlessness works in politics just as it does in entertainment. Reagan stood for reelection as if he were a national icon, a traveling Mt. Rushmore. Conservatives warned at the time that it was a mistake to mount a pageant instead of an issues-driven campaign. They were right. The second Reagan Administration, born of a directionless campaign, had no direction.

Like generals who robotically apply the lessons of the last war, the 1988 candidates are following in the wake that Reagan left in ’84. Whoever winds up winning in the end, it’s already clear who is losing: We are.

We deserve better than to have primary elections fought out over claims to propinquity. Vote for me: I live (vacation / was born) closest to you. That was Bob Dole’s pitch in Iowa. With little to distinguish his position on the issues from George Bush’s, the Kansas senator was reduced to telling Iowans, “I’m one of you.” Bush, who has a summer house in Maine, told New Hampshire audiences the same thing. “We’re neighbors,” Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis shouted over the back fence. Bush, the man from everywhere, was in Houston, sporting cowboy boots, swigging beer from a bottle and boasting, “My hunting license is from Texas.” We deserve better.

Whether it’s Dole (to Iowa farmers) or Dick Gephardt (to Iowa farmers and Social Security recipients and displaced workers) or Dukakis (to enemies of Seabrook, the nuclear reactor on the New Hampshire-Massachusetts border) or Paul Simon (to the elderly) or Jesse Jackson (to blacks and white liberals) or Al Gore (to Southerners), pandering to narrow constituencies is the dominant note of this campaign. We deserve better.

We deserve better than to have to watch, in debate after debate, candidates magnifying trivial differences to elephantine proportions in order to mask their essential agreement on the issues. All the Republicans are against new taxes and for Contra aid and the Strategic Defense Initiative. Among Democrats, the two candidates with the least chance of winning (though who knows?), Jackson and Gary Hart, are for tax increases, but they join their colleagues in disgust on SDI and Contra aid. For the rest, the seeker after an intellectually satisfying message finds either pap--Simon wants a government that cares, Dukakis stands boldly for “good jobs at good wages,” Gore and Bush both want to be the education President--or stirring political positions, like Gephardt’s pledge to open foreign markets, that experts say would raise no end of hell as government policy.

Meant to inject substance, the plethora of debates has actually intensified the mindlessness of this campaign. In the past a candidate would be expected to prepare the odd Major Address on Foreign Policy, an exercise that would at least force him to think beyond his most shopworn cliches. In 1988 the candidates spend their time preparing for the next debate, a forum that puts a premium on one-liners and one-upmanship, on sound bites rather than sound ideas. We deserve better.

Reagan won hands down with an empty campaign in 1984 because that year saw a 5.8% surge in disposable per-capita income, the highest of any election year in modern times. Nancy Reagan could have been elected on that triumph of electionomics. (Come to think of it . . . .) Four years earlier, in 1980, Reagan ran a powerful issues campaign--offering voters a real choice, not an echo. Besides Jackson, the only candidates with messages as bold in ’88 have been Bruce Babbitt for the Democrats and Pete du Pont for the Republicans. Both stood for sweeping programmatic change. Both addressed real issues--the budget crisis, major reforms in the entitlement programs, education and welfare. Both dared to tell the voters what they did not want to hear. And both lost big.

Could it be that we really deserve this campaign after all?