If Juices Aren’t Flowing, Try Quemoy and Matsu : With Moderates Seeking White House, They’ll Need Something to Divide Them

It was the subject of what Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called “one of the most remarkable and least noted speeches” of the 1960 campaign. The issue was what the United States should do to defend the Chinese Nationalist islands of Quemoy and Matsu in the event that they were attacked by the Communists. That and the fake issue of “the missile gap” that allegedly threatened the stability of the U.S.-Soviet strategic balance were the burning questions in the campaign that put John F. Kennedy in the White House. Vice President George Bush and Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, now scratching around for issues that will strike sparks with the voters, would be hard-pressed to do as well in the fall election.

The 1988 campaign is ripe for another round of Quemoy-Matsu and missile-gap-style debates because there exist no explosive issues that divide the candidates and set the juices of the voters flowing. After two elections in which liberalism and conservatism were etched deeply on the Democratic and Republican candidates, what is shaping up is a clash between moderates--which, when you think about it, sounds slightly absurd.

The restrained mood in the coming election will result from the action of cyclical forces in American politics. Whenever there is an era of great presidential activism in which the country is pulled dramatically in a new direction, there follows a period of consolidation. It is not a counter-revolution so much as it is a breathing spell in which the changes of the previous period are sorted through to determine which of them will be kept and which discarded.

The elections of the 1950s and the 1960 campaign saw contests in which fundamental questions of political philosophy were not systematically discussed. The Korean War was an issue in 1952 only insofar as who could terminate it most quickly. What we were doing in those campaigns was trying to process the changes of the previous tumultuous 20 years that had seen the Depression, the New Deal and World War II. What this quiescent period gave us was a national consensus: a bipartisan foreign policy based on the containment of communism and a domestic policy in which the principal reforms of the New Deal would be accepted by all. Republicans learned to stop bashing Social Security, and Democrats refrained from urging vast new expansions of the scope of the federal government. It is little wonder, then, that the most substantive issue of 1960 was Quemoy and Matsu.

The signs are everywhere that the same kind of consensus is developing in 1988. Take, for example, the case of the environment as a political issue. The Democrats have had a franchise on ecological issues since the 1960s. President Reagan’s most memorable campaign statement on the environment was the assertion that trees are a major source of air pollution. His secretary of the interior encouraged the development of natural resources on public lands in national parks. Bush, however, has decided that he will not be depicted as a foe of the environment. This week he stood by a methanol pump at a gasoline station in Los Angeles and warned against a too-hasty development of California’s offshore oil deposits. In environmentally sensitive California, Bush--the heir of the tear-it-down, dig-it-up Reagan Administration--came off sounding like John Denver.

There are other straws in the wind that signal the emerging consensus. Writing in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, former Secretaries of State Henry A. Kissinger and Cyrus R. Vance, who served Presidents of different parties and philosophies, urged a return to the bipartisan foreign policy of the post-World War II period. Their only point of dissent was recorded in a footnote in which Kissinger questioned the wisdom of involving the Soviet Union in Middle East peace talks.

Another revelation of the philosophical convergence of the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates came in a long article in the New York Times containing biographies of the economic advisers to Bush and Dukakis. The reporters struggled valiantly to find any significant differences between Dukakis’ chief economic adviser, Prof. Lawrence Summers, and Bush’s principal economist, Prof. Michael Boskin. Indeed, an examination of their views revealed that the most salient difference between them is in their treatment of the capital-gains tax. When one reflects on the 1980 Reagan advisers and their supply-side economics and plans for a return to the gold standard and the Carter experts with their ideas for income policies and state planning, the current convergence is almost breathtaking.

Without a natural set of issues that delineate the differences, campaigns quickly become fogged in by the dismal metaphysics of discerning leadership qualities. Vying with each other to persuade the voters that each will be better in fixing the deficit or more draconian with drug dealers, Bush and Dukakis will come off sounding to many Americans like two guys arguing over which of them is the stauncher foe of the man-eating shark. Such political dramas are not only unexciting, but they also set us up for the next phase in the political cycle: the silver-tongued Populist who will come along in a few years with the appealing message that there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the two major parties.