National Angst and the Presidential Primaries : The protest vote in a year of politicking dangerously

Things went well enough for President Bush and Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton on Super Tuesday, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to discern that American voters still aren’t exactly happy campers.

Nagging, widespread doubts about the economy persist despite the almost daily assurances that the long-awaited recovery is imminent--a recovery that has been sighted about as often as Elvis.

And the dark, pervasive anti-incumbent mood hovering about fortifies the astronomically long-shot candidacies of Bush challenger Patrick J. Buchanan and former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown. They are the beneficiaries of the generic unhappiness of, respectively, the Republican right and the Democratic left--and of some non-ideological voters too. Pat and Jerry have been tapping into the unease expertly.

California anticipated this national mood of Angst in approving Proposition 140, the 1990 initiative that punished state legislators with term limits. Now, with the U.S. Supreme Court having refused to overturn the sentencing, other states are sure to join in and enact their own term limits. The sense is that the political system is not working as well as it should and that the problem goes deep.

Bush is the main target of the unhappiness because he is the only President America has, and the President, after all, is the most visible symbol of America’s political Establishment.

Bush consistently loses between a quarter and a third of GOP voters in every primary. The immediate beneficiary is Buchanan, whose suspect or alarming views on trade, Jews, blacks and lots of other things obviously render him unfit to be President.

A kind of blessing in disguise for the nation, the only silver lining in the Buchanan cloud, is that the erudite, sometimes nastily witty political journalist siphons votes away from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, whose presidential campaign appears to have dropped dead in Louisiana.

On the Democratic side, Clinton, though not a Washington insider, has been a governor for so many years that he can hardly claim to be a political newcomer. (Though he may at times try.) But it’s Brown, an outsider-come-lately, who is harvesting the Angst . Some may call him “Moonbeam” but he has been a laser beam among some voters. Still, how far will he be able to go with his holier-than-thou plaints about big-bucks politics, given his onetime role as a fund raiser as chairman of California’s Democratic Party, his big-bucks, fund-raising days as governor and his failed candidacy for the Senate?

Now this less-than-glorious primary campaign moves to the key battlegrounds of Michigan and Illinois. The sense of widespread unease seems unlikely to wane no matter who the parties’ nominees turn out to be. For the economy is not only the overriding issue, it’s also a symptom.

Many voters feel something has gone wrong with America--and that maybe it’s not so much a Republican or Democratic thing. If so, then a growing number of people may question the very relevance of this campaign. That’s a challenge for both parties that even dwarfs getting the economy moving again.