PERSPECTIVE ON POLITICS : It’s Recentering, Not a Rightward Tilt

Eleven weeks have passed since the November elections and pundits are still guessing at what happened: Has the public turned to the right? Is the country basically Republican? Do voters just hate incumbents? Didn’t they notice the improvement in the economy? Each theory may have a splinter of truth, but the real mechanism for the change in the vote between 1992 and 1994 lies elsewhere, in the operation of what might be called horizontal versus vertical issues.

Horizontal issues are those that touch deeply felt convictions. Vertical issues are transient, arising from a current event that dominates public concern. Voters react to a vertical issue as a phenomenon; it seems bigger than any party position or ideology can contain. When the crisis is (or seems to be) resolved, horizontal issues reassert themselves in voter consciousness. What appears to be a mass shift in voter sentiment is only the resurfacing of underlying attitudes once the vertical issue is off the table.

The best examples of vertical issues on the national political scene are war, recession and major scandal. Each is bad news in its own way, and each is important enough to occupy the thoughts of the voters to the exclusion of other matters. On the eve of war in the Persian Gulf, President Bush’s support in the polls exceeded 90%. Then, in the space of a few months after the American victory, approval of the President evaporated as public concern reverted to matters on which he did not fare as well.

Worst of all for President Bush was the presence in 1991 and 1992 of a second vertical issue, the recession, which seemed to spring up from nowhere as a defining political issue. Just as it considers peace to be a normal state, the public takes growth to be the economic norm and recession to be the moment for judging stewardship of the economy.

Similarly, the voters give no credit to an Administration that is scandal-free. When Watergate arose, it crowded out all other concerns and pushed aside a President who had just received an overwhelming mandate with regard to the entire range of other issues.

What we saw in November was the absence of a vertical issue to dominate the debate. The host of moral, political and ideological concerns came to the fore and divided voters along deeper underlying lines. The voters knew that the economy had improved--witness the rise in auto sales and measures of consumer confidence--but gratitude, even if deserved by the Administration, is not the voters’ way.

The horizontal issues are never absent. They involve lifelong attitudes toward civil rights, fairness, economic class, race, ethnic group, regional identifications and the other qualities that combine to form the voter’s ideological identification. On these, the Clinton Administration and the Democrats in general have few of the majority positions. Perhaps pro-choice commands a majority and marginally helps the Democrats. Affirmative action clearly does not rally a majority. Decreased taxation is a position the Republicans own and the public loves. Prayer in schools is a Republican plank that probably would get a slim majority of the votes. In people’s private thoughts, gay rights probably do not get close to a majority. The big government typified by the Clinton health-care plan is a loser with the voters. Immigration, legal and illegal, has a Democratic stamp on it and not much citizen support. On and on it goes: The horizontal issues--the issues that endure and become visible in the absence of a vertical issue--lead to Republican majorities.

This does not mean that the public has turned to the right. It does not mean the public is ignorant of improvement in the economy and peace in the world or is any more ungrateful than usual. It does mean that when all the vertical issues go away, the public is “conservative” on the issues that remain.

Not understanding this dynamic, the Clinton Administration made things far worse for itself and the Democrats than was necessary. Mistaking its 1992 vote on the Bush economy as a mandate for its whole agenda on a host of deeply felt horizontal issues, it positioned itself in a place where the voters never wanted to see their government. Successful on a vertical issue, it damaged itself on the horizontal issues. The economic recovery laid this bare.

Unfortunately for President Clinton, vertical issues are almost always damaging for the incumbent. Only a war in progress at the time of the election would offer sufficient vertical diversion to support the President, obscuring all the horizontal issues. Not even Clinton’s strongest opponents expect such a motivation to drive his actions in the next two years. Unless the Republicans nominate a person who is himself radically out of tune on the horizontal issues, Bill Clinton will be back in Little Rock after one term.