Short Fuse for a Long Campaign

They were angry about trade treaties.

They were angry about taxes.

They were angry about abortions.

They were angry about affirmative action.

They were angry about immigration, legal and otherwise.

They were angry about “deviant lifestyles.”

“Homosexuals,” one man in the room spat at the reporters positioned on a plywood platform in the ballroom, and a titter went through the crowd.

They were angry at the media for what they considered shabby coverage of Patrick Buchanan, the man they wanted to be their president.

This was last Thursday night. Several hundred Buchanan supporters were stuffed into the Starlight Ballroom of the Castaways restaurant, located on a golf course in the hills above Burbank. This was not a suit-and-tie crowd of high-rollers. This was a T-shirt crowd, a cap crowd. “Forgotten Heroes,” said one man’s hat. “In-N-Out Burger,” advertised another. And no poll, no focus group was needed to assess its collective mood.

The anger was palpable. The room fairly reeked of it. And it was something to see--more important in a way than the post-primary percentages being picked over today--because anger has become the emotional gold of American politics. Anger has staying power. Anger, for a while anyway, can be counted on. It can be mined and molded, refined and polished. And this was a visit to the Mother Lode. This was a trip inside Ft. Knox.

*

These people were angry at Bill Clinton. They were angry at Bob Dole. They were angry at Steve Forbes. They were angry at Jesse Jackson. They were angry at Washington, at Sacramento, at the United Nations, Hollywood. They were angry about how much things have changed where they live. They were angry about how much they have stayed the same.

“We have worshiped other gods, and called it multiculturism,” a preacher read from what he called “the politically incorrect prayer,” a cold little ditty borrowed from some prairie politician. “We have killed our unborn, and called it choice.” And so on.

The crowd applauded every line. Several speakers followed. They had been called upon to warm up the audience for Buchanan, and each worked the anger from a different angle. Some of what they said was fantastic, but the crowd was in a mood to believe anybody with a notion about where to aim the next payload of wrath. Anger does that to people. One speaker held up a book and said it proved the government of Mexico has launched an organized invasion of the southwest United States. Another spoke of a conspiracy involving Farrakhan and Kadafi and Los Angeles street gangs, all working to incite a new civil war. And so on.

When Buchanan at last made the stage, his work had been done for him. He spoke with contempt of Mexican politicians and federal judges and Dole and Clinton and the United Nations and other sinister forces. He spoke of “dingbats in sandals and beads in Washington, telling us how to educate our children.” He spoke of 300,000 jobs lost to NAFTA and other trade agreements, the jobs that had belonged to, as he put it, “the forgotten Americans.” The crowd couldn’t bolt down all this red meat fast enough.

*

This was a crowd, of course, that had backed the wrong horse, and that contributed to its sullen mood. By then Dole’s inevitability was a fact known to everybody. “Once again,” one of the warmup speakers had complained, “our vote doesn’t count.” And the knowledge of their futility only stoked the anger that had drawn these people to Buchanan in the first place.

They were hardly alone. Anger, in various shades and hues, is splashed across the land. This has become a nation of grudges. So many people are angry, deep, blood-red angry, about something, anything, everything. So many people storm about looking like they just got fired from the Postal Service. Politicians stoke the anger to fit their purposes, but they do not create it. What does? Readers must answer that one for themselves. The possibilities are limitless.

What will be interesting--perhaps, too bland a word--to see now is whether Clinton or Dole can harness, or at least deflect, this anger. The front-loaded primary system has worked as rigged, producing nominees before the end of March. It also has left many Americans feeling rooked, cheated out of their chance to participate in The Process--something else to be mad about.

Seven months is too long a time to work with a material like anger. That it can be exploited in quick, lightning campaigns is clear enough. Over a longer haul, however, the precious metal of politics cannot be so surely managed. Over time the anger can turn more volatile, something more like dynamite than gold. Just how and where and when will it blow? On that pyrotechnic mystery, the campaign will turn.