To Truly Inspire--Offer Evangelical Fervor

Anyone hoping for a respite from campaign politics until the August conventions is being disappointed. With the nominations settled and Bob Dole now 20 points behind, the battle for the White House is already in high gear.

If the five months remaining are as unedifying as the current salvos, we are in for one of the less worthwhile presidential contests in U.S. history. Dole seems intent on making the election about character, where he believes his war record and 35-year, scandal-free legislative career will give him an advantage over a president trying to live down allegations about draft-dodging, Whitewater and infidelity. But Dole’s attacks seem to raise more questions about the senator’s qualities as a leader with a persuasive national agenda than they do about President Bill Clinton’s character.

Clinton himself has been less than “presidential” recently. On welfare, taxes, gay rights and any issue with a media half-life of two days, the president seems more intent on outflanking the GOP than offering considered solutions.

The want of constructive debate about the national well-being is hardly the first time in U.S. presidential history that the nation had to suffer through rhetorical bombast little related to public dilemmas. In a country where politics is a form of entertainment, most presidential contests have been more notable for mud slinging than grand debates.

In 1800, for example, the race between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson degenerated into an exercise in negative hyperbole the equal of anything in presidential history. Federalists described Jefferson “as an atheist, an ‘intellectual voluptuary,’ and the progenitor of the mulatto children.” A vote for Jefferson was a vote against God, since it would put “a howling atheist . . . at the head of the nation,” signaling that the Lord “had utterly forsaken the United States.”

The Jeffersonians portrayed Adams as a man of “disgusting egotism” and “distempered jealousy,” and this, they said, was only, what Alexander Hamilton, his Federalist rival, had to say about him.

Clinton and Dole would do better to take their text from the great campaign evangelists in presidential history. These include: Andrew Jackson, who made the case for democracy and individual opportunity against the forces of privilege embodied in the Bank of the United States; Abraham Lincoln, who confronted the issue of extending slavery into the territories, warning that a house divided against itself can not stand; William Jennings Bryan, who challenged the interests crucifying laborers and farmers on a “cross of gold”; Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, who proposed the New Nationalism and the New Freedom as ways to meet the excessive concentrations of wealth and power in the Progressive era; Franklin D. Roosevelt, who preached the humanization of America’s industrial system and the dangers of Nazism, fascism and Japanese militarism; Harry S. Truman, who made clear his intentions against anti-civil rights Dixiecrats and “do nothing” Republicans to his right and anti-containment Progressives to his left; Lyndon B. Johnson, who made equal rights and wider prosperity touch stones of the 1964 campaign, and Ronald Reagan, who left no doubt where he stood on taxes and domestic social programs.

There are, of course, drawbacks to evangelical, “educational” campaigns. Our preaching candidates and presidents have more often than not wooed us with unrealizable dreams that backfired. Jackson’s bank war contributed to the panic of 1837 and the longest economic downturn in the country’s history; Lincoln’s courageous advocacy of “free soil” led to America’s worst national bloodletting; Bryan’s identification with class warfare undermined the appeal of the Populists; Wilson’s excessive faith in a war to end all wars and a world league assuring U.S. safety through collective security made isolationism in the 1920s and ‘30s an appealing, if unrealistic, alternative. Later, LBJ’s promises to end poverty and build a Great Society gave new life to anti-government conservatism; and Reagan’s cure-all, supply side economics saddled us with unparalleled deficits.

There has always been an element of hucksterism in what presidential candidates will say to get our votes. A lot of preparation has to go into appearing spontaneous, Richard M. Nixon once said. Persuading voters that they are on their side has encouraged candidates to promise everything from safe streets to national harmony, and almost anything else that the public--regardless of hard facts--wants to believe is within reach.

Still, there is much to be said for substantive discussion and promises in a campaign. U.S. voters are not wide-eyed children taken in by election-year rhetoric. “They regard campaign oratory as campaign oratory” historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. says, “not as a solemn covenant with the people but as a clue to the candidate’s values, priorities and character. . . . They understand, with Ralph Waldo Emerson, that ‘nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.’ ”

“I have to inspire,” French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing once said. “It would be inconceivable to ask someone to make an effort and then tell him that this effort would be of no avail. . . . Mine is, therefore, not the optimism of illusion but rather the optimism of proposal, which is inherent in the nature of my office.”

What America needs in the current campaign is not the negative assaults on Clinton or the president’s reactive answers to piecemeal GOP policy proposals. Is there no grand design of substantive agenda Dole can fashion out of his 35 years in Congress? Is there no core vision Clinton can articulate after four years of wrestling with national dilemmas about the economy, race relations, health care, urban blight and the range of human suffering that is a fixture of every president’s term at home and abroad?

It is mystifying that a president as articulate, well read and devoted to the national well-being as Clinton has not come forward with an inspirational vision. The “one America” theme he struck so effectively in his Austin, Tex., speech the day of the Million Man March has disappeared in the welter of less-inspiring rhetoric of the campaign trail.

Does Clinton want a second term because voters see Dole as too old or less inspiring than the president? Would Dole be content to gain the presidency because Whitewater or some other “character” issue turned the country against Clinton?

Both Clinton and Dole should remember FDR’s biblical admonition in his first inaugural speech: “Where there is no vision the people perish.” I doubt that the current campaign or another four-year term lacking some concerted approach to national difficulties will sink the country. But a second Clinton or first Dole term devoid of larger purpose will consign one or the other to the unheroic status of those many other nameless, faceless presidents who contented themselves with the view that getting elected was the biggest thing a president could do.*