Politics Without Principles

It’s a good thing that the Oct. 6 presidential debate was held in an art deco auditorium and not in some national shrine like Mount Vernon or Independence Hall. The ghosts of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would have been too disturbed.

Maybe Wednesday’s debate in San Diego can still grapple with the challenges of the 21st century instead of the shortcomings of the 1990s, but for now a sad truth continues to apply: Too often, this has been a decade of opportunists, not statesmen, on both sides--conservative and liberal.

The GOP’s man in the Hartford debate was not the esteemed Sen. Bob Dole of the early 1980s, who bravely hiked taxes to keep the deficit from ballooning; laughed at supply-side economics; favored affirmative action; tried to sidestep issues like abortion, and asked why there were no political action committees for poor people. The made-over Dole who spoke for the GOP on Oct. 6 gave up all these old positions in 1995 to become a “New Republican” and sing along with the Newt Gingrich revolution. Now he’s uncomfortable with the new positions he’s been taking, which gives him the worst of both worlds.

President Bill Clinton, by contrast, is one of the world’s greatest politicians because he can change his policies about as easily as he can change his ties. No sooner had his over-ambitious 1993-94 national health-insurance program helped elect the first GOP Congress in 40 years than Clinton re-emerged as a born-again budget-balancer, crime-fighter and defender of family values. Under the tutelage of political consultant Dick Morris, the chastened Democrat--”New Democrat” is too philosophic a term--embraced what can most accurately be called chicken-feed centrism: tax credits for Mother’s Day cards, better crayons for inner-city kindergartens and suchlike. If the first debate had been held in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s old home at Hyde Park, N.Y., it would have been FDR’s ghost who stirred in dismay.

Put these personal shape-shiftings together with the back-to-back failures of a Republican White House in 1991-92, a Democratic White House in 1993-94 and a GOP Congress in 1995-96 and you have a pattern among our major political organizations and leaders of depending more on the other side’s failure than on their own understanding and prowess. Serious analysis of serious problems is to be avoided wherever possible. These people couldn’t begin to repeat the Abraham Lincoln-Stephen A. Douglas debates of 1858, or the Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian exchanges over the Constitution 70 years earlier.

Bad enough that the history of presidential debates since the 1960s has been one of unexpected glitches--jokes, bad make-up, snarls and even hints of senility--being more decisive than anybody’s arguments. But now we are coming up on the millennium, and the issues ignored in the 1996 debate could come back with a vengeance in critical 21st-century history books: the next recession and the danger of a fiscal crisis; the possibility that World War III is already gestating in proven powder kegs like the Balkans, the Middle East, the Caucasus and East Asia, and the evidence that even the North American continent could be coming unglued.

Ross Perot is almost certainly right about the threat of a fiscal crisis, but he’s learning the hard way that the Republicans and Democrats don’t want to discuss it--and that people won’t pay attention to Perot either if he doesn’t care enough to be at factory gates at 6:00 a.m. Still, both Clinton and Dole should confront the importance of the next recession because the last three slowdowns--in 1981-82, 1986 and 1990-91--each made mincemeat out of previous deficit-cutting projections, and a late 1990s recession could do it again. Talking about tax cuts and deficit-reduction without mentioning the “R word” is an exercise in self-deception.

The time has also come for U.S. foreign-policy analysts to start talking about the next war or its possibility--though that candor couldn’t occur in 1937 or 1938, either. But the number of hot spots around the world is enlarging to what could well be threshold-of-war levels, and the Clinton administration’s shallow foreign policy can best be described by a variation on an old movie title: “If It’s Tuesday, This Must be Bosnia.”

To be sure, politicians have always had a tough time discussing wars and recessions and, in some ways, the most striking omission in the 1996 debate involves the future of the continent we live on. There is some danger of North America coming unglued politically, economically and culturally--and this is far better understood in Montreal and Mexico City than it is in Massachusetts or Missouri, or even Washington.

The Canadian federal government, for example, has just asked the nation’s Supreme Court to rule on whether Quebec can unilaterally leave Canada. Mexico, in turn, is emerging as the only country in the Western hemisphere where the police are more corrupt than the people in jail and families of elected presidents routinely loot the country. No wonder several federal states in southern Mexico teeter on the brink of armed rebellion.

People in the United States don’t fully understand that North America--all three nations--has become a debt-ridden continent and a cheap-currency continent. The Rock-of-Gibraltar years are over. A chart of how the U.S., Canadian and Mexican currencies have all declined against the Japanese yen, German mark and Swiss franc in the last 25 years bears an unnerving resemblance to Niagara Falls. Ironically, one discussion point in how Canada might break up is how to divide the top-heavy national debt.

Canada’s problems have major implications for the United States. The natural divisions of North America run north-south, and each part of Canada is akin to the states immediately to the south: British Columbia and Alberta are a lot like Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana; and the eastern Maritime provinces area is much like New England. If Quebec pulls the center out from Canada, parts may want to go with the United States--and this could provide a millennial opportunity to draw some new regional boundaries that could be better frameworks for 21st-century North American federalism.

Pressure for new boundaries could even grow within Mexico. While the northern part of Mexico is more like the United States, this similarity is deceptive. The per capita gross domestic product in states like California and Texas is $25,000 a year; in the most prosperous states of northern Mexico, it is closer to $2,000--which makes the U.S.-Mexico border an economic boundary line of extraordinary importance. In the poor states of southern Mexico, meanwhile, per capita GDP is only $700-$900. These are the states, like Chiapas, where minor up-risings are never far away.

As the United States tightens its own southern boundaries against immigrants, the political and economic divisions within Mexico could grow more explosive. The Mexican government has talked about two different indirect approaches to U.S. politics: one would encourage Mexicans in the United States to take out citizenship and vote in the United States without losing certain Mexican rights; a second discussion has been about letting Mexicans in the United States vote in Mexico, even if they don’t live there.

What used to be English-speaking North America already shows signs of developing three spheres of foreign-language influence. This did not happen earlier in the 20th century with German-Americans in the Farm Belt or with southern and eastern European ethnic groups in the big cities. But it’s conceivable that within 20 or 30 years, Quebec will be a French sphere of influence--independent, French-speaking and perhaps with ties to France itself. The border from Texas to Tijuana now called el tercier pais--the third nation--could become a Latino sphere of influence with joint citizenship arrangements; and the Pacific Coast could see cities from Vancouver to Los Angeles become 25%-40% Asian, developing new trade and joint citizenship ties with East Asia.

None of this is too implausible. If U.S. politicians can’t discuss it too candidly, they can at least start acknowledging the potential importance of major 21st Century changes in North America.

One reason, obviously, why the 1996 debate between the presidential candidates has been so superficial is that the two parties that have alternated White House and congressional control in Washington have never put this kind of discussion--or subject matter--on the table. Maybe they can’t.

It could be that the “new” politics that the nation really needs involves statesmanship, depth and candor instead of image-building and centrist opportunism.