GOP’s Hard Sell: Showing How Bad It Is

Unemployment stands at a 29-year low. A rip-snorting economy has sent the stock market soaring through the stratosphere. Crime is plummeting. But you’d never know all that listening to the Republican candidates for president.

Step out on the campaign trail--the trail of tears, if you will--and hear how thoroughly miserable things are today in the land of the red, white and mostly blue:

In this parallel place, the economy is groaning under the weight of stifling taxes, dragging working men and women down with it. Drugs are coursing through the nation’s cities, schools are crumbling, the armed forces have been emasculated. Not to mention the immorality of those in high places.

As the 2000 campaign unfolds, the challenge facing Republicans--the “out” party--is to give voters a reason to switch after eight years of Democrats in the White House. The problem, of course, is that things seem to be going pretty well in fin de siecle America.

“Dissatisfaction is the fuel that drives the out party,” said Jack Pitney, a government professor and GOP analyst at Claremont McKenna College. “Right now, the Republicans are running on empty.”

Regardless, the GOP presidential hopefuls have felt compelled to accentuate the negative, to search the dark clouds around the silver lining. Their dour drumbeat is a far cry from the gauzy, feel-good sentiment of Reagan’s sunny 1984 “morning in America” reelection campaign.

Call this edition “mourning in America.”

Obviously, circumstances can sour. The war in Yugoslavia is a potential quagmire in the making. Gas prices are soaring. And for all the good news, polls have consistently shown Vice President Al Gore trailing the two nominal GOP front-runners, Texas Gov. George W. Bush and former Red Cross President Elizabeth Hanford Dole.

Gore’s showing “makes me wonder if maybe he isn’t suffering from a Clinton backlash,” said William Kristol, conservative pundit and publisher of the Weekly Standard. “Even if things are going in the right direction, people might not necessarily want four more years of the same thing.”

Still, good times tend to make for contented voters, leaving GOP candidates grasping for some issue, some opening during the next 18 months to make the case for change.

“Clearly, the Republican message can’t be the Dow is at 12,000 and people are doing great and everything is right with America,” said one GOP presidential strategist who requested anonymity. “There’s no question that’s the biggest challenge facing every one of these candidates.”

And so various Republican hopefuls have set out to convince Americans that things really aren’t all that grand, despite what many may think.

Formally launching his presidential candidacy last month, former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander suggested that the good times are mere illusion, a “magic show,” and urged voters to peel back the curtain to “see what has really happened in the last six years.”

“Twelve more countries have jumped over us in high school graduation rates; taxes are higher; the federal regulation book is thicker; our national defense is weaker,” Alexander moaned. “It is harder than ever for parents to raise children. Seven tons of illegal drugs come across our borders every day. Dictators thumb their noses at us. We are more divided than ever by race. And our standards of right and wrong have all but disappeared.”

As for the longest economic expansion in peacetime history, that was something Clinton and Gore “inherited,” Alexander said, casting the president and his understudy in the role of mere bystanders.

Shouldn’t Democrats get some credit?

“I think Bill Clinton gets credit for being the luckiest man alive,” said Steve Schmidt, spokesman for the Alexander campaign, who noted an economic recovery was underway by the time Clinton took office in January 1993. “Besides, a lot of the things boosting this economy--getting our fiscal house in order, passing a balanced budget, welfare reform--none of them would have happened if not for a Republican Congress.”

The tax gripe has become a staple of GOP stump speeches, with candidates often pointing out that federal receipts are running at a near record percent of gross domestic product.

“Why . . . are so many middle-class American families struggling to keep their heads above water?” candidate Steve Forbes asked in an editorial featured last week in the Wall Street Journal. “Because of outdated and counterproductive government policies,” including “a massive federal tax burden.”

Forbes asserted that taxes have risen “a staggering 45% per person during the Clinton-Gore administration,” citing research conducted by the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan research group.

What Forbes and other Republican candidates fail to point out, however, is that only a small percentage of well-to-do Americans are actually paying higher taxes--in large measure because the booming economy has made the rich that much richer. The tax bite taken from middle- and low-income workers has actually fallen in recent years, according to various studies. In fact, for some families it stands at the lowest level in decades.

Of course, Republicans vying to win their party’s nomination are playing to a selective audience, namely their fellow Republicans, many of whom believe there is no such thing as being too harsh or unfair to the Democrats in the White House.

“Right now, the goal for these candidates is to win the nomination. And a big part of that is being anti-Clinton-Gore,” said GOP strategist Scott Reed.

There remains a risk for candidates who overreach, potentially hurting their credibility with a wider audience. Bob Dole, the 1996 GOP nominee who ran against Clinton during a time of similar voter satisfaction, claimed America was then experiencing “the worst economy of the century.”

Nevermind the Great Depression. At that point, the U.S. economy was nearing the sixth year of its ongoing expansion, prompting Clinton to urge those who agreed with Dole to vote for the GOP challenger instead.

“If people think things are going well, you’re not going to convince them they’re bad,” Kristol said. “I don’t see much point in trying to convince people [the economy] isn’t good.”

Instead, he suggested, Republicans can plausibly argue that “certain things aren’t going so well: the moral climate, foreign policy. The rest we’ll make sure keeps going well, even a little better.”

Democrats chortle at GOP efforts to put on a mopey face. After all, it was not that long ago that the upbeat Reagan constantly had Democrats on the defensive.

“If you look back, voters choosing between the candidate of gloom-and-doom and the candidate of optimism will always go with optimism,” said Chris Lehane, a spokesman for Gore. The static from Republicans “sounds like it’s coming from an AM station when everyone else is living in an FM world.”

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Outlook Not So Good

Feeling sunny? Here’s a little rain on America’s parade, courtesy of four GOP candidates for president:

Lamar Alexander: “See what has really happened in the last six years.

. . . Taxes are higher. The federal regulation book

is thicker. Our national defense is weaker.

It is harder than ever

for parents to raise children.”

Patrick J. Buchanan: “With each year, America becomes ever more addicted to the narcotic of cheap imports. The price of that addiction is the dismantlement of the mightiest industrial empire the world has ever seen. Piece by piece, job by job, factory by factory, it is being carted off to foreign soil.”

Steve Forbes: “Why . . . are so many middle-class American families struggling to keep their heads above water? Because of outdated and counterproductive government policies that rob workers of their hard-earned take-home pay and threaten their long-term economic security.”

Dan Quayle: “Go to the coffee shops, go out to the farms, go out to some of the places [workers] have been laid off. If you own stock, if you’re a CEO of a company . . . you’re fat and happy. But I tell you, if you’re out there working with your hands every day, teaching, whatever the case may be, you are having a tough time making it.”