Left With a Nickel’s Worth of Difference

It might be supposed that the protesters from the radical environmental group Earth First! at a recent rally for Vice President Al Gore got confused and showed up at the wrong event. After all, who could criticize the impeccable ecological credentials of the man who wrote “Earth in the Balance,” who chose to attend the Rio Environmental Conference in 1992 while other Democrats were at home cozying up to Bill Clinton in hopes of becoming his running mate, and who has been cuffed around for speaking ill of the internal combustion engine? Yet there they were with placards proclaiming Gore as having no better a record on the environment than Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

Perhaps the tree-huggers might be forgiven their confusion in a presidential year in which the Democratic and Republican candidates seem to be vindicating Gov. George Wallace’s dictum about there not being “a dime’s worth of difference” between the two major parties.

There is a grand convergence of the Democratic and Republican parties that is without parallel since the election of 1952, when GOP candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower declined to attack the system of social programs established by the Democrats during the ‘30s and ‘40s, instead intoning the inoffensive slogan “It’s time for a change.” Even with the nation at war, Eisenhower’s campaign vow was only to “go to Korea”--not to end the conflict there.

Bush is, in a sense, taking a page out of Ike’s playbook. His astuteness in snuggling up to the political center with that honeyed phrase “compassionate conservatism” and the political visuals that abound with images of him surrounded by dark-skinned children is a canny gesture to purge from the Republican family scrapbook the pictures of GOP meanies as far back as Spiro Agnew and Earl Butz.

All of the movement, however, is not restricted to the Republican side. The Democrats, long scornful of the Republicans’ love affair with tax cuts, have embraced the abolition of the so-called marriage penalty and estate taxes and even concede the desirability of a general tax cut--albeit at a lower level than the GOP has been advocating.

Differences of kind between the parties have mellowed into differences only of degree. Even the hottest issue associated with the nation’s defenses--the national missile defense--finds Gore and Bush in near-agreement on the desirability of the system but at odds only on when the decision to deploy should be made and by whom. Gore wants Clinton to grasp that nettle; Republicans want it done by a GOP successor.

Both men support the death penalty, but Gore argues that the system leans too heavily on minorities and that Texas executes people a little too freely. Even the Texas judiciary, whose ideological composition might forecast a Bush effort to turn the Supreme Court hard right, presents a picture of striking moderation in the judges that the governor has chosen.

So what remains as the line that would help the perplexed voter decide between Gore and Bush in November other than the candidates’ wardrobes, elocution and whose upbringing was the humblest and most provincial?

We are left with the issue of abortion, which has dramatically demarcated the parties since the Roe vs. Wade decision by the U.S. Supreme Court 30 years ago. But even here, on the very knife-edge of partisan difference, a measure of convergence is also taking place.

While few mentions are made of such socially liberal Republicans as New Jersey’s Gov. Christine Whitman in connection with the vice presidential candidacy, the very frequency with which pro-choice Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge’s name is dropped without cacophonous dissent from the GOP right suggests that the conservatives may be sullen, but they are apparently not rebellious. If conservatives would be unwilling to take a walk past Ridge, imagine their elation if Bush selected moderate pro-lifer Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. In any event, a right-wing bolt from the party is unlikely.

The first presidential election of the millennium, then, requires a rephrasing of the 3-decades-old pronouncement of Wallace. Holding the rate of inflation constant, Wallace’s dime’s worth of difference between the two parties has diminished to about a nickel.