Democrats do not understand how much Republicans resented, and learned from, what Democrats did in 1964. Lyndon Johnson’s campaign against Goldwater was the most spectacularly successful negative campaign of modern times. Goldwater was-still is-the most amiable of men. Richard Rovere called him “the cheerful malcontent” and said that in personal relations he was “about as abrasive as a jar of cold cream.” But the Johnson campaign portrayed him as a wild man who as president would delay incinerating the planet only until he had time to dismantle the government. Granted, Goldwater assisted Democratic caricaturists by saying so many, well, colorful things.
You remember. He mused about how amusing it would be to lob a missile into the Kremlin’s men’s room. And: “I hope Tshombe beats the hell out of the United Nations.” And: “Sometimes I think this country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea.” Even though Goldwater needed to carry the South, he went right on saying the government ought to sell the Tennessee Valley Authority. One result was the story (probably apocryphal, but true enough) of a journalist asking an elderly woman whom she was going to vote for.
Woman: “I’m against Goldwater because he wants to get rid of TV.”
Journalist: “No, no–it’s TVA he opposes.”
Woman, unmoved: “Well, all the same, I’m not taking any chances.”
Clinton would be a more engaging candidate if every once in a while he would blurt out something–anything–that did not seem sterilized, homogenized and pureed. It would be fun to see a flash of spiky contrariness like that of Georges Clemenceau–no slouch as a politician–who, wearing a bowler hat to a garden party, encountered Lord Balfour wearing a top hat. “They told me top hats would be worn,” said Balfour. “They told me, too,” said Clemenceau.
But since Goldwater and the refinement of negative campaigning, politicians have learned caution. The result, this year, is a blandness exemplified by the relentless use of the hollow word “change.” It has become a mantra for both Bush and Clinton, although Bush cannot even change his Treasury Secretary and Clinton seems willing to change a lot of positions in order to be ingratiating.
Perhaps the symbol of the Clintonized Democratic Party should not be a donkey, a sinewy and sometimes stubborn beast. Instead it should be a jelly doughnut, round and soft and gooey in the middle. Clinton’s determination to be pitilessly pleasant probably is good politics and certainly is evidence of how serious Democrats are, for a change, about winning. To a journalist’s complaint that the “change” incantation is stupefyingly boring, a Clinton campaign aide tartly replied that the point of the campaign is not to entertain journalists. The nerve of the guy.
The Democrats’ passionate devotion to blandness is evidence that, in a two-party system, a successful leader of one party is apt to make his most important mark on the other party. About eight years ago, after Britain’s Conservative Party won its second consecutive election under Margaret Thatcher, one of her lieutenants said: “Look, in a two-party system, eventually the other side will win. Our job is to hang on until the Labour Party becomes sane.” Since then, Labour has jettisoned most of its socialist baggage. Not enough of it; three months ago it lost its fourth consecutive election. Still, Thatcher’s most important achievement may be the transformation of Labour. Ironically, her success will not be complete until, at last, a sufficiently changed Labour defeats her party. Similarly, one of Reagan’s successes is a Democratic Party so reformed in its thinking, or at least in its pronouncements, that it may defeat his successor.
Many conservatives are dry-eyed about that prospect. They believe the 1992 election might be a good one to lose. They say conservatism in the custody of Bush is an exhausted volcano. In opposition it could find new leaders and hone its ideological edge. The fly in this ointment is this fact, if it is a fact: The recession that weakened Bush was long and the recovery has been sluggish because the wringing out of inefficiencies from the economy has been severe and is continuing. But as a result, the economy will soon be poised for robust growth powered by the spending of consumers and corporations that have shed debt. Therefore the party that prevails this year may not be able, try as it might, to prevent prosperity from breaking out. That party, merely by being there (remember Woody Allen’s axiom that 90 percent of genius is just showing up), may acquire momentum for all of the 1990s.
The conservatives’ current demoralization may be deepened by this thought: The 1988 election may have been a missed opportunity for a hugely helpful defeat. If Dukakis had won, the economy probably would have soured at least as severely as it has under Bush. The economy was bound to lose steam after Reagan’s record-setting 92 consecutive months of economic growth. And Dukakis would have made, in spades, Bush’s mistakes, raising taxes as the economy softened and not containing the three explosive growths that have characterized the Bush years. Those were the explosions of the deficit, of domestic spending and of regulations.
If the Reagan years had been bracketed by the Carter years and four Dukakis years as dismal as Bush’s years have been, a conservative era might today be beginning rather than ending. Oh, melancholy conservatives! The poet for your mood is Dante Gabriel Rossetti: “Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been.”
