A nation as badly governed as this one nowadays is by professional politicians may not think the adjective “professional” is an encomium when applied to apparatchiks like Jordan and Rollins. But Washington clings to its comforting assumption that candidates are of secondary and voters of only tertiary importance. What matters most are the operatives who tell candidates which convictions are convenient to hold, and who are the favorite sources for the journalists who write and broadcast stories that take the operatives as seriously as the operatives take themselves: very.
Out there in the Republic’s vastness, voters must have been bemused by the fuss the national media made over Jordan and Rollins. It was as though baseball writers (who are too sensible to do this) got all lathered up about a team hiring a new first base coach. Peculiar perceptions encouraged by journalism help explain America’s astonishing mood swing, from the bombing of Baghdad to the burning of Los Angeles. Millions of Americans share the cockeyed belief that America is rocketing downhill and needs, as never before, a strong president. What it is going to get is a weak plurality president picked by depressed voters or by the most disdained institution of American governance, the House of Representatives, albeit a House with perhaps 30 percent fresh faces. However, reports of America’s decline are silly, and so is fear of a weak president.
The recession was unpleasant and perhaps unnecessary but the economy’s pause should not have been unnerving after 92 consecutive months of growth during which the U.S. economy grew by one-third. As Robert Bartley says (in his new book, “The Seven Fat Years”), it is as though we built from scratch an economy the size of West Germany’s and added it to the economy we already had. The recovery now underway, the result of the economy’s natural recuperative powers, will probably be strong enough to survive the policies of the next president, whoever he is.
Would a Perot presidency mean the dawn of economic reasonableness? Not necessarily. One criticism of him is that he knows only business. Perhaps he doesn’t even know that. He says “our real problem is our giant companies, like IBM, are down-sizing. General Motors is down-sizing. We want them growing.” Not necessarily.
For many reasons, having to do with the nature of entrepreneurial energy and the absence of bureaucratic sclerosis, small businesses are the principal engines of job creation and product innovation. Because giants like IBM and GM have been shedding white collar middle-management employees, the seriousness of the recent recession was exaggerated. Working-class people are supposed (or so middle-class people think) to live with job insecurity, but when middle-class people are insecure, they believe an entitlement has been violated. During the recent recession this insecurity and sense of injustice was magnified by the media, in part because journalists, too, were insecure. As Irving Kristol writes, journalists are “always ready to be professionally compassionate toward the jobless, but now [are] in a condition of near-hysteria at the discovery that they may be the objects of their own compassion. This, in turn, has led to a kind of apocalyptic fever in academia, always happy to think the worst about the United States.”
The nation’s nastiest ailments disconcert journalists and academics, for two reasons. These ailments arise from the culture, and journalists and academics are proud of having done much to make the culture what it is. Also, they are the last believers in big, compassionate government. Today, Kristol writes, people demand more and more of government because they have been taught that doing so is their democratic duty, but they expect less and less from it. That is not surprising, given the simultaneous growth of the supposedly ameliorative state and the problems it was supposed to ameliorate:
“Whoever expected that the creation of a Welfare State in an affluent economy would be accompanied by an incredible increase in criminality, so that our streets would be blanketed with fear? A sharp increase in teenage pregnancies? In drug addiction? In the creation of a dependent, self-destructive “underclass’? Whoever dreamed that an “enlightened’ move towards greater sexual freedom would engender a new, fatal venereal disease called AIDS? … Whoever thought that, with birth control so easy and sex education compulsory, the United States would witness two million abortions a year?”
Disappointment, disgust and chagrin have made voters volatile. However, the basic outcome of the 1992 election may already be apparent. The winner probably will win an unimpressive plurality–perhaps less than Woodrow Wilson’s 41.8 percent in 1912 or Lincoln’s 39.8 percent in 1860. A plurality president need not be weak. Both Wilson and Lincoln are on the short list of strong presidents. However, neither Clinton nor Perot is likely to make that list and Bush is already on the list of weakest presidents.
Bush is the weakest incumbent president to seek reelection since Andrew Johnson in 1868. Clinton is, so far, the weakest challenger since John W. Davis (the man it took Democrats 103 ballots to nominate in 1924). Perot, who only looks like a heavyweight because he is in the ring with those bantamweights, may soon be seen as even less than a sound bite. His bites have no meal around them, nothing, not even a sprig of parsley.
Never mind. In the words of the suitably silly theme song that wafted over Bush’s 1988 campaign, “Don’t worry, be happy. “It is too late to do anything about the choice we have. So let’s grit our teeth and do our duty of choosing, firm in the faith that America is much more than, and usually much better than, its politicians. And if it could not survive mediocre presidents, it would be long gone.
