King: “What do you make of the Clinton Moscow trip thing?”
Bush: “I don’t want to tell you what I really think because I don’t have the facts.”
But he told us anyway. And Democrats said contentedly, “There he goes again.” A Democratic consultant merrily describes Bush’s campaign as follows: The public says to Bush, “Sir, the issue is the economy.” Bush says: “OK. Now, about Clinton and the draft . . . " Public: “No, no-the economy.” Bush: “Yes, I see. Now, about family values. . .” Public: “The economy, if you please, sir!” Bush: “You bet. Wanna hear about a polluted river in Arkansas?” Public: “ECONOMYECONOMYECONOMYECONOMY!” Bush: “I hear you. Have you read Hillary’s 1973 law-review article?” Public: “Read our lips, Your Presidentship–E-CO-N-O-M-Y.” Bush: “I read you loud and clear. Now, about Clinton’s 1969 visit to Moscow. . .”
Nothing Bush tries works. In fact, everything hurts. His strenuous September campaigning sliced five points off his approval rating, which is at 37 percent and heading south. The Bush campaign resembles an ant trying to climb a refrigerator door: no traction. Now, in what looks like the twilight of his career, it seems that his presidency’s end was in its beginning, in his determination distinguish himself from Reagan by disparaging Reagan.
This began with his promise of a “kinder, gentler” America. His message was clear: Reagan’s America had been cruel and harsh. Democrats could not have expressed their theme better; they have not expressed it very differently. The theme of Bush’s first week in the White House was “ethics.” It was, he said, “a question of knowing right from wrong.” The clear innuendo of that declaration was that the Reagan administration had been, as Democrats said, “sleazy.”
The Bush White House swiftly and ostentatiously downgraded the White House speechwriting operation. The pettiness (for example, denying the writers certain privileges in the West Wing) sent this large message: Bush is better than Reagan, who needed scripts. Bush does not need rhetoric. (Right. You need rhetoric only if you want to make yourself clear, and if you want to show the public the respect implicit in attempts to persuade it.) With spectacularly self-destructive self-indulgence, the Bush administration drove home part of the Democrats’ message. Reagan was a charming conjuror, but overrated. Democrats hammered home the other part: the “progress” of the 1980s was a chimera.
Democrats understood what Bush still does not: They can win the 1990s by discrediting the 1980s. Shrewdly using sympathetic media, Democrats have done so. And Bush is chained to the reputation of the Reagan years. But even if he had been inclined-which he was not-to offer a spirited defense of Reagan’s record, his own record in office would have contradicted that defense.
Democrats may ride to victory over the rubble of Reagan’s reputation, but in doing so they will reacquire the bad habit of subordinating economic growth to shifting considerations of “fairness.” Michael Barone notes that the Democratic Party has long been tugged in two directions by competing concerns with growth and equity. Recently growth has seemed less urgent than “fairness” as defined by government and produced by political intervention in free market allocations of wealth and opportunity. The Democratic Party of President Cleveland concentrated on growth: laissez faire at home, free trade, hard money, low taxes, balanced budgets. Woodrow Wilson, embracing some of the Populists’ and Progressives’ agenda for equity through government action, produced the income tax, the Federal Trade Commission and antitrust legislation. FDR’s first priority was to reignite growth in an economy that had shrunk 50 percent. Only later, and with less popular support, did he emphasize equity measures to redistribute the wealth of “economic royalists.”
The war, and pent-up consumer demand after the war, produced growth that produced the revenue that financed government programs (such as the GI Bill and FHA mortgages) that facilitated equity. Equity was then understood as upward mobility for people who adopted socially useful behavior (going to school, starting families). But, says Barone, since the mid-1960s Democrats have handicapped growth by applying to all policy questions “the test of equity.” This involves measuring a policy’s “fairness,” as defined by whatever ideology is ascendant in the party at the moment.
Democrats, says Barone, opposed decontrol of oil prices, claiming the poor would suffer. But oil prices fell. Democrats favored bureaucratic delivery of education and other services because bureaucracies serve everyone equally. Badly, perhaps, but equally. Democrats today revile Reagan’s tax cuts because the rich benefited. Never mind that most people did, too, from 92 months of growth with low inflation. While Republicans were winning three presidential elections, Democrats were crunching numbers to prove that everyone was becoming worse off, as measured by the Democrats’ (not the voters’) definitions of “fairness.”
Because Bush has been such a reluctant defender of Reaganism, Democrats have been tempted to try to win the future by rewriting the past. And by stressing fairness rather than its prerequisite-growth, which produces the social surpluses to finance equity measures. Now Bush’s eagerness to contrast himself with Reagan may be crowned with success, of sorts. Reagan’s re-election campaign carried 49 states. Bush’s re-election campaign may provide a spectacular contrast.
