The Dangers of Content

By Hugh Sidey

In these late spring days of 1976, a lot of Americans do not have all that much use for a President, which is a tribute of sorts to our system but a cause of increasing concern to the people who care about the quality of leadership.

From the air over Illinois one can see the giant cultivators, drawn behind tractors, gently stirring the earth between the rows of new corn. It is a consuming drama between a farmer and his land. Building more than 50,000 cars and trucks a day, as auto workers did last week, is a noisy creation that tends to squeeze out idle thoughts of the political campaign. And with wages at $6.57 an hour, the workers are enticed into weekend recreation rather than Jerry Ford rallies. Last week the National Park Service estimated that there were 9 million campers and sightseers in their domain, a 25% increase over last year. For some 936,000 college students who will get their bachelor's degrees by the end of June, graduation ceremonies, held against the backdrop of a tranquil nation, suggested more hope (and challenge) than at any time in several years.

In short, the nation is running pretty well by itself right now. There is no major crisis at home or abroad. And for that reason it is hard to get a firm fix on the men and the issues in the presidential campaign. Trouble etches leaders, destroys the weak, brings out hidden strengths in others, nurtures daring and innovative contenders. Contentment (or anyway, relative contentment) tends to encourage phony issues and colorless candidates.

The danger in our present success lies down the road --when oil once again runs scarce, or the Social Security system must pay its way, or there is the threat of war. Then we may wish we had got a clearer view of the would-be Presidents. But now, with only muted adversaries in the Communist world, quiet ghettos and more food than we can eat, the call for that proverbial man on horseback lacks conviction and urgency. If a single one of the men who want to be President has dimensions of greatness, he has hardly been able to demonstrate them in the dubious debate about the strategic importance of the Panama Canal, or whether Henry Kissinger should stay or go, or just how big Big Government is or should be. A war like Viet Nam, 10% unemployment, Dust Bowls and soup lines make it easier to assess a potential President. It is hard for our politicians to live with success.

It may be one of the faults of our system. We have rarely turned from our pursuit of happiness until we were in a crisis. In other years we had time to recover. Events come faster now. The luxury of indifference to the future is greatly diminished. Our spring of contentment could vanish by summer. The last time we had almost two years of such unique affluent national and world equilibrium may have been as far back as the 1920s, when we were calling it "normalcy." It is curious that in that era of exuberant strength we produced Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, all men dealt low marks by historians. Writer H.L. Mencken described Harding as "the archetype of the Homo boobus." Lawyer Clarence Darrow proclaimed Coolidge "the greatest man who ever came out of Plymouth Corner, Vermont." And Herbert Hoover's boiled collar was the delight of cartoonists from coast to coast. Everybody chuckled until the collapse of 1929, and then they wondered what had happened.

These are not the 1920s, and politics is not the same. And yet there is a nagging feeling that once again our very success as a nation may have reduced our political vitality.

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