Politics as Gong Show

By Hugh Sidey

Last week in Ames, Iowa, real farmers asked Democratic presidential candidates questions about agriculture, which the farmers feel is in dismal condition. The idea was to get a measure of the knowledge and concern of these would-be Presidents. In a couple of weeks, a debate sponsored by the Des Moines Register will allow these men to question one another and answer a few queries from the newspaper's scholarly Washington bureau chief James Risser and a few more from knowledgeable lowans. No Phil Donahue, no Ted Koppel, no Hollywood, lowans have always had a bit more than their share of good sense.

Perhaps some time in the past 25 years, in a superpower summit somewhere or in one of the great legislative struggles in Washington, the day was won by a President standing on a stage and waggling his finger at his adversary and out-shouting him. If so, the event has not been recorded.

Theatrics is a legitimate part of statecraft. But how much? The principal memory from the great New Hampshire debate a fortnight ago was the dogfight between John Glenn and Walter Mondale. The spectacle was geared for combat.

"Let's go to it!" exulted Koppel. Donahue was the designated baiter. Zap, pow, thud! If the candidates could do that to one another, think what they could do to the deficits, Pentagon cost overruns and those nasty types in Latin America.

That one of the problems of governing today is the excessive partisanship of Republicans and Democrats seems not to have bothered the television impresarios, who appear determined to make the campaign the biggest Gong Show of this singular year. "Politics became fun," burbled Washington Post TV Critic Tom Shales. "National fun on live TV . . . nearly as action-packed as The A-Team." Will the political handlers, consultants, producers and scriptwriters--a flourishing industry now in league with the media--turn this campaign into a litany of despair, with each candidate exaggerating America's problems in order to sell his own solutions? Pray for a triumph of calm consideration and enlightenment in the Iowa experience.

When the Democratic candidates were asked at Hanover if Ronald Reagan had done anything worthwhile in three years, there was silence except for a flip answer from Mondale: "I think one of the fine things they did was to get rid of James Watt." That silence was disingenuous, since Reagan obviously has done a few worthy things. It was also an insult to the intelligence of 54% of the American people who, according to George Gallup, approve of Reagan's leadership in some way. But the President has too often led the political charge.

How much better off we would be if Reagan had buried partisanship back in the summer of 1981 and taken Speaker Tip O'Neill's budget compromise, which would have held down the deficits that now threaten to bury us. How much better off we would be if Reagan had muted his ire at the Soviet Union and heeded the public's nuclear-arms concerns.

No wonder a thoughtful man like Theodore Sorensen, who was John Kennedy's special counsel, cries out in a provocative new book (A Different Kind of Presidency; Harper & Row) for a startling departure by some candidate to stop this paralyzing partisan wrangling. Sorensen suggests naming a Vice President from the opposition and dividing the Cabinet appointments equally between the parties so that Democrats and Republicans could attack national problems instead of one another. The Washington Post's David Broder, an honored political pundit, immediately dismissed the Sorensen idea as unfeasible and cast his vote for the prevailing sentiment in the political show-ring that the duty of candidates is to bang heads, not put them together. Broder may be right. Trouble is, the problems of monstrous deficits, horrifying nuclear arsenals, huge trade and credit imbalances go untended as we glory in the fight.