A Candidate with a Vision

By Roger Rosenblatt

Hard as it is to take, the reason that none of the presidential candidates is . espousing a vision of America's future may be that there is no vision of America's future to be espoused. Citizen complaints suggest otherwise; if there is a general grousing point about the current 13, it is that much of the time they sound like tinkers or social science teachers, including candidates like Paul Simon and Pat Robertson from whom, for quite different reasons, the public might expect the expression of some grand comprehensive picture of national prospects. But, in fact, by speaking practically, the candidates may be doing all that is possible and advisable. Bruce Babbitt asks voters to stand up, literally, for economy-curing taxes. Robert Dole mocks "the v word." The closest any candidate comes to articulating a vision is when he calls upon America's compassion for the needy, but such calls seem meant to indicate that the candidate is warmhearted, and not, as Martin Luther King Jr. would have said, that he has a dream today.

One can pin the omission of a sweeping vision on the disinclinations of this particular batch of candidates, but the whole expectation of a national vision may be misplaced, as Charles Krauthammer suggested in a recent column, and it is worth considering why. Of use in certain industries is the phrase "mature product," customarily employed by a realist to deflate an optimist. The optimist will say that such-and-such commodity, although long on the market with a steady rate of buyers, still has a growth capacity in the millions. The realist will counter that the commodity is in fact a "mature product," and if it tries to overextend its natural reach, it will either flop, twist itself out of shape, or both.

Is America in 1988 a mature product? That is: Has it reached certain stations of progress to which dreamy visions are simply inapplicable? I am far from suggesting that the country has arrived at perfection, only that its most serious problems have attained stages of growth where no single comprehensive view may intelligently embrace them. Vision these days may be the modern equivalent of the prairie; it is what an empire looks for when it wishes to recall the thrill of expansion, and yet has no place to expand.

But look around and note the saturation points. American farming, which took so steep a tumble in the early 1980s, has recovered lately but only to a level where the surviving farmers look toward anxious stability, not flush times. Good news for American farmers and bad news factor each other out continually. Exports are rising, but the price of corn, for instance, is less than half what it was in 1982, and wheat has fallen 33% since 1980. The Wall Street Journal described the farm issue in a Jan. 8 headline: WHAT WAS A CRISIS BECOMES ONLY A PROBLEM. For every farmer unable to pay his debts, three or four others can actually buy more acreage. Debt delinquencies are lower, but so is the price of farmland, except in areas where developers want in. The entire farm economy operates as if in a vast container, a silo; and since places like Iowa rely so heavily on Washington subsidies, you can be sure that for the near future, a small improvement is as good as life will get.

The same is true of American manufacturing. What appeared to be certain death for American industries in the first years of the decade now begins to look hopeful, but here again the projected growth is severely contained. The nation's industries were running at more than 82% of capacity in December 1987. That's good. But consumer spending is decelerating. That's bad. The value of the dollar falls abroad. Good. More countries are becoming industrial giants. Bad. All of industry these days talks like an executive fitness center, in terms of slimming down and wising up. The brayings of protectionists suggest that the onetime home of swaggering competitiveness is beginning to see itself as a large island fort, and even if the protectionist mentality fails to carry the day (as it ought to fail), one rarely hears the opposite talk that the best is yet to be.

Meanwhile, looming over advancements in industry and decreased unemployment (below 6%) is the budget deficit, disabling the next generation of spenders from moving anywhere but toward reductions and caution. No visionaries need apply.

In terms of social ideals, the country may be reaching its natural limits as well. Incidents such as the Howard Beach killing in New York City serve to remind us that race hatred is ready to bubble up anywhere, but the fact that the nation almost universally responded to Howard Beach as a disgrace and an outrage suggests how much progress, not how little, the ideal of equality has made. Thanks to the ardor of three administrations, the necessary civil rights laws are in place and enforceable, and the nonlegalistic thinking about social justice has advanced immeasurably. Any Jew, Hispanic or Asian American looking back uncomfortably to life in the 1950s cannot help seeing the 1980s as brighter, whatever the residual pains. Women lead virtually new lives these days, more complicated and more difficult, but also more just.

Even in terms of temperament, the country shows signs of becoming a more mature product. The tawdry antics of the TV evangelists last year helped to encourage the faithful to discriminate between superficial and serious religion. Movies such as Broadcast News urge the triumph of substance over shadow, as does the popular television series L.A. Law, which has recently turned its hand to social-action stories and away from money, its founding muse. Tom Wolfe, who has forged a career out of the superficialities of the times, now produces a novel about vanity, sensing that people may be ready to condemn the vacant, self-celebrating life. The plague of AIDS, in its own dark way, has contributed to a national maturing by forcing prospective lovers to confront one another as realities and not as players in a game.

In an atmosphere of various maturing elements and tendencies, it is hard to conceive of a presidential candidate coming up with a vision that would project a beaming future unless he were able to make an extraordinary leap of the imagination and foresee the future of the entire world. So interdependent are the world's markets and functions nowadays that any vision of America in the 21st century must logically entail America and the European Community, America and China and Japan, America and the Soviet Union, America and the planets and the stars.

That leaves the possibility of a vision of the future that involves the past. In 1980, and to a lesser degree in 1984, President Reagan articulated a vision of the past, but divorced from a peculiarly appealing personality, that vision would be very difficult for anyone else to re-create, assuming that any candidate other than Jack Kemp would want to do so. After the Iran-contra scandal, the instances of criminality in the Administration, and, more relevantly, the stock-market crash and that alpine deficit, Reagan's past vision may also have played itself out.

Theoretically, of course, a wholly different vision of past-future is conceivable, one that stresses personal and national frugality and emphasizes paying attention to political and business ethics and to the cracks in the nation's infrastructure. But few audiences rocket to their feet at the sound of the word bridge or tunnel, and even austere political visions have to be | inspired by something more than good housekeeping. Americans know visions when they see them, after all; we have had more of them hurled at us than any civilization can properly catch.

You wonder, in fact, if the public quest for a candidate with a vision is really serious and sincere or simply the outcropping of an unspoken national desire to experience something emotional about the campaign as well as about the country one believes in. The failures of the Reagan Administration may have made people wary of looking at their country emotionally, and so the search for a candidate with a vision may be the people's way of asking their leaders to create emotions for them. Because of their performances on television, particularly the Marvin Kalb interviews, several of the candidates appear more capable now than they looked originally, but none seems about to play choirmaster to the nation, and by expecting too much of them we diminish our capacity to appreciate their true worth. If America is becoming a mature product, then it may be time for the mature idea that the possible is the desirable.

Instead of demanding a candidate with a vision, we might more sensibly appreciate some of the candidates under our noses who merely have plain old vision and who see clearly that no comprehensive view of America is likely to encompass its most troubling issues: the uses of wealth and power, the components of education, the poor, the homeless, the aged, the ill. We are at a point in this country where all the visions, liberal and conservative, have come and gone, and we are left standing among the quite specific and various problems that those visions either created or failed to address. No new mythic dream will clean up the mess, and no one really knows what to do about much of it. Yet we are still part of the original 200-year-old vision that saw America as a power wanting to be as good as it is great. The candidate who knows that, and who is willing to take the country problem by problem, perhaps to discover a vision by deduction, will not bring down the house with a speech this year. But he could grow up to be President.