Lighten Up, This Campaign Isn't So Bad

By Richard Brookhiser Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of the National Review, and author of The Outside Story.

The hills are alive, with the sound of bitching. "This most dismal of presidential campaigns," wailed Elizabeth Drew, in her most recent "Letter from Washington" in The New Yorker, ". . . has set a new low in modern campaigning." A few weeks earlier Page One of the New York Times's Week in Review gave the cartoon expression of this glum sentiment: Michael Dukakis and George Bush, pint-size brats, sticking their tongues out at each other in infantile fury. The 1988 election is, by general agreement, the dirtiest and dumbest election in recent memory, maybe ever.

Lighten up, everybody. This election is well within the normal range of modern American presidential contests -- which is to say, it is fairly ^ earnest, notably clean and even informative, if you know what to look for. A glance at the record dispels the notion that this election is peculiarly dirty or dishonest. Only eight years ago, the election was marred by loose, guilt- by-association swipes involving the Ku Klux Klan. The farther back you look, the worse it gets. In the Democratic-Republican propaganda of 1800, the Federalists were alleged to be cryptoroyalists and Anglomaniacs; the Federalists, in their turn, painted their opposite numbers as Jacobins, who lusted to pick pockets and rape daughters. Talk about the "L" word.

What about the rhetorical level at which the campaign has been conducted? We are a long way, certainly, from the intellectual intricacies of the Lincoln- Douglas debates (which, incidentally, occurred in a senatorial, not a presidential, election). But even the crudest gestures, if unpacked with care, will be found to contain some serious intent.

Take the Republican assault on Governor Dukakis over the Pledge of Allegiance. This bare-knuckled attack aimed to accomplish two things. One was to locate and identify the Governor for a national audience. The Republicans' intentions, of course, were malign, but they found their opening in Dukakis' relative obscurity outside his home state. The Republicans hoped that a trivial action, which had passed almost unnoticed in the political culture of Massachusetts, would have a different resonance when replayed in the political culture of the country as a whole. The second purpose of the pledge attack was to restate an old Republican Party theme: the G.O.P.'s patriotism is somehow a sturdier affair than the Democrats'. It may be a slander, but it's something Republicans have been saying or implying since the '50s.

The Democrats, for their part, kicked off the campaign at their convention with an orgy of anti-Bush preppie bashing. The most quoted line, delivered by Ann Richards in her keynote speech, was that Bush was born "with a silver foot in his mouth." The best lines came from Texas agriculture commissioner Jim Hightower, depicting a gathering of Bushmen around the yacht-club bar, "sipping a delightfully fruity and frisky white wine, saying 'Play it again, George!' " This was not random abuse but an effort to energize voters who expect Democrats to look out for the little guy -- a venerable Democratic tactic, handed down from Franklin D. Roosevelt (himself an aristocrat).

But what about issues that happen to fall outside traditional partisan ! agendas? Politicians don't act; they react. So it's not surprising that there should be a lag between a problem's first appearance in fact and in someone's stump speech. New issues have indeed been able to make their way into the campaign. Neither drugs nor the environment was a deciding factor in any recent presidential race. But after a year of national concern about crack wars, followed by a summer of worry over the greenhouse effect and kindred ecological disasters, Manuel Noriega has become the favorite foreign leader of Democratic speechwriters, while Bush has taken to deploring the condition of Boston Harbor.

This campaign has had more trouble dealing with old issues that are intractable, the budget deficit being No. 1. Although Dukakis and Bush have introduced some refinements into the arguments advanced by their predecessors four years ago -- the Democrats, obviously, have avoided promising to raise everyone's taxes this time around -- there is no indication that either one of them would do anything other than the last election's winner: sign off on a bipartisan effort like Gramm-Rudman-Hollings that accomplishes essentially nothing.

Clearly we are dealing with a failure of political will. But that failure extends beyond the candidates, to the voters. The Republican Party refuses to raise taxes; the Democratic Party refuses to cut nonmilitary spending; and the American people more or less agree with both positions. Until they abandon one or the other, they'll be stuck with the problem.

The budget deficit, after all, is not the first great issue to be fudged in an election. In 1940, with Western Europe plunged into war and the rest of the globe poised to follow, the American people were faced with a choice between a pair of interventionists, F.D.R. and Wendell Willkie. But both men, dissembling their true convictions, came down the campaign homestretch as quasi-isolationists. Their waffling reflected a national division, not closed until Pearl Harbor.

Presidential elections aren't campaigns in utopia. But that's because this republic is run on different principles than Plato's. An American election is a conversation. It tells us what the parties and the voters are willing to say and hear. If it does so with a minimum of muck and outright lying, it has done its job relatively well. This one has. Bring on Dan Quayle and the A.C.L.U. cards.