WHEN FOXES POSE AS HEDGEHOGS

By Richard Stengel

The fox knows many things," wrote the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, "but the hedgehog knows one big thing." In his famous 1953 essay, the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin used that conceit to divide Russian writers into hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs, he suggested, are individuals who relate everything to a single, all embracing principle, while foxes are those who see a multiplicity of things without fitting them into some universal system. (Dostoevsky was a hedgehog, Tolstoy a fox.) Berlin regarded this contrast as a profound philosophical difference that divided writers, thinkers and even politicians.

This election season, the Dole campaign is depicting the presidential race as a battle between a Republican hedgehog and a Democratic fox. Republicans portray their candidate as a homespun political hedgehog, a man with a simple, overarching view of America, while representing Bill Clinton as a sharp-eyed political fox, a candidate who has, as Bob Dole says, "a million little plans." Dole repeatedly contrasts his "one big plan" with Clinton's "inch-by-inch" approach. The subtext of Dole's message, beginning with his Senate resignation speech, in which he described himself as "just a man," is that he, not Clinton, possesses a singular insight into the American character, an insight that he cannot always put into words. The hedgehog riseth.

But Dole, by nature as well as nurture, is a fox. When he was lambasted during the primaries for lacking a vision, it was another way of saying, Bob, you're no hedgehog. Dole's beloved job of majority leader is the ultimate fox's occupation. "Bob Dole knew more about more things than anyone else in the Senate," says Lawrence O'Donnell, former staff director of the Senate Finance Committee. "And that was the source of his power." The fox incarnate.

As a result of his hardscrabble upbringing and his war wounds, Dole is a man who trusts in the concrete, the empirical, a man who distrusts philosophizing and grand theory. Economics is not an imaginary curve scrawled on a napkin, but nickels and dimes plunked in a glass jar. Dole's 15% tax cut is his one big idea (the symbol of less government and more individuality), but he is so uncomfortable with it that he has trouble keeping it at the forefront of his campaign, not to mention persuading voters that he actually believes in it.

Clinton, for his part, has played his campaign like a sly fox, shaping it with Executive actions on everything from teen smoking to anti-inflation bonds, using them to underscore a single, optimistic view of the country and the future. (I see many things, and I see one big thing too.) It was fallen guru Dick Morris who tried to make the case that Clinton was the great postideological hedgehog, the unifier of divergent strains in American political thought. Clinton, Morris said, is "the end product of the debate between Democrats and Republicans this century." He used this Hegelian dialectic to describe Clinton as the modern ideological synthesizer of traditionally Republican ideas (balancing the budget) and Democratic nostrums (raising the minimum wage). But Clinton is not so much the synthesis as the dialectic itself, veering from a massive top-down national health plan to supporting more incremental advances like the portability of health plans. His foxy hedgehogginess lies in finding the golden mean that appeals to voters.

Ronald Reagan was the great postwar hedgehog, and candidates ever since have of necessity sought that same aura. George Bush was as poor at managing "the vision thing" as Dole. In this presidential parlor game, George Washington was a hedgehog, John Adams a fox. Abraham Lincoln was a hedgehog, Harry Truman a fox. Franklin D. Roosevelt was a fox who grew into a supreme hedgehog. Richard Nixon lost as a fox in 1960 but won as a hedgehog in 1968. National crises both demand and create hedgehogs, and hedgehogs go down in history as the great Presidents. And in this era of slogans and 30-sec. commercials, hedgehogs have the clear advantage as candidates. In the parlance of Madison Avenue, they are instantly recognizable name brands.

The irony is that in the post-cold war era, governing is a fox's job, and campaigning a hedgehog's profession. Dole has proved himself as a fox, but he can't get anyone to see him as a hedgehog. What Dole could but won't say is that Clinton is no different from him: a fox in hedgehog's clothing.