THEY ALWAYS LOOK BETTER AT A DISTANCE
By JEFF GREENFIELD
Ladies and gentlemen, let me ask those of you up front to move back so that everyone can see and hear, for I am about to perform a time-honored healing ritual of political journalists. With the able assistance of a corps of researchers, I shall produce a cornucopia of quotations bemoaning the state of our candidates and the campaign, only to reveal that--tah-dahhh!--these comments were about past political campaigns. Ready?
"The indifference of the public seems as marked as the excitement of the professionals seems feigned." That was from the campaign of 1880.
The candidate is "a highly impressionable person without a firm grasp of public affairs." That was Walter Lippmann in 1932 talking about Franklin D. Roosevelt.
"In traveling extensively throughout the country, in reporting on five other presidential-election campaigns, I had never found such pervasive distrust...national politics was more irrelevant to people's lives than ever before." That was journalist Haynes Johnson writing about the 1976 election.
"Neither [of the candidates] seems to me to carry in his personality the vitality that moves history." That was Theodore H. White writing about Jimmy Carter--and Ronald Reagan.
There. Feel better?
O.K., the fact is that not even a barrelful of historical balm can ease the ache of one of the most spectacularly boring presidential campaigns in history. But it may help to remember that while we celebrate our system of government in the abstract, we almost never seem to celebrate it in the concrete. Our campaigns, like wine and cheese, need time to age.
Seen from the distance of 36 years, the campaign of 1960 seems to us high drama: two young men (Richard Nixon was only 47 when he ran against the 43-year-old J.F.K.) fighting to inherit the presidency from the oldest man ever to hold the office, in a contest marked by the first general-election debates in U.S. history, decided by barely 100,000 votes out of some 70 million cast, the highest American voter turnout in history.
Back in 1960, though, Kennedy and Nixon were scorned as the plastic products of professional packaging, exemplars of what one journalist labeled "the Smooth Deal," so much alike that Democratic partisan Arthur Schlesinger Jr. rushed into print a pamphlet titled Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference?
The battle between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford is now seen as a model of civility, with two fundamentally decent men running fundamentally positive campaigns: Carter promising "a government as good...as the people," Ford coming from behind to near victory with a campaign featuring the jingle I'm Feeling Good About America. During that race, however, debate panelist Robert Maynard asked the candidates how much responsibility they were prepared to accept for the "low tone" of the campaign.
Ronald Reagan is now regarded as a giant political figure, a man who won and who retained his popularity by offering a clear ideological message, one of those rare Presidents who run for office not to be somebody but to do something. But back in 1980 he was usually portrayed as a Hollywood simpleton regurgitating lines fed him by speechwriters and media consultants.
Does any of this offer hope for the historical rehabilitation of the 1996 campaign? Not if the measure is drama, excitement, suspense. But suppose the two parties call off the endless Punch-and-Judy show that passes for political discourse; suppose they sit down in January and decide to grapple with entitlements, with Bob Dole playing a key role in the process (as Wendell Willkie did after 1940 in combatting America's isolationist tradition). Suppose the disclosures about campaign finances finally embarrass the two parties enough to create the climate for real reform.
We might wind up looking back at the '96 campaign as a significant election, after all. It would mean that the next generation of political journalists would get to chuckle at our hand wringing. But that's a cost this journalist is more than willing to pay.