David Brooks, writing in the New York Times, asks “Why are we still tied?”
— meaning more or less equally divided between red states and blue
states. He calls this “the central mystery of this election” and
theorizes that it is owing to something in the very nature of
Republican and Democratic perceptions of the world and of the
qualities desirable in a leader. “Republicans,” he says, “admire a
president who is elevated above his executive branch colleagues,”
someone they feel is “set apart by virtue of exceptional moral
qualities.” Such leaders “set broad goals and remain resolute in
times of crisis” while those admired by Democrats “engage in
constant deliberative conversations” in a collegial setting. “It
just so happens that America is evenly divided about what sort of
leader we need: the Republican who leads with his soul or the
Democrat who leads with his judgment.”
This may be true, but it tells us not why but
how we are divided. For the why, I wonder whether or not
the nearly even red-blue split can be said to be a kind of
statistical artifact of the final and total extraction of principle
from politics. Up until the 1990s, that is, there was still a
meaningful ideological distinction between the two parties. If you
voted Democratic you knew you were voting for more government but
weaker, less aggressively poised defense; if you voted Republican
you were voting for less government but stronger defense. After the
Gingrich debacle and the Clintonian “triangulation” of the
mid-'90s, however, these distinctions ceased to be very meaningful.
“The era of big government is over,” said Clinton, and suddenly cut
the ground from under the resurgent Republicans. George W. Bush
learned the lessons of triangulation as well, and offered his own
version: Compassionate Conservatism. Clinton signed the Welfare
Reform bill while Bush reversed himself on “nation-building” after
9/11.
Now John Kerry is running for president completely without
reference to his career in politics. Nothing that he stood for in
the 1980s and 1990s does he stand for now except taxing the rich.
Indeed, that relic of Democratic class-war rhetoric is almost the
only vestige of ideological difference between the two parties.
Like that other Massachusetts liberal, Michael Dukakis, under whom
he served as Lieutenant Governor, Kerry wants to make this election
“about competence, not ideology.” This is just as well, because the
ideology he has espoused throughout his political career is no more
popular now than it has been since Lyndon Johnson left office. Once
he might have been tied to it anyway, as Dukakis the “Massachusetts
liberal” was, but in the post-Clinton era there seems to be a
widespread attitude that politicians should be given a wide scope
for self-reinvention. After all, if they don’t think that ideology
is important, why should we?
At any rate, it seems to me undeniable that neither candidate is
identified by the electorate with any clearly understood
principles, either conservative or liberal. Each no doubt has a
base in states historically identified with one tendency or the
other. Bush has no more chance of winning Massachusetts than Kerry
has of winning Texas. But on the middle ground between the two
tendencies — which has grown much narrower and, as Brooks points
out, is more a matter of style than substance — both are fighting
to take possession of the same territory. Each will say whatever he
thinks likely to draw that dividing line between them a millimeter
to the right or left of where on the basis of more and more
sophisticated polling it is already perceived to be. That means
that the even division of the electorate would be likely in the
absence of any outside force not only to persist but to get
more even.
But there is an outside force, and that is the media.
The events of the past week have made it more clear than ever that
they are now not even bothering to disguise their pro-Kerry slant,
and this makes it much more easy for Kerry to pander, much more
difficult for Bush. Kerry is allowed to make the ludicrous claims
that he would have captured Osama bin Laden or got results
by doing “everything different” in Iraq without challenge, while
Bush is held accountable for every accident and failure
attributable to the fog of war as well as for the events and
strategies in which his or his deputies’ and ministers’ conscious
purposes went astray. The only question now is whether or not the
media will be able to win the election for Kerry. It is certainly
possible, but so is a backlash among those who may finally be made
aware of the undeniable evidence of the media’s partisanship.
America’s and the world’s future may well depend on how savvy a few
thousand people in Ohio have become as media critics.
