The Mediocrity Of The Middle Ground by Robert B. Reich
With only a bit over a week to go, Al Gore and George W. Bush are still neck and neck in the polls. This is the closest race since the Kennedy-Nixon election of 1960. But unlike that race, this one is something of a bore. Most Americans aren't very interested in who's to be the next leader of the world's most powerful nation. In 1960, most adult Americans turned out to vote. This time around, it's predicted that fewer than half will bother. The presidential election of 2000 will go down as one of the closest and most boring in American history.
The conventional Washington explanation for this is that there aren't any large issues facing America. Peace and prosperity have lured Americans into smug torpor. So the candidates' styles, smiles, sighs, smirks and quirks have become determinative. And by these trifling criteria, it's a toss up. Just wait, the pundits assure us: When the stakes are higher, we'll have a real election again.
This is nonsense. America is not lacking large issues - among them, the incarceration of a record-shattering two million of our citizens, the expanding use of capital punishment here, the almost one in every five of American children still living in poverty, the unprecedented gap in income and wealth, the resegregation of the our schools, and the overwhelming dominance of money in American politics. There have been no large issues in this presidential campaign because the two major candidates and their handlers have avoided them.
The closeness and dullness of this election is a consequence the strategies pursued by both sides. And it presages future American presidential elections that will be just as close and dull.
From the start of the Bush and the Gore campaigns, both launched more than two years ago, the objective was clear: 'Forty percent are with us, 40 against, so we need to keep our base and take as much of the middle 20 as possible,' one consultant explained to me with the antiseptic certainty of an eye surgeon wielding a laser machine.
Add to this that each campaign has been a marvel of technological wizardry. The candidates and their handlers have been able to discover exactly what voters think, what they want to hear, and what turns them off - even down to phrases and words, the style of clothing, the tilt of the head, the use of body, the intonation of the voice. Focus groups, dialometers, media labs, word labs, and mountains of bytes and bits of data have been analysed and econometricized. A mountain of money has been spent devising and airing advertisements cunningly tailored to particular groups of targeted voters in swing states.
Some of this happened in past elections. But never with such sophisticated tools, with such an abundance of information backed by so much cash. The election of 2000 is the first major encounter between the digital economy and American politics.
Bush and Gore also have been the most pliable of candidates, willing to try anything, say anything, do anything, wear anything that worked. Each followed the directions of his handlers and consultants to the letter. Each stayed on script, avoided risks, and experimented only within a narrow zone of safety in order to more precisely adjust the resonance to accomplish the mission.
Bush's brand of 'compassionate conservatism', conveyed with wide-eyed smile and innocent shrug of the shoulders, is different in detail from Gore's 'practical idealism', expressed in stentorian tones and sweeping movements of the arms. But because the differences have been calculated to achieve the same end - keeping intact respective bases while claiming as much of the middle as possible - the positions and styles have inevitably converged.
Gore's flirtation with old-fashioned American populism has been targeted at the big drug companies, HMOs and oil companies that most Americans distrust. Gore has not attacked corporate America in general, of which most Americans approve. Bush's attacks on big government have been discreetly aimed at the bureaucrats, red tape, and taxes that most Americans dislike. But has not taken on the vast complexes of the Pentagon, and the giant retirement programmes - Social Security and Medicare - all of which most Americans like. Bush and Gore have different schemes for reforming America's antiquated system of retirement security. But they're complicated, and they have been expressed in mind-dumbing trillions of dollars - eyes have glazed from Jersey City to Sacramento.
As the campaign nears its close, both candidates have moved to the centre in pursuit of the 'swing' voters. Gore had condemned the easy access Americans have to guns and had called for strict gun controls. Now he avoids the mention of guns (Pennsylvania and Michigan are both toss-up states, and a lot of hunters reside in them). Months ago, Gore talked about 'working families'. Now he speaks mostly about 'middle-class families'. Early on, Bush railed against abortions. Now he stays away from this most controversial topic.
Both men now agree on a host of things. Both say they're firmly behind a 'patients' bill of rights' which would require private providers of health care to meet minimum requirements. Both say they want to subsidise elderly Americans' access to costly prescription drugs. Both support free trade, a stronger military, and capital punishment. Bush has pushed into Democratic territory by making one of his priorities the improvement of schools attended by poor children. Gore has stepped into Republican land by promising to be so conservative with his spending that he will eliminate the national debt.
Is it any wonder that America has ended up with a race both remarkably close and exasperatingly dull? The question is whether we have anything different in future years, regardless of how large the stakes or how important the issues? Combine the new digital technologies of direct marketing with endless campaign money, add the continued decline of American political parties once held together by ideology or class, fold in an abundance of vacuous, spin-dried, principle-free candidates, and we're likely to have larger, longer campaigns about less, culminating in lifeless dead heats.
Alternatively, Americans may decide that they've had enough contrivance, and insist upon real candidates who will talk about real things and challenge the nation to debate its true fate. Listen carefully to the electorate and you can hear a yearning for a different kind of politics. Perhaps we haven't heard the last from the likes of a new breed of mavericks - among them Republican Senator John McCain, who mounted a strong challenge to Bush in the Republican primaries by arguing for laws to reign in campaign spending; former Senator Bill Bradley, who confronted Gore during the Democratic primaries; Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate, now Green Party presidential candidate, who has generated unexpected enthusiasm (and may divert so many votes from Gore in Oregon and California that Bush takes those states); and Jesse Ventura, the unorthodox Governor of Minnesota. Or it may be another as yet unknown candidate who shucks the technology, takes risks, and tells it like it is.
ROBERT B. REICH, secretary of labor in the first Clinton administration, is University Professor of Social and Economic Policy at Brandeis University and national editor of The American Prospect.