There are now about two weeks until the first presidential debate. This means that the Bush campaign has just a short time to redefine the nature of the race. For if George W. Bush enters the debates and final frenzied month with the campaign still being fought on Democratic turf, it will be very difficult to regain the advantage.
Since the Democratic convention, the election campaign has sunk into a bidding war more worthy of a campaign for city council. Gore promises to give us all prescription drug benefits; Bush promises to give us better ones faster. Gore promises a middle-class tax cut; Bush promises an across-the-board tax cut. Gore promises to spend on the environment; so does Bush. But as the budget fights of the last few years amply demonstrate, Republicans are always on the defensive when the debate is about which set of politicians can deliver the most goodies to voters. They end up advocating half-baked programs they only half believe in — and still getting trumped by the Democrats.
Republican campaigns do better when they elevate the terms of debate to higher ground. They win when they can convince voters that a presidential campaign isn’t about who can deliver the most chum; it’s about America’s purpose and greatness. It is, after all, a contest for the most powerful office on earth, not for some mayoral slot. In a broad and serious way, the Bush campaign is going to have to remind voters what George W. Bush’s America would look like, and why it would be a finer country to pass down to our children than Al Gore’s America.
There are many ways to elevate the race, but three obvious themes suggest themselves: the rule of law, America’s mission in the world, and the renewal of American citizenship.
Begin with the rule of law. The Bush campaign hasn’t been sure how or whether to raise the issue of the Clinton-Gore scandals. The low point so far was the sarcastic Bush commercial about whether Al Gore had invented the Internet. The campaign squabbled about whether to air the commercial, did so and reaped a week of bad publicity, then practically apologized for the ad, calling it a light-hearted jibe.
But the issue isn’t whether Al Gore exaggerates. It’s whether the executive branch is going to uphold the law or subvert it. It is an eight-year pattern of abuse of power — starting with the prosecution of the head of the White House travel office (acquitted by a jury in less than two hours), through the coverup and subversion of the White-water investigation, the serial bungling of Janet Reno’s Justice Department, the 1996 fund-raising scandals, and Bill Clinton’s perjury in the Lewinsky matter. This is an administration that has corroded the legal framework of American society and corrupted the legal process for its own petty and political advantage.
Instead of dancing around this topic with generalized comments about restoring integrity to the White House, instead of making a few pointed remarks to a gaggle of reporters on the tarmac, Bush could deliver a serious speech explaining how the Clinton-Gore administration has undermined the rule of law. He could remind voters why the rule of law is sacred; he could argue that to elect Gore is to turn a blind eye to the depredations of the administration in which the vice president has played so prominent a part; and he could point out that, under a Gore administration, there is every reason to believe the pattern of the past eight years would continue.
The second great issue available to Bush is America’s role in the world. The Clinton-Gore types have allowed their ruthless political style to infect the conduct of foreign policy to an unprecedented extent. Over the past eight years, America has run a venal foreign policy, inordinately influenced by profits and polls. With its Commerce Department junkets for favorite donors, its pinprick sea-based missile attacks on foreign tyrants, and its politically convenient high-elevation bombing missions over troubled hotspots, this administration has always taken the easy way out.
The Bush campaign has thus far bungled the foreign policy issue by displaying the sort of ambivalence about American power that used to mark Democratic campaigns. Bush has called for greater military spending, but he has also been quick to complain that American troops are overdeployed. He says his administration will review American commitments abroad, and that we are overextended — thereby suggesting a foreign policy of retrenchment rather than one that uses American power to ensure stability and advance the cause of liberty around the world.
Yet Governor Bush still has time to use foreign policy to illustrate America’s highest ideals. Last spring, he proposed a bold missile defense plan, attached to a new post-MAD military doctrine. The America he described then was a country capable of undertaking ambitious technical challenges, and bold enough to reshape the world order on its own terms. There was a hint in that speech of the sort of assertive foreign policy that has always marked Republican presidential candidates successful at the polls, from Eisenhower to Nixon to Reagan to Bush. In their day, voters may have supported Democrats for alderman, but they preferred Republicans as commander in chief.
A third way to elevate the campaign is to talk about citizenship. Bush has built his candidacy on the idea that he is a compassionate conservative. At its worst, the message is merely that Bush is a nice person, unlike some of those other Republicans. On another level, it’s just an updated form of noblesse oblige: Rich people should give a little more to poorer people.
But more profoundly, compassionate conservatism could be a call to renew American citizenship. It could be an argument that Democratic big government has not just been wasteful and ineffectual; it has suffocated citizenship. Professional bureaucrats have taken over roles that are best performed by active citizens. School choice, for instance, is good policy not only because competition leads to better schools, but also because it gets parents involved, rather than surrendering education to the professionals.
An appeal to citizenship is an antidote to the great anxiety plaguing America, that despite all our wealth, our common culture is deteriorating, with selfishness and indulgence replacing duty and virtue.
Citizenship can also be an antidote to the balkanization of America into mutually mistrustful ethnic and religious subcultures. Al Gore claims to be a fighter; he used that word 20 times in his convention speech. But Bush, on his best days, has used his compassionate conservatism to remind Americans of our common bonds. “These are not strangers,” he has said of the poor, “they are citizens, Americans.” By appealing to our dignity as a free and self-governing people, Bush is capturing a basic American ideal, and his united America is more attractive than the nation Al Gore describes, full of resentful squabblers.
The remaining weeks of this campaign need not be a mere continuation of the tit-for-tat games of gotcha that have marked the recent ones. The tactical pressure to punch and counterpunch will always be tremendous. But amidst the day to day jabbing, the press and the public would surely welcome a few aggressive but thoughtful addresses that elevate and redefine the campaign. It would, after all, be good to have a debate commensurate with the importance of the office. And incidentally, it’s hard to see how George W. Bush wins without forcing such a debate.
David Brooks and William Kristol
