Simple logic made a Republican presidential victory look almost inescapable. The incumbent Democrat, elected with a minority of the vote, had never come close to pleasing most of the electorate. His poll numbers were terrible. His domestic program, built around a cumbersome health-care scheme, had gone nowhere. The newspapers were filled with the tedious details of one petty administration scandal after another. The country seemed tired of the president, tired of the Democrats, tired of government.
It looked like an election that no presentable Republican nominee could possibly lose. And yet, as the campaign began, Republicans all over the country seemed not only fearful that it would slip away, but somehow prepared to lose it. The leading Republican contender for president was the party’s leader in the Senate, an aging veteran of undeniable intelligence and legislative skill. For the past decade he had dominated the Republican side of the aisle, alternating between caustic partisan warfare and sustained efforts at compromise.
In private conversation, the senator nearly always demonstrated an appealing modesty and self-deprecating charm. In public, however, his manner seemed brittle, his sarcasm unsettling, his partisanship mean-spirited, his clipped midwestern accent grating to listen to. Three times he had been a candidate for national office, and each time he had demonstrated his singular lack of popular appeal. If it was diffcult to imagine the Republican party losing at a time like this, it was easy enough to imagine this particular candidate being rejected.
That was why, a few months earlier, so many Republicans had been so infatuated with another possibility — a general and recent war hero with no political experience who had never even established clearly which party he belonged to. This general was everything the Senate leader was not — avuncular, soft-spoken, reassuring. He conveyed easy authority with very few words and scarcely a breath of effort. Nobody was sure just what he thought about most of the issues of the day, but one thing seemed all but certain: If he were the Republican nominee, the Democrats would be turned out of office.
By now you probably have figured this one out, in case you did not get it immediately. This is the script for 1952, not 1996, and the flawed front- runner was not Robert Dole but Robert Taft. The president was Harry Truman. You know who the general was. You also know what the ending was. Dwight Eisenhower was no Colin Powell.
To keep the analogy going, you have to ignore some inconvenient distinctions between that year and the present one. The Republicans didn’t control Congress in 1952, and the Democratic president didn’t run for reelection (Truman chose to retire). So I’m not presenting the comparison between 1952 and 1996 as some sort of uncanny historical coincidence. It isn’t that at all. What it does is offer us a way to begin thinking about how presidential politics — and American political life have changed in the 44 years since Eisenhower and Taft contested the Republican nomination.
The system we currently use is not a very dignified or effective way of picking a president. That point is made countless times every election year, and it is correct. But there is another point to be made, one that we rarely bother to state explicitly. It is that the presidential politics of the 1990s serves up a different sort of human being than the politics of the 1950s — different in style, different in temperament, different in the most fundamental attitudes toward life.
In the 1990s, far more than in the 1950s, presidential campaigns are crowded with aspirants eager to proclaim their loyalty to conservative principles of one sort or another. They are crusaders for the free market, or for personal responsibility, or devolution, or some image of a better America that existed at one time but does not seem to exist anymore. But when it comes to temperament — when it comes to virtues like prudence, reticence, respect for order, and gravitas — then I think it is only fair to say that there are no conservatives in the race.
That was not the case in 1952. Indeed, the presidential election of 1952 offered the country a choice among three people who were conservatives in the innermost compartments of the soul. That this description applies to Taft will surprise no one who remembers him. But Eisenhower, fabled moderate? And Adlai Stevenson, lion of liberalism? Let me explain.
For 15 years on the Senate floor, Robert Taft was the implacable enemy of Roosevelt, Truman, the New Deal, and the Fair Deal. Taft was the prophet warning that liberal government was the road to economic and moral ruin. But he was no reflexive opponent of government action — he was a supporter of public housing to the end of his life, for one thing. No, what angered Taft so much about the New Deal was its aura of reckless experiment — its seeming willingness to indulge in poorly thought-out reform ventures that flew in the face of order, precedent, and decent respect for the lessons of 150 years of American history. The essence of Taft’s conservatism wasn’t hatred of Democrats, but a reverence for history. The idea of any conservative calling himself a “revolutionary” would immediately have struck him as absurd.
Dwight Eisenhower possessed no such reverence, and no particular animosity to the New Deal. What he did possess, and in huge quantity, was innate caution — a stubborn refusal to proceed with any enterprise unless consensus had formed, maximum strength had been gathered, and the likelihood of success was overwhelming. This is not everybody’s idea of statesmanship, but it was Eisenhower’s approach to a) fighting World War II, b) running for president, and c) governing America in the 1950s. It explains his reluctance to pounce on Joseph McCarthy until McCarthy had engineered his own downfall in 1954; it explains his repeated distaste for committing U.S. troops and weapons to the tropical skirmishes his foreign-policy advisers kept urging upon him in the White House. Eisenhower believed in his heart that the best policy was very often no policy. He felt more problems solved themselves than submitted to activist solution of any sort. That should make him a conservative in anybody’s book.
Including Adlai Stevenson in this triumvirate may seem odd. After all, there is no doubt that he believed in the New Deal. As president he would have maintained it, perhaps even expanded it in a few places. But it is impossible to read Stevenson’s speeches or study his career without absorbing his sense of the tragedy of life, the constant of human suffering, and the futility of expecting to end that suffering by purposive public action. From the earliest years of his childhood, in which he accidentally killed a playmate with a shotgun, to the disaster of his marriage, to a woman who went slowly and inevitably mad, Stevenson was a man with an acute appreciation for the cruelties of fate. There were no Humphreyesque speeches from Stevenson proclaiming that the promised land was in sight; his idea of liberalism had more to do with the simple amelioration of misery. Perhaps he wasn’t a conservative in Robert Taft’s or Barry Goldwater’s sense of the word; I think he qualifies nevertheless.
We are living in a different era. This is a difficult time to be a conservative in temperament. For a brief time last fall, it seemed as if Colin Powell might test that proposition. Whatever he may believe on the public policy questions of the moment, he scores pretty well on at least the first two elements of the Eisenhower-Taft-Stevenson conservatism scale — he is clearly driven by respect for order and governed by instinctive caution. His absence tells us as much about the current contest as does the presence of those who chose to enter it.
When Powell removed himself from the campaign, the conventional wisdom soon held that he had been unwilling to endure the sheer physical and emotional burden of running for president — unwilling to spend a year in the field, raise $ 20 million, subject every detail of his personal and financial life to the most demeaning form of scrutiny. And this needs little justification. Few normal people wish to experience such an ordeal. Presidential politics is now a natural-selection process that seeks out campaigners, not presidents.
Not so in 1952. That year, Dwight Eisenhower spent the entire spring in Paris, where he was serving as commander of NATO. He sent back a letter declaring that “under no circumstances” would he “seek nomination to political offce or participate in the preconvention activities of others.” That was as expected. It was Eisenhower’s following sentence that mattered. ” Of course,” he conceded, “there is no question of the right of American citizens to organize in pursuit of their common convictions.” That was all it took. By uttering those few words of code, to obtain it. In the stretch of eight months he traveled 50,000 miles and gave more than 500 speeches.
Nor was he above telling audiences a few things he thought they wished to hear. He promised southerners that he would name a southern Democrat to the cabinet.
But there were limits. Taft, for all his ambition, was not a man free to re-create himself to please an audience. He conducted the 1952 campaign clearly marked as a standard-bearer: the vehicle of an entire wing of the Republican party, of people who continued to resist the New Deal at home and an internationalist American policy abroad. He was the candidate of those who still wanted to fight the battles of 1933. This was his identity, and his constituency, and he could not change it. All he could do was hope that his faction was strong enough to overcome its opponents — the eastern internationalists whose champion was Eisenhower. As things turned out, it was not.
It is in this way that Robert Taft differs dramatically from Robert Dole, the senator and candidate he sometimes seems to resemble. After 36 years in Congress and a decade as Senate Republican leader, Dole is still not a standard-bearer in any meaningful way. There are no Dole Republicans, in the way that there once were Taft Republicans. Dole’s campaign is not an effort to mobilize an existing constituency; it is an attempt to create one, at the age of 72, on the basis of title and seniority.
One can speculate there may be a traditional conservative underneath the armor of sarcasm and sheer competitiveness that Dole wears for protective purposes. It is hard to say. Clearly he has shown a preference for caution at critical moments in the legislative process, the recent budget showdown among them. But somehow it looks more plausible, reflecting on Dole’s political life and long Senate career, to say that he betrays little evidence of any larger vision or governing philosophy. He is an ad hoc political leader who operates in the present and advances from one situation to the next. If there are any underlying themes to the 40 years that have taken him from the Russell County courthouse to the 1996 campaign, they would seem to be pragmatism and hard- nosed partisanship, not ideology.
There are worse qualifications for president. No ideology is clearly preferable to many of the existing ones. But the fact remains that, after all these years of prominence, Dole is out there campaigning as the representative of no one and nothing in particular, a vehicle above all of his own individual ambition and desire to succeed. In this he is the most modern of candidates, one who has very little in common with Robert Taft or any of the cast of characters of 1952.
This is not precisely Dole’s fault. The fact is we no longer have a presidential politics of groups, factions, and stable loyalties as we did 44 years ago. We no longer have standard-bearers. We have a politics of individuals. We go to the polls in the spring and choose among people who woke up one morning (or many mornings), looked in the mirror, and saw statesmanship, even if no one else had seen it in them before. It is a politics that is dependent almost entirely on self-propulsion.
Of course, to say this of the presidential nominating process is to say nothing that cannot be said of the American political system as a whole, or for that matter of the society beyond its confines. The processes of politics are nearly always an accurate reflection of the larger culture, and that is especially true in this case. All sorts of transactions that used to be conducted by organized groups with stable loyalties and enduring rules are now mostly a matter of individuals selling themselves as transients on an open market. The presidential campaign just happens to be one of those transactions.
But it produces some ludicrous spectacles. Perhaps the most garish exhibit of 1996 is the Republican candidacy of Lamar Alexander, an obsessive political careerist who began running for office in childhood but is nevertheless seeking to present himself as a flannel-shirted man of the people untainted by the wickedness of Washington and its professional politicians. This is one of the things you get when you move from a politics of standard-bearers to a politics of individuals. You get hustlers scrambling to market themselves in the most spurious way imaginable.
History does sometimes repeat itself in curious fashion. The 1952 campaign that produced Eisenhower, Stevenson, and Taft also gave us the candidacy of Estes Kefauver, the maverick senator despised by party leaders who hoped to ride to the Democratic nomination on the publicity from his televised anti-crime hearings and on the strength of a strong primary showing. Like Alexander, his fellow Tennessean, Kefauver was indulging in self-invention. He was an abrasive, alcoholic Yale graduate masquerading as a simple, good-natured rustic in a coonskin cap. Alexander, who seems to have none of Kefauver’s worst personal qualities, nevertheless shares with him the notion that identities can be made and sold at will in a presidential campaign.
But there is one difference: Kefauver ultimately had to appeal to a convention controlled by colleagues and party leaders who saw right through him and wouldn’t have nominated him no matter how many primaries he had won. Alexander needs to clear only the more modest hurdle of fooling the electorate. So far, he does not seem to be doing it.
No nominating system is guaranteed to produce good presidents. The process that created Dwight Eisenhower and Franklin Roosevelt also created Warren Harding. The circus we are engaging in now may yet serve up a statesman. It is impossible to be sure. What can be said with confidence is that the present system comes close to screening out conservatives of a particular temperament and attitude toward life. Taft’s traditionalism, Eisenhower’s caution, Stevenson’s tragic perspective — all are bound to be scarce in a politics of self-nomination and compulsive Solutionism.
Perhaps there are moments in history when the absence of these qualities is not so serious. This is not one of them. This is a period in which the United States will be tempted into a whole series of foreign adventures for which an instinctive caution and respect for consensus would be reassuringly appropriate. At home, it is a time of middle-class economic insecurity that calls out for a president with an appreciation of the public desire for order and stability — not one who values change as a good itself.
Maybe even more important, it is a good time to elect a president who can tell the American people something very simple: that they have produced a successor generation too small to support them in the style to which they have become accustomed, and so have to stop spending so much money on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security or the whole country will be broke sometime in the 2010s. In other words, this is a moment suited for a president with the courage and credibility to tell a society hooked on the present that it should begin facing the future. That is a job conservatives used to specialize in. It would be nice to have one around now.
Alan Ehrenhalt is executive editor of Governing magazine and the author of The United States of Ambition and, most recently, The Lost City.
