Heads up. The sky is falling. Barring the possibility of some freak event or act of unprecedented self-destruction by Bill Clinton, this year’s presidential campaign is over. On November 5, American voters will almost certainly return a Democratic administration to the White House. In fact, there’s a serious risk that the Dole-Kemp ticket will spin through its drain with sufficient deadly speed to suck the entire 1994 congressional revolution right down with it.
And what will happen in that case? The GOP will further confuse itself with a round of apres-le-deluge recriminations. You can already hear the angry murmurs begin. It’s a message problem, one faction says; we’ve done a bad job telling people who we are and who Clinton is. No, it’s a substantive ideological problem, says another; we are too far outside the mainstream. Either way, it’s a technical problem, as well, all agree: The Dole campaign is incompetent, plain and simple.
Excited by a landslide, and inspired into analytical overdrive by the Republican self-doubt this event will produce, print and broadcast deep- thinkers will chew anew on a question that not long ago seemed settled beyond dispute. Is this really a conservative era in American history? Hmmm: Maybe not.
Election Day turnout will tell the tale. If Republican voters are given no reason to hope for a Dole presidency between now and November 5 — and given the campaign’s current entropy, it’s hard to imagine they will be — millions of them may give up and stay home. And if the GOP, irrespective of Dole, cannot otherwise impel the great majority of its voters to the polls, then the Republican Congress will vanish. We will appear to be right back where we started, in January 1993.
Dear God, you protest . . . but don’t blame Him. There has been nothing natural or inevitable about the trajectory of this year’s politics so far. Yes, the economy is strong and the international stage seems calm. That makes 1996 an “incumbent’s year,” and the perfect Republican candidate running the perfect campaign might still have fallen short — by a sizeable five points, say, in the popular vote — against a sitting president whose career seems uniquely touched by luck.
But chance is not enough to explain the 10- to 15point Clinton blowout every national opinion survey has been forecasting for months on end. The setback Republicans suffered during last year’s government shutdown can’t fully account for it, either. Speaker Gingrich and company linked their party and its conservatism to a controversial, Medicare-reforming budget without adequately preparing the political ground for it. A painful error. But not an automatically devastating one, for the GOP or its ideas. How do we know?
Bill Clinton proves the point. He is walking to easy reelection, and yet he flees the word “liberal” as if it were a fatal illness. Clinton recognizes the power of conservative ideas, in other words. Would that Messrs. Dole and Kemp could voice those ideas clearly.
Bill Clinton has his off nights. He had one during the first presidential debate in Hartford, an evening during which he seemed grinningly content just to down the football and not suffer injury. But even at half-throttle, every time he opens his mouth, the president is a man who shows evidence of having worked his mind to absorb and synthesize his own arguments — and the arguments of his opponents — into a semi-plausibly coherent . . . well, vision. This is his great strength as a politician. Clinton offers his partisan confreres an account of themselves, a self-justifying story they can take before the public. Voters always want to hear such a story.
Bob Dole tries hard and means well but makes an inadequate storyteller. Dole performed with creditable doggedness in Hartford. He came with facts and ideas to use against his opponent. He had facts and ideas to use in his own defense. But as he has all too often throughout the campaign, Dole managed his memorized information much as a law student manages his answers on a final exam. In presidential politics, alas, you do not get credit simply for mentioning stuff. You’re required to put it together into something larger, something gripping and alive.
Which was always supposed to be Jack Kemp’s great skill. He was supposed to be the Republican presidential campaign’s “man of ideas,” its energy, its talk. But in the vice-presidential debate, up against that patronizing schoolmarm Al Gore, Kemp was something else. He was passive, unprepared, lazy. Time and again, Gore leveled robotic, specific complaints against the Republican party and used Kemp’s past words against Bob Dole. Time and again, Kemp came back empty, with vague and loose appeals to economic growth and inner-city development. No doubt he believes in both. But his passion cannot excuse what was palpably true: Kemp had not done his homework. The story he told was tissue-thin. He hurt his party.
THE WEEKLY STANDARD does not care for Bill Clinton, as a president or a man. It goes without saying that we think it would be far better if Bob Dole and Jack Kemp were elected to replace him in the White House. But neither Dole nor Kemp has done what all national candidates must do: Give the American people a convincing reason to cast an affirmative vote for them in November.
The Republican Congress, however, has earned the honor of reelection. The goal of keeping the House and Senate in GOP hands is still achievable. It is also important, not only for the party as an institution but (far more crucial) for conservatism as an idea. Republican House and Senate candidates, for the most part, run far ahead of Dole and Kemp in state and local preference polls. If turnout is good, those candidates will probably do well enough to secure the reelection of a bicameral Republican congressional majority for the first time since 1928. If not, the fault will lie in one specific place, above all. At the top of the ticket. Bob Dole and Jack Kemp have failed to fulfill their responsibilities as party leaders.
State by state, district by district, Republican candidates should make their case. They should behave as if they were at the top of the ticket, making the overarching case for conservative government that has eluded Dole and Kemp. If GOP House and Senate candidates manage to do this, they still may succeed. And the country will be better for it.
David Tell, for the Editors
