GONE WAS THE AL GORE whose high-energy, big-necked huffing and puffing about policy led one to the sure conclusion that if presidential debating were an Olympic event, the veep would have been disqualified for steroid use. Gone, too, was the George W. Bush who looked like a diffident, 5-foot-2 cowhand (nickname: Stretch), quailing before the raging bull. The country’s pundit class claimed that last Thursday’s vice-presidential debates created a nation-wide bipartisan yearning that the presidential tickets be flipped — that Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman become their parties’ presidential nominees — for the reason that Cheney and Lieberman were talking about “the issues” more than George Bush and Al Gore had. Sorry: If people liked the debates, it wasn’t because Cheney and Lieberman were substantive or civil. It was because they engaged in happy talk.
This debate was described as being about substance because pundits wanted it to be about substance, and both candidates played to that wish. But from the most substantive issue of the campaign — what to do with the gargantuan budget “surplus” — the two candidates fled as if it had sharp teeth. Let’s get one thing straight about the budget surplus: There isn’t one. It’s a demographic artifact, the result of the Baby Boom generation (now aged 36-55) entering its most productive years, in which it’s paying huge taxes and collecting no benefits. George Bush talks about giving $ 1.3 trillion back to American taxpayers, which is only 5 percent of government revenues. Al Gore plans to pay current benefit levels to retirees, based on the assumption that the economy will grow at the rate of — oh, say, 7 percent a year for the next three decades. But once the Boomers retire and are totally non-productive, we’re going to have only two workers for every retiree, and it’s going to take about $ 10 trillion to set them up in the lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed. So what do these “substantive” veep would-bes have to say about this?
Joe Lieberman set the tone when, in his opening statement, he said of the budget surplus, “We’re not spending anything more than is projected by the experts. In fact, unlike our opponents, we’re setting aside $ 300 billion in a reserve fund just in case those projections the nonpartisan experts make are not quite right.” You’d think Cheney would have battled back, but no. He, too, refused to entertain the possibility that the “surplus” would be less than munificent. “With respect to the surplus, Bernie, we’ve got to make some kind of forecast. We can’t make 12-month decisions in this business.” So forget about it!
Then the pair got into education, a weird issue in this election, because George W. Bush’s insistence on nationally required standards and Al Gore’s on voluntary ones makes the Democratic party the champion of states’ rights for the first time on any issue since Jim Crow. This federal supervision Cheney described as “accountability.” He added that “the achievement gap between minority and non-minority students is as big as it’s ever been.” It leaves one wondering exactly what educational issue Gore would use to get to the left of Bush.
Finally, there was abortion. Cheney laid out the Republican position: that the party was pro-life, but only so long as there was never, ever, any chance whatsoever that opposition to abortion would be codified in law. “Bernie, the abortion issue is a very tough one . . . ” he began. No it isn’t! Not for a pro-lifer. And then he proceeded to nudge the GOP’s position into line with President Clinton’s. “Governor Bush and I have emphasized that while we clearly are both pro-life, that’s what we believe” — sort of — “that we want to look for ways to try to reduce the incidence of abortion in our society. Many on the pro-choice side have said exactly the same thing. Even Bill Clinton, who’s been a supporter of abortion rights, has advocated reducing abortion to make it as rare as possible.” So the ultimate aims of being pro-life and being pro-choice are a matter of degree, and the difference between the two positions is merely tactical. In other words, there’s no difference between them at all.
There’s a dismal aspect to this election. Dick Cheney described its stakes as being inordinately high. “We’re really going to choose between what I consider to be an old way of governing ourselves, of high levels of spending, high taxes, an ever more intrusive bureaucracy, or a new course, a new era if you will, and Governor Bush and I want to offer that new course of action.” New how? Lieberman sounds like the Ivy League liberal he was in the 1960s and 1970s. Cheney sounds like the chief of staff in the Ford administration that he once was, seeking nothing more than to move closer to his interlocutor, the better to confuse himself with him. Kennedy and Nixon in their own debates in 1960 talked about the crisis in education, the amount the rich benefited from tax cuts, the fraying social safety net. So did Eisenhower and Stevenson in 1956. And in 1952. And if you were to look at Dewey and Truman in 1948 . . .
In fact, the vice-presidential debates leave one with the depressing realization that the end of the Cold War brought not a new politics to America but an old one. It looks as if the fall of the Iron Curtain introduced no new issues. Instead, it just gave us back the politics of the 1950s minus one issue.
Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
