These are heady days for the self-appointed disciplinarians of American politics. There’s so much for them to do, many Republican and Democratic fannies to spank. Festering national problems demand commonsense, compromise solutions, you see. But our party politicians never come when they are called to complete that assignment; they’re out running wild with their fellow gang members, extorting campaign contributions and getting into knife fights with the rival mob. If only these children could be made to quiet down, clean up their act, and finish their chores.
It’s a seductive impulse, this sense that modern politics would be better if less rambunctious and smaller, its layers of partisan “dirt” removed. American government is structured to resolve questions of national policy in a battle conducted by major parties with opposed ideas. And often, in a transitional era like this one, and on issues like last year’s Republican budget, the fight is an inelegant stalemate. Creation of an effective majority must await further national elections, in which the parties have at it some more — with even greater heat and directly before the voters — until one side outpersuades the other.
But the panjandrums of big Media and the Alienated swing voters of grassroots populism have lost patience with the never-ending, rigorous debate that democracy requires. The press boys are weary aristocrats of good- government refinement: They have heard all the policy arguments before, and they already know the right answers, having long since worked them out in neat little op-ed pieces and talking-head guest spots on CNN. The populists, for their part, do not pretend such sophistication. They have no answers, and bristle when asked to provide them. but they are just as certain as the pundits that those answers exist, blocked from public view by the self- interested cowardice and dishonesty of our elected officials. In this essential respect, Ross Perot and the New York Times editorial page march in lockstep. Cease the squabbling over partisan orthodoxy, they demand of ” the system.” Find the middle. Get it done.
Do the two parties defend themselves — and the honor of democratic discourse — against this fundamentally anti-political crusade for “reform”? They do not. Quite the contrary: Fearing its power, they rush to embrace its logic.
Democrates have learned an obvious lesson fromthe mid-term election of 1994. Their party’s animating principle, liberalism, is broadly and deeply unpopular. Defending it is dangerous. So they’ve packed its arguments in dry ice and locked them in storage. As directed by President Clinton’s White House, current Democratic advocacy is an elaborate, image-protecting nothingness. The president and his party colleagues are for everything that’s nice and uncontroversial, and opposed to everything that isn’t.
No such trick is too cheap or shameless to be employed. Last week, they pulled off two of them. First came word that Mr. Clinton had suddenly discovered a gaping hole in the Constitution: It fails to guarantee crime victims the right to speak at the sentencing and parole hearings of their victimizers, an oversight by the Founders that the president proposes to correct by amendment. Twenty-four hours later was unveiled a nationally distributed television advertisement produced by the Democratic National Committee and organized around footage of a burglar’s hands prying open a backyard window — and dark-skinned people leaping over border fences and being arrested by the feds. The president, we are meant to understand, is tough an immigrants.
Abandon liberal orthodoxy. Find the middle. It works; Clinton enjoys a solid and steady 20-point lead in preference polls about the 1996 presidential election. But it won’t help America make up its mind about the correct size and reach ofthe federal government — or about what cultural norms we will strengthen or reject. And Republicans won’t be much help in that effort, either, it seems. The GOP’S most articulate and interesting ideological spokesman, Newt Gingrich, stung by the low poll standings he earned during the 1995 legislative session, has made himself almost completely invisible. And the party’s titular leader, presidential nominee-in- waiting Bob Dole, apperas similarly fixated by last year’s news. He doubts that vaguely partisan and independent middle America can be persuaded to conservatism. So he mutters about President Clinton’s theivery of the oldest and most popular Republican ideas — and neglects to come up with any new ones.
How, then, will the national agenda be advanced? What will the two parties argue about? They will argue about restricting the scope and form of their own arguments. This year, once again, the Senate was cowed by critics of political “corruption” into taking up a campaign-finance “reform” measure that would have applied strict limits on the amount of money congressional candidates might use to run for office — to proclaim their views and engage their challengers. It was unconstitutional legislation, and it is now, mercifully, dead, narrowly defeated by a filibuster threat. Reaction to the loss was swift and predictable. “Truly awful,” harrumphed the New York Times. “The system is incable of change from within,” announced russ Verney, national coordinator of Ross Perot’s new spoiler third party.
Both parties are now conditioned to accept such insults without objection. Each, in fact, is almost eager to confess and repent its sins of debating excess. Something called the American Association of Political Consultants, a bipartisan guild of campaign handlers, has now gone on record denouncing the practice of “push polling.” Push polls are the crime du jour of dirty campaigning. As described by Larry Sabato and Glenn Simpson in their recent bible of political reform, Dirty Little Secrets, the technique involves phoning targeted voters late in a campaign, pretending to be conducting scientific survey research unconnected to the interests of a particular candidate, and quickly revealing misleading and derogatory information about that candidate’s opponent.
Take one example that Sabato and Simpson apparently regard as horrifically beyond the pale: In a 1992 Ohio congressional race, the Democratic polling firm of Cooper & Secrest phoned voters in the district to tell them that Republican Martin Hoke “in the past was part of a religious cult where he wore a turban, a beard, and had an assumed name.” The real facts of the matter? Sabato and Simpson set the record straight: “Hoke had joined the Sikh religion two decades earlier while a student at Amherst college. But the Sikhs — a respected religious entity — are certainly not a ‘cult,’ even though male members wear a turban and grow their hair long.”
And how to prevent such dastardly misdeeds? According to the reform agenca proposed by Sabato and Simpson, and now adopted by the consultants’ association, campaigns may still phone voters with embarrassing information about their opponents. But the callers may not disguise themselves as ” reputable” hired-gun pollsters (no smirking, please). They must clearly reveal the partisan motivation for the call. And the information in question may not be “false or misleading.” You’re still allowed to inform voters that Martin Hoke was a Sikh, in other words. But you may only do so “truthfully.”
And therein lies the central and ugliest problem with the entire goo-goo project to shame partisan political debate back into its paddock. What does ” truthfully” mean? Like it or not, there really is no objective third-way path to truths and oughts in American politics. People disagree about such things. Political parties are designed to reflect that disagreement — and settle it, temporarily at least, on behalf of a persuaded majority sentiment. If loud, robust, partisan argument — about abortion, or affirmative action, or anything else — is “dirty cammpaigning,” we need more of it, not less.
–David Tell, for the Editors
