The Republican presidential campaign has stripped its poorly tooled sprockets in the effort to illuminate Bob Dole’s advantages over Bill Clinton as a guide and steward for the next four years of American public life. It remains possible, nevertheless, through the smoke generated by the GOP’s gunning but motionless engine, to discern meaningful policy differences between a Dole presidency and a second Clinton administration. Those differences alone are reason enough to cast a vote for Bob Dole.
Federal policy is not the only thing in question on Election Day, however. The future direction of conservatism, on the one hand, and of the Republican party, on the other, will be affected, too. But even that stuff is “just politics.” Something still grander is at issue in the Dole-or-Clinton choice, something hinted at but never fully captured by the Dole campaign’s lurching, nervous assaults on the president’s “character.” It’s something, in our view, that commands support for the Republican ticket of Bob Dole and Jack Kemp. That something is this: The current president of the United States is a self- conscious demagogue. And so a vote for Bill Clinton is a vote, in effect, against the very soul of America’s constitutional order.
Demagoguery is a shrunken word in modern discourse. The term has come simply to connote a politician’s use of expansive dishonesty to frighten the public about his partisan opponent. It once meant more. Along with aristocracy, demagoguery was one of the evils the Founders drafted our constitution to help forestall. In place of aristocracy, the Founders made an electoral democracy. And to ensure that democracy might be just and virtuous, they gave it republican form. A vitally important distinction was made between momentary popular will and reasoned public judgment. A certain space was established between the people and their government. It was a space intended for deliberation.
The demagogue makes war on this deliberative space. His god is Popularity. He seeks power purely through the manipulation of mood — by encouraging people to believe that their instantaneous and shifting wishes can and should be realized in the instantaneous and shifting decisions of his government. He calls this process “leadership.”
The Founders did not mean for Americans to be demagogically “led” by their own passions like this. And they believed they had done much to address this central risk of democracy. It is a “moral certainty,” Hamilton wrote, “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed by the requisite qualifications.” The country would be too big for that: “Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone surface to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.”
If that was ever true, it is no longer. The institutional independence of American government from its citizens — its republican character — has eroded more than a bit. We now vote every day, for all intents and purposes, in the polls that control political news. And our president constantly and compulsively responds, as no president has ever responded before, with a charismatic smile, or a close-set jaw, or an erapathetic touch to the knee for some victim of tragedy.
“Low intrigue” and “the little arts of popularity”? Notoriously so, where this president is concerned. A Clinton-Gore television ad scores Bob Dole for being “against vaccines for children,” a reference to Dole’s Vote against an almost universally derided and counterproductive public-health initiative. Our colleague Charles Krauthammer calls the “against vaccines” charge ” vintage Clinton.” He’s right, but each week brings fresh examples of the infection, each more outrageous than the last. A series of Clinton commercials on welfare reform, gay rights, abortion, and campaignfinance reform all spin slowly around the truth — none of them ever actually touching it.
Another series of commercials does much, much worse. “Melissa lived every moment,” the grieving mother of a childhood cancer patient says at the beginning of one. “My daughter Polly was only 12 years old,” Marc Klaas says at the beginning of another, but someone “kidnapped her and took it all away.”
Other politicians do a slippery to-and-fro from time to time. Some have been known to use the occasional dead-baby-style emotional slam as a tool for electoral victory. But few American politicians — certainly no modern presidents — have ever employed classical demagoguery’s dark arts to such great and complete effect. And no major American politician has ever bragged about it. Bill Clinton brags about it. His government, remember, is a ” permanent campaign.”
The American political system was not designed to function this way — with its executive administration permanently and biorhythmically attached to popular sentiment. It is fundamentally un-American, this presidency by Q- rating. Bill Clinton is a high priest of political popularity. Bob Dole has never mastered the liturgy. This difference between them will likely defeat Dole. Ironically, it is the strongest possible reason why he deserves to succeed.
David Tell, for the Editors
