Then again, the candidates haven’t had all that much to say. The most striking thing about this election has been the utter absence of new ideas. I can’t think of one. There are those who say this is all to the good – people have given up on government; we don’t need new ideas. In last week’s CBS-New York Times poll, only 30 percent said that ““government should do more to solve national problems’’ while 63 percent said government ““is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals.’’ All right, then: it falls to Republicans – the natural beneficiaries of this trend – to come up with creative ideas for cutting back government and restoring order (which was the other great voter concern). They haven’t. They’ve shouted ““fire’’ in our public theater. They’ve run on cutting taxes rather than cutting spending. They’ve run on symbols – the death penalty, immigrant-bashing – rather than cogent antidotes to the family disintegration that caused the anarchy. But the Democrats haven’t been any better.
In fact, one of the few times that a Republican made a bold and responsible suggestion for cutting spending – William Kristol’s notion that agricultural subsidies should go – Democratic dinosaurs massed and pounced, led by . . . the president of the United States. Bill Clinton spent the last 10 days of the race traveling about, palpably relieved that Democrats finally agreed to be seen with him, saying the election was about moving forward, not backward, while arguing in reverse – that Republicans were poised to cut social security, a fossilized chestnut of limited credibility (one recent poll suggested that more younger voters believe in UFOs than in social security). Which raises the second distinguishing characteristic of this awful year: it was ultra-retro. Most of these campaigns could easily have been waged in the mid-1970s. The Republican ““Contract With America’’ was circa 1980: cut taxes, raise military spending, balance the budget. The president spent most of his time campaigning with Democrats who left their best days in the 1960s, the Kennedys and Cuomos of the party; he moved his cable show, effectively, from MTV to the Nostalgia network.
How could so much change in a mere two years? In two words: Bill Clinton. A skeptical public gave him the opportunity to show that activist government was still plausible – and he blew it. There have been many accounts of how and why he blew it; the grisly details do not bear repeating here. But one grisly detail has been largely overlooked or misinterpreted: the impact of health-care reform on this election. It has been devastating. The conventional explanation – that Clinton didn’t ““win’’ and therefore suffered – does not suffice. The problem wasn’t gridlock, but the nature of the plan itself – an old-fashioned, liberal, bureaucratic mess of the very sort that voters find implausible in this straitened, competitive era. Health care defined Bill Clinton as an old Democrat, just as gays-in-the-military defined him as a lifestyle liberal.
Actually, the bottom line on health care is worse than that. It dominated the past year. It seemed all the Clintons could talk about. It may have been all Mrs. Clinton wanted her husband to talk about; she wasn’t very pleased when NAFTA, the crime bill or ““reinventing government’’ intervened. This pushed the administration’s real successes into the background. Several weeks ago, for example, the president signed an important defense procurement reform bill, which will save billions. It means the end of $700 toilet seats (quartermasters can now go to their local Wal-Mart and stock up). But no one knows about it. Rather than attach himself to the paleo-Dems, the president might have been better advised to wander the country with a toilet seat in the campaign’s waning days. The public has needed to be reminded that politicians sometimes get it right.
Clinton’s strange affinity for the very sort of policies (and politicians) that most Americans now reject has given rise to a vast misunderstanding of the actual state of the nation, apparent in the results of last week’s Newsweek Poll: 59 percent think the economy is still in recession, 54 percent don’t think the deficit has diminished – and on and on. The president might argue, with some justification, that it’s the media’s fault: we’re allergic to good news. But he didn’t try very hard to tell his economic success story until the last few weeks of the campaign, when almost anything any politician says is assumed apocryphal.
Clinton has often seemed lost this past year. His once formidable ability to sense the public mood deserted him somewhere in the health-care morass. His recent foreign-policy success – not the policies but the dignity and discipline he conveyed while pursuing them – may have put him back on the right track. But make no mistake, the ugliness of this election year is a direct result of public anger at a president who lost touch and lost his way – which is one thing 1994 does have in common with 1992. The difference this time is that the ““out’’ party hasn’t had the sense to offer a positive alternative.
