Presidential election 1988: the degradation
of democratic discourse

By JAMES W. CAREY

To twist a line of Henry Adams, the succession of American presidents from George Washington to George Bush hardly gives one confidence in the law of evolution. Darwinism in reverse would describe the curve of our politics even had Michael Dukakis won.

The election provides fresh evidence, if we need more, for the continuing decline of the intelligence and purposes of our political elite. Despite our egalitarian protests, we do have a political elite: those who possess power. However, they no longer act much like an elite. Michael Dukakis did not appear to know why he was running for the presidency and did not appear to want the office. For him, apparently, the nomination was the prize, Atlanta his moment in the political sun, and the campaign an energetic but lifeless exercise of concession. George Bush, on the other hand, desperately wanted the presidency and was willing to stoop to almost anything to snare it. He felt the presidency was owed him: a workright rather than a birthright. He had loyally served the party for a quarter century, swallowed his pride and lived in Ronald Reagan's long shadow for eight years, and now it was his turn, the presidency his reward for all he had done and endured. Unfortunately, Bush misplaced, somewhere along the way, the purpose of his campaign. He wanted power and prestige but had no political goal beyond that.

Why can we not recruit an acceptable political elite? We have not had a hereditary political elite, one prepared for public service by family, education and cultivation, for a generation. We have not had a professional political elite, one prepared by a lifetime of work in the precincts, parties and smoke-filled rooms, for a half generation. What we have now is a meritocratic political elite — careerists in pursuit of a career or, more common now, a second career. Having exhausted the stage, screen, playing field or space program, they turn to politics for gainful employment. Or even worse, they look to politics from the outset as an alternative to other professions, as a path to a pension and a way of avoiding the unemployment lines. This is an elite that spends its time building a resume: getting by and getting ahead, holding onto their present job, thinking about their next one. Such an elite is without corporate identification, public obligation or any notion of public service beyond accumulating wealth, power and prestige. Their only qualification is mere success in the climb up the ladder, the morally neutral ability to perform.

As William Pfaff among others has reminded us, no democracy can long function without an elite to represent the only superiority it recognizes, that of the mind and character. At a minimum we have to expect our political elites to be hostile to the values of the marketplace and the bureaucracy, but our candidates embrace both. At a minimum we have to expect our political elites to lead rather than patronize or pander to our self-deceptions. Our candidates can figure out no way to lead other than to feed back to us whatever their advisers tell them we want to hear.

Bush and Dukakis are representative of the type of leadership we are getting in all our institutions these days and, therefore, why all our institutions are working so badly. Products of a meritocratic education system which equates high grade with both intelligence and character, they have no notion of the appropriate ends of political power or the moral character of governance. Are we so undeserving that this is the best our political system can produce?

All that said, George Bush won and he deserved to win. It was a campaign of mendacious lying on one side and endless vacillation and equivocation on the other. Bush, we are not surprised to know, turned out to be the perfect yes man, the perfect No. 2 man; he simply went along with whatever was required to win without regard to the consequences of the campaign for the temper of the country or his ability to govern it. Whatever Lee Atwater or Roger Ailes read out of the tea leaves of the public opinion polls as strategy was acceptable to him. This was a market-driven campaign with a vengeance: the endless repetition of a few "unique selling propositions." As a result the electorate was reduced to boredom and torpor. Meanwhile, the one item on the national agenda — the economic, political, educational and cultural decline of the United States — was left undiscussed. How could it be discussed when the candidates themselves were further evidence of that very decline?

Bush, however, was closer to public sentiment (if not public

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opinion), closer to the illusions we have of ourselves, and the beneficiary of the tidal movement of conservatism that is a feature of all industrial democracies (including the putatively socialist ones). Moreover, Bush inherited from Ronald Reagan a monopoly of the symbols of nation, patriotism and family that are virtually the only currency of presidential elections.

Dukakis at least showed more character. There were some dungs he was not prepared to do. Dukakis, however, turned out to have an absolutely tin ear for the vox populi. He began by trying to sell competence over ideology, and when he proved to have neither, all political routes were closed off. The listless and dispiriting campaign revealed only the continuing confusion and emptiness of the national Democratic party. At no point in recent years have the Democrats been willing to ask themselves whether Republicans (and conservatives generally) were winning national political races because they spoke to legitimate and felt needs of people. The Democrats take the easy road in explaining defeat: malicious campaigning, Hollywood dissimulation. They cannot admit that they have lost the ideological purchase on the American people in campaigns for the presidency. Democrats comfort themselves with victories in local and state elections where candidates articulate more directly with interests. But on the big issues — the economy, foreign policy, the courts — they are hopelessly out of touch and seem incapable of learning anything. The Democrats lost, as Bruce Babbitt pointed out, because they ignored presidential politics; they were silent on issues of peace and prosperity, and they allowed Republicans to steal and dominate issues surrounding the family, children and the future. On the latter, all Democrats can do is chant individual rights. George Bush did not have much to offer on all these things either, but he did have the blessing of Ronald Reagan and that was enough.

Democrats seem determined to explain their defeat by the superiority of Bush's media advisers and the unprecedented scurrilousness of the Bush campaign. There is some truth to this but not much. Political campaigning is rarely a gentlemen's art and is rarely "nice." However, it usually has a purpose beyond winning an election. The contrast with the recent Canadian elections is instructive. The contest between Brian Mulroney and John Turner was hardly gentlemanly or nice. It was an exercise in venom and invective and filled with hyperbole, exaggeration and bad faith. However, there was a major issue on the table, an important bill before the next Parliament, and a specific direction for the country at balance in the election. It was a political rather than a merely personal contest. Passion ran thick, and accusation was in the air because the stakes were high and tangible. Mercifully, the campaign was also limited in time. With us, there was invective but no passion; all was pointless sound and fury. The issues in question — Willie Horton, the Boston police, the "pledge" — were local and artificial rather than national and genuine. The campaign was an endless posturing, an appeal to mood and sentiment rather than to politics and policy.

We are left, post November 8, with a dangerously divided electorate. Those colorful television maps showed the sectional divide of politics: a deep swath of Republican blue running from the South to the Southwest and up through the western Plains and Rocky Mountain states. Dukakis won or ran a strong race in a thin band of states strung out along Interstates 80 and 90. Blacks stayed overwhelmingly with Democrats, but that only increased the racial polarization of the parties. Bush ran strong among men everywhere, but Dukakis managed to hold to an equal share of the women's vote. Those identified as "moralists" in the Times Mirror polls gave 94 percent of their vote to Bush, up from 56 percent in the first Reagan campaign. Bush overwhelmingly carried the vote of the well-off; Dukakis won among the poor; and they split the vote of those with incomes between $20,000 and $30,000.

A Victorian campaign, with its forbidden words and issues, whimpered away when Dukakis conceded defeat and revealed, inadvertently, the bankruptcy of his campaign. He excessively congratulated Bush (a nice guy to the end) and then astoundingly gave his standard campaign speech, a speech that wasn't any good during the campaign. He closed with obligatory regards for family, friends and supporters. He said nothing about ideology, not a word about the Democratic party and nothing about the future. Dukakis conducted a campaign solely about himself, and when it ended he made it appear that politics was ending with his defeat.

Jesse Jackson followed Dukakis on television and the contrast was refreshing. The journalists, of course, had already forgotten about the election and had moved on to the next story. They only wanted to know about the forthcoming struggle for control of the party. Jackson would have none of it and spoke of the work necessary in Congress and in the party in order to win the election in 1992. He spoke of the party, of ideology, coalitions and the future. The conclusion is inescapable: Jackson, not Dukakis, should have made the run at the presidency. He would have lost and lost badly, but he could have been to the Democrats in 1988 what Barry Goldwater was to the Republicans in 1964: the vehicle of an ideological reformation of the party, the point around which new intellectual and political resources could be formed. Jackson would not have been the beneficiary just as Goldwater received no reward for reconstituting the Republican party. But for Democrats to win, they have to get off the pendulum that swings between liberalism and conservatism and create a populist attack on wealth, privilege and the elites currently running the country while at the same time defending the traditional values of family, neighborhood and community. This Jackson might have done if he could have been lured away from some of the more bizarre ideas concerning foreign policy.

There was much talk this time around about the role marketing men, media advisers, advertising writers, public relations strategists and public opinion pollsters played in the campaign. Since the first Eisenhower campaign, professional salesmen (hired guns without political commitment) have assumed increasing prominence both in directing campaigns and as official spokesmen for tactics and strategy. The most cynical rumor of the season was that Bush chose Dan Quayle at Roger Ailes' suggestion for Quayle is an Ailes client as well. Ailes is apparently dreaming of 16 years as the man behind the throne.

What was new in this campaign was that Ailes, and other media

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advisers to both candidates, openly announced their contempt for the electorate during television interviews. They freely admitted that campaigns were merely tactical matters in which voters were mere pawns in a process of cynical manipulation.

But this is also an old story and to understand it we need a long aside on the system of marketing products that grew up in the 19th century. Back then products were distributed in the United States by a "gravity feed" system. Manufacturers put their wares at the door of the factory and hoped they would flow downhill to their ultimate customers. In such a distribution system enormous power was vested in wholesalers who repackaged and priced merchandise, got it into the hands of the retailer and controlled its promotion.

Manufacturers invented modern advertising to break the control of middlemen. Advertising, by influencing consumer demand for packaged and branded merchandise, suctioned goods through the distribution channel. This restored power to the manufacturer and led him to pay unusually close but manipulative attention to the ultimate consumer. This marketing system, first worked out with the newspaper and national magazine, was not perfected until radio and then television were available. These media spoke from a national center to individual consumers without the necessary intervention of local media or even proximate groups like families and neighborhoods. However, the audience for radio and television was unknown, unseen and invisible, so it had to be tracked as a demographic abstraction: run down by research, polling and audience measurement devices. This audience was not known but categorized. What came of this was a paradox: Broadcasters developed a contempt and disdain for their unknown — and fickle — audience, and in their frustration invented the notion of the 12-year-old mind as the ruling American intelligence. The audience, on the other hand, developed an unusually personal and intimate connection to the human voices and faces featured in the electronic media. Broadcasters and advertisers now had a direct connection to individuals but had to stage and feign intimacy lest the audience silently steal away.

This degenerative system of invisibility and feigned intimacy has had a long gestation and now has taken over politics. The displaced middlemen are the political parties, of course. As national entities, the Democratic and Republican parties exist largely to raise money for television and to get out the vote. They otherwise play no organizational nor even an ideological role in the general elections. Political advertising is designed to suction votes through the political channel. Campaigns are merely staged for television; set pieces that are mere extensions of advertising.

The candidates travel in a time machine and space capsule. They never know where they are or what day of the week it is. They are kept safely insulated from voters and from the real concerns of ordinary men and women. In fact, it is the traveling journalists and photographers and their assorted cameras, crew and equipment that form the carapace in which the candidates travel. No voter could possibly penetrate this migrating horde. Morever, as David Broder candidly admitted, it is the media apparatus that directs the political system; it was the press that determined that Paul Simon's campaign, among others, had to come to an end. Following Iowa and New Hampshire anything more than two candidates would have too expensive and complex for the media to cover.

In campaigns staged by and for the press and media advisers (the two groups that persist across presidential campaigns), voters become mere statistical artifacts, demographic variables, deracinated entities without real existence. Votes are tallied across groups as if we were running a national plebiscite, and only the anachronism of the electoral college reminds us of an older system of politics. In this new system we have the deadly combination of feigned intimacy and silent contempt that is the hallmark of electronic communication. Just as we no longer have customers but consumers, we no longer have citizens but voters. Customers haggle and citizens argue; consumers and voters do neither. They watch and they buy. We are, thank God, better than that, but we are despite, not because of, the polical system.

And that brings us to the final point, the point at which both ends of the narrative join. Just as we no longer have real political elites, we no longer have real citizens. Rousseau complained of his own century: "We have physiocrats, geometricians, chemists, astronomers, poets, musicians, and painters in plenty; but we no longer have citizens among us." We too leave politics to the politicians and have no need for citizens. But without citizens, as Bernard Barber has said, "there is no public domain, no commonweal, no civic responsibility — and so, all too soon, no democracy."

Because some of our lawyers, some of our teachers and increasingly some of our actors and football players become political elites, they bring to politics the sense of professionalism cultivated in their craft. But professionalism is a denial of citizenship and of the public domain. It is worse. Because the domain of citizenship has been evacuated from our public life it cannot be learned in our private lives. There are, in truth, damned few citizens in our universities and school district, in our corporations, professional associations or trade unions. Therefore, these entities fragment into competing citadels and antagonistic interests.

The crisis is more general then. The domain of the citizen is vanishing in America because no one wants citizens anymore. The political parties do not want citizens and therefore do not attempt to cultivate them. One cannot learn citizenship in the schools for they are mere training grounds for professional success or occupational failure. There is little room for citizenship in civil society. With the elimination of conscription and jury duty rare and resisted, only occasional visits to the polling booth by less than half the population is left of a obligation. We expect little of civic life beyond the spectatorship of a self-absorbed and self-interested population. This is what our elite is teaching us about citizenship, and this is what drives the degradation of democratic discourse.

James W. Carey is dean of the College of Communications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author ofCommunication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society published in November by Unwin and Hyman of London and Boston.

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