Both of these stories were boffo media events. Duke’s heavily encoded, factually warped ideas about “welfare illegitimacy” will be amplified in American politics for years to come. Kerrey’s dirty tale, told privately at a New Hampshire banquet when he thought the microphone was off (the details of it are still unclear), was analyzed to death. Talk about a sick joke: more voters now associate Kerrey with a gag about Jerry Brown and a couple of lesbians in a bar than know that he won the congressional Medal of Honor in Vietnam.
Compare that coverage to something else that happened in presidential politics last week. Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, who was in the news as the man to whom Kerrey told the joke (Did he laugh or didn’t he? reporters dutifully asked), gave a speech. It was the second in a series of addresses offering a detailed analysis of what the hell has gone wrong in this country and what we can do about it. Clinton outlined a “new covenant for economic change that empowers people, rewards work and organizes our country to compete and win again.” He denounced both Republican supply-side and Democratic tax-and-spend policies, outdated union work rules and outlandish pay for CEOs. And he offered a series of unusual ideas (e.g., tax incentives to discourage companies from relocating offshore) for economic renewal. This is clearly a candidate who has thought coherently about why he wants to be president.
You don’t have to be a Rhodes scholar like Clinton to figure out what happened next. With a few exceptions, the speech was widely ignored-including by The New York Times. It lacked the conflict and color of what is conventionally defined as “news.” And–horrors!–the speech was prepared in advance. The press consumes plenty of well-cooked mush, but it prefers it to at least look raw. Thus any seemingly unscripted, offhand comment or joke–however trivial–is seen as “revealing,” while any prepared speech-even one that a candidate had been cogitating on for years-must by definition be a contrivance.
Worse, lazy-minded reporters might be manipulated by other candidates into viewing some of Clinton’s ideas through a David Duke prism. In an earlier speech, Clinton, stressing “personal responsibility,” said that Americans must face up to the issue of forcing welfare recipients to go back to work. These aren’t code words. Clinton goes to pains to distinguish his argument from Willie Horton-style racial divisiveness. But Douglas Wilder and Mario Cuomo are already trying to define such views as outside Democratic orthodoxy. Wilder even connected Clinton to Duke. If Clinton, habitually cautious, were to succumb to the Offensiveness Police, he’d lose one of his best issues.
Why is it that Republican politicians consistently get away with being less cautious than Democrats? Ronald Reagan (“We begin bombing in five minutes”) and George Bush (“We kicked a little ass,” re Geraldine Ferraro) made open-mike miscues in 1984. When Reagan told a joke about Poles and Italians in 1980, it barely hurt him–even with Poles and Italians. One explanation is that they weren’t voting for Reagan because he pandered to their particular interests as Poles and Italians. They were voting for him because he pandered to their larger interests as Americans.
This is what several of the Democratic candidates insist they want to do next year–end the Balkanizing of their party. The aim is to talk broadly about the middle class without making too many promises to its component parts. Even Cuomo, supposedly the symbol of New Deal traditions, says he’s willing to challenge the sanctity of budget-busting entitlement programs like government pensions. In years past, Democratic candidates have been electrocuted for less. Their fear of offending the party’s interest-group orderlies ruled everything. The challenge now is to make sure this straitjacket comes fully off, and that the peculiar demands of the campaign don’t put it back on again.
