The return of the Ancient Mondaleans was a fitting finale to an election season that featured weary faces making weary arguments to weary voters. The Senate, always a refuge for the elderly, was on the way to becoming Washington’s version of Madame Tussaud’s. Republicans were the first to go to the retirement bench, pushing Elizabeth Dole in North Carolina (aided by husband Bob, the Viagra pitchman) and resurrecting former presidential candidate Lamar Alexander in Tennessee (who, alas, was no longer “Lamar!,” having dropped the exclamation point he used in his campaign literature in 1996). Mondale, for his part, could at least claim juniority to former senator Frank Lautenberg, who eagerly returned to the Senate campaign trail in New Jersey at the age of 78.
The first campaign of the post-9-11 era had an aura of forced nostalgia, as if it were the finale of an earlier, simpler historical time. Most candidates (Wellstone, ironically, was a rare exception) studiously avoided addressing profound questions raised by the rise of Al Qaeda and its allies. Are we indeed safer as a nation than we were a year ago? Will a war with Iraq, alone if necessary, make us safer? How do we do business with a world that both admires and hates us? There was little discussion of the economy at large, since few Democrats were willing to challenge George W. Bush’s $1.3 trillion tax-cut program. “The discussion was scattered and unfocused in this election,” says Darrell West of Brown University. “The big issues didn’t dominate the debate.”
Instead, the record-setting barrage of TV ads dwelled on market-tested, old-shoe issues aimed at seniors and near seniors, who vote in disproportionately high numbers in low-turnout midterm elections. House and Senate candidates focused on Social Security, prescription-drug plans, Medicare and a patient’s bill of rights. “It seemed like the only question was: ‘Who’s going to pay for my Lipitor?’ " says Dan Glickman of Harvard’s Institute of Politics.
The electoral system itself seemed caught in a downdraft, with courts bracing for challenges to voting procedures and ever-mounting hoards of cash producing ever-nastier campaigns–and ever-lower turnout. The country as a whole, and politics in particular, seemed in dire need of a cleansing, idealistic youth movement. Minnesota, in fact, has often produced them: Hubert Humphrey’s crusade for a civil-rights plank in the 1948 Democratic platform; former senator Eugene McCarthy’s “Get Clean for Gene” antiwar effort in 1968; Jesse Ventura’s dorm-room-and-Internet-based reform campaign of 1998. Last week’s “Fritz Blitz” (in which he stayed on the road and off TV as much as possible) didn’t seem likely to mark another such generational milestone–no matter how happy Marty Kaplan was to be back on the bus.
