Even so, campaigns have a way of offering hints of what is just over the horizon of the election. The challenge lies in discerning the hints, because they often prove deceptive. Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon Johnson both pledged to keep us out of war–then presided over big ones. FDR promised to balance the budget during the campaign of 1932–then launched the New Deal. George Bush didn’t find out until 1992 that his 1988 lips had been read and remembered. Some candidates and issues are simply ahead of their time. Think of Adlai Stevenson’s failed 1952 and 1956 campaigns anticipating the liberalism of the 1960s, or the stark conservative choices Barry Goldwater offered in 1964 echoing through the 1980s.
A defeat like Goldwater’s can delay historical tides that might otherwise have washed ashore earlier. Should Dole get shellacked, his attack on the teachers unions will be seen as ham-handed and counterproductive. The already emerging backlash against that jab–Dole is being unfairly pilloried as ““anti-teacher’’–may even slow the movement within education toward accountability for performance. As a result, shortsighted politicians might for a time shy away from going after the National Education Association and its hidebound state affiliates. But someday (soon, please) a candidate will win votes by properly framing the issue of union-backed tenure rules protecting mediocrity in our schools. Then assumptions about what sells politically will change, and Dole will look like a prophet.
The most deceptive sleeping giant of an issue remains taxes. Republicans recall fondly that in 1980, Reagan ousted Carter by promising big tax cuts. Not really. Sluggish growth, sky-high interest rates, inflation and humiliation in Iran played bigger roles. In trying to rerun ‘80, it looks as if the Republicans have gone to the candy store once too often. Because tax cuts aren’t selling, they feel obliged to build their ““bridge to the truth’’ with some major distortions. One new Dole ad wrongly says that Clinton ““gave the middle class the largest tax increase in history’’ (in fact, except for a modest gas tax, the middle class escaped almost unscathed from the 1993 tax increase, which landed overwhelmingly on the richest 1 percent).
Dole knows better. Columnist Matthew Miller has even fancifully suggested that the senator’s 15 percent tax-cut proposal is really part of a secret Dole plan to have radical tax-cutting decisively repudiated at the polls. That way, the death of his political career can give life to the principle of fiscal responsibility that he devoted so many years of that career to advancing. If only. By refusing to make the hard choices about where he would cut spending–chiefly on entitlements–Dole has squandered his best chance to go down as a noble, historically significant candidate.
But before the Democrats get too smug about how their ““targeted’’ tax cuts have finessed the issue, they should peer ahead. Jack Kemp may have lost the vice-presidential debate, but his message could yet win the war in the next century. Whenever he and Dole talk about ““ending the IRS as we know it,’’ they get a big response. Though a rich guy like Steve Forbes was the wrong messenger for a flat tax, its day will come. If Al Gore wants to win in 2000, he will press Clinton to move beyond tinkering to a fundamental restructuring of the tax system. Give Bill Bradley a commission to draft a simple, deduction-free plan and push it through.
Clinton won’t do that because his own dreams for the history books are tied up with tax deductions designed to expand the current 12 years of universal education to 14, with some kind of college or community-college degree as common as a high-school diploma is now. That might end up being the big idea coming out of the 1996 campaign–or it might not. Looking back, we may all be wondering why China’s nuclear-arms sales to Pakistan didn’t become a central campaign issue. Or the 40 million Americans who still have no health insurance. Or the militias.
The point is, there’s no way of knowing. The GOP assumption is that Clinton’s character will inevitably come back to haunt him if he’s re-elected. Not necessarily. Whatever their seriousness, none of the so-called scandals from Whitewater to Travelgate to the FBI files has really touched him personally–so far. The only one that might truly reflect on his character–as opposed to his staff, management abilities and wife–is also the only one that is not being turned into a campaign issue, namely Paula Jones’s charge of sexual harassment.
Nor can it be. The Republicans should have learned their lesson in 1992 on the so-called ““trust’’ issue. If they couldn’t scare the public about Clinton then, they won’t be able to now. Those who are so sure he’ll turn out to be Richard Nixon should reflect back a couple of years to when they were so sure he was Jimmy Carter. Let’s stop misinterpreting the past to try to predict the future. All we really know is that the good times never last. Fear not: the future won’t be so boring after all.
