STILL THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH
Dole's a counter-attacker, Clinton's a
campaigner, and Pat's fun — Hugh Brogan
is enjoying it all so far
HAPPY DAYS for the senior senator from Kansas: suddenly he has seen off all his rivals and can be sure of the 996 con- vention votes he needs to secure the Republican presidential nomination. Cali- fornia holds its primary election on 26 March and will probably put him over the top. Happy days for onlookers, Pat Buchanan has vowed to keep fighting to the last. It has been difficult to take Mr Buchanan's candidacy seriously; part of his charm is that he does not seem to take it seriously himself. But his entertainment value is enormous, even if some of his other values are suspect. Alone of the can- didates he talks like a poet, or at least like a spontaneous human being: 'The peasants are coming with pitchforks!' Don't wait for orders from headquarters, my friends. Mount up and ride for the sound of the guns!' We're going to fight until hell freezes over, and then we're going to fight on the ice!' (Is Mr Buchanan a fan of Eisenstein?) The imagery may verge on cliché, but it is fresher than anything heard in American politics for years.
Mr Buchanan has also shown that it does not take millions to make an impres- sion on a presidential race. His campaign on a shoestring has not won him the nomi- nation, but it has made more of a mark than the lavish, self-financed bid of Steve Forbes, the multi-millionaire. For it was Mr Buchanan's views, not his relative poverty, which checked his dizzy course, just as it was his views and his eloquence which for a moment made him the front- runner. In the end his extravagant espousal of every grievance and prejudice in sight won him the support of less than a third of Republican primary voters in the states where he competed: the rest thought him an extremist. But he intends to go on mak- ing trouble, and has the means to do so. Unless he changes his mind (as Bob Dole must be earnestly hoping) the months between now and the convention in August should be quite lively. For connois- seurs of the greatest show on earth it is all delightful.
The story so far confirms the old obser- vation that presidential elections have a way of confounding the prophets at every turn. The surprise this time is that anyone should be surprised at Dole's victory. He is the senior Republican in the race, and as the pundits are now busy pointing out to each other, Republicans usually turn to their top men: vice-presidents, big-state governors, previous presidential nominees. The last dark horse to get the nomination was Wendell Winkle in 1940, for in 1952 Eisenhower's standing as a national hero outweighed his late recruitment to the party and Robert A. Taft's authority as Senate minority leader. Dole is much more acceptable to the moneybags of the party than Forbes: he has been cultivating them for years. When Buchanan fright- ened the big corporations by his populist attacks on them in New Hampshire the bosses took shelter behind Dole, and in the party of capital, capital talks. Dole had the support of the great majority of senior Republican office-holders, had collected millions and millions of dollars and had built up effective organisations in all the states, organisations which none of his rivals could equal. Even if you have your own super-fortune to spend, as Forbes had, machines are not put together overnight. Thanks to all these advantages Senator Dole was able to absorb his early defeats and counter-attack overwhelmingly. He will not be taken lightly again.
Yet can he beat Clinton? It is ominous for the President that the question can even be asked. Clinton by now ought to be invincible. America is at peace, and pros- perous (though the experts differ sharply as to what this means to the average citizen). He holds the presidency, and should have used his first term to build up a position of unassailable strength, as did Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan before him (none of whom, whatever legend says, had an easy time of it). Instead he has frittered away what strength he had, like Carter and Bush. He has no reserves of trust and affection with which to meet emergencies, whether in Bosnia, the Taiwan Strait or at home, where the Whitewater business is still drag- ging damagingly on. If anything goes wrong between now and the election he may find it difficult to shift the blame onto the opposition as he did so brilliantly when Newt Gingrich unwisely engaged him in war a outrance over the budget. In short, Bill Clinton may yet defeat Bill Clinton.
But the procedures of the election have so far served him well. He faces no chal- lenge from inside his own party, while the Republicans' attachment to the seniority principle has confronted him with an opponent who may prove as brittle as Thomas E. Dewey in 1948. Clinton is no Truman (it is a long way fiom Indepen- dence to Hope, though Missouri and Arkansas are adjoining states) but he is an immensely effective campaigner. Dole in his previous national campaign, as the Republican vice-presidential candidate in 1976, came across as surly, even shifty, and as Theodore Roosevelt's daughter Alice remarked when explaining Dewey's defeat, `a soufflé doesn't rise twice'. (Dewey had been the Republican nominee in 1944 when he lost to Franklin Roosevelt.) Dole is now an old man with not very much to say for himself: according to Pat Buchanan, 'You go to a Dole rally and think you're stepping into a funeral par- lour.' He could be harder to beat.
He has one problem which Clinton is spared. The Republicans are now the majority party in the United States, which means that they have built up a coalition, centred on the educated, urban or subur- ban middle class (sneered at by enemies as `country club' Republicans) but allied to the reactionaries of the South, the gun- lovers of the mountain West, the anti- abortion lobby, the anti-immigrant lobby, and so on. Like all such coalitions — like the Democrats of yesteryear — it has a fierce propensity for quarrelling with itself; no bad thing (it tests men, ideas and strategies) if in the upshot the contenders decide to sink all differences and rally behind a compromise candidate and a compromise platform. The trouble for Senator Dole is that Mr Buchanan and his followers seem to be in no mood to com- promise. In 1992 they pushed the party much further to the Right than was pru- dent, and they are in a strong position this year to repeat the mistake. Furthermore, the Christian Coalition, which has much the same programme as Buchanan, endorsed Senator Dole in the critical South Carolina primary, which he won; he is in its debt therefore, and it will certainly push in the same direction as Buchanan in such matters as the party platform and the vice-presidential candidate. Every student of politics knows what the result might be. In 1972 George McGovern made Richard Nixon seem a moderate; in 1983 Michael Foot yielded the centre to Margaret Thatcher; in 1992 Bill Clinton was elected President.
There are signs that rank-and-file Republicans recognise the danger, but the rank-and-file won't make the decision. It will be up to Senator Dole alone to reject a disastrous strategy — if he can.
A further complication is that the Buchanan candidacy has unearthed anoth- er danger in the bitterness, confusion and anxiety among Americans who fear for their jobs or have already lost them in `downsizing'. They may find it difficult to vote for a party of fat cats, and the fat cats' candidate. Clinton will certainly try to win over these resentful voters, who until the 1970s would have been natural Democrats. Dole may need Buchanan to bring them on board, but anything which makes Buchanan conspicuous will also draw attention to his hostility to Israel, feminism, free trade, etc., and make it difficult for Dole to reach out convincingly to the centre, as he must if he is to win.
It was probably their accurate perception that Buchanan has altered the agenda of presidential politics that led so many com- mentators to overrate the threat he posed to Dole's bid for the nomination; yet he may cost Dole the election.
On the other hand, in November 1945 my daddy told me never to predict the out- come of a presidential race. He had just conspicuously made a prediction himself, in the Sunday Times. He had foretold a vic- tory for Dewey.
The author is Professor of American History at Essex University.
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