Voters--Not Candidates--Used to Get More Respect

One of the traps that seniors--emphatically including me--fall into far too often is the good-old-days syndrome. Back in the good old days, we say, it wasn’t like this. It was a lot better. Sometimes there is truth in this, but much of the time seniors are guilty of selective remembering. Human beings have an enormous capacity for screening out the bad memories and allowing the good ones--often embellished--to grow until they fill all the cracks and crevices of memory.

Which brings me to the just-completed election. (Let me have one more shot at it and I promise not to bring up elections again until 1992; and if you doubt that, read my lips.) The “dirtiest in history” was a catch phrase used repeatedly in the media to describe this election. Is that true? There’s no way to measure election mendacity. We can only put today’s excesses up against our recollections of the past and make judgments. I suspect this has been going on since Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr excoriated one another in 1800.

So are we completely off base in being hypercritical about the tactics used in this recent election? Or has it really reached a new and distressing level of negativity?

Three things, it seems to me, set the 1988 election apart. The first is money. If we are no less vituperative than we have been in the past, we are investing enormously more money in spreading this poison, especially in local and regional races.

The second is communication. For most of the lifetime of our republic, the spoken or printed word was the only means a candidate had to reach the electorate, which required dealing with an occasional fresh idea or legitimate issue. Then television corrupted our whole political process by substituting cosmetic appearance, the “sound bite” and the quick hit for ideas. This technique was developed into a fine art in 1988 by people whose principles start and stop with getting their candidates elected.

The third difference is subtler. When I was growing up--and indeed a century before that--the voters were treated with some measure of respect. Roosevelt and Willkie, Truman and Dewey, Eisenhower and Stevenson actually dealt with ideas (and, of course, Abraham Lincoln first came to national attention because of his political debates with Stephen Douglas). By contrast, today’s voters are generally treated with contempt, like not-very-bright children who can be bribed, cajoled or gulled at will. The election process is in the hands of hucksters and power brokers who base entire campaigns on this premise.

Examples are easy to find. On the national level, there was the refusal--or inability--of Michael S. Dukakis to deal substantively with issues when he had the chance (on Ted Koppel’s “Nightline,” for example). The rejection by both sides of a legitimate debate format, compounded by the propensity of the press to ask sappy questions (we still don’t know, for example, Bush’s connection with Irangate because he was never pressed on it). But by far the supreme gesture of contempt for the voters was Bush’s selection of Dan Quayle, whom virtually no one considers qualified for high office. Bush, in effect, stuck Quayle in our collective eye, then hid him throughout the campaign when it became clear he couldn’t open his mouth unscripted without sticking his foot in it.

Examples are even more profuse at the local and regional levels. Most notably, I suppose, is the insurance companies’ go-for-the-groin campaign to keep consumers from sticking it to them for a change. Among other things, I received two different mailing pieces, each labeled a “Democratic Voter Guide.” All the major races and propositions were listed, with the Democratic candidates and liberal positions on the propositions marked for support, with one exception: the propositions sponsored by the insurance companies were all marked “Yes” in red. The implication that the Democratic Party supported the “Yes” votes was countered only by a disclaimer in almost invisible type that this flyer was not “authorized” by any Democratic candidates or organizations. The insurance industry spent more than $70 million on this kind of dishonesty, and you know where that money came from: right out of our pockets.

Locally, there was the flyer from an organization called Newport 2000 that polluted mail boxes with a headline that read “Feces on the Bay: Newport Politics--It Stinks.” There was the Democratic Party’s contempt for its own voters when it didn’t file a candidate in the 38th Congressional District, then allowed a Lyndon LaRouche follower to represent the party. And finally, there was the use of uniformed security guards at the polls in Latino districts of Santa Ana--a supreme gesture of contempt. Tom Fuentes, who heads the Republican Party in Orange County and hired the guards, was quoted the next day in the Times-- after his candidate had apparently won--as saying he didn’t mean to offend anyone.

The dreary list could go on and on--and I suppose these tactics will, too, as long as they win more often that they lose. But I still believe voters were treated with more intelligence and respect in the good old days. And that we’ll probably never achieve that place again until we begin consistently to stiff the candidates who resort to these tactics.