Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Electrifying the Electorate

(Reprinted from the issue of January 15, 2004)

In the hope of keeping on top of the latest developments, I buy six newspapers every morning. As a result, I’m prepared to discuss the current misadventures of Jacko and Britney (Michael Jackson and Britney Spears, to you squares out there), since celebrity doings are about the only things that stand out distinctly from the general buzz of insurgencies, deficits, entitlements, and mad cows.

Oh yes. There’s a big election coming up this year. I’d better bone up on Howard Dean, the Democratic front-runner who most Democrats fear will go down in flames in November, taking other Democrats with him, though none of the other Democratic candidates can remotely match his appeal.

In order to be “presidential material” in the two big parties, you must meet two standards. First, you must be charismatic, messianic, exciting, with a message that will electrify the electorate. Second, you must be absolutely conventional, never questioning the premises of the welfare state.

These two things may seem hard to reconcile, especially since the second is more basic than the first. This guarantees that every election year will bring us a mad stampede of bores.

Howard Dean, thanks in part to his mildly explosive gaffes, is marginally less boring, and therefore faintly more exciting, than his Democratic rivals. He at least gets the others shouting at him, though not loudly enough to awaken the hibernating voters, who have long since learned to snore through these intraparty commotions. Wake us up when you’ve found your latest messiah, they tell the Democrats, and maybe we’ll give him a sniff.

Even Washington can’t get very interested in the Democratic race. The big news in the nation’s capital this week — the thing people are truly and happily excited about — is the return of the great Joe Gibbs as coach of the Redskins. Under Gibbs, the Redskins were a superb team, winning three Super Bowls; but for the last few years, high hopes and new coaches have always ended in dismal seasons. Now Gibbs, a certified legend and a warm memory, is back. But Michael Jordan was a certified legend too when he came out of retirement to play for the Wizards. Premature excitement is nothing new in Washington.

Howard Dean is no Joe Gibbs. He’s just not a very interesting man, and even his supporters don’t really seem to picture him as a president. He just brings their hatred of the incumbent into focus. He’s a protest candidate, not someone you imagine wielding power creatively or skillfully. Even Ross Perot was more inspiring.

To put it another way, nobody seems to have any specific idea how we’d be better off under President Dean. He wants to hold the most powerful office on earth — but why? Just so George W. Bush won’t continue to hold it, apparently. Woodrow Wilson ran for re-election on the slogan “He kept us out of war.” (Then he got us into it, but never mind.) Dean’s slogan might be “He would have kept us out of war.” He’s not exactly quixotic, just subjunctive. He tells us in effect: “If I were president, all this wouldn’t be happening.”

No, but something else would. So just what would that be? He has enough trouble just managing his gestures, let alone offering a plan of action. Lately he’s been working on his appeal to voters far outside Vermont: most notably, guys with Confederate flags on their trucks. And now he’s talking about his religious faith, which is rather inchoate but, he assures us, intense. One indication of its depth is the fact that he quit the Episcopal Church some years ago in a tiff over a bike path. Henry VIII founded that church in a tiff over weightier whims. But then, Dean seems to have no quarrel with Henry VIII. Only with Bush.
 
The True Messiah?

Right now, all the talk is about what Dean would do to the Democratic Party, not what he’d do to — or for — the country. The Democrats, who are divided about the Iraq war if not about the need to replace Bush, can’t even agree about what grounds to oppose Dean on. Using the Internet as the base for his campaign, he has simply beaten his rivals to the punch with tricks they haven’t learned yet. By the time they figure out how they should have handled him, it will be too late. He’ll have won the big primaries, locking up the nomination before spring.

Then the Democrats will have to kiss and make up, uniting in the fiction that Dean is this year’s true messiah after all. It won’t be very convincing, considering all the awful things they’ve already said about him, which the Republicans will be quoting until November. The pretense that Dean is significantly different from (and worse than) the other Democrats will then become useful as proof of another fiction: that Dean is significantly different from (and worse than) Bush.

If politics is the art of the possible, elections are the quest for the lesser evil. Campaign rallies and nominating conventions are so absurd because they present the spectacle of otherwise intelligent people cheering themselves hoarse, amid confetti, balloons, and blaring bands, for the Lesser Evil, just as if he were indeed a messiah bringing — at long last! — deliverance.

Media coverage of these things is carefully poised between mild skepticism, so as not to insult our intelligence, and genial indulgence, so as not to offend our partisan pieties. After all, this is Democracy in Action, and whatever the result, it’s the American people engaged in the great, if sometimes baffling, process of self-government. What does it really matter whom, or what, they choose? The important thing is that they are free to choose at all!

Unfortunately, their choices only keep getting narrower. Both parties agree that, as George Will purrs, “the welfare state is here to stay,” and the only question is how to manage it as 77 million Baby Boomers cease to be taxpayers and become a gigantic new welfare class. Do the math, if you can.

So the issue, to call it that, is which party’s candidate is better able to do the impossible. For that’s what American politics is about to become: the art of the impossible. Instead of reducing the problem by cutting back on federal spending like a good conservative Republican, Bush has chosen to play chicken with the Democrats by expanding Medicare for those 77 million prospective retirees. Top this, you bleeding-heart liberals!

No wonder many Democrats are tempted to risk everything on a kamikaze liberal like Howard Dean. True, the most exciting moment in his campaign so far was when he picked up the endorsement of Al Gore, which was followed by that of Bill Bradley. But who’s to say he’s not a worthy successor to so many other false messiahs?

If you view American history as a long series of changes for the better, bequeathing us a vibrant democracy, then this is no time to shed your optimism. In the spirit of this joyous election season, I’ll keep my doubts to myself.


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Joseph Sobran