Insufficient Funds
The folks in Bill Clinton's
White House see November's election as a replay of Ronald Reagan's 1984
electoral triumph. But they may be overlooking a more obvious parallel: Richard
Nixon's landslide in 1972.
Until his campaign moved
into gear, Nixon's popularity, like Clinton's until recently, was low--stuck at
the "nemesis figure of 43 percent," as Theodore White recounted in The
Making of the President, 1972 . But, again like Clinton, Nixon was fortunate
in the choice of his opponent. By fall of 1972, in full contest with the
hapless George McGovern, Nixon was enjoying 60 percent-plus popularity.
Though
Nixon had no Gennifer Flowers growing in his home garden, he had been plagued
by allegations of unethical--or at least unattractive--behavior dating back to
his earliest political days in California. Still, while the public might think
twice about buying a used car from either "Tricky Dick" or "Slick Willie," most
people seemed willing, then as now, to make an independent judgment about the
incumbent's ability to govern--especially when weighing it against the capacity
of his challenger.
Both presidents came into their second-term election
campaigns having governed against type: Nixon, the Republican, proposed to
establish a federally guaranteed income for all families with children. He
extended the food-stamp program nationwide and established a federal benefit
floor for the elderly and disabled. Urged on by a Democratic Congress, he
signed a pile of big-government initiatives. These included a 20 percent
increase in Social Security benefits, plus automatic cost-of-living
adjustments; the "black lung" disability benefit program for miners; and
creation of the Environmental Protection Agency as well as the Occupational
Safety and Health Administration.
Grants for
low-income housing programs, needy college students, the arts and humanities,
urban renewal, mass transit, community health, and worker training gushed from
the federal Treasury. When inflation jumped in the summer of 1971, Nixon didn't
fool around with balanced budgets, tight money, or other conservative nostrums;
he slapped on wage and price controls. ("," he had remarked a few months
earlier.)
Democrat Clinton, on the other hand, having set
off leftward at the start of his first term, soon reversed course. Under strong
pressure from the GOP Congress in his third year in office, he submitted a plan
that purportedly would balance the budget in seven years--at the price of deep
domestic spending cuts. Later, on the campaign trail, he declared his devotion
to school uniforms, youth curfews, tough crime control, and kiddie-safe TV
programs. Where Nixon would have doubled family welfare rolls, Clinton signed a
bill that promised to deny benefits to most welfare recipients after five
years. "The era of Big Government is over," Clinton proclaimed in his 1996
State of the Union address.
The
challengers to both presidents were undermined by the rise of noisy extremists
in their respective parties who alarmed many mainstream voters. For McGovern,
it was the hard left, abetted by the hippie fringe--Bella Abzug, along with
Abbie Hoffman. For Dole, it is the religious right and noisy populists--Ralph
Reed, with Pat Buchanan looking over his shoulder. The 1972 Democratic platform
was a wish list compiled by every liberal--even radical--group in the country,
who carried their banners across the floor of that year's party convention.
Southern whites and blue-collar workers deserted the party, and its
fund-raising capacity was debilitated for years to come among big donors and
small givers alike.
The GOP had its 1996 convention under far better control,
but the fractures, made evident during the contentious primaries, were no less
deep. Debarred by his own party from running on his record of fiscal and social
moderation--and with Clinton pre-empting much of the conservative agenda--Dole
sought, as McGovern had in 1972, an eye-catching proposal to set him apart from
his competitor.
And, like McGovern, Dole was
enticed into an untenable choice, not by his party's fringes, but by ostensibly
responsible establishmentarian elements. For McGovern, it was the liberal
professors of Yale and Harvard who persuaded him to embrace his misbegotten
$1,000-a-person "demogrant"--a cash-welfare plan that would have put half the
country on the take. For Dole, the damage was done by a coalition of pinstriped
supply-side enthusiasts and Nobel laureates from Chicago, Harvard, and
Stanford. These worthies lured the red-ink-wary Dole into espousing an
across-the-board 15 percent tax-rate cut that even the average voter (not to
mention most of Wall Street) could spot right off as a budget buster.
With the
economy rebounding smartly from the brief 1971 recession and inflation
temporarily in check, even the unpopularity of the raging Vietnam War couldn't
shake the power of Nixon's incumbency. McGovern's big blip in the polls came
earlier than Dole's post-convention gain. His gap with Nixon, according to
White, narrowed briefly to 5 percentage points after a string of primary
victories. The disastrous Democratic Convention, however, left McGovern a then
record-setting 23 points in the hole. Dole got a bounce out of the
well-orchestrated Republican Convention, but soon fell back into a double-digit
deficit. With the gap still of landslide proportions in most polls, Dole has
been written off, correctly or otherwise, by the pundits. (See this week's
"Horse
Race.")
Finally, lest their opponents' weakness not
suffice to produce a landslide, both incumbents got further help from a
third-party candidate: Nixon from George Wallace, who drained white Southern
support from the Democrats, and Clinton from Ross Perot, who likely will drain
white suburbanites from Dole.
Beyond the election, the
parallels may break down. Nixon's Watergate sins (dismissed by the public on
the eve of the election as, at most, the work of overzealous campaign aides)
caught up with him in his second term. Clinton's Whitewater and assorted other
troubles, having been more thoroughly aired in his first term, may have run
their course. In any case, it's hard to imagine Clinton's vice president, Al
Gore, accepting bundles of cash in his White House office as Spiro Agnew
did.
It's not so hard, however,
to imagine the GOP following the pattern set by the Democrats after 1972:
pulling themselves together momentarily to field a winning centrist candidate
four years later--and then thwarting his ability to govern (as the Democrats in
Congress did Jimmy Carter's)--thereby producing an era of domination by the
opposition for the next two decades.
