On the other hand, Bush’s plummet in the polls is producing an updraft strong enough to elevate Bill Clinton’s campaign, which recently has been a leaden dumpling. It would have been amazing if it hadn’t resuscitated when unemployment was rising in 10 of the 11 largest industrial states (all but Pennsylvania). Those 10 have 246 electoral votes, 91 percent of the 270 needed to win.
Ross Perot, the helium-filled candidate, has lost some altitude because he has been punctured by attacks. Bush has sunk still lower because he has attacked. Some people say it is remarkable that Clinton has pined some public approval while losing the public’s attention, which has been focused on Perot and Bush mud wrestling. Actually, Clinton may have floated up partly because people have not been paying attention to what he has been saying.
To AFSCME–the labor union for employees of state, county and municipal governments–he promised to trim 100,000 government jobs. Federal government jobs. AFSCME stoically received this bad news for others. Clinton said the reduction would be achieved by attrition. But that is small beer. The Pentagon is in the process of cutting 221,000 civilian employees (and 530,000 military personnel) by 1995.
To a Hispanic audience Clinton proposed “meaningful” bilingual education. That probably would be even more balkanizing to America than the kind of bilingualism Clinton considers unmeaningful. Clinton’s draft platform, in mincing language that suggests an uneasy conscience, endorses, somewhat opaquely, “language access to voting.” The opacity is probably purposeful. Those weasel words are a way to avoid saying “bilingual ballots.” Such ballots proclaim that immigrants need feel no obligation to achieve even minimal competence in the language of civic life before exercising the most fundamental civil right.
To an audience of gays and lesbians Clinton promised that an HIV-positive person would address the Democratic convention. He topped that with a resounding cliche in the service of an extravagance: He promised a program comparable to the Manhattan Project to combat AIDS. This in spite of the fact that the billions already allotted to AIDS research make it the most privileged disease in history.
Search Clinton’s draft platform for evidence of fresh ideas, or at least of lessons learned. Talk about looking in a dark room for a dark hat that isn’t there. The Democratic Party’s vaunted change is chiefly adjectival. “Entrepreneurial” is especially favored. “Competitive” gets a good workout. The noun of the hour is “investment.” It is a synonym for “spending.” Clinton favors lots of government investment. His four-year proposals include a $150 billion tax increase (on “the rich” and corporations) to help fund $200 billion worth of “investments.” And he says he will end the $20 million honey subsidy.
Clinton has difficulty arguing (as opposed to asserting) that parsimony has been part of the Reagan-Bush Terror. There have been Republican presidents for a dozen years, but per capita federal outlays (in constant 1991 dollars) have risen from $3,964 in 1977, Carter’s first year, to $5,623 in Bush’s fourth year, an increase of 29 percent. Under Bush real domestic spending, even excluding the S&L bailout costs, has increased more than twice as much as it did under the most recent Democratic president, and faster even than under the Democratic president before that–LBJ, architect of the Great Society. Clinton’s platform, which says the last 12 years have been a “nightmare” of Republican " neglect," suggests Clinton would spend–make that “invest”–even faster. His economic plan suggests a 20 percent increase in discretionary domestic, er, “investing.”
The most telling evidence of the Democratic Party’s unreformed statism, and of the hubris that animates statists, is the platform’s promise of a “national plan” for the economy, a plan involving “a partnership of government, labor and business.” There they go again. Is that what Democrats think is the lesson of the late 20th century–that good government and economic vigor require yet another gulp of corporatism? Aspiring planners of national economies were thick on the ground, here and especially in Europe, as recently as the 1940s and 1950s. But recent history has been chastening, at least to people paying attention.
Planners aspire both to anticipate and control the future. Inevitably a national “plan”–a.k.a. “industrial policy”–tries to pick tomorrow’s “winners” among firms and products. Planners say, with breezy confidence: Why wait for billions of private decisions in free markets to reveal possibilities and preferences? Government in the hands of clever people like us can know what is possible and preferable.
American government is failing at such fundamental tasks as providing streets free of gunfire and schools with high standards, and yet at this moment, when government’s reputation is deservedly rotten, Clinton’s platform says that it is competent to plan the future. National planning, an exercise that is part prophecy and part nanny-knows-best, illustrates this law of institutional behavior: government’s goals become more grandiose as government becomes less able to master mundane tasks. Count on it: when government promises, say, a Great Society, roads and bridges and schools are going to get worse.
You see? The modest revival of Clinton’s campaign may be because of the fact, not in spite of the fact, that people have not been paying attention to him. The usual objective of politics may be exactly wrong this year. Usually candidates want attention. But with this year’s tiresome threesome, the winner may be the one least listened to. The kindest thing that can be said about them is something said in a P. G. Wodehouse novel. When a character boasted that he had never talked nonsense, another character replied, “Then, for a beginner, you do it dashed well.”
