Campaign 2004: are guile & force enough?

In the presidential election of 2004, there are a lot of reasons to be concerned about the state and future of the country--something like 70 percent of Americans have been telling pollsters that the election matters a "great deal" to them, enough for John Zogby to call it the "Armageddon election--but not many seem to be excited about the campaign. The contest is strangely flat, often strident but scripted and predictable, an unfunny sitcom doomed to early extinction. A majority of voters don't much like either candidate, but about two-thirds of them are now persuaded that George W. Bush will win, and the Democrats are where they were a year ago, convinced that Bush could lose the election through bad news or some major gaffe, but hard pressed to see how John Kerry can win it.

The president is leading the political dance, defining the terms of the contest, and Kerry hasn't shown any promise of changing that. As a campaigner, he is anything but a star turn. His rhetoric is humorless and portentous--he always sounds to me like a slightly demented Episcopal bishop. He has no signature issue and no clearly defined agenda: rule out distaste for Bush, and it's very hard to complete the sentence, "I am for John Kerry because ..." In recent days, Kerry has been doing better, giving speeches that have focus and bite, but this improvement may be too little and too late.

The great majority of voters have already made up their minds, especially the public-affairs junkies who listen attentively to PBS, NPR, or the cable news channels. The voters for whom Kerry and Bush are competing are more likely to watch network news, and at this point in the campaign, the networks are almost impervious to issues and argument. They've settled, for the most part, into a "horse race" coverage that features polls and sound bites, amplified chiefly by whatever scandal happens along. A dramatic initiative--Kennedy's call to Mrs. King comes to mind--might claim media attention and shake prevailing images, but so far that hasn't been Kerry's style. And while the debates might change voters' impressions of the candidates--I write this a week before the first scheduled debate--the Democrats recognize that as a TV debater, John Kerry is more likely to resemble Al Gore than John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan.

Obviously, Kerry's campaign gets a low score for tactics. For example, it was sensible to accentuate the positive at the Democratic convention, but Kerry's staff--assembled higgledy-piggledy and including some political operatives who are the next thing to standing jokes--fell foolishly in love with the idea. In the first place, while voters will tell you that they dislike negative campaigns, they're speaking in their role as good citizens, thinking about what's good for the country, just as they were in 1998 when substantial majorities consistently said that they wished the media would spend less time on l'affaire Lewinsky. They could, of course, simply have refrained from watching, but they knew, at least half-consciously--and more important, the networks knew, altogether consciously--that as private individuals we could not resist following the case in all its luxurious tawdriness. And in the same way, we think that negative campaigning lowers the quality of civic life, but the negative ads are those we are most likely to remember.

Moreover, apart from a few moments like Barack Obama's soaring keynote, the convention's positive theme was a one-note emphasis on Kerry's service in Vietnam, at least a little tiresome and sometimes really tacky, like Kerry's "reporting for duty" salute at the beginning of his acceptance speech. Kerry's program, as presented to the public, was what it has remained: largely vague, carefully hedged, and only uncertainly coherent.

Partly, this reflects Kerry's electoral experience in Massachusetts, a state in which a Democrat who survives the primary is reasonably sure of election if he or she doesn't mortally offend some element of the party's (admittedly fractious) coalition. Partly, it reflects the Nader factor in this election: competing for voters in the center, Kerry has to avoid estranging voters on the left. What is unmistakable, however, is that as a candidate, Kerry's hallmark is caution.

In reaching for support among the relatively small number of undecided voters in the center, Kerry's version of moderation is trimming, splitting the difference, fuzzing the edges of policy so as not to offend. The difficulty, of course, is that this tactic makes him look weak or evasive--an image strengthened, to the delight of Republicans, by the necessary complexities and compromises of Kerry's years in the Senate. There is, it should be noted, another sort of moderation: one that takes some relatively strong positions from the Right and some from the Left, the sort of roughly balanced daring that seems to come naturally to Senator John McCain or, in a softer mode, to Bill Clinton. In his campaign mode--his conduct in office is quite another thing--it is also an image cultivated by George W. Bush.

It is an anxious time and, looking for leaders to deal with perils and powers, Americans treat wisdom as desirable but guile and force as indispensable, and Bush's stubborn resolve at least looks like strength. Still, a great many--and perhaps most--of us suspect that the administration's stance is only so much bravado, a role played by stay-at-home warriors like Bush, Cheney, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. In fact, the Bush administration seems to have calculated that this cinematic toughness is what we really want. In this view, Americans are worried, but in a rather distant way: most of them don't want to serve and don't want their kids to do so; they aren't willing to pay higher taxes or give up their Hummers. After all, Bush's (or Karl Rove's) "ownership society," with its implicitly oligarchic conviction that invested capital is the greatest contribution to the public good, sees most of us as consumers rather than citizens.

As Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg argue in their Downsizing Democracy (Johns Hopkins University Press), there's altogether too much truth in this diagnosis of American public life. Still, there's more to it than that: just as there are plenty of people in "Blue America" who worship an Awesome God--Senator Obama was right about that--even among Bush supporters in the "Red states" there's a yearning for citizenship with more blood in it. As Gary Bauer, the conservative activist, puts it, "Joe Six-Pack doesn't understand why the world and his culture are changing and why he doesn't have a say in it." It isn't just Joe: Howard Dean, screams and all, spoke to and for multitudes who recognize that while we can't hope to avoid change, we can hope for a say about its shape and direction. The Bush administration appears to believe, however, that a good cheerleader is all the voice we need.

At the Republican convention, Rudolph Giuliani likened Bush to Churchill, but the president isn't asking most of us for heroic sacrifices--nor is his administration particularly attentive to the soldiers who are making them, or to their families. Instead, he has consistently offered us the mall and our regular routines. The Bush administration, to judge by its policies, is moved by the implicit conviction that American patriotism is largely spectatorial.

The Democrats are better only on the margins, but in democratic politics, it's the margins that make the difference. John Kerry still has a chance to take our citizenship seriously, to offer measures that ask and expect us, in John Kennedy's echoing challenge, to do what we can for our country. For Kerry, such a venture into civic courage would at least be news, and might be something more.

We aren't about to be Spartans, we Americans, but in most of us there is a bit of Private Ryan, and the best hope for John Kerry and the Democrats is to find words and ways to draw it out.

Wilson Carey McWilliams, a longtime contributor, teaches political philosophy at Rutgers University.