Hoax populi: if we love populist leaders so much, why don't we elect one.

Nineteen ninety two was going to be different. This was the year Americans were going to ditch the professional politicians. After all, look what the pros did to us four years ago.

It didn't turn out that way, of course. Though Ross Perot won nearly 20 percent of the popular vote, the presidential election came down to a choice between two Big Leaguers who'd played politics nearly all their adult lives. Still, our thwarted hunt for a populist leader was important, not because of the true heroes it turned up-none-but because it brought us face to face with what we were really seeking: our own presence in the political process.

The national mythology rests on the blithe conviction that amateurs can run a democracy. We can pluck from our midst a non-politician, a rough-hewn leader able to speak the truth from his or her unsullied heart. Any one of us could do it. From the New Hampshire primary on, we cried out for such a person. Yet aspirant after aspirant just didn't measure up.

Some candidates clearly didn't deserve to carry the torch of political amateurism. Pat Buchanan's man-of-the-people mask didn't stay on long. The guy was a pundit, he drove a Mercedes, he even grew up in Washington. Jerry Brown was reared in politics. He claimed to have seen the dark side of big money and then came back (clothes tattered, a black eye, cuts, and bruises), but his too-belated conversion never really seemed credible. It only played up his weirdness.

Paul Tsongas also stalled. Although for many he seemed to be a viable outsider, the problem was: for whom? His unpolished goofiness and talk of bitter medicine seemed fresh to the Eastern Volvo crowd. But when he took his message to the rest of the country--at least judging from his anemic performance in the Midwestern and Southern primaries--he was speaking the alien tongue of the Northern elite.

Ross Perot came the closest. "You got a stray dog that nobody's sure has ever been vaccinated," he said about himself. "Then we got the two registered dogs over here," he added, referring to Bill Clinton and George Bush. "And, believe me, by the time they got through blow-drying their hair and pasting them all up, they looked like they've just been to the kennel show." At one point in the early summer, Perot led Bush and Clinton in the polls. But he could have done better. He could have won.

Perot's failures as a populist are threefold. First, he fatally transformed himself into a more political creature: Perot II steered clear of such inflammatory topics as means testing Social Security. Second, the Texan was severely hurt by his decision to embark on further adventures in paranoia. The third and most important failure was his conspicuous lack of compassion. Good populists aren't Darwinian. Perot's curt dismissal of his son at a damage control press conference, his media killing sprees and other moments of intolerance made some of us wonder what would happen if we weren't world-class. If we couldn't keep up on the march to Washington, would he ditch us too?

Gliblock

Most revealing in our search for the populist hero, however, was our reaction to Admiral James B. Stockdale, Perot's running mate. After we slammed the door on applicant after applicant, we beheld a man who embodied everything we'd been asking for. Stockdale was neither a politician nor a salesman and--best of all--he hadn't even wanted the job (Perot had asked him). He should have been the poster boy for our democratic myth.

Like Kierkegaard's "man of faith," Stockdale was to be a hidden leader we'd pass on the street. He was the kind of guy who'd blend in with the rest of us at the Cineplex on Friday night. Even his name evoked what we wanted: stores brimming with fruits and vegetables, verdant hillsides, safety, solidity, traffic officers at school crosswalks.

But when James Stockdale took the stage in Atlanta, when America came face to face with the virgin leader we'd been searching for all year to guide us out of our domestic mess, we wanted to run screaming from the room. We make a fetish of ridiculing the varnished hair of Dan Quayle and Al Gore, but what an unnerving apparition was Admiral Stockdale's too-vital shock of uncontrollable white.

The amateur's entry into the lions' den of the professionals turned out to be the ultimate anxiety dream. Stockdale seemed to have fallen through layers of unconsciousness onto a kleig-lit stage. There he was, cornered between two trained lions: a senator who came through with a subject, a verb, and an object every time and a vice president who made up in quickness and Midwestern boosterism what he lacked in grammar. "Who am I," was all the Admiral could ask. "Why am I here?"

After his performance, even the most ardent of cheerleaders for populism would have had trouble envisioning him in the Oval Office. Still, you couldn't blame Stockdale for playing with his glasses, tripping over his words, and saying the weird things from deep in the id that we all say under pressure. We understood all too well why he stabbed the podium with his thick, black pen as if he was trying to find a hidden ejector button that would blast him back to the safety of his office at the Hoover Institution.

Stockdale did what the rest of us--that is, those of us who haven't been practicing to be president for the last 20 years--would have done. Given our quest, you'd think we'd feel sympathy, identification, maybe even joy that one of us was closing in on the White House. Instead, many of us felt shame, fear, even contempt. That contempt was for ourselves, for our own self-delusion, for our need to convince ourselves that we could run a government.

This mythology of a popular democracy serves a purpose. It's comforting, not to say sedating, for us to believe that ordinary Americans can get up on stage and debate with the pros. Our worship of amateurism this year is a direct result of our exclusion from the political process and our isolation from each other. The more we cede debate to the pundits, the higher the security walls grow between ourselves and our neighbors, the more we project ourselves back into the political process through the symbolic surrogate of the populist hero. The deeper our emotional wounds, the more we need to believe that one of us could come in from the outside, from beyond the beltway, and lead.

All year, surveys and interviews showed that Americans felt exiled from the political system. We felt powerless to curb Washington's follies: the S&Ls, the deficit, Iran-contra, Iraqgate, the House post office. The pundits, the news media, and the handlers--whose job security is served by our exclusion--had hijacked the electoral process. At the very least, our information was being refracted through their prism of professionalism.

The most important reason for our search for the populist hero who could embody the masses was the severity of our isolation. According to the 1990 census, nearly half of all Americans are situated in the suburbs, edge cities, and exurbs, centerless places where congregation is next to impossible. No neighbors or sidewalks, just cars and walls. The other plurality lives in the division and isolation of cities, where the psychic distance between Beverly Hills and South Central Los Angeles is measured in light years.

Weak connection

The second presidential debate dramatically shattered that isolation and powerlessness. The evening revealed something far more important than the candidates' relative suitability. The audience-participation debate--indeed all this year's public access politics--was not about establishing an unmediated connection to the candidates. It was about establishing an unmediated connection to one another.

The realization that our concerns about the deficit were sensibly shared by a surprisingly random cross-section of people was democratically empowering. The populist heroes weren't on stage, they were in the audience. They were our neighbors. No longer did we have to delude ourselves that we could make it to the podium. Our dignity came from finally remembering the building blocks of real democracy: that we are the ordinary people who can ask the smart questions.

So as long as we remained out of touch, isolated from our neighbors, we had to deny loudly our reliance on the trained professionals, the lucid technocrats, the political elite. The extent of our dependence on the pros, with their smooth answers and their controlled gestures, was our collective shameful secret. Our rage at the candidates merely underscored our incapacity.

When we reappropriate the knowledge of democracy, we can use and appreciate sound bites--and all professionalism--for what they are: the precious currency of political exchange, the most effective means of conveying ideas to our neighbors. Confident in our intelligence and our sense of community, we can usefully listen to the tutored answers of the Gorebots and the Clin-Trons rather than the blips and fragments that spew forth from the mouths of the informationally unschooled.

The true populist hero for the modem American megalopolis is like a phone line, a conduit through which we can communicate, educate and reassure ourselves. It's no wonder George Bush failed: his chaotic cyberspace offered little but static and broken connections.

Ross Perot offered us two choices, both inadequate. Though he had a high-quality line, it went one-way: from him to us. He was a man of 30-minute infomercials and no questions from the press. His disdain for dialogue exposed a less than populist mentality. He could never be our messenger. And by choosing Stockdale he signaled his contempt for our need for dialogue. He didn't pick Stockdale to stand around and shoot his mouth off, Perot said. "Washington's overrun with people who can do that."

Paradoxically, it was Bill Clinton's smoothness, along with his five-point plans, that gave him the best connection. Not only was the sound clear as a bell, but the president-elect furthered the conversation--and our empowerment--by asking us questions: "How may I connect your call?" he seemed to be saying.

With our newfound self-assurance, we may be able to choose a leader somewhere between the linguistic ineptitude of James Stockdale and the super professionalism of Bill Clinton. Whoever that person is, he or she will have learned from the election of 1992 that the populist for our age must be a facilitator as well as a cowboy.