What the beltway could learn from the Bible belt; campaigns aren't horse races, they're moral arguments.

WHAT THE BELTWAY COULD LEARN FROM THE BIBLE BELT

You might think you've heard too much, not too little, about religion in politics. But, quick, to what denomination does Jesse Helms belong? What's the percentage of evangelicals in the North Carilona electorate? Don't know? You are forgiven, since the news mdeia act as though the Bible and its various believers and interpreters matter only to inhabitants of an insignificant Beltway symbolically cinched around Dayton, Tennessee, where the Scopers trial occurred in 1925.

You are not forgiven, however, if you don't care. In Under God, (*1) Garry Wills contends that we pay a heavy price for the secular Beltway's perspective on American elections. Unless we look at religion, especially evangelical Protestantism, Wills contends, "we cannot understand our corporate past; we cannot even talk meaningfully to each other about things that will affect us all (and not only the 'religious nuts' among us)." To Wills's mind, by ignoring religion the press not only misread the key events of campaign 1988, but also abetted the moral enervation of America's democratic dialogue.

The Beltway perspective--as evidenced by the recent campaign opuses of Sidney Blumenthal, Paul Taylor, Jack Germond and Jules Witcover, and Roger Simon--tends to turn campaign coverage into stories about journalism. Everything becomes grist for Fred Friendly roundtables. The pattern holds for Jesse Jackson (Do We The Media have a double standard?), Michael Dukakis (Did Maureen Dowd's Sasso story and Bernard Shaw's debate question range beyond Our Professional Objectivity?), and George Bush (Should We The Media check these television ads for accuracy?). Media ethics is an interesting and important topic. But it's a selfish stand-in for understanding campaigns, and it inclines thoughtful people to identify with the journalists' perspective, and, thus, toward the wrong kinds fo reforms.

By contrast, Wills cuts to the essential quality of presidential campaigns. He regards them as an interplay of moral arguments. The contents of the arguments matter more than who wins and who loses the final vote count (not to mention the synthetic vote counts along the way). A presidential campaign, he argues, is more significant as a communal ritual than as a preface to government. Wills's approach is a tonic to political scientists, who have wailed for years at reporters and other campaign junkies that most voters pay little attention to the elction process, and the few who do use it to reinforce their pre-existing views, not to genuinely make up their minds. Wills recognizes that candidates' talk and imagery, along with their public reception, tell us how millions of Americans want to live.

Candidates and their teams craft campaign messages according to the competitive strategies that reporters like Germond and Witcover dissect, but Wills holds that the speeches, ads, symbolic acts, and remarks to the media that we remember--"Follow me around. I don't care, I'm serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They'd be very bored."--we remember because they are also steeped in moral dilemmas. When a candidate wins name recognition, that means his campaign message has reached great numbers of people who grew up under similar influences and, like the candidate, seek either to conserve their formative world or to liberate themselves from it. Campaign events are thus, foremost, occasions to plumb American values.

Wills examines the cavalcade of arguments through a combination of biographical reporting, textual exegesis, and intellectual history. In past works, he unpacked the Declaration of Indendence, Nixon's "Checkers" speech, and Ronald Reagan's career. In this book, his chapters on Gary Hart are characteristically wide-ranging, featuring interview material from Hart's college classmates and teachers and the suggestive juxtaposition of an excerpt from Hart's spy novel with Hart's romanticized description of George McGovern in 1972. And Wills traces the development of the former senator's boyhood affiliation, the Church of the Nazarene, to demonstrate that this "cult" is not so far removed from the protestant mainstream as the word suggest--not on attitudes concerning adultery, at any rate.

Gary Hart rebelled against his Nazarene upbringing and adpted a high-risk self-image of the kind many Americans like to see in escapist movies, but not in presidents. Faced with the choice The Miami Herald thrust upon him, Hart might have won support by confessing his sins and asking forgiveness--in short, by returning to his roots. Alternately, Hart could have broken new ground and admitted adultery while declaring it irrelevant to his race for the presidency. But by failing to make a moral argument--by turning on the press instead, shifting his story, and clamming up about his character--he unleashed the doubt Americans has harbored about him since 1984. "Where's the Beef?" meant, "Who is this man? Where does he come from?" "It was not moralism that did in Hart," Wills concludes, "But morality, or the quest for it. He had not defined himself as a responsible agent."

Elsewhere, Wills finds gold by locating Jesse Jackson within the black milliennialist tradition, thus making it clear how the Beltway impulse to see Elmer Gantry at the first hint of moral shortcoming in publicly active religious figures does Jackson injustice. Wills shows that those who oppose Jackson need to make a stronger argument against the Reverend than the charge of charlatanism, because that charge does not apply to the millions of Americans--including white Iowa farmers--for whom Jackson's message resonates. Wills also provides searing profiles of Bush and Dukakis, as he did in an excellent documentary on the two nominees that aired on public television in the fall of 1988.

Unfortunately, Wills's writing style dectracts from the influence his interpretations should have. He's an intellectual showboat, given to name-dropping and long footnotes with chapter and verse from the classics. By Wills's lights, it's not enough that Hart resembles Mozart's Don Giovanni; the comparison has to be buttressed by Kierkegaard's reading of that operatic archetype. For a man so sensitively attuned to the structure of other peoples' arguments, Wills is recklessly tone-deaf regarding his own. Backwards runs the Time essayist's logic more than once, especially when he zooms back to earlier centuries to make a point.

Worst of all, in Under God Wills strains his annotation of the 1988 presidential campaign through the filter of his own political philosophy/theology without making his first principles explicit. For a while as I read, I thought he was calling for a liberal religious leader, a candidate capable fo closing the divide between evangelicals and progressives that Mencken and Darrow opened when they savaged The Last Populist, Williams Jennings Bryan. This divide, replicated every Sunday morning on television by the choice between preachers and talking heads, is the Democrats' albatross. But hey, Wills is a William F. Buckley protege who titled his autobiography Confessions of a Conservative. What's going on?

Wills attacks the liberal idea that bully pulpit presidents can do good via an elliptical and zealous discussion of Henry Steele Commager and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. True, Wills calls for politically engaged sermonizers, but he'd rather have them in jail than in the White House. His favorite recent president remains Eisenhower. Wills's position would be more effective if he instead refuted the president's role as an economic activist; in Under God however, as in previous works, such issues elude his gaze. Ultimately I think Wills does want a liberal religious leader, but only for a sparring partner.

On cultural issues, however, Wills strikes me as more moderate. He reminds us, for instance, that the disestablishment clause of the First Amendment does not discourage religious people from bringing their faith to the fore of the civic dialogue. Nor does the "wall" between church and state provide a legitimate excuse for Capital habitues to dismiss religion. You don't combat the degeneration of campaigns with technical fixes, but by shifting your priorities from the horse race and the tube to beliefs and expressions. Voters' cynicism will wane when they find candidates who give them something to believe in or reinforce their own long-held beliefs. The news media can help by according more coverage and serious skepticism to the moral arguments that surface during presidential campaigns.

Wills sees the next decade as a time when religious fervor will increase in America. His discursiveness, while annoying at times, does bring out the moral dimension of political campaigns. That's why Under God ought to be as well-thumbed in the 1990s as The Making of the President and The Selling of the President were in their day.

(*1) Under God: Religion and American Politics. Garry Wills. Simon and Schuster, $24.45.

Michael Cornfield teaches rhetoric and communications studies at the University of Virginia.