The Democratic candidate for President during the dark days of 1932 had few firm economic ideas. Buffeted by conflicting advice, he lamely tried to split the difference. His speeches were a study in contradiction, combining hints of bold spending programs with cries for a balanced budget. If Franklin Roosevelt's approach was inconsistent, even intellectually dishonest, it helped produce a landslide victory over Herbert Hoover and ultimately the New Deal.
That precedent is worth savoring as America runs short of borrowed time and borrowed dollars. Indeed, the hope that one of the 1988 contenders is a hidden F.D.R. may be the only comfort amid the dreary landscape of their economic pronouncements and records. None of the top-tier candidates in either party can claim to be talking sense to the American people. A few, such as Bob Dole and Michael Dukakis, can point to past accomplishments. But, for the most part, economic leadership is inversely proportional to standing in the polls. Bruce Babbitt in particular has advanced a laudable program on the deficit; most surveys put him last among the Democrats.
It is hard to rate the candidates solely on the basis of particular policy stances. None of them can predict the precise nature of the mess that he would inherit in 1989. Nor is there any one set of clear answers on what to do about the hideously complex results of years of economic blindness. To judge the candidates' potential as economic leaders, it is necessary to examine their mastery of financial complexities, their candor in facing economic reality and their credibility in light of their record.
By these standards most candidates in both parties are running a deficit. On the Republican side, it starts at the top with George Bush. There are many reasons he is a serious candidate, but economic leadership is not among them. Even as President Reagan is dragged toward fiscal flexibility, his Vice President is skittering away from the potential pitfalls of such flexibility by vowing that "I am not going to raise your taxes -- period."
Bush's refusal to consider new taxes is accompanied by support for a balanced-budget amendment, proposals for increased federal aid to education, and a refusal to specify where deep cuts could be made. Taken together, these positions are incoherent. Bush's only independent proposal is a plan to cut the top capital-gain levy from 28% to 15%. Supposedly that would eventually . spur investments, but it would probably reduce Government revenues initially, according to the Treasury Department. More broadly, Bush has not answered the most basic questions about his own economic philosophy. Until he became an acolyte of "voodoo economics," as he called Ronald Reagan's program in 1980, he was a standard deficits-do-matter conservative. What is he now?