LET'S SAY THAT THE THREE leading presidential candidates in 1996 are Bill Clinton, Bob Dole and Pat Buchanan. Is there a precise way to express what's obvious, which is that they are utterly different kinds of people?
The difference isn't background: Clinton and Dole both come from small-town, lower-middle-class Middle America. Buchanan, an accountant's son from the sleepy, segregated Washington of the 1940s, falls roughly into the same range as the other two. It isn't ideology either. Two of the three are Republicans, and two are moderates; we still don't have a clean division into three categories.
But what works precisely as a way to differentiate them is to say that they represent three different versions of success in America. The constant, bitter, obsessive competition among these ways of getting ahead defines not just this presidential campaign but much of American life.
Class, defined economically, doesn't work as an explicit political issue in this country, even now when the gap between rich and poor is indisputably widening. Americans are focused much more on a related but distinctly different issue from class. Let's call it paths. The U.S. is unusual for how widespread the preoccupation is with individual ambition. Classes are economic end points; paths are routes to success into which the population divides itself. In America it's the paths that hate one another, not the classes.
Of course, not every American is self-defined according to the particular form ambition takes. But most of us are, including many people a sociologist would define as working class or poor. It's hard to find a person who has never harbored some dream of socioeconomic ascent.
There are three main paths in the U.S. today: Talent, Lifer and Mandarin. It's possible to think of American politics as an epic power struggle among the three paths; in this year's presidential campaign, Buchanan is the Talent path's candidate, Dole is the Lifer path's, and Clinton is the Mandarin path's.
Talent is the oldest, the classic American path, made up of people who simply go out and engage in a self-initiated activity, hoping it will bring them money, status or acclaim. The yeoman farmers and skilled artisans of the colonial period are examples. Today people who start businesses are Talents. So are performers. The key to the Talent path is that it's unstructured. No formal credential, no passing through a rigidly defined series of stations of the cross, is required. Talent is the riskiest of the three paths but also the most rewarding. Most of the familiar, celebrated examples of success in America are Talents.