At the high table of presidential politics, primary campaigns are sumptuous nine-course affairs. Aspiring candidates put on long white aprons, line up behind tables full of flickering Sterno, and dish out issues and arguments to fatten the voters. This year the smorgasbord from Iowa to California groaned under all the offerings: flattening the tax structure, abolishing free-trade agreements, limiting the terms of lawmakers, reinventing welfare or health care or public housing or farm subsidies, spending more on defense, cutting this agency or that, restricting immigration. In this context voters could come to believe that those they elected would determine what kind of country they would live in.
But if last week is any example, this general-election campaign could be shaping up to be a far less caloric undertaking. In Clinton and Dole we have two candidates whose being is defined, whose views are shaped and whose success is measured by their ability to win votes. Clinton, who has been campaigning ceaselessly since junior high school, approaches politics as an obsessive host, something for this group, something for that set, an endless round of dim sum. Bob Dole, master of the Senate floor, is a tireless vote hound as well. When Dole says of legislation, as he always does, that he wants to "see how it looks" on the Senate floor, he isn't talking about the shape of a specific bill as much as its whip count. He believes in what emerges from the day's horse trading; his vision is the shadow cast by compromise.
These dispositions help explain why voters are now being treated to a lavish round of political pandering. The cycle goes something like this. Some aggrieved group begins to complain: gas prices are too high, beef prices too low, liability insurance too burdensome, there's a salmon surplus driving coho prices down. Clinton and Dole rush in with their offers: sell off part of the Strategic Petroleum Reserves (Clinton's offer), repeal the gas tax (Dole's offer). The moment one candidate makes a bid, his rival tops it. The immediate goal on both sides is simply to control the news cycle: there is no reasoned discourse, just strikes and counterstrikes. And he who moves faster wins.
It is no accident that Clinton is proving especially good at this. In 1988 he watched in pain as Michael Dukakis was battered without mercy by George Bush. Clinton was so upset by the Democratic nominee's failure to punch back that he flew from Little Rock to Boston to tutor Dukakis staff members on the wisdom and methods of rapid response. But no one listened until it was too late; Dukakis thought the ads about furloughed killer Willie Horton did not need to be answered simply because they were stupid and wrong, ignoring the fact that they were devastating. By the time he ran in 1992, Clinton had learned that brazen replies were key to political success. The War Room operation in Little Rock, set up after the Democratic Convention at Hillary Clinton's behest, was mostly a quick-response center, directed by strategists James Carville and George Stephanopoulos, who currently heads the same effort in the Clinton White House.