This isn't just the last election of the 20th century. With the parties and the media terminally out of touch, it's the last election of the old system, period.
Can it really be a year since I got roped into this wretched business? Back then, I was healthy, happy, and arguably coherent. Now look at me. A wreck. Incapable of speech, let alone complex thought. Slipping uncontrollably into a prose style not all that different from the way Bob Dole talks. Or whatever.
The idea sounded sensible enough. Be the first digital boy on the bus. Write a daily campaign diary online. Hold forth in these pages. After all, this was supposed to be the first wired election. Every serious candidate had a homepage (and so did Dick Lugar). Every serious news outlet was launching a political Web site. It seemed obvious: in the annals of presidential history, 1996 would be the Year of the Net.
As if.
At least any illusions I had were shattered early. One afternoon in January, on a flight out of Des Moines, I was sitting with Lamar Alexander's media guru, Mike Murphy. A year earlier, the night before formally declaring his candidacy, the ex-Tennessee governor had become the first presidential contender to take part in an online forum. "It's Virtual Lamar - we're cyber announcing," Murphy crowed at the time, and the press lapped it up. Now, with the Iowa caucuses close at hand, I asked Murphy how he was using the Net to spread Alexander's message. He replied, "Well, you know, basically we do that stuff to get on TV."
It was downhill from there - all the way downhill to Bob Dole, who in May gave a speech on the Senate floor citing a link from the White House homepage to a Japanese government Web site as evidence that the Japanese "are writing the trade-policy papers for the Clinton administration." A few months later, he was memorably quoted as saying that "the Net is a wonderful way to get on the Web." More to the point, in his defining address at the Republican National Convention, Dole managed to speak for an hour without even uttering the word technology.
Thwarted in my efforts to chronicle the emerging nexus between presidential politics and the etherworld - because, plainly, the nexus between presidential politics and the etherworld still has a hell of a lot more emerging to do before it's worthy of being chronicled - I was forced to occupy myself with other matters. The obliteration of "retail politics" in Iowa and New Hampshire, for one. The descent of the GOP primary process into abject and often hilarious lunacy, for another. The death of the national conventions. And the terminal disintegration of the two major parties, both as competent and effective political organizations and as the embodiments of any coherent set of ideas and beliefs.
You wonder why I'm fried? Coping with total system failure takes its toll on the synapses.
Not that I was completely unready for this. The collapse of the post-New Deal order has been a prolonged affair, with the crumbling of the two parties' hierarchies vividly on display throughout the 1990s. Still, there is no way of truly being prepared for Charles Collins, a Floridian berserker with bushels of hair growing out of his ears who sought the GOP nomination in New Hampshire on a platform of abolishing the UN, the IRS, and the Federal Reserve. "If you can afford an M-1 tank, go ahead and buy it," Collins said at a gun owners' meeting in Manchester where he shared the stage with Phil Gramm and Pat Buchanan. "The Constitution doesn't say you have the right to bear only slingshots and BB guns."
Collins was, of course, a freak, but in the Republican field in 1996, he was a freak only in degree. There was Morry Taylor, aka "The Griz," a Midwestern, Harley-riding, disco-dancing wheel tycoon. There was Robert Dornan, a congressman from California who always seemed on the verge of snapping like a dry Frito. There was Alan Keyes, a black talk-radio host who, when denied a spot on stage at two debates in a row, went on a hunger strike and then engaged in an act of "civil disobedience" - trespassing at a TV station - that got him led away in handcuffs. And there was Steve Forbes, space alien. In today's GOP, it seems, anyone indeed can run for president.
This supporting cast was but one reason the Republican primaries were an incandescently surreal experience. The GOP, you may recall, has historically been the disciplined party in US politics. More recently, it has been the party of ideas, and more recently still, the self-styled party of revolution. In 1995, Republicans of every stripe paraded around Washington spouting grandiose schemes to redefine the role of government in American life. Amazingly, they even tried to enact some. But now, at the start of an election that they'd been claiming was going to usher in a lasting Republican realignment, the party's presidential wannabes were engaged in a campaign totally disconnected from their own theories and plans, not to mention anything that could be remotely described as "reality."
A pseudo-campaign, that is.
I'm borrowing here from historian Daniel Boorstin, who back in 1962 wrote a book called The Image that dropped the term pseudo-event into the vernacular. A pseudo-event, Boorstin said, was a contrived happening, like a press conference or a photo op, that existed "primarily for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced."
Boorstin was a prescient - and deeply cynical - guy, but it's hard to imagine that even he could have foreseen the level of contrivance attained by Gramm, who, to illustrate his commitment to "kitchen-table economics," would invite us into the homes of ordinary voters so we could record his turtlish self sitting at their kitchen tables and lecturing them about economics. And Boorstin's brain would surely have melted altogether in the face of Lamar, the robotically genial, quietly egomaniacal man of a thousand props: the red-plaid shirt, the ABC (Alexander Beats Clinton) building blocks, the mud boots (to help him wade through the nasty ad muck), and piano (to let him tinkle out his theme song, "Alexander's Ragtime Band"). Lamar, who would stop his rallies halfway through, dim the lights, introduce a country-western singer, then go sit in the front row, where the cameras could capture him listening with that awful treacly smile of his plastered flush across his puss.
Horrifying as this was, the primaries went one step further: from the pseudo-campaign to the meta-campaign. In the absence of talk about substantive policies, the runners jabbered endlessly about advertising, polling, and fund-raising - a tendency that gave the race, as Elizabeth Kolbert of *The New York Times *put it, "a curiously inverted quality, like a suit of clothes with the seams sewn on the outside."
Dole groused that Forbes's wild barrage of negative spots drove his "positive ratings" into the dirt. The space alien relented and claimed that his new approach was a sign of leaderly maturation. Lugar and Alexander cited their upbeat TV strategies as proof they were the best qualified to sit in the White House. And at one debate, the candidates were asked to critique each other's ads, Siskel & Ebert style. ("It looks like it might have been taken out of context," Forbes said of a Dole ad that labeled Pat Buchanan "extreme.") Weirdly, the mechanics had become the message.
This whole self-referential spectacle may seem like ancient history, but in fact it set the tone for - or was a leading indicator of - what would come later. In San Diego and Chicago, in particular, pseudo and meta came crashing together to put the finishing touches on the destruction of a political institution. In place of conventions, where debate and oratory once held sway, the Republican and Democratic parties not only staged a pair of elaborate infomercials, but spent their time explaining in intricate detail to the national media precisely how they'd gone about it. Best of all, they said, they'd succeeded in dispensing with the least TV-friendly aspects of political conventions: politics and politicians.
In the case of the Republicans, the thick pseudo-meta haze the party engulfed itself in all year served one simple purpose. It covered up the fact that the GOP is indeed still the party of ideas - ideas so potent and contradictory they're ripping the "big tent" to shreds; ideas so unpopular with vast swathes of the voting public that they doom the GOP's chances of presiding over a stable majority. But every so often, even in San Diego, reality would come crashing through.
For me, it happened twice down there. When Newt Gingrich gave his speech, I felt sorta sorry for him at first. A year earlier: Maximum Leader, vanquisher of the "failed liberal welfare state." Today: not-ready-for-prime-time player, locating the essence of American freedom in Olympic beach volleyball. But the next day, as I watched Newt being greeted by loud chants and cheers at a Christian Coalition rally full of revelers carrying posters of mutilated fetuses (labeled "Choice") and telling them, "This is not about a bunch of people saying we're saints and you're sinners," my sympathy vanished. These were Newt's people - the activist core of the Republican Party.
My second reality check was Pat Buchanan (a strange sentence, I know). On the night before the Republican convention, Buchanan held his farewell rally in Escondido, California. Endowed with the magnificently hagiographic title "The Man and the Movement: A Tribute to Patrick J. Buchanan," and featuring speeches by Ollie North and Phyllis Schlafly, the evening was Buchanan's occasion to declare that he didn't need to run as a third-party candidate because "before our eyes, the Republican Party is becoming the Buchanan party." This was an extravagantly self-serving statement. It was also more than a little true.
Before going any further, a confession. Like many reporters, I have a soft spot for Pat. Not because he's a charming fellow, though he is. But because, alone among this year's crop of Republicans, Buchanan's candidacy was one of ideas. The rise of the new economy - the fiercely competitive, globally integrated, information-based economy that's rapidly displacing the old industrial order - is producing huge new opportunities for America but also creating real dislocations. Stagnant wages. Income inequality. With his anticorporate, anti-internationalist, class-war-tinged rhetoric, Buchanan was addressing only the downside and offering solutions that would do more harm than good. But at least he recognized that something big was changing in the conduct of capitalism.
Which isn't to say that Pat's populism was bred in his bones. There was always something faintly comic about this cat - a chardonnay-sipping, wing tip- and tasseled-loafer-wearing, Hermes-tie-sporting, serious-stock-portfolio-holding, former Mercedes-driving arch-establishmentarian - cruising around like he was the reincarnation of Huey Long. One day we visited a rug factory in Georgia owned by arch-protectionist Roger Milliken. As Pat posed for a pic with a sample, his face suddenly lit up and he blurted out, "Hey! These are the rugs they have at The Ritz-Carlton!"
Other than Dole, Buchanan was the only Republican this year who thought, for a brief glistening moment, that he might actually win the nomination. Coming off his victory in New Hampshire and a week stumping in Arizona, he could nearly taste it; he'd given a speech to a crazed, thousands-strong crowd outside Atlanta; all he needed to do was knock off Dole in AZ. But he didn't. He came in third. Around midnight he wandered down past the hotel restaurant, looking devastated, babbling dejectedly to some of us ("I don't know who the front-runner is now - I just don't") and went to his table and dropped his head in his hands.
From that point on, Buchanan's run was really about 2000 - about trying to push the party in his direction, and, of course, about tormenting Dole, who he'd come to consider a hollow man. He set his sights on the platform the GOP would adopt in San Diego. He wanted it to be stridently anti-immigrant, anti-UN, anti-gay marriage, anti-affirmative action, anti-gun control, and, crucially, absolutist in its stance against abortion. And, in the end, the platform was exactly that.
Platform, schmatform, you might well be thinking, and certainly that's what Dole - a moderate, you understand, a moderate - kept saying when he rolled into San Diego. "I'm not bound by the platform," he announced. Hell, he hadn't even read it. One thing, though: when Dole was going about wooing Republican primary voters (who eat their red meat with their fingers, thanks very much), he adopted every big-ticket position eventually codified in the platform. It was not without reason that, one night in Houston, Buchanan had joyfully trotted out a mechanical parrot he called The Bobster and induced the bird to squawk after him, "There's a cultural war going on! There's a cultural war going on!"
Now, it's hard to believe that anyone in America with half a brain would come to the conclusion that Bob Dole and Pat Buchanan are even the roughest equivalents. Yet, on the day Dole set foot in San Diego, a poll in the Los Angeles Times showed that, although his support was solid among conservatives, Dole was bleeding hard in the suburbs. Fully a third of all moderate and liberal Republicans said they were inclined to vote for Bill Clinton. Thirty percent of pro-choice GOPers said the same.
"Our focus groups tell us that a lot of people don't know much about me," Dole told The New Yorker's Michael Kelly in August. "I think they view me as some right-wing Republican, some right-winger, and there's a change in perception out there that I think we need." All I could think of was The Bobster, and how Pat would have laughed his ass off if he'd heard Dole just then.
Here is a statement of fact about Bob Dole that The New York Times will not publish: he is a staggeringly bad campaigner.
To be fair, this isn't exactly a secret. Anyone who's seen Dole live (so to speak) knows it. And any reasonably intelligent reader could infer it from the reports in the *Times *or any other paper in the country. A great irony, though, remains. Out of fear of appearing biased, the "liberal media" has by and large refrained from depicting in grisly detail the totality of Dole's awfulness at the business of getting elected.
But this awfulness has been one of the campaign's most basic and irreducible elements. There is, for example, no other way of understanding the fact that Dole - despite a field of sorry rivals, a process rigged in favor of those with stacks of cash and endorsements, and a party that has always operated according to the principle of primogeniture - came within a hair's breadth of blowing the GOP nomination by finishing second in New Hampshire. (Had it been third, he told Bob Woodward, he would have pulled out, plunging his party into unmitigated chaos.)
In New Hampshire, Dole's lameness was a painful thing to witness. Lurching from place to place, looking inescapably cadaverous, he gave short, themeless speeches punctuated with the phrase "It's about ideas!" - after which he would fail to enunciate a single one. One night he offered tepid Buchananisms: "These are the best of times for many who work on Wall Street," but "the worst of times for many who live and work on Main Street." The next he assured his audience, "Like everyone in this room, I was born ..." and then stopped cold.
After Dole survived the blow administered by Hampsterland, I kept waiting and watching. Every few weeks I would haul myself aboard his campaign plane, the Leader's Ship - which, after Dole left the Senate, was rechristened (with equal cleverness) the Citizen's Ship - hoping to see some improvement. And every time I would look into the faces of those poor wretched souls sentenced to covering him full time and realize that, though he did get better, and though his postconvention incarnation was positively lifelike, expecting Dole to become genuinely fluent was like expecting my retired, analog father to become a Web designer.
The charitable line on this is that Dole's deficiencies as a performer spring from his admirable qualities - his antipathy to cant and sentimentality, his deep distrust of and dislike for make-believe. There's some truth to it, no doubt. It doesn't, however, explain flights of oratory like this one, which Dole sent aloft in Bakersfield, California, last June, shortly after the White House files fiasco broke:
"My wife was here six days last week, and she'll be back next week, and she does an outstanding job. And when I'm elected, she will not be in charge of health care. Don't worry about it. Or in charge of anything else. I didn't say that. It did sort of go through my mind. But she may have a little blood bank in the White House. But that's all right. We need it. It doesn't cost you anything. These days, it's not all you give at the White House - your blood. You have to give your file. I keep wondering if mine's down there. Or my dog. I got a dog named Leader. He's a schnauzer. I think he's been cleared. We've had him checked by the vet but not by the FBI or the White House. He may be suspect, but in any event, we'll get into that later. Animal rights or something of that kind. But this is a very serious election."
If Dole's inability to speak in a tongue that bears at least a vague resemblance to English were his only problem, that would be one thing. But he also is prone to speak his mind. Sometimes this candor can be harmlessly refreshing, like when, a few days after he left the Senate and hit the open road, some hack asked what the theme of the trip was and Dole quipped, "Ah, we're trying to get good pictures; don't worry too much about what I say." Other times, though, the results were more disruptive.
Like in Kentucky, when Dole was hit with one of those questions he could no longer respond to by saying, "We'll hold hearings." It was about tobacco, and Dole said, "We know it's not good for kids. A lot of other things aren't good. Drinking's not good. Some would say milk's not good." The predictable furor followed: the criticism from C. Everett Koop and the giant cigarette (Buttman) inhabited by various Democratic operatives that began turning up, hacking loudly, at every Dole event.
So now here's Dole, way out on a fragile limb, and what does he do? Admit the error and bury the story? No. He sends a letter to Koop in which he continues to express doubts about the addictiveness of tobacco. He goes on national television and says that Koop's gotten "carried away" by the "liberal media," and, when asked whether the ex-surgeon general had been "brainwashed," he answers, "Probably a little bit." Then, for the coup de grâce, he unleashes the Old Dole on Katie Couric.
"I know what was going through his head," a senior Dole adviser told me later. "He kept thinking, 'I'm right. Some people can kick tobacco.' So he kept saying it. And you know, he was right. But he didn't understand - there are some subjects you can't win on, so you just get rid of 'em." Worse, I think, Dole didn't understand that his views reinforced an image of him not just as a shill for the cancer industry - a notion that cut into his advantage over Clinton on character - but as a man of the 1950s, an era when science still thought cigarettes were a tonic.
And that's how Dole occupied himself in the long fallow period between the end of the primaries and the conventions in August. Reeling aimlessly from false start to setback, without hope or clue or sense of direction. And every time you thought it couldn't get any worse, he would invariably manage to surprise you with some fresh mishap - blowing off the NAACP convention, say, then accusing the group's president of "trying to set me up" while averring that he'd prefer to speak to a friendlier audience, one that "I can relate to." (The American tobacco growers associations, perhaps?)
It was astonishing. By mid-summer, the Republican Party was enveloped in gloom. Every time I would run into a conservative politico or right-leaning pundit, he or she would invariably have hit some new depth of despair. The Dole operation was at a loss; at one point things got so desperate that aides began dissing their boss to reporters in hopes that he would see the slam in print and take it seriously. A new concept: leaks as a replacement for interoffice memos.
Yet all this was, in a way, mere window dressing around Dole's real problem: not "the vision thing" - a concept that, as Richard Ben Cramer has written, "is a lie so infantile it must embarrass any patriot" - but the rationale thing. Why does Dole want to be president, anyway? In his convention speech, Dole said he wished to "be the bridge to an America that only the unknowing call myth ... a time of tranquility, faith, and confidence in action." But although Bill Clinton would later mock Dole mercilessly for this proud display of backwardlookingness, the truth is that Dole has no intention of trying to revive the Golden Years of postwar America. That is too, well, too visionary an objective for The Bobster.
No, having traveled many miles with Dole and listened to him more times than I care to recall, I've never come across any evidence to suggest that he dreams of anything more lofty than fashioning an in-box presidency. Of dealing with what needs to be dealt with, nothing more, nothing less. "He believes that people want someone who's going to get in there and get things in order," one of Dole's longest-standing and most trusted advisers said to me once. "You know, straighten things out, get things organized. Like that."
"Getting things organized" doesn't have quite the ring of Putting People First, however, or Four More Years, for that matter. Nor quite the draw to the polling places. So it was inevitable that economics - a whopping tax cut, to be specific - would be the core of Dole's fall campaign. This was clearly making a virtue of necessity. For one thing, Clinton had co-opted every Republican social issue in sight. For another, in the increasingly fractious funhouse that is the GOP big tent, tax cuts are just about the only thing that all sides, from Christie Whitman and Bill Weld to Ralph Reed and Bill Bennett, can agree on. That, and the fact that the White House is a den of thieving crackhead junkies.
Another problem, though: the economy's in fine shape. Growth is steady and inflation low. The solution: latch on to the anxieties that Buchanan laid bare, anxieties rooted in stagnant wages and slow growth. (And rising income inequality, but we won't talk about that - Jack Kemp's crowd wouldn't approve....) "We have defined the message," Dole's manager, Scott Reed, proclaimed. "It will be about Dole's economic plan and the economic anxieties of the voters."
There is a compelling story there to tell, but to tell it would require a keen feel for the contours of the new economy, and that is something Dole has never shown the slightest sign of. In the must-win South Carolina primary, it was Dole's allies - people like Gramm - who described the state's at times painful but finally beneficial transition from old economy to new and made the arguments about why Dole's approach to speeding that transition was preferable to Buchanan's. Meanwhile, Dole went to a BMW plant in Greenville that was a temple to high tech manufacturing and intoned nothing more articulate than "It's about jobs, it's about trade, it's about growth." As the fall campaign began, in a week when figures showed the unemployment rate falling to its lowest level in seven years and growth surging, he informed America that "the economy's in the tank."
Maybe I shouldn't be so tough on him. An old-economy guy who's believed his whole long life that balanced budgets are the key to prosperity, Dole suddenly finds himself trying to peddle a supply-side tax cut to remedy the ailments of a new economy he'll never understand. This leaves him, however, in dire straits. Absent a cogent explanation for how a 15 percent rate reduction will affect wage stagnation - truth: it won't - the Republican candidate is left with precisely three assets in the final days of his race against Clinton. The tax cut as pure bribery, his biography, and the electorate's doubts about the president.
Who knows? Maybe Dole will pull it off. Voters have been known to partake of bribes before. Dole's biography is indeed a valiant, powerful one. And the doubts about Clinton are pervasive. But no challenger in modern times has overcome a Labor Day deficit in the polls as large as the one Dole faced. If he does it, there will be talk of a miracle. If he doesn't, it'll take about five minutes for the conventional wisdom to congeal that his was among the most hapless presidential campaigns in history.
Even so,I had to go halfway around the world with Bill Clinton to realize how severely the cards were stacked in his favor.
It was April. After three days in Asia, the presidential entourage was winging its way to Russia. In the press plane - Air Codependence - we filled the 10-hour flight with Nick of Time and Doctor Zhivago. But on Air Force One, the President of the United States (POTUS for short; his wife, the First Lady of the United States, goes by FLOTUS) was in full blab.
He was talking sumo. At lunch in Tokyo, the president had met two of Japan's top wrestlers, Akebono and Musashimaru. Akebono, he was told, had been a basketball player in college and was forced to gain 240 pounds to take up sumo. "He still has a high center of gravity," which helped, POTUS explained, since sumo is "a leverage deal." Which is also true of world diplomacy. Clinton showered praise on Japan's prime minister, Ryutaro Hashimoto. "He's a high-energy guy who says what's on his mind. He doesn't mind being emphatic. He's always making fun of Mickey Kantor."
Then it was Yeltsin, nukes, Oklahoma City, high tech terrorism, the new Van Damme movie, and on and on. Finally, Clinton spoke fondly of the place in South Korea that was the first, all-too-brief stop on this trip - a honeymoon island called Cheju-do. In the days before Chelsea, Clinton said, he and FLOTUS used to go on two trips a year. Now he just longed for a few "lazy days" to rest up. And with that, he went back to his cabin to get some sleep.
There are moments on presidential trips, at home or abroad, when the whole scene feels intensely disorienting - not pseudo, not meta, but still not quite tethered to anything real. Here you are, being ferried around with the rest of the press corps, your every move orchestrated, calibrated, timed to precision. You're inside the bubble, meeting few actual citizens, spending most of your time in windowless conference rooms in nondescript hotels. And here is the president, meeting bigwigs, eating fine food, doing events for TV, delivering ceremonial remarks, moving on to the next locale. Pretty soon it all starts to seem like some empty dance - but not an unfamiliar one. It's more or less the same dance you go through whenever you travel with Bob Dole.
But there's one huge difference. When you're with the president, every so often the bubble breaks - and you look up and Clinton is standing on the tarmac in the middle of the night in Saint Petersburg, talking about some bloody carnage in Lebanon, calling for a cease-fire, extending his condolences. Being president.
When people talk about the advantages of incumbency, they could mean any number of things. But if the past year has hammered home nothing else to me, it's that the single greatest advantage is that, as Clinton himself once put it in a fit of defensive self-pity, "The president is relevant." As Dole showed in 1996, the same can't automatically be said of challengers. In retrospect, his decision to flee the Senate was probably right, but it did have the effect of cutting him loose from his moorings, and in a way, from reality. When someone was killed or something blew up, Clinton was there, the mourner in chief. Meanwhile, Dole was rattling around the country, a stern, free-floating visage - a fellow dressed in senatorial garb, set loose in a nonsenatorial world - with no discernable relationship to the events of the day.
A couple days after the Tokyo-Saint Petersburg flight, at his press conference after meeting with Boris Yeltsin, Clinton provided a stark reminder of the second large advantage he had over Dole. Back in Washington, Dole had fired off the first volley of the general-election campaign: a blistering attack on Clinton's record of naming "liberal judges" to the bench. Now, downstairs in the Radisson Slavjanskaya hotel in Moscow, Clinton swatted the shot back straight down Dole's throat.
"I will just say this," he said, almost nonchalantly. "Senator Dole voted for 98 percent of the judges I appointed, and the rating system for judges by the American Bar Association indicates that I have appointed the best-qualified judges of any president since Mr. Eisenhower was in this job." Next question?
Nobody sensible, and certainly not Dole, has ever disputed that Bill Clinton is better at the game of electioneering than ... pretty much anyone. And only a few of the hardest-core cynics deny that Clinton has grown into the presidency over the course of his term. But it wasn't until that trip around the world that it fully sank through my thick skull what a potent combination this was - the stature of the office twinned with Clinton's skills as a pitchman. A nightmare for any Republican, let alone Dole.
Nevertheless, it was clear Clinton would need to wring every iota of juice out of this combo, for at the dawn of 1996, he wasn't exactly looking like FDR II. He was chronically unpopular, with levels of support consistently hovering in the mid-40 percent range. The electoral map favored the GOP. Any number of his campaign promises from 1992 had gone unfulfilled; the grandest, health care reform, had been a debacle. There was a widespread perception, even among those who supported him, that he wasn't trustworthy. There was Whitewater. And there was an even wider-spread perception, especially among voters in the center, that he had failed to live up to his pledge to be an "agent of change" and a "different kind of Democrat," and instead had turned into the embodiment of postmodern invective: a status-quo liberal.
Dole, that is, had some material to work with. But what Dole, like the rest of us, didn't comprehend was that Clinton had another advantage - an advantage of incumbency that, it happens, no other incumbent has employed before. When you're a challenger, you are to a certain extent a creature of your party. To be selected as standard-bearer, you have to pass certain tests, litmus and otherwise. When you're president, on the other hand, such rules don't apply. You're already the head of your party; in a sense, you are the party. You hold the office. You have constant media exposure. You have your own cash machine and your own organization.
In theory, the political implications of this are enormous. Where Dole, in order to secure his party's nomination, felt compelled to take positions - on abortion and gun control, to name just two - that were potentially off-putting to centrist voters, Clinton was free, in theory, to indulge in the luxury of absolute pragmatism. He could, in theory, use a fine calculus to weigh out the electoral costs and benefits on every issue, and if in the end what made sense was contrary to the core beliefs of the Democratic Party, or to the views of its elected hierarchy, or even to his own convictions (to the extent he can be assumed to have any), he was free to say: Well, fuck off - I'm going the other way. And in practice, that's just what he did.
You could feel the earth shift on its axis the first time it happened, when Clinton announced in June of 1995 that he was agreeing in principle with the GOP to balance the budget. That night I was having dinner with a tableful of true liberals, including one cabinet official from the administration. This official was blunt. Everyone - everyone - in the White House was violently against it. So were all the Democrats on the Hill. The only person who thought it was a good idea was Clinton's ideologically ambidextrous (and sexually deviant, God love him) guru, Dick Morris. All the liberals thought it would end in tears. They couldn't have been more wrong.
Encouraged by that example, in 1996 Clinton repeatedly dissed the Democratic establishment and urinated on liberals from a great height as he veered right to shut down Dole's openings on social issues. He betrayed gays by declaring that he'd sign the GOP's anti-gay marriage bill. He enraged civil libertarians with a litany of depredations ranging from the CDA to the evisceration of habeas corpus. He said that "the era of big government is over," and although his sincerity remains open to question, in one instance at least he acted accordingly. He acquiesced in the repeal of a part of the New Deal by signing the Republican welfare bill.
This was the clincher, for no issue cut closer to the bone of what the Democratic Party has always stood for. In 1992, Clinton had promised to "end welfare as we know it." He endorsed the radical ideas of time limits and work requirements. But he also understood (as do most of the committed welfare-reforming Republican governors, such as Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin) that putting welfare mothers to work costs more money, not less. Child care, health care, training, last-resort jobs for women who just can't find work - this wasn't going to happen on the cheap.
Idiotically, Clinton had put welfare reform in the backseat behind health care. His plan sank without a trace. Now, having twice vetoed Republican get-tough, cash-saving welfare bills because they threatened to push a million kids into poverty, Clinton was faced with a new GOP plan that most analysts agreed would do the same thing. There was principle - not just liberal principle (they'd be happy to see the old system remain intact) but Clinton's own principles (this was a plan miles away from his). And there was politics. If he vetoed the bill, it would hand Dole a rare stick with which to beat him. The decision was announced amid a flood of crocodile tears.
On the morning of the signing ceremony, I walked down the two blocks from Wired's offices to the White House to see this depressing piece of history made. It was a brutally muggy day, and there were no black faces in the audience, and all the White House liberals were inside, hiding their heads. As I was leaving I came across Donna Shalala, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, talking to reporters. She was asked about one of her deputies, Wendell Primus, who had resigned over Clinton's decision to sign the bill. Primus was a source of mine, a principled man and serious social-policy analyst who wanted to fix the welfare system but thought the GOP plan was a disaster and was bitter at a president who had gone along with it despite knowing better.
But Shalala didn't say that. She didn't say that there were honest and honorable differences of opinion within HHS, and that although she disagreed with Primus's decision, she respected it. Instead she contrasted people like Clinton who wanted to fix the system with "some people" in her department who wanted to preserve the failed status quo. And left it at that.
At first, I was just appalled. Then it occurred to me that this was the perfect metaphor. Shalala was just doing to Primus what Clinton, on welfare reform, had done to the Democratic Party. The only difference was that the party didn't have the option of resigning in protest.
And so it was that, a few days later, the Democrats came to Chicago for what history will probably judge less a convention than a jubilant funeral. For four days they celebrated. They ate and drank and did the Macarena. They wept openly at the sight of the disabled and at tales of those who had died tragically. They tittered at the news that the president's chief strategist had availed himself of services not all that different from the ones he was in the business of providing. They listened raptly as the president tried to define himself as a man of the future by invoking a metaphor of Iron Age construction (22 times, a new metaphor record) that had the classically Clintonian virtue of promising to carry everything and therefore to carry next to nothing.
The only thing the Democrats in Chicago did not do was advance a serious or even plausible political agenda to take the country into the next century. And how could they? Virtually all of their important ideas had been repudiated - by the man who they happened to be renominating for the presidency.
And that, when it comes right down to it, is the real story of 1996. In the course of his poll-driven, market-tested reinvention, Clinton has come to embrace certain laudable positions (balancing the budget) and certain terrible ones (disdaining civil liberties). He has rehabilitated himself politically to an extent that, a year ago, was simply unthinkable. But whether or not he completes this resurrection and, as now seems likely, triumphs over Dole at the polls, he has already done something far more significant - even historic. He has, in effect, administered the final, mortal blow to the world's oldest political party.
A different kind of Democrat, indeed.
So in the end, it was just like Frank Luntz said it would be.
Almost a year ago, just a few days after I'd agreed to this gig, I drove across the Potomac to see Luntz, a Republican pollster, in his office in Rosslyn, Virginia. Colin Powell had announced that week that he wasn't going to run, and I was in need of a reason to think this campaign wasn't going to be a colossal waste of time.
As expected, Luntz came through. A thirtyish operator with chipmunk cheeks and a knot of red hair, Luntz has become a minor political celebrity by casting himself as the polling profession's Howard Beale - the mad prophet of the focus group. In 1992, he crunched numbers for Ross Perot; in 1994, he helped Gingrich cook up the Contract with America. Now Luntz had taken to spinning a fresh line of apocalyptic populism, predicting a campaign that would bring about the end of ... well, the end of pretty much everything.
"What we're about to witness is the breakdown of the partisan structure," he told me. "This isn't realignment. It's dealignment. Democrats won in 1992 - then the public rejected them. Republicans won big in 1994 - now the public is rejecting them. If things continue as they are now, Clinton's the Democratic nominee, Dole's the Republican, Perot runs as his own third-party candidate, and Americans wake up on election day mad as hell that this is their choice and swear that they'll never let it happen again." A pause. "I do believe this will be the last election of the old system."
At the time, I had my doubts; now it seems obvious, unavoidable. Whether Dole wins or loses - but especially if he loses - the Republican Party is about to come apart at the seams. Whether Clinton wins or loses, the Democratic Party already has. As for Perot, in spite of (or perhaps because of) his obvious madness, by launching the Reform Party and working to establish ballot lines for it in all 50 states, he has created a structure that could well serve as a ready vehicle for a legitimate (i.e., nonderanged) independent candidate in 2000.
And after what took place in '96, who doesn't think the millennial campaign will be a different sort of deal? After watching Forbes throw millions at the TV screens of Iowa and New Hampshire, who believes anymore in the myth of retail politics? After Buchanan's ultimately inconsequential win in New Hampshire, who still thinks a state so ridiculously unrepresentative of the nation as a whole should be accorded some special status? After Dole locked up the nomination before two-thirds of voters had a chance to cast their ballots, who doesn't regard the primary system as a farce? And after the pair of national conventions that took place this August, who doesn't think that it's right and proper for the next ones to be banned from the airwaves and consigned to the dustbin of cable?
Nineteen ninety-six was the year that Old Politics died - or at least we should sincerely hope so. For outside this bizarre electoral system that's grown and mutated over the past 40 years - this strange, pseudo-meta-ritual that, experienced from the inside, feels like being trapped in an echo chamber lined with mirrors - there are profound, paradigm-shifting changes afoot. Changes that are economic, social, cultural, technological, demographic. Changes that Old Politics have failed to take account of, but changes that desperately need to be dealt with. With a new order being born, it's time for a new politics.
Which is why, for all the exhaustion and cynicism this campaign has saddled me with, in a backhanded way it's also been a cause for hope. As the man once said, It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.
