Mr. Bush has said, by way of defaming Mr. Clinton’s character, that the character of a presidential candidate is important. So it is. The president we get is the country we get. With each new president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into, and get us into, is his characteristic trouble. Finally, the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail. One four-year term may find us at reasonable peace with one another, working things out, and the next, trampling on each other for our scraps of bread.
That a president is inevitably put forward and elected by the forces of established wealth and power means usually that he will be indentured by the time he reaches office. But in fact he is the freest of men if he will have the courage to think so and, at least theoretically, could be so transported by the millions of people who have endorsed his candidacy as to want to do the best for them. He might come to solemn appreciation of the vote we cast, in all our multicolored and multigendered millions, as an act of trust, fingers crossed, a kind of prayer.
Not that it’s worked out that way. In 1968 Richard Nixon rebounded from his defeat at the hands of Jack Kennedy, and there he was again, his head sunk between the hunched shoulders of his three-button suit and his arms raised in victory, the exacted revenge of the pod people. That someone so rigid and lacking in honor or moral distinction of any kind, someone so stiff with crippling hatreds, so spiritually dysfunctional, out of touch with everything in life that is joyful and fervently beautiful and blessed, with no discernible reverence in him for human life, and certainly with never a hope of wisdom, but living only by pure politics, as if it were some colorless blood substitute in his veins—that this being could lurchingly stumble up from his own wretched career and use history and the two-party system to elect himself president is, I suppose, a gloriously perverse justification of our democratic form of government.
I think of the president’s men cast in Mr. Nixon’s character: convicts-to-be Ehrlichman, Haldeman, and Mitchell; and Henry Kissinger, who seemed to go through the ranks as if magnetized, until he stood at the president’s side, his moral clone in the practice of malefic self-promotion. I think of the events sprung from Mr. Nixon’s character: the four students going down in a volley of gunfire in the campus park of Kent State University. More than seven thousand antiwar marchers detained in a stadium in Washington, D.C. The secret bombing of Cambodia, the secret deaths, the secret numbers, the always secret realpolitik operations. And one other lingers in the mind: the time he ordered plumed golden helmets, Bismarckian tunics, and black riding boots for the White House honor guard.
The subsequent two holders of the office, Mr. Ford and Mr. Carter, showed hardly any character at all, the one a kind of stolid mangler of the language whose major contribution to American history was to pardon Richard Nixon, the other a well-meaning but terribly vacillating permanent-pressed piety who ran as a liberal and governed as a conservative. We jogged in place during their terms of office. Nobody in America can remember where they were during Mr. Carter’s term, or what they were doing, or if they had any waking life at all. Mr. Carter’s biblical fundamentalism gave him exceptional patience in the negotiation of a peace between Israel and Egypt, but Washington looked nothing like the Sinai and did not inspire him. The ancient Near East was his glory and, with the failed desert operation to rescue the hostages in Iran, his downfall. He did define human rights as a factor in international relations but did not become an honorable champion of the idea until he had left office. His vapidity is remembered, like the nervous smiles flitting across his face, as an invitation to the electorate to bring in the wolves of the right who had all this time been pacing back and forth and fitfully baying in the darkness beyond the campsite.
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And so in 1980 we found ourselves living the mystery of Ronald Reagan.
With not much more than his chuckles and shrugs and grins and little jokes, Mr. Reagan managed in two elections to persuade a majority of the white working/middle class to vote against their own interests. The old self-caricaturing B-movie actor had the amazing capacity to destroy people’s lives without losing their loyalty. He was said to go blank without a script, and his political opponents could think of nothing worse to call him than, in the words of Clark Clifford, an “amiable dunce.” But his heartfelt pieties and simplistic reductions of thought, his misquotations and exaggerations, his mawkish appeals to rugged self-reliance, spearheaded a devastating assault on the remedial legislation that had been enacted from the New Deal to the Great Society, set off new brazen white-racist furies across the land, and culminated in the most dangerous conspiracy against American constitutional government in the twentieth century.
The old deaf actor who nodded off in staff meetings managed always to wake up in time to approve schemes at variance with his oath of office. He refused to enforce civil rights laws, subverted the antitrust statues, withheld Social Security payments from disabled people, cut off school lunches for needy children, and gave into private hands the conduct of American foreign policy in Central America. Under the persona of this fervent charmer, we were released into our great decade of deregulated thievery, and learned that the paramount issues of our age were abortion and school prayer. Meanwhile, the rich got filthy rich, the middle class turned poor, the profession of begging for alms was restored to the streets, and the national debt rose to about $3 trillion.
Now there was a president with character.
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Since the end of the war in Vietnam, American government under Republican presidents has been punitive. Their philosophy is called conservatism, but the result in these many years of its application has been to dissipate the wealth of the country and lower the standard of living, health, and the hopes of an education of all but the top economic stratum of society. That is punitive. What Mr. Clinton refers to, inadequately, as the trickle-down theory is really the oligarchical presumption that no one but an executive citizenry of CEOs, money managers, and the rich and well-born really matters. When Mr. Reagan talked of getting “the government off our backs” what he meant was freeing this executive from burdens of public polity. No regulatory agency must stand in the way of our cutting timber, no judge can enjoin us from acting to restrain the competition, no labor law must stop us from moving a manufacturing plant to Indonesia, where they work for a tenth of the wage. For that matter, women will have no legal rights in the conduct of their own personal lives, and the fate of all citizens, as well as the natural world they live in, or what’s left of it, is to be entrusted perpetually to the beneficent rule of the white male businessman to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the property interests of the country.
There is an electoral strategy for implementing this nineteenth-century baronialism, and we are seeing and hearing it again in this campaign because it has always been very effective. It relies on the mordant truth that the right-wing politician has less of a distance to go to find and exploit our tribal fears and hatreds than his opponent who would track down and engage our better selves. That it seeks out and fires the antediluvian circuits of our brains is the right’s advantage in every election. Pat Buchanan at the Republican convention was the Neanderthal baring his canines and waving his club.
The right will always invoke an enemy within. They will insist on a distinction between real Americans and those who say they are but aren’t. This latter group is your basic nativist amalgam of people of the wrong color, recent immigration, or incorrect religious persuasion. At the beginning of the cold war “fellow travelers” and “pinkos” were added to the list (Communists being historically beyond the pale). Mr. Nixon contributed “effete intellectuals”; Mr. Reagan’s secretary of the interior, James Watt, threw “cripples” into the pot with Jews and blacks; and this president and his men have consigned to perdition single parents, gays and lesbians, and a “cultural elite,” by which they mean not only the college-educated, cosmopolitan (Jewish and their fellow-traveling) residents of both coasts who write or work in publishing, films, or television but really any person in any region of the country who is articulate enough to compose a sentence telling them what a disgrace they are.
Mr. Clinton’s dissenting actions during the Vietnam War place him at the head of the dark and threatening coalition of faux Americans. He is, finally, the treacherous son who dares to oppose the father. As far as Mr. Bush and his backers are concerned, when the young people of this country rejected the war in Vietnam, they gave up their generational right of succession to primacy and power. They could no longer be trusted. Neither could the democracy that spawned them, like an overly permissive parent, ever again be trusted.
All the presidents since Vietnam, from Nixon to Bush, have been of the same World War II generation. They will not be moved. The thrust of their government has been, punitively, to teach us the error of our ways, to put things back to the time when people stayed in their place and owed their souls to the company store.
In June 1989 Mr. Bush vetoed a bill that would have raised the minimum wage to $4.55 an hour over three years. In October 1989 he vetoed a bill that included a provision for the use of Medicaid funds to pay for abortions for poor women who were the victims of rape or incest. In October 1990 he vetoed the Civil Rights Act enacted by Congress to set aside Supreme Court rulings that make it more difficult for women and minorities to win employment-discrimination suits. In October of the next year he vetoed a bill extending benefits to people who had exhausted their twenty-six weeks of unemployment insurance (reversing himself in November to sign a more modest extension). On June 23 of this year he vetoed a bill that would have allowed the use of aborted fetuses in federally funded research. In September he vetoed the family leave bill, which would have entitled workers to unpaid time off for births or medical emergencies in their families. In July he vetoed the “motor voter” bill, which would have allowed citizens to register to vote when applying for driver’s licenses.
The would-be beneficiaries of these bills—people who sweep floors, kids who work at McDonald’s, poor women, blacks, the critically ill, people who’ve lost their jobs, working mothers and fathers, and nonvoters (can’t have too many of those)—always heard from Mr. Bush at the time of the veto that they had his sympathy, but that somehow, or someway, the bills on their behalf would not have done what they were designed to do and in fact would have made their lives worse.
Mr. Bush is a man who lies. Senator Dole, who ran against him in 1988, was the first to tell us that. Vice President Bush lied about his opponents in the primaries, and he lied about Mr. Dukakis in the election. President Bush lies today about the bills he vetoes, as he lies about his involvement in the arms-for-hostages trade with Iran and continues to lie, even though he has been directly contradicted by two former secretaries in the Reagan Cabinet—Shultz and Weinberger—and a former staff member of the National Security Council. He lies about what he did in the past and about why he is doing what he is doing in the present. He speaks for civil rights but blocks legislation that would relieve racial inequities. He speaks for the environment but opposes measures to slow its despoliation.
You and I can lie about our actions and misrepresent the actions of others; we can piously pretend to principles we don’t believe in; we can whine and blame others for the wrong that we do. We can think only of ourselves and our own and be brutally indifferent to the needs of everyone else. We can manipulate people, call them names, con them and rob them blind. Our virtuosity is inexhaustible, as would be expected of a race of Original Sinners, and without doubt we will all have our Maker to answer to. But as to a calculus of damage done, the devastation left behind, the person who holds the most powerful political office in the world and does these things and acts in these ways is multiplied in his moral failure to a number beyond the imagining of the rest of us.
Nevertheless, there is something hopeful to be discerned in all of this. Mr. Bush is a candidate on the defensive. His term in office has been disastrous. This presidential heir to the conservative legacy of Mr. Nixon and Mr. Reagan has about him the ambience of the weak dauphin. His own right-wing constituency is disgusted with him, possibly because he portends the end of an age, the decadence of a ruling idea, or merely the played-out vein of the Republican gold mine. Certainly he is, in all his ways, less than resolute. Lying is a tacit admission of having done something inadmissible. A mosaic of presidential lies offers the cryptic image of a better world.
All else being equal, what sort of presidential character is most likely to take us there?
Who would not wish for someone, first of all, who realizes that once elected, he cannot be the president merely of the constituency that empowered him but, if he would fill the defining role of the office, must be a president on behalf of everyone? That is a simple grade-school concept and, given the relation in America of money to politics, cannot be anything more than that. But the president who had the courage to live by it would immediately lead a reformist movement to erase the advantages big money accords to itself by its political contributions and its lobbying. This would presume a morally intelligent president as well as a courageous one.
I would wish for a developed historical sense in the president, one that could understand and honestly acknowledge that the political philosophy of what we lovingly call the free market has in the past justified slavery, child labor, the gunning down of strikers by state militias, and so forth.
I would want a presidential temperament keen with a love of justice and with the capacity to recognize the honor of humble and troubled people. And the character of mind to understand that even the borders of the nation are too small for the presidential service—that willy-nilly and ipso facto we’re planetary blunderers now.
The true president would have the strength to widen the range of current political discourse, and would love and revere language as the best means we have to close on reality. That implies a sensibility attuned to the immense moral consequence of every human life. Perhaps even a sense of tragedy that would not let him sleep the night through.
Also, I should think he would be someone who really likes children, who laughs to be around them, and who is ready to die for them—but who would never resort to the political expedient of saying so.
Perhaps Mr. Bush’s major contribution to this campaign is his raising of the idea of character in the public mind. He cannot have thought it through: We’ve been living with him. We know his mettle. When a candidate is up for a second term we don’t have to rely on his actions as a twenty-three-year-old graduate student at Oxford to determine if he’s got the goods. But it may be finally a great service to the electorate, and even a personal redemption of sorts, that he invites us to imagine by contrast with his own and his predecessors’ what the character of a true American president should be.
(1992)