The new president, indeed, will be the inheritor of a new political consensus in America, born of the failures of Bill Clinton, in his first years, to bulk up the government and of Newt Gingrich to tear it down. Gore, in most analyses, stood a step to the left of Bill Clinton, and Bush struck the limners of politics as a sun-belt conservative, closer in spirit to Ronald Reagan than to his own father. But both men modulated their voices to suit the centrist temper of the times, and either would be further constrained by the manner of his victory. Bush accepted the new consensus that there is a proper role for an activist federal government, and Gore recognized the limits on its reach and cost; their debate consisted largely of haggling about the details of how it should go about its business. It was appropriate symbolically, a Republican strategist said, that they were both the scions of moderate political leaders of another time; beneath their differences, they had the blue of their bloodlines and the caution of their political positioning in common.
The historical moment was not conducive, in any case, to larger ideas; periods of contentment rarely are, and the nation, by all the standard polling measures, was in its longest, sunniest run since Reagan’s three-year-long “morning in America” in the middle 1980s. The economy had endured just eight months of recession in the past 17 years, and they happened nearly a decade ago. Inflation was at bay. Unemployment was at a 30-year low. Stocks had more than trebled in value in the Clinton years, and by one industry estimate, half the country had a piece of the action–by far the largest shareholding class in our history. The passage from budget deficits to surpluses, or their illusion, had changed the first premises of the debate about government, from how to save money to how best to divvy it up. The cold war was history; in the new order, there was America and then there was everybody else.
A season so mellow did not appear to require a president of compelling size or long vision; with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the advent of the Information Age, the office itself, and hence the stakes in the election, seemed diminished in the eyes of significant numbers of Americans. Bill Clinton never made a coherent case as to why he, let alone Gore, should get credit for the prosperity of the Roaring ’90s, but he might not have been believed had he tried. In the public imagination, as Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin observed, the center of power had shifted from politics to the new wired economy and the business people who run it. Over the past 20 years, Garin said, the public had come to see the president only as the head of the government, not of the nation, and to believe that governments could no longer keep up with the sheer warp-speed velocity of change. In Garin’s polling, people guessed that the Microsoft gigabillionaire Bill Gates would have more influence than the president on the future of the country.
In the circumstances, it was unsurprising that the men who presented themselves for the office were something less than visionary figures or that the race should devolve into a contest about personal qualities–a battleground that favored Bush but was not wholly flattering to either candidate. To a degree rare in presidential elections, Garin said, people chose sides less out of affection for their own man than out of dislike for his rival. Asked in his focus groups to explain their preferences, “the Gore voters were all convinced that Bush is a know-nothing who will be a rich man’s president, and the Bush voters were all convinced that Gore is a lying weasel. And then you had those voters in the middle who said, ‘Well, they’re both right’.”
The ideological differences between the two were muted until the closing weeks of the campaign, when each side put its base voters on a diet of red meat. Until then the battle of ideas sounded like a contest between two New Democrats, one offering the Near-Great Society and the other proposing the No Big Deal. The differences in the particulars of their platforms were, in fact, real and, in a few instances, radical–Bush’s proposal for a monster tax cut, for example, and his plan to let younger workers invest part of their Social Security taxes in the private sector. But his strategy nearly to the end was to blur distinctions rather than sharpen them, and Gore’s populism was softened at the edges by his technocratic cast of mind. The mood of the day favored what one think-tank conservative, Marshall Wittmann, called a “mushy centrism,” and both candidates delivered it, as if they were two upwardly mobile baby boomers running for manager of the welfare state.
The result was a largely themeless pudding of a campaign, an exercise in what Richard Nixon once called the politics of prose; the poets have appeared infrequently in our history, usually in more demanding times, and Nixon did not count himself one of them. The nearest thing to a big new idea was a school of thought called “national-greatness conservatism,” which argued for a revival of patriotism and civic duty at home and for activism abroad in the service of American values as well as interests narrowly defined. The credo found its way from the pages of Kristol’s Weekly Standard into the war councils of Sen. John McCain and helped shape his core message in the primaries–that prosperity was not an end in itself but a starting place, a patriotic challenge to enlist in causes larger than one’s own self-interest. The message lasted only as long as McCain’s ill-fated candidacy, at least as part of the public debate. With his withdrawal from the field in March there were no other takers and, as Wittmann put it, no “ask not” moments in the fall campaign; the candidates, Bush as well as Gore, were too busy telling voters what the country could do for them.
All presidential elections have consequences, with or without large causes. The first consequence of this one will be the end of the Clinton era and, with it, the removal of a polarizing figure from our public life; both candidates promised–Bush explicitly, Gore implicitly–to restore to the White House an honor and dignity found wanting even by Americans who most admired the departing president as a public man. But each would be confronted by the residue of Clinton’s years, and Gingrich’s, a smoky partisanship that has shrouded the capital for much of the past decade and impeded its pursuit of the people’s business. Perhaps Bush’s most persuasive advertisement for himself was his commitment to work across party lines, as he had with some success in Texas; with a new, razor’s-edge Congress even more narrowly divided than the one just departing, he or Gore would have to keep that promise before either could attempt anything else of any real imagination.
The prospects were not promising, not with the bitter end of the contest between them and their parties and with the possibility that the loser of the popular vote could win the presidency; either man would begin his tenancy in the White House with his legitimacy in some question. It was perhaps fortunate that neither was asking terribly much in their collision of the center-right and the center-left. Both their platforms were tailored to the placidity of the times. But even their incrementalist objectives were placed in doubt by the prospect of a long, angry fight over the presidency and by the reduction of Congress to two warring camps, roughly equal in number and in rancor. In matters of casting and style, George Bush’s Washington would look very different from Al Gore’s. On issues of substance, the Age of Dubya or of Al may come to seem less the dawning of a new American century than a muted coda to the Era of Bill.
