The Politics of Emptiness

By Crispin Sartwell

The decline of American political rhetoric is sometimes traced to Richard Nixon, the president who fully explored the possibilities of the passive voice. "Mistakes were made" has been a staple of felons ever since. Nixon's only really memorable declaration from the Oval Office came on August 8, 1974: "I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow." If nothing else, Nixon quit with clarity. When Gary Hart slunk out of the 1988 race in disgrace, you couldn't even tell whether he was actually gone. By the time Bill Clinton accepted the '92 Democratic nomination to the strains of "Don't Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow)," the language of the entire political process had become a Fleetwood Mac lyric: you'd heard it all a thousand times before and it never said much of anything to begin with.

The 2000 election cycle, already in high gear, seems the acme of emptiness. That the presidential candidates lack sincerity, passion, or commitment to anything other than their own election is almost a trivial observation: it's something we all know and, seemingly, something we have come to accept. Try naming a position that Al Gore or George W. Bush or Elizabeth Dole feels so strongly about that it could not be compromised or reversed to ensure election. The public discourse of these statesmen amounts to a series of cliches or truisms that nobody could possibly disagree with, such as the sentence (a favorite of all three): "not a single child can be left behind."

American politicians are inauthentic. And American voters are apathetic. Those two facts are connected. We react to these smiling hand-pumpers as we might to a gushing party host, hoping to sidle away as soon as possible. In fact, a cocktail party-type juxtaposition of fraudulence and indifference perfectly encapsulates American politics, though as at a cocktail party, we can still hope to find a few interesting conversations around the edges.

This existential and ethical abyss at the center of American politics has long been noted and deplored. The usual explanations are television and polling. Television, it is said, reduces substance to sound bite, politics to entertainment, and leaders to the status of actors or celebrities. And the use of polling and focus groups, which has reached an absurd intensity in the Clinton White House, encourages leaders to float with the winds of public opinion rather than develop or promote definite commitments.

These explanations are facile. Television is an extraordinarily intimate medium, revealing both disingenuousness and authenticity with clinical precision. As Nixon tried to explain away Watergate on television, folks looked into his eyes and knew he was lying. When a thin-lipped Bill Clinton testily addressed the nation following his grand jury testimony, America finally saw the man behind the curtain. And while polling can tell you in a rough way what people think, it doesn't force you to pander to them. The question of whether you are going to change important positions to match the pie chart is a question, finally, of guts. The sheer information doesn't make the decision, and leader can shape opinion as well as be shaped by it.

So let's not blame the electronics; the problem is deeper and closer to home. For the sad but obvious fact is that politicians with definite beliefs lose. Whether you come from the right or the left, whether you're Barry Goldwater in 1964 or George McGovern in 1972, a candidacy of conviction may be admirable, but it is disastrous.

Goldwater's acceptance speech at the '64 Republican convention is clearly the product of a single coherent vision: it has a voice. Goldwater speaks in plain unvarnished English without any jargon. Here is the famous climax, which takes its cue from Lincoln's attack on slavery: "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!"

But the very force of Goldwater's words-the fact that he actually asserted something and let his passion show-became the weapon that Lyndon Johnson used to beat him in one of the most lopsided elections in American history. Johnson's positions were both more moderate, and, importantly, more vague. Definite views and their passionate articulation-Goldwater's most obvious assets--became political liabilities. His perfectly sensible take on Vietnam was that we should fight to win or not fight at all. "Yesterday it was Korea; tonight it is Vietnam. Make no bones about this. Don't try to sweep this under the rug. We are at war in Vietnam. And yet the president, who is the commander in chief of our forces, refuses to say--refuses to say, mind you--whether or not the objective over there is victory, and his secretary of defense continues to mislead and misinform the American people." Johnson's public relations strategy was to release disinformation and to say that we weren't really in a war and even if we were it wasn't so bad and eventually we might sort of win or we might withdraw or . . . whatever. It was ruinous policy, but it was very good politics in the sense that it made no commitments.

In 1972, it was the Democrats' turn to get too real. George McGovern was a man of obvious integrity, decency, and conviction, but Nixon managed to paint him, as Johnson had painted Goldwater, as an extremist. McGovern's platform included an immediate end to American involvement in Vietnam and a guaranteed income for all Americans. Nixon managed to persuade the voters that these views were not, to use George Bush's favorite term, prudent. Pursuing the Johnson line, Nixon pitted vagueness against specificity. In the landslide that followed McGovern didn't even carry his home state.

Bill Clinton had worked for McGovern in Arkansas, and Clinton's election depended on what he learned from McGovern's defeat. It was a lesson that McGovern himself drew in a 1996 interview with the New Republic. Asked what he and fellow failed candidate Michael Dukakis talked about at the convention, McGovern answered, "How Clinton is so much smarter than we are. How well he's masked some of his liberal views...."

Masking your views, if any, has since 1972 been the key to success. The candidate who wins has been the candidate who makes the fewest mistakes and the fewest personal revelations. Every positive assertion is a risk; every time the candidate reveals anything of the real person beneath the facade, disaster looms. Presidential politics has become a flight into the void. One exception to this was Ronald Reagan, who came into office with a definite set of positions. But Reagan, who had worked for Goldwater in '64, took his cue from his mentor's debacle as Clinton did from McGovern's: he framed his program in fuzzy rhetoric and a sunny benevolence that made it seem unthreatening. Since McGovern, the winning strategy has been to say nothing at great length and smile at the cameras. The virtues of public passion and integrity now seem merely quaint.

With Clinton, the inauthenticity of American politics has resulted in a final parting of the ways: the man and his public persona seem utterly detached from one another. It is obvious to everyone that Clinton has no deep commitments. But if Clinton is the messiah of meaninglessness, his road was paved by almost every candidate in the last several election cycles. Lamar Alexander's platform in 1996: "I want to be the first president of the twenty-first century." Gary Hart: "We need bold new ideas." Ross Perot: "You own this country!"

Anyone for putting a tiger in our tank?

You would beg them to call a speechwriter, except the problem is, they already have. At least since Nixon, the president has too rarely spoken his own words, and has too rarely even worked closely with his writers. That's one obvious reason that there's no weight or commitment behind the words: often a politician intones words he's hardly read before, much less that he cares deeply about. Here Reagan is the most ready recent example. One thing you've got to say for Patrick Buchanan, who got into politics by writing for Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew: his words are his own.

The founders regarded the president as an executive rather than a spokesperson. They saw speech-making as at best a minor function of the office; at worst, as an invitation to demagoguery. And though occasionally the presidency was occupied by a great orator such as Lincoln, public speaking was not central to it before the turn of the century. As Carol Gelderman shows in her recent book "All the President's Words," it was Woodrow Wilson who established speech-making finally as the pre-eminent function of the office. Wilson sought to force legislation through a recalcitrant and fragmented Congress by mobilizing public opinion, a strategy that has been pursued by presidents ever since.

Both Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt, who coined the phrase "bully pulpit," were writers as well as masterful politicians, and they wrote their own speeches. But as public speaking became perhaps the single most time-consuming, function of the office - to the point where Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton have averaged well over a speech a day for their entire terms - the use of collaborators and writers became unavoidable. Until Nixon, they were the president's closest advisors, and the processes of devising and articulating policy were not distinguished. Franklin Roosevelt's great fireside chats were written in collaboration with the people who made the policies he articulated. The people who composed Johnson's speeches included such eminent policymakers as McGeorge Bundy, Cyrus Vance, and Dean Acheson.

All of that changed with the Nixon White House. As Nixon wrote in his memoirs, "In the modern presidency, concern for image must rank with concern for substance." Nixon considered speech-making a branch of public relations. He established an Office of Communication and staffed it with professional writers and public relations experts who wrote his speeches, though Nixon himself had considerable involvement in the editing process. Some of these folks, including Buchanan and William Safire, were wonderful writers. But they had little access to Nixon, and little influence on policy. Their job was to package the Nixon presidency in an attractive way for television. And that is essentially the way every administration has worked ever since. The terrible possibility that lurks behind this development is that the president or candidate becomes a kind of ventriloquist's dummy. If there is one thing that could make presidential speech more authentic, it is less speech-making and more writing by the leaders themselves.

And so we arrive at the present moment, which seems to be the apotheosis of the politics of emptiness. Gore and Bush engage in a contest to see who can make fewer definite commitments and offend the fewest voters. Here are a couple of samples, from their announcement speeches:

Bush: "America will be prosperous and strong if we do the right things. But prosperity alone is simple materialism. Prosperity must have a greater purpose. The success of America has never been proven by cities of gold, but by citizens of character. Men and women who work hard, dream big, love their family, serve their neighbor. Values that turn a piece of earth into a neighborhood, a community, a chosen nation."

Gore: "No executive action can mend a broken family. No legislation can reconnect a parent to a child, or a family to a grandparent. No proposal can change a culture that does not place family life at the top of our hierarchy of values, where it belongs. Families deserve real neighborhoods - where the word "neighbor" is not just a geographic term but a moral one. Let us become neighbors again."

Apathy is not only an understandable response to talk like that; it is in some sense the only physically possible response. Your brain just doesn't get any traction. These are typical examples of American political rhetoric, circa late twentieth-century: they sound vaguely visionary and inspiring, but have no concrete content. And of course they are quite similar to one another. As many commentators have noticed, the differences between Gore and Bush are at this point rather . . . obscure.

Gore and Bush, however confident they seem, live in fear. They say as little as possible in order to minimize their chances of turning out to be wrong or alienating some segment of voters. Every unrehearsed word is a potential disaster; every real commitment is a disqualification; every stray hair is a television nightmare. And so they end up as plastic people who emit words that they didn't make and that carry no weight or even content.

But there are a few signs that there's life still in the body politic. The New York Times reported that Bill Bradley, at a campaign appearance Iowa, told a woman with a huge "Choose Life" button that he would never agree with her. Try walking up to George W. Bush or Elizabeth Dole with a huge pro-choice button and what you will get will be mush: they're personally opposed to abortion and perhaps favor a constitutional amendment to ban the practice (or perhaps not), but on the other hand they're basically not going to do anything about it. In the privacy of their own homes and churches they think it's murder. Out here where the voters grow, they're both against it and for it.

It may be that Bradley will succeed in cutting through some of the hogwash and causing a stir. Bradley has a real chance; Gore and Bush may be overestimating our tolerance for blather. One indication of that is the election of Jesse Ventura as governor of Minnesota, which is surely due in part to the fact that he doesn't watch his mouth: more than any politician in recent memory he says exactly what he's thinking, exactly what he believes. His positions in favor of legalizing marijuana and prostitution were certainly arrived at without polling. He has great appeal to conservatives for a number of reasons, but in endorsing gay rights, a position that will certainly alienate many conservative voters, he said "Love is bigger than government."

Or consider John McCain, who has rejected the safe positions of his party's leadership on issues from campaign finance reform to Kosovo to tobacco (and so probably made it impossible for the party to nominate him). This is what he said to the 1999 graduating class at Johns Hopkins: "We who are currently privileged to hold public office have ourselves to blame for this sickness in American political life. It is we who have squandered the public trust. We who have, time and again, in full public view, placed our personal or partisan interest before the national interest, earning the public's contempt with our poll-driven policies, our phony posturing, the lies we call spin, and the damage control we substitute for progress."

That's a very acute diagnosis of what ails us. McCain delivered it with passion and I'm betting he wrote it himself.

Match the Candidate to the Claptrap

1. Dan Quayle

2. George W. Bush

3. Al Gore

4.Elizabeth Dole

Answers: 1-d; 2-c; 3-a; 4-b

(a) "We are here at this extraordinary gathering, the very first of its kind, to talk about a subject that lies at the very heart of economic growth and productivity-and even basic political legitimacy-for the 21^st Century: reforming and reinventing government so that it is smaller, smarter, and more responsive to change in this fast-changing information age."

(b) "As I travel this country, I am buoyed by the goodness of our citizens, the clarity of your vision and the strength of your values. . . Like you, I love my country. And like you, I want to do whatever I can to make it better. I believe the road ahead beckons to every American, for whom the untraveled world is a place of limitless possibility. God willing, we will travel it together, with courage, confidence, and conviction, leaving no one behind, knowing that the future is our friend."

(c) "This country is hungry for a new style of campaign. . . . A campaign that unites all Americans toward a better tomorrow. I say better tomorrow because I've learned that people want to follow an optimist. They don't respond to the message "Follow me, things are going to get worse." . . . They respond to someone who sees better times-and I see better times."

(d) "But you know, even though we are number one, we know that something is missing. Something fundamentally isn't quite there. . . My friends, it is time to reclaim the values that made America great in the first

place. Values like respect, responsibility, patriotism, integrity. Respect. Children should respect their parents and parents should respect their children."