Stop the Endless Campaign, Please

By LANCE MORROW

The Endless Campaign, Please

The dead weight of the 1980 presidential campaign has fallen away, and Americans, no matter how they voted, seem to be walking with that little bounce in the spirit that comes when an ordeal is over, a decision finally made. The evening hour, for example, seems unaccountably more pleasant; the reason may be that political advertising has abruptly vanished from television--a sweet, almost subliminal improvement in the moral atmosphere. No more candidates hagiographically displayed, saints mixing radiantly with the adoring throng; no more of those sarcastic prosecutorial voice-overs about the other guy, the pitchman's tone as low and urgent and insinuating as a whisper of Cassius in the ear. No more that tussling, scuffling sound of the reluctant national psyche being dragged on a leash toward a booth with curtains and a lever in it.

Americans thought they were through with political campaigns for a while. They certainly thought they had earned a rest, having endured a presidential campaign that began in August 1978 (when Philip Crane announced his candidacy) and then ramshackled extravagantly up and down the landscape like a jet-fueled, chaotic American re-enactment of the 11th century People's Crusade. But politics abhors a silence. That buzzing noise you hear, that distant clattering of political dopesterism now rising faintly in the land, is the sound of the 1984 election campaign at its earliest stage of development. Columnists are making their way briskly through the Democratic ruins to locate politicians still sound enough of wind and limb to try to drive President Reagan out of Washington--which seems almost manically premature, since Reagan is still almost two months away from his Inaugural Oath.

Columnist Joseph Kraft studies the Democratic field, staring at the political teeth, smacking the ideological haunches. Max Lerner agrees with many commentators, including the Chicago Tribune's Michael Kilian, that the Reagan landslide has "all but wiped out Ted's strategic position." The Christian Science Monitor's Godfrey Sperling demurs: "[Edward Kennedy] seems well positioned to become the de facto head of the party--and to be its 1984 presidential candidate." Meantime, New York magazine's Michael Kramer knocks out the Republican early form: "Where is Kemp today? He is a front runner for the 1984 Republican presidential nomination (assuming Reagan is a one-termer), and there is only one other front runner--George Bush."

It would be pleasant to think that those agitating to get the 1984 race going are merely tapering off 1980, releasing pockets of undischarged gas. But things do not work that way. The nation's political metabolism has changed. At one time, the presidential campaign was a comparatively brief quadrennial eruption. An impressively haughty 19th century protocol dictated that the office must seek the man. William McKinley, for example, a candidate of piercing eye and vacuous mind, rocked away the 1896 campaign on his front porch in Canton, Ohio, while Mark Hanna freighted in the citizenry to gaze upon him.

If bossism and inertia had their drawbacks as democratic procedure, today's almost continuous political hyperactivity has its disadvantages as well. Presidential campaigning threatens to become almost constant. The phenomenon is hard on the national nervous system. A troubling pattern has emerged. Characters perhaps abnormally ambitious, single-minded and durable decide four years in advance to go for the White House and then arrange their lives accordingly. Leadership must originate somewhere, of course. But campaigning is not the real world; if anything, a man who spends too much time on the road winds up with a numb, unhealthy sense of dislocation -- and a bizarre relationship with his own ego.

Political campaigning should be a serious instrument for the purpose of gaining power and using it well -- a thought more charmingly idealistic than objectively descriptive, no doubt. The trouble with the perpetual campaign is that it has spawned a huge life of its own, with a primitive instinct for self-preser vation. The vast fraternity of pollsters, imagemakers, mass-mailing specialists, political journalists and consultants inevitably does what it can after a presidential election to avoid sitting mutely for 31/2 years until it is needed again. The organism of American campaigning is now all thumping heart and nerves and swooping mood swings: a kind of antimatter replicating and yet strangely falsifying American life as a whole.

It is probably just as well that the U.S. does not have a parliamentary form of Government; with its multiple, brawlingly dogmatic constituencies, the Government in Washington might be brought down every month or two. But the system of perpetual campaign produces a little something of the same effect in the nation's psychology: a state of unceasing political excitation and poll-watching that makes it difficult for the elected Government to concentrate upon the task it was, after all, elected to do. You must "have had your life," Henry James said.

A President, similarly, should have had his Administration. Organized opposition, of course, is part of the nature and protection of the sys tem, but that is entirely different from the turbulence of the perpetual campaign, the huge ritual of publicity, that serves personal ambitions rather than programs and ideas. Both parties, both the President and Congress, need a time to work without all the anticipatory regicides of the permanent campaign getting drunk and firing off odd shots in the lobby.

Besides, politics surely should have some rhythm: the field should lie fallow for at least some interval of noncampaigning so that all the political nitrates and phosphates wrung from the system -- all the ideas and workers -- can replenish themselves. Voters must feel that the whole point of making a choice is that you then do not have to think about making another choice almost instantly. There is a difference between being well informed about the news and being in a state of permanent media overload and stimulation, just as there is a difference between a moderate, nutritious dinner and a Petronian orgy in which a populace recumbent on cushions and marble floors continuously, for 3 1/2 years, devours wild boars, ortolans, sweetmeats, tea leaves and dainty pundits, stuffed gallups and microphones and county chairmen's brains.

No. Let the healing sleep of nature fall upon the land, and let the political process go (a little bit) underground for its proper season of dormancy, and let the little secret chemicals and creatures of the political earth do their work of remorse and restoration and ambition and conspiracy, all hidden from our infinitely tired eyes. A new crop cannot take seed and eventually arise if the urgently, dementedly curious are constantly stomping across the furrows with camera crews and probing the earth with pencils and microphones.

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