When the Elite Loses Touch

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

Before the great campaign of '84 is handed over to the history professors, one of its unfortunate side effects bears a glance or two. Besides marking Ronald Reagan's return to the White House, this year will be remembered for the way a sizable segment of the pundits, academics and campaign theorists turned against the American electorate.

There was the expected debunking of the Republican candidate in Cambridge and New Haven, in the newsrooms of the big liberal papers, in the salons of trendy Georgetown. But what startled in the final weeks was the paroxysm of complaint against the voters, who, despite all the entreaties from these learned folks, made up their minds in impressive numbers to back President Reagan. For years these same voters had been praised and pumped up by overpaid TV commentators and underpaid instructors of political science as the most informed and best-educated and therefore the wisest electorate in the world. This year's affection for Reagan, however, brought bitter second thoughts among the liberal intelligentsia, best summed up by the Washington Post's Haynes Johnson, normally an evenhanded fellow. He suggested in a column that Reagan's overwhelming support proved Abraham Lincoln wrong, that in this age of packaged candidates it was possible to fool all of the people all the time, or at least enough of the time to put a mountebank like Reagan in the White House.

East Coast intellectuals and their support troops have favored the Democrats for five decades. That tradition was maintained in this election with the Washington Post and New York Times endorsing Mondale, the network commentators gamely trying to disguise their preference for Mondale and Ivy League students expressing their Democratic leanings in campus polls. For years the presumption of liberal Democrats has been that the thinkers and the workers had much in common, namely great political wisdom and, more times than not, winning candidates.

But now, the opinion molders and political strategists who have been so influential for so long are obviously at odds with ordinary people. The Democratic Party's frustration with its rank and file was evident when Geraldine Ferraro went before autoworkers and students in the Midwest and West and became almost accusatory in her professed bafflement over why they preferred Reagan. Ferraro's tone suggested that she viewed her listeners as hapless innocents beguiled by a pitchman into breaking their longstanding contract with the Democrats. Ferraro had discovered the world beyond the Hudson and Potomac rivers.

Several interesting questions are posed now that will bear examining over these next months. According to political folklore, many Americans west of the Mississippi view Washington, so highly educated and amply endowed with the taxpayers' money, as an arrogant and isolated state within a state, condescending toward the rest of the country, enamored of itself and puffed up by its social pretensions and inside rituals. That legend now has some scholarly support. Austin Ranney, a resident political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, points out that the losers in past elections have often blamed the electorate. In their despair they have decided that the voters were "a bunch of jerks," not "the good peasants and yeomen" of yore. This time, says Ranney, the sense of disunion may be greater than ever. The group of inbred Democrats who have controlled the thought and mechanics of official Washington for so long is exquisitely geared to "issues," having encyclopedic knowledge of programs and laws but limited sensitivity to the intangibles of leadership, like boldness and enthusiasm, that cannot be written into bills and dropped in a legislative hopper. The Democrats have not had a candidate who possessed those qualities since John Kennedy. Reagan has been a master of the intangibles, emerging as a leader of a new populism composed of whitecollar, high-tech, professional, small-merchant voters itching for an assault on the Washington royalists.

"Among the losers in this presidential election campaign you will have to include the nosy scribblers of the press," wrote the New York Times's James Reston last Sunday. "Not since the days of H.L. Mencken have so many reporters written so much or so well about the shortcomings of the President and influenced so few voters." Reston and those like Syndicated Columnist Joseph Kraft, who lamented in the past few weeks that "greed sits in the American saddle," are more accustomed to being the Pied Pipers of Middle America, marching jauntily out front with majorities forming obediently behind. Being deserted is a frustrating experience. Reston sighed that "the people don't want to hear." Another view is that most voters decided the media heavyweights were just plain wrong. They were certainly out of touch.

Richard Scammon, a seasoned political analyst, says the malady is old-fashioned "ivory toweritis." The intellectuals and their allies in politics and journalism have got farther above ground level than ever before, he insists. They do not feel the raw emotions of plain people, even though they frequently journey to the outlands to inspect the species. The experts are engrossed in telling the voters what they ought to believe and do, not in listening to what is on their minds.

There is in this time, believes Scammon, just a faint hint of the mind-set that affected many intellectuals in Britain before and during World War II. They decided in sequence that war was avoidable, that the Allies had been defeated in 1940, that Egypt would be lost in 1942, that Japan could never be dislodged from conquered territories and that strategic bombing of Germany would have no effect. George Orwell may have had some insight for our year in some other writings not so famous as his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Commenting on British self-delusions during World War II, he wrote, "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool." He had glimpsed something in ordinary folks that has endured in this difficult world. It is called wisdom.