The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

There seemed to be the ingredients for some old-time demagoguery in this fall's election. The economic strain was palpable, from the Texas oil patch through the heartland cornfields to the Piedmont textile mills. Toss in the problems of Rocky Mountain mining, the timber woes of the Northwest, and despair in the Rust Belt and there was plenty of material for a latter-day rawboned, loudmouthed populist. Thus invited, none came to the party. There was a good deal of personal mudslinging, but of such limited imagination and low quality as to be totally forgettable.

We could have used a Kansan like Mary Elizabeth Lease, a Populist of a century ago who galvanized the nation by exhorting angry farmers to "raise less corn and more hell." The slogan was ready-made this year for Iowa and Illinois, surfeited with corn by farmers who "farm the Government." No takers.

Nary a "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman, of South Carolina, or a silver-throated Robert LaFollette, of Wisconsin, or a Hubert Humphrey, from Minnesota, all men who could take a national issue down to Main Street and rekindle political hope and energy among the discouraged and dismayed. Are those $200 billion deficits not a scourge? Isn't the trade deficit a demon? Aren't corporate mergers a scandal? Don't those nuclear arsenals mock common sense?

The experts are pondering this lack of ideological fervor now that the tallies are all in. Pollster Louis Harris is up in Pound Ridge, N.Y., watching the leaves fall and writing a book on the new political climate. What he sees is a transitional time from the shortcomings of Ronald Reagan's crusade. It boils down to a "battle over the center." By definition, that means moderation, caution, reasoned argument about what is on this hand and what is on the other hand.

Washington's uproarious Richard Scammon, a political expert who loves the thunder of combat, wonders somewhat sadly if we have "become too sophisticated for ideology." The level of education, awareness and understanding increases geometrically with every election. Government programs cushion and encourage almost everyone in the nation in some way. Only a small fraction of the population is now outside the system, a phenomenon that tends to discourage boat rockers. The farmers in trouble are not penniless tenants on somebody else's land; they are farm owners, capitalists who risked and lost, which is part of the game, no matter how dispiriting. And when the unionists cry out for protection from foreign trade to save their jobs, they run smack into the ire of those very same farmers, who know that tariffs on shoes or steel may mean further market losses for soybeans and wheat.

"It has taken two centuries -- and, now, 100 elections -- to reach the point where individual Americans were so willing to follow their own judgment politically and make their decision at the polls without regard to party," says Political Historian Horace Busby. "Such voter judgment serves notice that the parties must rely on performance rather than prejudice, habit or family tradition to hold their position in the public arena."

The President's political handler, Mitch Daniels, believes that all U.S. politics has "run aground on fact." The voters proved once again to be smarter than many of those who would exhort them. They know how complex the issues are, and they have developed a tolerance for normal human error in politics if motives are just. Demagogues don't do very well in that environment.

When all is said and done, Ronald Reagan is probably not so much a prophet of the modern problem of a government that is too big and expensive as he is a product of the people who understood that and thrust him forward. Now those same people want to fine-tune what he has wrought.