A Change in the Weather
By LANCE MORROW
It happened with surreal swiftness. One moment, the pageant of Reaganism was proceeding, with brilliant fireworks over the harbor. The next moment, the Iranian scandal burst up through the floorboards. Strange blackbirds of policy flapped out of the White House basement. The Reagan Administration, the phenomenon that had defined so much of the '80s, that had given the decade its agenda and style, seemed to collapse in a bizarre shambles.
If the U.S. were a parliamentary democracy, the Reagan Government might have fallen. As it is, Ronald Reagan will remain in Washington for another 22 months. His White House is laboring to repair the damage. In time Reagan may reassert his charm. Even as a lame duck, he will have his successes, perhaps even an arms-control agreement. It is possible that Ronald Reagan has not yet exhausted his luck.
But the question is not whether Reagan can recover. The nation is beginning to look beyond Reagan now. Any President in the last half of his second term is already in the valedictory mode. The Iran affair simply hastened the process and abruptly concentrated the nation's mind. The 1988 election is coalescing. The parties are sorting out candidates and issues. There are signs of a fundamental change in the nation's political weather, a philosophical mood shift like those that seem to occur in America every generation or so.
Even without Iran, the era of Reagan was passing. It has left its indelible mark, yet its battle cry -- that Government is the problem, not the solution -- is losing force. Presidential candidates of both parties are struggling to define a new role for Government in the post-Reagan era. While seeing the need to be frugal, they are talking more and more about compassion, more active approaches to deep-rooted social problems, a new sense of community values. Reagan has done what he has done, and he has accomplished much. He presided over one of the longest periods of economic recovery in American history, a time attended by the end of inflation and of the wage-price spiral. He rolled back the writ of the Federal Government, helped to initiate tax reform, strengthened (amid some set-backs) the American posture in the world. But now one feels the ground shifting underfoot, a grinding of the tectonic plates.
"We're at the end of an Eisenhower period," says UCLA Political Sociologist Jeffrey Alexander, "and we're moving into something not unlike the 1960s. The 'era of good feeling' that Reagan presided over is ending, and people are ready for the next cycle of history, for a new period of activism and social change." But as Alexander well knows, the future never merely recycles the past. The nation cannot return to federal taxing and spending on a Great Society scale. Most candidates in 1988 will focus wistfully on new ways to engage Government, business and labor in projects to solve problems and help people. It will never again be the all-daddy Government of the New Deal, they say, but neither will it be the shrunken Reagan version. "The swing is away from what you could call the laissez-faire approach of Ronald Reagan to one that takes a more active, compassionate approach to those in true need," says Republican Mayor William Hudnut of Indianapolis. "It is a ground swell gaining force."
Reagan has been a master of public symbols. He worked an alchemy of nostalgia and hope, visions of the past and the future collaborating. He gave the people reassuring images of a mythic American past -- the Olympic torch, the tall ships, the Statue of Liberty, the heroes in the visitors' gallery on State of the Union nights, Tom Sawyer come back to life as a yuppie -- a sweet, virtuous America recrystallized by Reagan after the traumatic changes of the '60s and '70s. Reagan gave Americans the idea of a future as spacious as their past.
Some of the new American imagery is very different. It suggests something closing down, a darkness crowding in at the margins. One sees not the sunshine of Reagan's American morning but touches of Thomas Hobbes. The gloom probably is just as exaggerated as the earlier optimism. But the encroaching new images are haunting: homeless people on heating grates; the ominous national debt and the spectacle of Japanese managers moving into the American heartland to show Americans how to run things profitably; the AIDS epidemic, which is becoming an important and menacing presence in the 1988 campaign.
Another powerful image: Wall Street millionaires arrested for insider trading and taken off in handcuffs. Not long ago, the "go for it" mentality of untrammeled capitalism was a virtue in the culture of Reaganism. Now that culture is being questioned. The Rambo story, which was a cartoon of Reaganism's individualist machismo, has been discredited by the escapades of Oliver North. The enduring ghost of Viet Nam returns not in the cretinous revenge fantasies of Sylvester Stallone but in Platoon, a movie that confronts the ambiguous mess and tragedy of America's mission in Viet Nam. The show that has captured Broadway is Les Miserables, with its themes of suffering and redemption, and the injunction "Look down!" -- meaning look down upon the poor, the homeless. The injunction of the Reagan years has been "Look up!" -- to success, to wealth.
And of course there are the dark images of the Iranian fiasco: the President's men skulking around, with cake and Bible and guns, on ventures so goofy as to seem unhinged; the tablets of Valium that Robert McFarlane swallowed. The Iran affair destroyed Reagan's nimbus of immunity, subverted his magic. His political authority derived from the idea that Ronald Reagan believed certain simple things profoundly, with an incorruptible candor. He would bob his head, in the way he has, and smile and say, "Here I stand: I can do no other." Martin Luther washed up on the beaches of Malibu. But the Iran affair carried Reagan over into a strange, other dimension where both his candor and his principles proved corruptible, where his powers seemed to fail. It is a powerful irony that for all the differences, the Iran affair smacks of Watergate, in the sense that the abuse of the highest power undoes the king (the highest power manipulated by little knights, stupid and zealous). That one of the most beloved American Presidents should have found himself in danger of recapitulating the fates of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson is American political theater edging toward the Shakespearean.
An odd effect: Reagan's powerful connection with the American psychology now takes on a negative charge. In a way that would have seemed inconceivable not long ago, op-ed writers venture to speak well of Jimmy Carter. One senses uneasily a return of the world Americans thought they had left behind when Carter went back to Plains, Ga.
"Wise men have remarked on patterns of alternation, of ebb and flow in human history," writes Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in The Cycles of History. Emerson observed that "the two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and the party of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made . . . Innovation is the salient energy; Conservatism the pause on the last movement." But that can be tricky. Reagan in his way was no conservative and was something of an innovator, who tried, with limited success, to reverse deep-rooted Government traditions going back to the New Deal. In any case, Emerson also observed that "every hero becomes a bore at last."
What is the essence of the change that is now occurring in America?
In part it is a return from the long vacation of the Reagan years, Americans coming back from the picnic of restored nationalism and morale, a necessary pause, to discover that the old problems are still there, only in some ways worse now. The Indian summer was lovely, but the weather turned cold: Provide, provide! That holiday was paid for by more than doubling the national debt, to $2.2 trillion. Time to look for new ideas, time to move beyond the era of self-congratulation and beer-commercial patriotism. America cannot afford stupidity. It costs too much in the world. Education therefore must have a priority, and not just through more money; it needs discipline and imagination. America can no longer afford racism and a neglect of the underclass. They also cost too much. These are problems that must be solved not only as a matter of social justice (which they are) but as a question of America's long-term economic survival.
The moral ecology of American politics is altering. Issues that figured in the Reagan revolution -- family values, school prayer, abortion, pornography -- remain powerful. But some of them will be in collision with problems such as AIDS, homelessness, racism, toxic waste, business ethics, nuclear disarmament and the national debt -- a more public agenda, one that veers somewhat away from religion.
The change now occurring is emphatically not a simple pendulum swing back from conservatism to New Deal liberalism. The change is more complex, more interesting. By the end of the '70s, Americans understood that from the '30s on, the welfare state had grown almost unrestrained. The left-leaning populism that bashed Big Business gave way to a right-leaning populism, one that produced tax revolts like California's Proposition 13.
That anti-Government mood prepared the way for Reaganomics and drove a wedge between the poor and the middle class. Americans in the middle detected something askew in the Government's social policies. Reagan played upon the middle-class intuition that some basic unfairness was loose in the garden of the dream. (Reagan was wise enough to know that the dream existed still and needed tending.)
"Welfare" was at least one of the things wrong. It meant a morality of entitlements, people getting something for nothing. It meant the unfairness of ordinary people paying the bill for the noblesse oblige of an elite. The Great Society eventually became institutionalized, even when the nation's economic growth flattened out and the middle class began losing ground. That dissonance helped to create Ronald Reagan. Americans bought the Reagan solution: cut welfare programs, or at least slow their rate of increase, to strengthen defense and give people more to spend through tax cuts. Says Daniel Yankelovich, the public opinion analyst: "They were uneasy about doing so because they suspected that millions of poor people would get hurt, but they accepted the Reagan approach because they agreed that something was badly amiss with the liberal theory of Government-backed entitlements. But Reagan's personal 'goodness' seemed to guarantee that it was not a Scrooge-like thing to do. As long as Reagan was credible, his solutions were acceptable."
Even before the Iran-contra affair, Americans had a suspicion that Reaganism had gone too far in trying to rescind the more generous work of Government: cutting Aid to Families with Dependent Children, for example, and federal funds for housing while running up the military budget from $134 billion in 1980 to $266 billion in 1986. (Although as a percentage of the gross national product, non-defense spending has declined very slightly and is still more than double defense spending.) The dream of salvation -- "Get the Government off the backs of the American people and release the energies of free enterprise" -- may not have been given enough time to work, but, in truth, it was never an agenda that took deep root anyway. Says Kevin Phillips, the Republican political analyst: "In the 1986 election, you saw the desire around the country for candidates who could make Government work, for defining some Government roles. It was flowing from parts of the country where people began thinking, 'Hey, we need something from Government after all.' It was coming primarily from areas dependent on mining, timber, agriculture, energy, textiles, steel. They stopped thinking of Government as something that just took care of muggers and Detroit welfare mothers, the whole conservative rhetorical syndrome."
In a new poll for TIME by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman, people were asked whether Government spending should be increased, decreased or kept the same for various public needs. More than 70% said that funds should be increased for health care to the poor and the elderly, for cleaning up the environment and for aid to the homeless. Given a choice of spending more for the military or more for social programs, respondents preferred the social programs, 69% to . 23%. More than three-fourths of those surveyed said Government "should play a more active role" in such areas as health care, poverty, housing and education. Most surprising of all, 60% said they would "support increased spending for social programs even if it would require an increase in taxes" (see box).
The results, though compelling, may also say something about the mood swings of the American public. Only two years ago, these same people might have said that you cannot solve problems by throwing money at them. "Americans have always expressed ambivalent desires about the role of Government," says California Pollster Mervyn Field. "We ask, Why doesn't the Government just get off our backs? And then we demand, Why doesn't the Government do something about this? Today, in several ways, the Government is off the public's back. Taxes are down. Inflation is down. Interest rates are down. But at the same time, our polling data show growing public anxiety about both the national and the local economies. The layoffs are hitting close to home. So are the growing numbers of the homeless. More people are now asking, Why doesn't Government do something about this?"
The Reagan revolution is not, of course, just going to evaporate. In part, it arose out of inescapable forces: a sense that Government had bloated out of control, that it was time for a period of unabashed good spirits and confidence after an era of gloom and self-doubt. "Reagan has significantly changed our attitude toward Government, away from looking toward Washington to solve our problems," says Field. A new form of Reaganism, possibly even under Democratic auspices, will have to cope with that legacy after Reagan is gone. Few Americans want to return to the Great Society style of welfare. The nation can no longer afford that kind of grand buffet, if it ever could. So the instinct for a new compassion, a word that is often heard these days as a signal of recoil against the meannesses of Reaganism, comes abruptly up against hard realities.
If Reaganism has now and then been perceived as social Darwinism, the idea that the sleekest beast with the sharpest teeth is the fittest to survive (Ivan Boesky in the skin of a panther), the new emphasis, among Republicans as well as Democrats, is upon the practice of a kind of governmental "tough love," an aggressive compassion designed to end dependencies and get people self-sufficient and back to work as quickly as possible. In the 1980s there is ^ an acute awareness of the nation's economic limits and of the intractability of many problems.
The current push for welfare reform, led nationally by New York Senator Daniel Moynihan and Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, is the best example of this approach. It is based on two truths: that unconditional aid leads to long-standing dependency and that the impoverished children of this nation cannot merely be abandoned. The new approach -- being tried with some success in states such as Massachusetts, California, New Jersey and New York -- is to require recipients to enter training and job-placement programs. In some of the proposals, the Federal Government would become the employer of last resort.
In Chicago, Aleen Zimberoff Bayard is one of the growing number of people returning to social activism but demanding "more bang for the buck." As Bayard says firmly, "People don't tolerate giveaways anymore." In 1985 Bayard and several friends started the Entertainment Action Team, whose mission is to "end hunger in Chicago through self-sufficiency." Says she: "It makes such a difference to me that I'm doing something. The team is one example of how young, socially minded people are rewriting the Reagan message." The team is auctioning off part-ownership of an Arabian horse to raise money for a cafe that will be a restaurant-training program for homeless teenagers. "We want to teach them job skills," says Bayard. "Our group believes people want to help themselves. We're saying, 'Money doesn't solve the problem.' "
Such programs, which owe something to Reagan's long emphasis on volunteerism, usually stress the idea that compassion is best implemented through cooperation of governments, businesses and private citizens. "We are really apolitical," says Bayard. "Fat government is the problem."
At the state level, social programs are being seen as an investment in the future. In Colorado, for example, a powerful issue in last November's gubernatorial race was how to handle an expected $434 million windfall in state tax revenues caused by federal tax reform. While the Republican nominee promised to return the money to taxpayers, Democrat Roy Romer proposed to spend it on education, highways, water projects and industrial development. He won. Says he: "I asked people, 'What's more important to you, another $18 in your pocket right now or a job for your kid when he finishes school?' The public support for state-government investment in the economy and education is ; rooted in fear about where the economy is going."
In Kansas, a fortress of Reaganism, the state legislature seems to be moving leftward as the farm crisis persists. Says Richard Larimore, recently retired administrative assistant to the minority in the state senate: "The pendulum is swinging back and is already approaching the middle. In Kansas, this will probably be the last big legislative year for major economic- development programs because people are figuring out that that means giving money to the wealthy."
For years, starting in the late '60s with Lyndon Johnson, successive American Presidents have used inflation, foreign borrowing and other devices to avoid coming to terms with some fundamental problems in the nation's economy, especially the runaway spending on middle-class entitlement programs (like Social Security), the falling productivity of some industries and the resulting failure to compete in the international markets. Americans have indulged themselves in a certain denial of reality. Increasingly, however, they suffer from what is called a "cognitive dissonance" between the nominal economy and the real economy. In other words, they cannot figure out why so many are losing their jobs while 11 million new jobs have been created since 1981, why the stock market soars to record highs, and thousands of new businesses are launched every year while thousands go bust.
It would be ironic for Americans to lose their faith in a free-market economy at the very time that the rest of the world, including even socialist countries, is looking forward to the forces of market incentives and entrepreneurship. In many respects the American economy is remarkably solid, with a respectable if not spectacular growth rate of around 3% projected for 1987 and an unemployment rate significantly lower than that in most other industrialized countries. But economic reality in America is complex and contradictory. Yesterday's boom regions, like the Southwest, are suffering while yesterday's depressed areas, like the Northeast, are booming. Thirty- one states, mostly in the heartland of the nation, are in recession. Mothers and fathers know that the industries in which they have worked all their lives will not provide middle-income jobs to their daughters and sons, who may of course make their fortunes as junk-bond traders or software geniuses, but are far more likely to find "hamburger jobs" and drop into the minimum-wage sector of an increasingly bottom-heavy economy.
< If Big Government was the villain of the Reagan cycle of American history, the bete noire of the new may be Big Business. In 1979, according to the pollster Lou Harris, 69% of Americans gave corporate America a favorable rating. In 1986 only 35% rated corporate America favorably. "Clearly," says Harris, "the mood about business has turned negative on a massive scale."
This swing has been spurred by the insider-trading scandals, which find considerable resonance with Americans. Says Pollster Field: "The public doesn't distinguish between Wall Street and Big Business. I see Big Business becoming a target in 1988." Deputy Treasury Secretary Richard Darman, one of the intellectual turbines of the Reagan revolution, masterminded last year's successful push for tax reform. He has attempted to formulate a conservative populism that would save the Reagan Administration from being inextricably tied in the public mind with Big Business and Wall Street. Darman has used the term corpocracy to describe the bloated management of U.S. corporations that have resisted becoming more competitive. "Big Government isn't what is bugging everyone these days," says Darman. Instead, he sees the resentment as being directed at stagnant industries and declining education systems. Businesses that profited from tax breaks without making intelligent investments, combined with the scandals and takeovers on Wall Street, have bolstered the perception of greed run wild. One result, Darman says, "is that latent idealism is having a comeback."
These themes are being stressed by Democratic candidates, including Gary Hart, Bruce Babbitt, Joseph Biden, Richard Gephardt and Jesse Jackson. "When Rhodes scholars are arrested for insider trading, that contributes to this populist sentiment that a privileged class is getting rich at the expense of the rest of the economy," Babbitt says. Like most Democratic candidates, Babbitt is careful to focus his attacks on Wall Street and Big Business, as opposed to entrepreneurial and family businesses.
Gephardt often cites the successful Japanese management of American workers at the General Motors plant in Fremont, Calif. He wonders whether U.S. industrial failures should not be attributed to American managers rather than American workers (despite high U.S. wages compared with some of America's competitors). Babbitt adds that unlike Japanese managers, who often cut their own compensation before that of their workers, "American executives reward + themselves with huge bonuses during the good times but console themselves with layoffs as soon as times turn bad."
Pierre Proudhon, the 19th century French utopian, once wrote of "the fecundity of the unexpected." It is always somewhat dangerous to think that history can be foretold by studying the patterns of the past. Still, the rhythms of change in the past century have displayed uncanny regularity. Schlesinger's theory, inherited in part from his father, is that people have absorbed their formative political values by the time they reach age 18 or so. Ronald Reagan reached that age during the years of Calvin Coolidge, whose portrait now hangs in the Cabinet room in the White House. John Kennedy came of age with the New Deal and World War II. Says Schlesinger: "In general, we have 30-year cycles based on generations. Just as the 1980s were a re- enactment of the 1950s, the Eisenhower time was a re-enactment of the Harding- Coolidge time of the 1920s. So at 30-year intervals -- Theodore Roosevelt in 1901, F.D.R. in '33, Kennedy in '61 -- we have a swing from private interest, from self-interest, to public purpose." By Schlesinger's calculation, the cyclical change now beginning should reach full momentum around 1990.
American history in the past 100 years has arranged itself in the cycles with an odd neatness. A period of economic depression, war, social change and activism has generally been followed by a spasm of reactionary backlash, followed by a time of consolidation, relative calm and prosperity.
The three decades from 1890 to the end of World War I were turbulent with industrialization. The first labor-union movement arose in idealism and turmoil and disruption. Immigrants poured in from Southern and Eastern Europe. Then came "the war to end all wars," attended by Woodrow Wilson's millennial ambitions.
Even before the war ended, Americans began recoiling from Wilson's international activism. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer went on witch- hunts for Bolsheviks. The Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles. America closed down Ellis Island and slammed the door against new immigration. What followed in the '20s was the "era of good feeling," a period with some resemblance to Reagan's '80s.
The next cycle turned on the Great Depression, the New Deal and World War II, followed by the backlash of McCarthyism and the era of relative calm and prosperity during the 1950s and early '60s. Then the real '60s: turbulence, crisis, war, the rhetoric of revolution.
Reagan's election in 1980 was less a new starting point than the cresting of a conservative-populist movement that began with Richard Nixon's election in 1968. That year, the Middle American constituency struck back against the activist '60s -- against antiwar protesters, against the civil rights movement and the sexual revolution, against high taxes, Government regulation, the Washington elite, the Woodstock generation. George Wallace was in full cry against "pointy-headed intellectuals." The Nixon-Agnew ticket swept into power. Watergate brought Gerald Ford's brief period of consolidation and then the anomaly of Jimmy Carter, who came to Washington campaigning against Big Government, just as Reagan did four years later.
What is the legacy that Ronald Reagan leaves?
"The Reagan revolution," observes Political Analyst Richard Scammon, "never moved as far as many on the left feared it would, or many on the right hoped it would." Just so. In American governance, the pendulum rarely makes radical swings. Change generally comes by evolution, not by sudden transformation. The only radical changes, the elections of Lincoln and F.D.R., for example, occur at times of severe national stress.
"The main achievement of the Reagan Administration," argues Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative editor of Commentary magazine, "has been to move the country in a different direction, which was much more consistent with traditional American constitutional, legal and cultural values." Podhoretz distinguishes between the actual performance of the Administration and the general direction in which Reagan tried to move the nation. He has always approved of Reagan's intentions, but thinks he fell short in the performance.
After a half-century, Reagan sought to steer America on a course away from the New Deal. And yet, in doing so, he more than doubled the national debt. He was unable, or unwilling, in a term and a half tackle middle-class entitlements, such as Social Security, Medicare and wildly excessive farm- support programs. Reagan bequeaths that burden to future Presidents.
The legacy of Reagan the great American imagist lies as much in the realm of the symbolic as in the area of hard accomplishment. One of his great achievements was to restore the morale of the American people for a time, just as he restored -- for a time -- a faith in the institution of the presidency & and in the idea of presidential leadership. He persuaded the American people that their optimism was once again valid.
The nation in the next few years will be groping toward a new definition of itself. Now a new generation comes to power. Those marked by the formative experiences of the Depression and by World War II will leave the stage. The generation of the baby boom, which was formed by the Viet Nam era, will begin taking over.
Each party is now struggling toward its candidate, its theme. The task is harder for Republicans, who are reluctant to break abruptly with Reagan and Reaganism. Still, Congressman Jack Kemp tries to stir a "sense of activism" with ideas for a flat tax with a low rate and "enterprise zones" to bring businesses to depressed areas. Vice President George Bush, who now must ease judiciously out of the Reagan shadow and establish himself as his own man, told TIME, "There will be a reordering of priorities, and it isn't inconceivable, in the future, that there will be more emphasis ((on Government's role)). I do think there is a certain feeling ((concerning)) tolerance, compassion, understanding, caring. I think there's a reawakening in those areas." Robert Dole, in his latest speeches, stresses the need to combine conservatism and compassion.
Gary Hart, the Democratic front runner, declares, "For all practical purposes, we have entered the post-Reagan years." But he knows that the Democrats "won't win by default, or because of some historic trend or tide. We must offer some concrete alternatives to the laissez-faire philosophy of this Administration and to its militaristic foreign policy." Most of the Democratic candidates are cautious about criticizing "militarism," for fear of being tagged antidefense, and even more cautious about advancing big- spender ideas; the national deficit is already ruinous. Hart talks about a "more important role for Government, not necessarily a larger one." Joseph Biden is somewhat more inspirational, evoking generational memories of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. and constantly quoting a hymn: "And he will raise you up on eagle's wings,/ and bear you on the breath of the dawn . . ."
Only Jesse Jackson preaches the old-time religion, a classic populism of the left. Trying to expand his coalition of the dispossessed, middle-class workers and distressed farmers, Jackson calls unashamedly for large increases in programs for education, health and public housing.
Some Democrats delude themselves that they can ignore Reagan's legacy and return to the old Democratic practice of tax and spend, as if it were still 1964. At the California Democratic Convention at the end of January, the public address system blared Happy Days Are Here Again, and many delegates sank into a liberal nostalgia, dreaming of a redistributed American pie. Clinton Reilly, a moderate Democrat and political consultant, listened to the rhetoric and shook his head. "One reason for Reagan's success," he said, "is that he appealed to the self-interest of the middle class. If Democrats don't learn to make the same appeal, if they only talk about the needs of the poor and don't include the middle class, they're going to lose again."
The Democrats last year recaptured control of Congress because they fielded better candidates, but also because they were more finely tuned to people's thoughts about what the Government ought to be doing. The Democrats were well in control on Capitol Hill by Christmas. With the Administration weakened, the party leaders swung into place the long-deferred Democratic agenda, items thwarted during the Reagan years: education, job training, increased research for AIDS and health care. Says Democratic Hopeful Gephardt: "I don't think people care about Government or no Government. They're willing to use Government if it is part of the solution. People want things to be solved. They want the Government to make airlines safe, to find a cure for AIDS, to prevent more Boeskys."
To be successful in the next phase of American politics, candidates and parties must come up with specific, tough-minded solutions to well-perceived problems. It will take great sifting and discipline. The recent congressional override of Reagan's veto of the clean-water bill suggested hearts in the right place (the public considers clean water a necessity, not a luxury, and is willing to sacrifice for it) but minds not yet tough enough to resist temptation (the bill was a nice display of logrolling).
A bill for emergency aid to the homeless was passed by Congress last month. That was not tough-minded either, since the $50 million to be spread around the entire country can hardly solve the problem. But the symbolism was important. In a nation that prides itself on its economic comeback from recession, the spectacle of people huddling around trash-can fires is ethically embarrassing. One makes five or ten serious moral choices (give money, pass them by, what?) on the way to work, and as many coming home, and the conscience at last is frayed. Says Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, another Democratic presidential aspirant: "The conscience of the nation is beginning to be troubled. People in every city see the homeless lying around on grates, even a few blocks from the White House. And they wonder, Does this have to be?"
In the beginning, America was a blank page, in Tocqueville's phrase: no history, all potential. Today America, the oldest continuous political system in the world, has a full page of history and heavy debts to pay. The campaign of 1988 could be one of the more interesting and important in recent history. There is no incumbent; neither party has an obvious heir apparent. The nation will perform the very American act of reimagining itself.
CHART: TEXT NOT AVAILABLE
CREDIT: TIME Chart by Joe Lertola, Research by Noel McCoy
CAPTION: AMERICAN CYCLES
Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. suggests that there are 30-year cycles of American history that swing between eras of liberalism and conservatism -- periods he calls Private Interest and Public Purpose.
DESCRIPTION: Chart shows cycles of private interest and public purpose in U.S. with important events 1890-1987 during Republican and Democratic administrations
With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett/Washington and Lawrence Malkin/Boston, with other bureaus