SETTLING THE SCORE

By Michael Kinsley

On election day American political journalism typically turns on a dime. Before the election reporters and pundits are obsessed with the minutiae of the campaign: consultants, fund raising, TV spots, sound bites. The premise is that these quotidian details are crucial to a highly uncertain outcome. Immediately after the outcome is known, however, journalists start treating themselves and their customers to grander themes: the voters' message, the sweep of history and so on. The premise is that these larger forces explain what happened.

As storytelling, this change makes perfect sense. As logic, it's puzzling. What was held only hours before the election to be full of suspense becomes, in retrospect, inevitable. Campaign developments reported and analyzed breathlessly as they occurred--Clinton's physical stance in the second presidential debate, Dole's decision to concentrate on California during the past few weeks--are dismissed, not long afterward, as irrelevant. And the question never seems to arise: Why have you invested all those months chasing around the country after the candidates and chewing over every twist and turn in the saga if you're now going to declare that the election was decided by forces beyond even Dick Morris' control?

But this treasured journalistic flip-flop may be harder to perform in November 1996, for two reasons. First, it has been weeks if not months since the media have been able to persuade either themselves or their audience that there was any real uncertainty about the election result--at least on the presidential level. And second, President Clinton's brilliantly successful re-election strategy of good times, bite-size issues (school uniforms) and soaring but empty imagery (bridges hither and yon) does not lend itself to grand historical theorizing or to bold claims about what the voters were trying to say in rewarding it.

Republicans grew used to enjoying those little gold "history" stars rewarded after each election. By 1988 they had won five out of the past six presidential races, and could plausibly claim an unstoppable historical tailwind. Then came '92. This helps to explain the almost hysterical hatred of Bill Clinton by many Republicans and conservatives: he didn't just snatch an election from them; he punctured their claim to history. When the Republicans gained control of Congress in 1994 for the first time in decades, the victory was that much sweeter for restoring--with a vengeance--their momentarily lost sense of historical inevitability.

That makes 1996 a bitter, bitter occasion for the G.O.P. History has been toying most cruelly with the Republican Party. The six-election presidential scoreboard now stands tied at 3-3. And each side has chalked up a re-election victory for an incumbent whose success the other side finds enraging and inexplicable. In short: now we're even.

The Republicans' spin on the history question is that history is still on their side, and its unlikely messenger is Bill Clinton: he "stole" the election by campaigning as a Republican. But this is a tremendous exaggeration. Clinton did not campaign (or govern) as a McGovernite Democrat any more than Bob Dole campaigned as a Goldwaterite Republican. Both parties and both men have accommodated to history; neither can claim history's momentum. Dole, who voted against the creation of Medicare in 1965--a principled, conservative stance--spent the 1996 campaign passionately insisting that he wanted to "save" Medicare, not "cut" it.

Some politicians had to accommodate a lot faster than Dole or Clinton. In Washington State first-term Republican Congressman Randy Tate, elected in 1994 as a classic young conservative revolutionary, ran television commercials in 1996 denouncing his Democratic opponent (named, hilariously, Adam Smith) as a lying "liberal." Smith's alleged liberal lies were mainly that Tate wanted to cut a variety of liberal spending programs--not just Medicare but also student loans and so on. Tate, the ads insisted, actually voted to increase spending on these programs.

Republicans like Tate (and Dole) have a legitimate complaint here. Democrats, from Clinton on down, found their best issue this year in overstating if not actually fabricating Republican designs to shrink the government. In that sense you could say that this election was indeed "stolen." Claiming the center ground and painting the opposition as extreme is a standard campaign strategy, but it is a game the Republicans have played much better than the Democrats until this year. For the Democrats to play it suddenly with equal success does seem almost like cheating. Two things made this possible. Republicans are happy enough to credit Clinton's enormous political skill: it's a way of denying any larger message from Dole's defeat. But the Republicans' own hubris was equally important. Democrats won by accusing Republicans--often inaccurately--of attempting to be precisely what the Republicans claimed to be: agents of history, carrying the message of smaller government.

If a wily Democrat stole the 1996 election, you could argue that every presidential election since 1980 has been stolen. Victory has gone to the candidate who came closest to offering voters a convincing promise of smaller government combined with a convincing failure to produce it. Ronald Reagan invented the formula in 1980: tax cuts without commensurate spending cuts. If anything like the cuts he proposed--and quickly backed off from--in 1981 had been enacted, he wouldn't have been re-elected in a landslide in 1984. Walter Mondale's promise to raise people's taxes--the only explicit denial of a free lunch by any nominee of either party during this period--didn't help. In 1988 George Bush said, "Read my lips: no new taxes," and people believed him. In 1992 anger at Bush for breaking that promise was the best thing going for Bill Clinton. He, of course, promised a middle-class tax cut and failed to deliver. But Clinton was saved by the Republican Congress, which was elected on the promise of smaller government and made the mistake of actually trying to deliver. It's hard not to sympathize with the Newtoids, who have been punished largely for doing what they said they were going to do--or sometimes because of false accusations that they were doing what they said they were going to do.

But it was Republicans, starting with Reagan, who taught Americans to expect a free lunch. If Dole's free-lunch promises (tax cuts and a balanced budget without any painful reductions in middle-class spending programs) in this election were less convincing to the voters than Clinton's free-lunch promises (targeted tax cuts and a balanced budget with increased spending on nice middle-class programs), well, Shakespeare, in Twelfth Night, said it best: "Thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges." In other words, once again: now we're even.

Something similar might be said about what must be, in the view of Republicans, the voters' infuriating refusal to take seriously the various ethical issues they (and the media, to whom they are so ungrateful) raised against President Clinton. It was Republicans, during the Reagan and Bush administrations, who trained the voters to pooh-pooh presidential scandals, who argued that special prosecutors and congressional hearings were just political tools of the opposition. Then when the tables turned, the Republican Party began throwing mud indiscriminately, in the hope that something would stick. Instead the public cynicism that Republicans had encouraged--and Clinton's Reaganite skill in shrugging it all off--meant that nothing stuck. Without settling whether Clinton's ethics are better or worse than his predecessors', the conclusion, yet again, is: now we're even.

The historical lesson of the 3-3 tie is that neither side can claim the mantle of historical inevitability. Through all the Sturm und Drang of the past 20 years, the share of the economy taken up by Federal Government spending has been virtually stable, and the share paid in federal taxes has wobbled around in a narrow band. The American people have not made a historical decision for either smaller government or larger government. They maintain a preference for getting more government than they pay for, but they may even be waking up from that fantasy.

"Now we're even" is the best reason for hope coming out of this election. Now that the free-lunch pandering battle of almost two decades has been fought to a draw, now that both sides have not only won but also lost the White House trying to out-free-lunch the other, maybe there can be a truce. Not a high-minded agreement to settle all our differences in a spirit of bipartisan cooperation. That, like smaller government, is something people think they want but might not like much if they got it. Instead maybe we can hope for an honest and civil debate over what the government should do and how it should be paid for.

And what about the man from Hope? Bill Clinton has the mentality of a Rhodes scholar: his entire life's focus has been on winning approval and acquiring the next glossy credential. What does a person like that do when approval is no longer necessary and there are no more credentials to acquire? Everybody's answer: he looks to history. This is fine. But he should learn from the Republicans that history's mantle is easier to claim than to deserve.