Political Discourse and the Electorate
excerpted from the book
The Democratic Facade
by Daniel Hellinger and Dennis R. Judd Brooks
Cole Publishing Company, 1991, paper
Political Discourse and the Electorate
p112
... the two-party system is a crucial means for ensuring that
elections will be run within a narrowly defined public discourse.
It isn't so much that the voters get what they deserve; elites
go to considerable lengths to guarantee that they can get nothing
else.
p119
The Poverty of Political Discourse
The two major parties conduct their political arguments within
an extraordinarily narrow range, and the extent of their differences
is reflected in the views of party loyalists. Political scientist
Benjamin Page examined the magnitude of difference between Democratic
and Republican partisans in 1967 and 1968, utilizing 119 questions
asked by several polling organizations during that period. Altogether,
the questions were combined into two clusters of issues; twenty-seven
issues dealt with foreign policy, and thirty-six concerned domestic
affairs. On 59 percent (that is, sixteen) of the foreign policy
issues, the spread between the percentage of Democrats and Republicans
expressing an opinion one way or the other was no more than 5
percent, which is statistically insignificant. This was also the
case for 42 percent of domestic issues. In effect, the Democrats
and Republicans largely agreed on nearly half (49 percent) of
the issues put to them in polls. Despite the rising controversy
over the war in Vietnam, which would force Lyndon Johnson from
the presidency in 1968, there was not a single foreign policy
issue on which Democratic and Republican identifiers diverged
by more than twenty percentage points (e.g., a 60% to 40% split).
The greatest differences in political opinions between Democrats
and Republicans involved a few select domestic issues, especially
federal assistance for medical care, employment, and education.
Democratic respondents were slightly more likely (by a 21% to
18% margin) to support the rights of various kinds of employees
to organize unions and to strike.
By comparing speeches by presidential candidates Hubert Humphrey
and Richard Nixon in the 1968 election, Page tried to determine
how closely candidates' issue differences fit with the positions
expressed by Democratic and Republican activists. He found that
on 87 percent of the issues the candidates mirrored the difference
between supporters, when these existed. Humphrey and Nixon, however,
meticulously avoided strong positions on the most controversial
issue of the day- Vietnam-and both attempted to project a centrist
image on the occasion of their main image-making opportunity,
their nomination acceptance speeches. By the most generous estimate,
only about 10 percent of Nixon's acceptance speech and 8 percent
of Humphrey's dealt with Vietnam. Both candidates strived for
ambiguity and vacuity. Nixon, for example, promised to make a
"complete reappraisal of America's policies in every section
of the world" and to make it a high priority "to bring
an honorable end to the war in Vietnam." Page concluded,
"The voter could not hope to find much information here-or
in the TV spots or stump speeches which echoed the acceptance
speech: whether he would 'end the war' by massive escalation,
by unilateral withdrawal, or by negotiation." Humphrey's
statements were equally insipid. In the most specific references
Page could find, Humphrey mentioned the "necessity for peace
in Vietnam," and promised that he would "do everything
within my power to aid the negotiations and to bring a prompt
end to this war," adding on another occasion that the "policies
of today need not be limited by the policies of yesterday."
In contrast to such meaningless and contrived platitudes,
George Wallace, running as a third-party candidate, made thinly
veiled racist appeals for votes complaining that the federal government
was forcing people "to sell or lease your home or property
to someone that they think you ought to lease it to" and
"saying you folks don't know where to send your children
to schools." These remarks were obviously aimed at fair housing
policies and integrated schooling for blacks and whites. Wallace's
demagoguery sharpened the controversy over civil rights and framed
the issues for voters. Four years later, a poll found that voters
found it relatively easy to define their own positions on civil
rights. On the other hand, the Vietnam War remained a very difficult
issue for voters to define in 1972.
It is important to ask why Eugene McCarthy's 1968 and George
McGovern's 1972 campaigns failed to sharpen the Vietnam conflict
for the electorate in the same way that Wallace's campaign helped
to define the civil rights issue. McCarthy and McGovern both campaigned
as peace candidates and were sharply critical of the war. Wallace
was willing to attack directly the liberal consensus on civil
rights, and thus the policy alternatives were clear. McGovern,
although he consistently opposed the war throughout his campaign,
was unwilling to attack the kneejerk anticommunism that both parties
long had embraced as the linchpin for their foreign policy positions.
As a consequence, the policy alternatives were ambiguous: As in
all previous post-war elections, in 1972 the candidates "mostly
repeated the prevailing wisdom that national security must be
sought through mutual armament; that 'freedom' must be defended
abroad against socialism." McGovern felt that Vietnam was
not the appropriate place to defend American interests, but he
defined these interests in a rather conventional way.
The 1988 Democratic platform and the nature of the campaign
suggest that despite substantial public support for "liberal"
positions on specific issues (as distinct from liberalism as an
ideology), most Democrats shunned the label. Dukakis was determined
to avoid being branded a liberal, successfully using his majority
of delegates at the convention to keep the platform deliberately
vague, preferring to make the election turn on "competence"
rather than on ideology or issues. The Democratic National Convention
was carefully crafted to mute debate over issues and political
commentators repeatedly stressed the value of having Jesse Jackson
criticize Dukakis from the left in the latter stages of the primary
so that voters would perceive Dukakis as a centrist. What actually
happened, however, is that George Bush put Dukakis on the defensive,
and Dukakis began to articulate a vaguely populist campaign with
only two weeks to go, too late to turn the tide. Voters who made
their minds up in the last two weeks selected Dukakis by a 55
percent to 43 percent margin but only one voter in seven decided
so late in the campaign.
The Republican platforms of 1980, 1984, and 1988 presented
clearly conservative positions on the issues. The shift to the
right in American politics ... was not preceded by shifts in public
opinion on most of the items composing the conservative agenda.
Conservatism has become the leading "brand name" ideology
largely because liberalism has left the field of battle. In 1976
Jimmy Carter presented himself as a southern moderate, and in
1980 he offered what amounted to an apology for his first term
and a promise to do better in his second. In 1984 Walter Mondale
offered concrete promises to various interest groups, but voters
contradicted the Michigan study findings by refusing to vote merely
on the basis of membership in an interest group. Dukakis so successfully
avoided saying anything concrete, especially about taxes, at the
Democratic convention that George Bush's campaign researchers
found that the epithet "stealth candidate" was one of
the most popular phrases that Bush used to describe Dukakis.
Although the Republican platforms of the 1980s were quite
issue oriented, candidates Reagan and Bush were cautious. What
Ronald Reagan's campaigns succeeded in doing was to create an
encompassing, coherent image based on "a powerful myth that
a return to a single, carefree, omnipotent America could be reached
through the magic of slashing big govemment." Bush did not
successfully convey such an image but instead was able to cast
Dukakis as a threat to traditional American values: Liberalism
was painted as "a general softness, especially on crime and
defense, alien values; threats to the family; rampant permissiveness;
anti-Americanism; and radicalism."
The "L" word became a scarlet letter because Dukakis
offered no rejoinders that could frame the issues effectively.
In media campaigns, when issues are replaced by "sound bites"
and fleeting TV images, the absence of equally dramatic sound
bites and images carrying a different or opposing message leaves
a vacuum that only exceptionally informed or ideological voters
can fill on their own. The day after the election, Michael Dukakis
seemed to appreciate this when he said, "I think one of the
lessons of this campaign is you have to respond, you have to respond
quickly." But respond with what? Dukakis was only the latest
in a line of Democratic candidates so eager to find the "center"
of political opinion that they dared not stake out solid ground
of their own. Perhaps Dukakis carried this tendency the furthest,
projecting J an image of no convictions at all; he "whined
about being labeled, confirming a sense that there must be something
wrong with the politics that dare not speak its name."
It is clear that in 1988 a majority of Americans favored "liberal"
programs for more aggressive environmental policies, education
programs, child care, gun control, access to abortion, deep cuts
in nuclear weapons, and a rapprochement with the Soviet Union.
Yet the Bush campaign was able to use the Pledge of Allegiance,
attacks on the ACLU, and Willie Horton's crimes to label Dukakis
as a liberal. The images conveyed in these attacks on Dukakis
were constructed of sacred cultural symbols of family, religion,
and patriotism along with profane symbols of crime and radicalism.
The issues making up the liberal agenda could have been framed
around the same images and symbols, as Jesse Jackson showed in
the primaries. By fleeing from the fight, Dukakis "left huge
sectors of the population frustrated, alienated and feeling as
if they [had] no stake in the election. Worse, his flight...abdicated
the middle ground of political discourse." Voters were denied
even the familiar choice between the lesser of two evils.
Of course, a political discourse that involves "two sides,"
identified as current American brands of liberal and conservative
thought, is itself remarkably truncated and artificial, especially
when compared to the panoply of ideologies represented in a competitive
multiparty system. Liberals share so many assumptions with conservatives
that the two cannot be accurately called oppositional ideologies.
Accordingly a study of the origins of ideological identification
in the American public concluded that the liberal and conservative
labels "have largely symbolic, nonissue-oriented meaning
to the mass public," and that voters' self-identification
as liberal or conservative is derived largely from evaluations
of the labels that they take from their environment-that is, politicians'
rhetoric and the media.
Nonetheless, one must acknowledge that losing one of the "sides"
in American political discourse exerts a significant effect on
American politics. The ideological identification one assumes
does affect one's position on an issue or a candidate Obviously
there is a complex interaction among voters, candidates, and political
parties. Voters are generally blamed for being no more clear about
issues than politicians seem to be.
A political process designed to obscure issues cannot produce
or even tolerate an informed public. The most effective technique
for a challenger is not to offer policy alternatives, but to highlight
and make more salient (but not necessarily to define) those broad
values that are deeply held by the national electorate.
p124
The quality of political discourse engaged in by candidates and
other elites inevitably trickles down to the electorate. Social
scientists who are surprised and dismayed to find a low level
of issue awareness among American voters are, one may surmise,
assuming that the electorate ought to be able to reach well-defined
issue preferences even in a political system in which candidates
and parties meticulously avoid debating issues.
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