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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