| The Harvard Salient | November 4, 1996 |
| Cover Story | |
ou can accuse Bill Clinton and Bob Dole of a lot of things. Bill's a liar, a cheat, and a thief. Bob's mean-spirited, unimaginative, and a hypocrite. Bob's friends are nicotine-loving tobacco executives. Bill's friends are convicts. To top it all off, both Bob and Bill have running mates that make Admiral James Stockdale ("Who am I? Why am I here?") look interesting.
There remains, however, one thing you can't accuse Bill and Bob of being: extremists. Dole may call Clinton "liberal, liberal, liberal," and Clinton may accuse Dole of being a reactionary old grump, but the reality of the situation is that both Clinton and Dole are hugging the center. While Dole has made a career out of driving in the middle of the road, Clinton's shuffle to the center has been part of a brilliant political strategy that could very well result in a Republican embarrassment on more than one front come Election Day.
One of the most significant reasons that the American public is so bored
with this election is that there's been no black and white, and no good
and evil. There has never been any doubt that Dole is a centrist. His record
over the past half c
entury proves it, and not even his
rightward shift in the Republican primaries could mask it. That's why his
proposed 15% tax cut clashes so severely with his image as one of the Senate's
most fervent backers of responsible fiscal policy. In fact, Dole's moderate
stance is one of his most valuable assets, as it allows him to form (in
the most over-used metaphor of the election season) a bridge between the
Ralph Reeds and Bill Welds of his party.
The failing of Dole's campaign is that it has not clearly addressed who, exactly this Bill Clinton fellow is. It's not just Dole's problem, either - a recent New York Times/CBS poll found that while 43% of voters consider Bill Clinton a liberal, 36% see him as a moderate, and 12% (the Communist delegation, perhaps?) think he's a conservative. Moreover, 50% of self-identified moderates voters say President Clinton is one of them. Meanwhile, 53% of the voters claim Dole's a conservative, and the crucial moderate voters agree - a large majority feel that Dole stands to their right.
These results, in and of themselves, are not crucial to the election. The problem is that Bob Dole has failed miserably to increase his standing with the center by painting a portrait of Clinton as a raving left-wing liberal. Whether or not Clinton is truly a liberal is not the point - appearances are what counts. The age of New Deal-style liberalism appears to have ended in America, and a politician who is effectively linked to the "L-word" has no future. The key word, though, is "effectively," and Dole's attempts to place Clinton just to the right of Karl Marx have been anything but effective. Granted, Dole has called the President "an old-style, dyed-in-the-wool, big-spending liberal," yet, at the Republican Convention, he claimed that Clinton "has tried of late to be a good Republican and I expect him to be here tonight." Dole's mixed message further confuses swing voters, and results in polls such as the ones released in the past two weeks.
A composite of three election polls (Reuters, CNN/USA Today/Gallup, and ABC) from October 21 show Clinton with a comfortable 13-point lead, with 50% of likely voters favoring him. In the composite electoral college poll, Clinton swamps Dole 420 to 102, with 16 electoral votes up in the air. These results are not aberrations; they show approximately the same numbers as the last two months' worth of polls.
The most worrisome election data - at least for the loyal Republican voter - is not from the presidential poll, however. A composite of four generic congressional ballot polls (Reuters, Times/CBS, ABC and Newsweek) taken from October 18 to October 21 shows the Democrats holding a seven-point lead (46 to 39 percent). The smallest Democrat lead in these polls was 2 percent (Reuters); the largest was 14 (Newsweek). And the seven point lead should give you a sense of déjà vu - it's the exact nationwide margin by which the Republicans won Congress in 1994, in the so-called "Republican Revolution."
That this revolution might be short-lived is due as much to Clinton's centrist rebirth as it is to the mistakes made by the Dole campaign staff. Dick Morris's reconstruction of the Clinton image was finished long before the maligned consultant's exile from power. This time, Clinton is dead on center. If Clinton still clings to liberal values, he has hidden them well, and only he knows if they would reappear in a second term in the White House. To make matters worse for the GOP, the Republicans gambled - and lost, badly - when they submitted a poison-pill-laden welfare bill for Clinton's approval. The GOP expected Clinton to show his liberal colors and veto the bill, leaving the door open to ridicule and election season attack ads. Clinton, ever the master campaigner, would have no part of that. He shocked Republican leaders, and much of the nation, by fixing his signature to the bill. While this move may have alienated the loyal liberals of the President's constituency, it almost certainly consolidated his good standing with the moderate voters who make up the majority of the American electorate. As for those disaffected liberals, Clinton began anew with them when he claimed his first action in a second term would be to "fix" the reforms he'd just put into law. With the liberals and moderates accounted for, Clinton could be reelected by a landslide with Democratic congressmen riding his coattails.
Unlikely? Maybe. But it's worth noting that even Newt Gingrich has been given a bit of a scare in his bid for re-election. Gingrich was forced to return home to stave off the millionaire challenger to his throne when the Georgia state GOP chairman warned him his victory was steadily being put into question. And the mere thought of a Democratic Congress is enough to send conservatives howling into the night. Consider, for example, Dick Gephardt as the next Speaker of the House. Think about Charles Rangel as the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, and remember the Commerce Committee when it was ruled by John Dingell.
oston Globe columnist Thomas Oliphant recently
cited Texas politician Jim Hightower's old line about centrist politics.
"The only things in the middle of the road," the populist Hightower
would crack, "are yellow lines and dead armadillos." The election
is still a long way from over. Dole officials are predicting the first "96-hour
election," in which everything is decided in the last four days leading
up to Election Day. If this prediction is wrong, however, then Hightower's
yellow lines will mark the last lap of Bill Clinton's "Road to the
White House" and the beginning of his second term as President leaving
the dead armadillos in the dust.