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Nearly everyone, including the unsympathetic media, hailed the Republican National Convention as an enormous success. The Republicans had an attractive and personable candidate, the character issue, a message of "compassion" shrewdly calculated to win those elusive minority and women votes, and a united party.
By contrast, the Democratic National Convention was an untidy affair.
First, there was the self-congratulatory speech of the current president, during which references to the party's nominee were only sparingly made. The Democrats, unlike the Republicans, who were consciously striving to broaden their political appeal, seemed to be desperately struggling to hold onto their base. Gore, lagging behind in the polls, looked like a loser.
But nothing is certain in politics. By Labor Day, Gore had surged ahead of Bush by an astonishing 10 points in a Newsweek magazine poll.
Conventional wisdom says George W. Bush should take this election in a walk. The public, weary of the endless Clinton scandals, craves an antidote to "Clinton fatigue." They want a new start, a fresh face, someone unencumbered by the moral lapses of the administration.
In Bush, they would find a candidate without ties to either the current administration or those mean-spirited Newt Gingrich Republicans of the past.
These reasons seemed plausible, but they weren't rooted in the concerns of real voters. As James Carville, Clinton's confidant, famously proclaimed during Clinton's first campaign for the presidency, "It's the economy, stupid."
This piece of political wisdom encapsulates almost the entirety of the average voter's interests during an election year. It explains as well why the Gore campaign team was unshaken by Gore's anemic poll numbers during the summer. A surging economy, they knew, always benefits the incumbent party. Scandals, character issues, foreign policy pratfalls cannot compete in the public's mind with the unassailable fact they have never been better off economically.
Hence, this is not an issue-driven election. Voter turnout may reach historic low levels. Although the voters might not care who wins, anyone with a partisan interest knows that the political stakes have rarely been higher.
While candidates always claim that the stakes in every election are "critical" for the future of the party, this year, they are correct. The two political parties are presently about equally matched. Slight shifts in public opinion could hand awesome power to the victorious party to shape executive, legislative and judicial branches of government for a generation or more.
The Democrats are more determined to win since they have more at stake. The Republican attitude is more complacent. If they lose, they think that they will live to play another day. The Democrats, on the other hand, believe if they lose this one that there may not be another day to play.
During his term, the next president will likely pick three or four new justices for the U.S. Supreme Court. The present Supreme Court splits narrowly toward a moderately conservative interpretation of the Constitution. The judicial appointments of a Gore administration would inaugurate a new age of judicial activism the likes of which have not been seen since the heyday of the Warren Court in the '60s and early '70s.
The most significant consequence of a Gore election "is that Al Gore is forthrightly," as columnist George F. Will observes, "candidly promising the largest expansion of federal energy since 1965." Gore's "New Populism" means not government closer to the people, but more government.
If Gore wins, Will glumly predicts, "the conservative proposition -- that is that government is too big and largely inefficient at handling certain kinds of problems -- will have been emphatically rejected."
The American political culture has changed so dramatically during the Clinton era that it is now reasonable to conclude that the social, moral and cultural basis necessary for the prevalence of genuinely conservative ideas no longer exists.
Clinton's own moral example has made us comfortable with our own inadequacies. Clinton has taught us to de-couple the issue of character from governance.
Clinton, a sex abuser, an unrepentant and convicted perjurer, occupies the White House and the public reacts with bored indifference. Chinese agents steal America's vital military secrets and the public could care less. Allegations that government favors may have been traded illegally for campaign donations to the Democratic Party only evoke public yawns.
The unprecedented economic prosperity has lulled Americans into a sleep-like state in which they have deluded themselves into believing the fanciful notion that peace, progress and the good life are not earned rewards for lives of hard work, sacrifice and accomplishment, but government-guaranteed entitlements.
Only a sharp economic downturn or some other disaster can awaken them from this slumber.
W. Wesley McDonald is an associate professor of political science at Elizabethtown College.
