Online NewsHour: State of Political Discourse--November 5 , 1996

THE SOUND AND THE FURY

NOVEMBER 5, 1996

TRANSCRIPT

Four experts on American culture discuss their impressions of this election year's discourse. Their verdict: generally disappointed.

A RealAudio version of this NewsHour segment is available.
Browse the NewsHour Coverage of Election Night '96

MARGARET WARNER: As Americans vote or don't vote today, what does this election say about our society and culture? For thoughts on that and other questions, we're joined by Barbara Ehrenreich, an author and essayist for Time Magazine, Dorothy Rabinowitz, editorial writer and television critic at the Wall Street Journal, Cornel West, professor of the Philosophy of Religion and Afro-American Studies at Harvard University, and Michael Novak, theologian and director of Social and Political Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Thank you all for being with us. Michael Novak, what is the most important thing you think is at stake in this election?
MICHAEL NOVAK, American Enterprise Institute: Well, the most important thing is nudging us closer to the American experiment, which is an experiment in self-government, a republic of self-governing people. I think that's the direction, if I may put it this way, the tides of history are moving both us and the rest of the world to, and I hope we come to grasp it more clearly and move in that direction.
MARGARET WARNER: And how does this particular election have the potential for doing that?
MR. NOVAK: Even Mr. Clinton, though running as a Democrat and running as a liberal, has talked about the era of big government being over. He's talked about welfare reform, personal responsibility. Now, it's to a remarkable extent those who are enunciating the original ideas have been winning the intellectual argument in America. And I think this election showed that in practical political terms.
MARGARET WARNER: Barbara Ehrenreich, what do you see as the central issue, or the focus of this election?
BARBARA. EHRENREICH, Author/Essayist: Well, there wasn't an issue. I think this was our first issue-free campaign, and, and Michael Novak I think gave part of the reason that--it's that we had a tremendous ideological convergence of the candidates and not a huge difference between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. Uh, that certainly saps enthusiasm, and then I think we've been listening to the right bash government, bash politics, bash the political process for so long that the whole thing begins to seem a little bit tawdry and worthless and insignificant. And that, I think, is pretty tragic. When we withdraw this much, we get so bored and so disgusted with our own national affairs.
MARGARET WARNER: Well, Michael Novak seemed to be saying that he saw this election has potentially an affirmation of something in a positive sense. You don't see it that way then? You're seeing it--just make that distinction.
MS. EHRENREICH: It's hard to find any affirmation. This is the first time that actually the media got sick of things too, that the media stopped their coverage, cut back significantly in their coverage. This has been a period that, well, the New York Times called it the year of the yawn. Uh, no--people just turned off, tuned out, and I can't see anything positive about that, uh, if you're looking at a future of democracy.
MARGARET WARNER: Dorothy Rabinowitz, what do you see at the heart of this election?
DOROTHY. RABINOWITZ, Wall Street Journal: I see the American people having to go back to, uh, an earlier time in their lives when they trusted themselves and were able to make judgments. We have seen an election campaign now in which Americans have, I think with the help of the media but not entirely, simply abdicated their right to make judgments, because they have had this message ground down upon them, and it's come out of them. Negativism is a bad thing, and absolutely everything related to character and uh, questions of, if not morality, what is right and what is wrong, Americans have been taught to say, well, they all do it. They all do it is about as poisonous a piece of wisdom that has come out of this election campaign, probably the most depressing. They all do it means I don't have to make a judgment about any of it, it's none of my business.
MARGARET WARNER: So you're saying then that you think character questions should have been at the heart of this election but aren't?
MS. RABINOWITZ: Yes, indeed. I mean, it was suddenly not an issue. When is it not an issue to say, uh, that there is a character and he sits--it's part of the President of the United States, and we have a right to ask questions. Instead, it was simply preempted. It was ruled out as in bad taste. We will not dirty your hands with these discussions. But we cannot blame the media for this. And this is, in good part, the electorate's abdication. You hear people over and over saying things you know that they don't mean, that they have learned to parrot approved ideas.
MARGARET WARNER: Cornel West, what do you see at the heart of this election?
CORNEL WEST, Harvard University: Unfortunately, I think we've seen an election of avoidance and evasion and denial. I think that most Americans would agree that we're actually in trouble, if not deep trouble, but the major issues are wealth and income inequality and the major issues of economic insecurity and anxiety, de facto racial segregation by space geography and social life were hardly touched upon. No focus on inner cities, very little talk about urban policy, housing policy, investment in education--so unfortunately, it was a missed opportunity, and I think Barbara's absolutely right, uh, in regard to a democracy that if not in decline is certainly in need of deep renewal.
MARGARET WARNER: So do you think that the fact that those issues weren't addressed, in your view, says more about the political leaders that happen to be running, or about us?
MR. WEST: Well, I think about both, but especially leaders, leaders who were courageous enough to enter public life or give them credit for that, but I think they have to have a vision and courage, and I think unfortunately most are politicians opposing process more than high principles and wise prudence, and, therefore, they were unwilling to challenge us, they were unwilling to challenge the American people. When we look back in American history, the Abe Lincolns and FDR's, they challenged the American people because there were states of emergency in various parts of this country. And I think this is certainly true in working communities and poor communities. There's a real sense of urgency.
MARGARET WARNER: Michael Novak, would you agree with--I know you don't agree with Cornel West--well, let me ask you, do you agree with him about the issues that he believes were not addressed and he thinks should have been addressed?
MR. NOVAK: Well, they were addressed in some part. Jack Kemp, just to give a "for instance," talked most often--more often than anybody else, I think--about empowerment and specifically about inner cities and about racial harmony. So it's not as if the ideas weren't addressed. I think what has happened, though, is that the notion that the government is the vehicle of our hopes for helping the poor no longer convinces people. It doesn't even convince most Democrats. And as a consequence, the political leaders cannot go on repeating a mantra which has shown--you know--seems empty when the government is over-promised and under-achieved. In some ways, the condition of the poor today--especially the young--is worse than it was 30 years ago when we launched a war on poverty. So we tried very hard--and some things worked. The condition of the elderly is much better. But the condition of the young is worse, and so people think there's got to be a better way than what we've been doing. We need more invention. We need to try a new way.
MARGARET WARNER: Cornel West, reply to that point. Do you agree with Michael Novak that perhaps one reason those issues weren't addressed in the context of a presidential campaign is that the public--a majority of the public--no longer sees government or the federal government as the answer to those problems?
MR. WEST: I think part of the problem is that we're locked into such a narrow and truncated public conversations on the one hand, you have a kind of spineless neo-liberalism of the Democratic Party and a kind of cold-hearted conservatism, and the American people believe these are the only options, and Michael's absolutely right. We try one, it doesn't work. We try the other, it doesn't work. It seems to me we have to be much more creative. We need to recognize the private sphere had this role, but there has to be some regulation of where--from a 205 percent increase in corporate profits but stagnating and declining wages for workers raises deep problems in terms of class and inequality and increasing economic inequality, so I do not want to argue that big government is the answer, the panacea, but we have to be able to talk about this in such a way that private and public can work together in the name of justice, and I think it's very important not to confuse racial harmony with racial justice. There can be racial harmony, but alongside racial hierarchy. That's not what we're after. We're after about--we're after justice.
MARGARET WARNER: Barbara Ehrenreich, let me present to you the two lacks that have just been expressed. One is Cornel West saying that the election is flawed because it didn't address economic, uh, injustice and insecurity, Dorothy Rabinowitz saying she thought it lacked something because it didn't really address or comes to grips with character. Where do you come down on either of those?
MS. EHRENREICH: I don't think character was the issue. I wanted issues like economic policy, like the growing inequality in this country. I'd like to have a real discussion about government and its role in our lives. There's a lot of hypocrisy in this talk about big government. We still have military spending at average Cold War levels. We see the prison system expanding and expanding, government becoming more intrusive in many ways, so there hasn't been a shrinkage of government. There's been a shrinkage of helping functions of government--uh, the sort of progressive functions of government. There's a lot of hypocrisy about that, and what we're left with, if we're going to say, as Michael Novak was saying and I think Dorothy Rabinowitz too, is that, um, government is really kind of a petty concern. It's not very interesting since we can't touch the military, can't touch the law enforcement parts or the prison part of it, so what's left? It's just--it loses interest, and I think that attitude has sapped the whole democratic process, that our collective affairs are common affairs, our politics, our government look to us clearly trivial and loathsome, and I think that's pretty tragic.
MARGARET WARNER: Dorothy Rabinowitz, do you see that, that the American public really thinks government has become kind of a petty or trivial concern?
MS. RABINOWITZ: I think that they do only because of the nature of the discourse that came out in this election season. I really think that the quality of the campaign and the way people in it--if you look at the conventions, you look at especially the Democratic convention, where, uh, Clinton and the entire Democratic platform had fled from every memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and every--every memory of the old New Deal to the point where they wouldn't even play "Happy Days Are Here Again" to well after--into the convention--it means something that certain subjects are cut out completely. It means something that people are--candidates are afraid to discuss anything that is like a hot-button issue, that candidates return over and over again to the silliness of focus groups, both of them. I mean, I think that this is what has rained down on the electorate in a terrible way and made them feel in its reflection that there's something--that there's a great charade going on. No one is saying anything really about anything because they're waiting to hear what a focus group tells them to say. I think this has dampened and depressed the Americans enormously and the American electorate.
MARGARET WARNER: Do you agree with that, Michael Novak?
MR. NOVAK: I think the level of discourse was not what it should have been. There were some high moments. I think, for example, Dole's speech at the convention was a really fine speech, and there were moments I have to say when Bill Clinton's eloquence was quite notable. On the other hand, it's hard to know when Bill Clinton's really drawing the line in the stand he's going to stand with, so I think that's a big discouraging, and--and as candidate, Mr. Dole didn't keep at that high level all the time. So we're waiting for a kind of leadership to emerge that will point the ideals just ahead of us that we have to strive for. We didn't get that out of this campaign. I think the drift towards ideas, questioning the state, questioning the welfare state, looking for better ways, they're right, and the country's moving in that direction, but who puts their finger on it, who articulates it? That's what we're still looking for.
MARGARET WARNER: Barbara Ehrenreich, in the, uh, election of �92, the word "change," we heard change over and over. The American public wanted change. Now all these polls, if they're to be believed, show there isn't even voter anger out there, and we're not hearing that term. Why do you think that is?
MS. EHRENREICH: Well, that was a term with no content, though. It wasn't changed to something. I think it was part--it was a preview of this content list campaign, this election season, and, and I feel very bad about the discussions we didn't have. We didn't have the discussion about welfare partly because Clinton caved in and signed an extremely punitive and dangerous welfare bill before the campaigns heated up. We should have had that discussion. We should have had a discussion of the Dole-Kemp attempt to exhume supply-side economics and bring that back, and talk about what happened with it last time. Why bring that up again? What are the class dimensions of that kind of proposal? There were so many rich possible topics of discussion which we would have had real disagreements about, maybe fist fights over, but that's what democracy is--is to get to those issues and not have vague discussions of somebody's character, whether or not he inhaled and so on--that's fluff.
MARGARET WARNER: Cornel West, why--I know you think these issues should have been discussed--why do you think they weren't? Did the public not demand it? Why weren't the issues addressed?
MR. WEST: Well, one, I think that we have to recognize that the rule of big money and big business and shaping the very context in which the discussion takes place, very important, because when you have a citizenry that feels more and more powerless and impotent and helpless, they begin to pull back, become much more apathetic and indifferent, and, therefore, don't bring the kind of pressure to bear on our candidates. I think there has to be some serious debate about campaign finance reform, or we're going to continue to see this kind of hemorrhaging. The American people are so much more intelligent, imaginative, courageous, and visionary, than was reflected in the campaigns of most of our politicians.
MARGARET WARNER: But why aren't they able to demand that of the politicians?
MR. WEST: Well, one, because you've already got certain politicians in place within the two major parties--both parties very much beholden to--it seems to me--some very, very narrow frameworks--frameworks, as I said before, deeply shaped by big business and big money.
MARGARET WARNER: Dorothy Rabinowitz, do you agree with, with that critic, that the funding of campaigns maybe partly responsible for what you have said is a lack of exploration of certain ideas?
MS. RABINOWITZ: I think only in small part. I think there's something in larger part goal--the spirit of the age that's like--which tells us what the morality is that everyone is simply falling victim to--I continue to harp, perhaps excessively, on the question of--on the outlawing of this thing--negative campaigning, which means the outlawing of every genuine exchange of ideas, anything hard, anything tough, anything that relentlessly pushes you to the board is a negative campaign. When we speak of character, we're not talking about smoking pot or women or anything of this course. We're talking about--we're talking about consistency of view and adhering to one's political conviction, rather than flip-flopping one day after another. That's character. But when all of these assaults on--on character are outlawed in the interest of something called civil discourse, uh--and it--essentially utterly phonying up of the whole nature of this political discussion--and this is relatively new phenomenon. We have not seen this before, where no hard, tough exchange is permitted. And if you look at the presidential debate that took place or the vice-presidential debate between the two candidates, you could have seen that immediately--the lack of anything like a hard exchange is a very serious symptom.
MARGARET WARNER: All right. Well, this exchange I'm afraid will have to end, but thank you Barbara Ehrenreich and Cornel West, Dorothy Rabinowitz, and Michael Novak. Thank you very much.

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