Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/040692/0406100.000

Text File | 1992-10-19 | 13KB | 243 lines

                                                                              ╚NATION, Page 16

POLITICS

1-800-Pound Guerrillas


The telephone lines are humming as voters direct-dial their
outrage into the heart of the presidential campaign and fuel
the anti-Establishment crusades of Jerry Brown and Ross Perot

By WALTER SHAPIRO -- Reported by Jordan Bonfante with Brown,
Michael Duffy/Washington and Richard Woodbury/Houston


    Call it the Touch-Tone Rebellion, the Phone P-for-Protest
Uprising or the 800-Number Insurrection.

    Just six months ago, a mad-as-hell voter enraged at the
mess in Washington and disgusted by compromising politicians in
both parties would phone his favorite radio-talk-show host to
vent his throw-the-bums-out spleen. Now that same populist rage
is dialing right into the political system -- right into the
volatile center of the 1992 presidential race -- and mainstream
politicians from Bill Clinton to George Bush are all but cursing
the invention of toll-free telephone numbers.

    Jerry Brown, the flamed-out former California Governor,
derided by Democratic insiders as a flake, a fake, a maverick
and a mountebank, regained political legitimacy last week by
edging out Clinton 37% to 36% in the Connecticut primary. "It's
a miracle," Brown proclaimed. "It's not about me. It's about the
grass roots rising up against the bounced checks, the
congressional pay raises, the corrupt status quo."

    Brown's amazing resurrection is linked to his
small-contributions-only 800 number, which has kept his ascetic,
spare-couches-and-coach-seats crusade alive with $3.5 million
in pledges and $2 million in actual contributions. Brown may be
only the vessel of protest against big-money politics and
Clinton's too-slick-for-his-own-good image. But after months
lost in what Brown calls "the dark hole of media nonexistence,"
he is suddenly running nearly even in the Clinton campaign's
private polls handicapping the decisive April 7 New York
primary.

    Yet the new king of phone-call frenzy is neither an
insurgent Democrat like Brown nor a Republican conservative like
the fast-fading Pat Buchanan. That honor belongs instead to
billionaire Texas businessman H. Ross Perot, who positions
himself as a modern-day Cincinnatus called from the boardroom
by the little people clamoring for him to mount an independent
campaign for the White House. In what may be the cleverest anti
politics fandango in an antipolitics year, Perot insists, "I
have no desire to be President. My personal feelings are,
anybody intelligent enough to be able to do the job would not
want the toughest, dirtiest, most thankless job in the world."

    With instant credibility that comes from the biggest
political bankroll since Nelson Rockefeller, Perot boasts his
own 800 number, which was flashed on the screen during an
appearance on the Phil Donahue Show. The response was so intense
last week (Perot partisans claimed 500,000 calls in a 24-hour
period)* that the fledgling campaign had to obtain 1,100 extra
phone lines from the Home Shopping Network. What Perot is asking
for is not money but commitment. He has said he will run only
if his supporters circulate petitions and navigate the election
laws to get him on the ballot in all 50 states. With petition
deadlines in states like Texas just six weeks away, the
obstacles are formidable but far from impossible, especially
with enough money.

    A Perot campaign would revolve more around person than
policy and would test whether the American voters buy the notion
of sending someone with no experience in national government or
politics to shake up the way Washington works. (If Perot's
candidacy were a movie, the title might be Daddy Warbucks Goes
to Washington.) But such speculation is premature: Perot might
not run, his record might not survive public scrutiny, he may
prove a maladroit campaigner, and his damn-the-torpedoes style
may not sit well with voters. Still, the Bush camp, having
already survived third-party threats from Buchanan and
hatemonger David Duke, is taking Perot very seriously indeed.
"There is contingency planning going on," says a senior Bush
campaign adviser. "In places we need to win, like Pennsylvania
and Texas, he could be a pain in the butt."

    In past political seasons, there have been moments when it
looked as if the structure of traditional two-party politics
would finally collapse under the weight of too many 30-second
attack ads, too many sound bites, too many backroom handlers,
too much voter apathy and too many dispiriting November choices
between candidates who inspire more cynicism than commitment.
These interludes pass, which is why it is tempting to dismiss
the latest manifestations of anti-Establishment sentiment as a
short-term aberration. The Connecticut Democratic primary, after
all, was highly unrepresentative: the turnout was low, the
voters were angry, and local favorite Paul Tsongas had just
withdrawn from the race. (In a clear rebuff to Clinton, the
former Massachusetts Senator received 20% of the vote.) Still,
there are contrary signs that suggest that 1992 will be far from
a normal political campaign. A Harris poll at the end of last
year found that voter alienation was at a 25-year peak. Turnout
in primaries is even lower than usual, and much of the
stay-at-home electorate may be too bitter to bother to vote in
November. The recession is seen as a talisman of America's
long-term economic decline, rather than just as a cyclical
downturn. The House-bank scandal underscores the impression that
Congress is mired in corruption. "There's something out there
of major significance," says University of Texas political
scientist Walter Dean Burnham. "Thank God we're not a culture
that produces Fuhrer figures very easily. Because the underlying
conditions that do that are in the process of being formed."

    Send-them-a-message candidates like Brown -- and Buchanan
in the early going -- have found fertile soil in the primaries
largely because there are legitimate reasons for
public-spirited voters to protest. Bush may win re-election, but
little in the campaign is likely to be an endorsement of his
handling of domestic affairs. On the Democratic side, Clinton
and Brown are the embodiment of the ancient Greek maxim of the
fox and the hedgehog. Clinton, the fox, knows many things well:
his policy positions on a wide range of issues are thoughtful
and often innovative. But Brown, like the hedgehog, knows just
one important thing: the current system of multimillion-dollar
political fund raising is inherently corrupting to democracy.
Brown -- who, even his fondest admirers admit, is a political
changeling constantly taking on new personas -- has finally
embraced a cause that returns him to his political roots as a
post-Watergate clean-government crusader in California.

    It is hard to believe that less than two months ago, five
Democratic contenders were conducting a civics-book campaign in
New Hampshire, rising to the occasion as the voters earnestly
debated the fine print in their policy proposals. But then
cynicism kicked in as the candidates were forced to adapt to the
destructive realities of too many primaries demanding too much
money for too many negative ads. Desperate to know the
candidates, all that the voters in the 15 March primary states
heard was the irritating static of petty politicians sniping at
each other with exaggerated charges and counterclaims.

    With Tsongas out of the race, ire set in when Democrats,
with more than half the delegates yet to be chosen, were
deprived of the one thing they craved: a real choice. Democratic
leaders deserve some of the blame for artificially stacking too
many primaries around Super Tuesday to create an early
consensus. By tinkering with the rules, the Democrats fell
victim yet again to the law of unintended consequences: Clinton
was anointed as the de facto nominee before most Democrats were
comfortable with him. Little known before the campaign began,
Clinton is now being defined by Brown's sound bites, his own
blunders, like golfing at a segregated country club, and the
work of investigative reporters delving into the less savory
aspects of his record in Arkansas.

    Last week Clinton was jolted by a New York Times story
alleging that he had helped remove a provision in a tough 1988
state ethics code that would have forced disclosure of potential
conflicts of interest in his wife Hillary's law firm. The
Clinton campaign issued a detailed rebuttal, and a spokesman
claimed "misrepresentation on the part of the New York Times."

    The obvious beneficiary is Brown -- Public Enemy No. 1 for
Establishment Democrats -- who inherits a larger platform than
he might otherwise deserve. The former California Governor's
shrill attacks on Clinton as the "scandal a week" candidate of
complacent political insiders led the customarily neutral party
chairman, Ron Brown, to denounce the candidate's "scorched-earth
policy" of verbally assaulting the Democratic front runner.
Snapped Jerry Brown: "I think it is understandable that [Ron
Brown] becomes overzealous in his protection of the old order."

    As a protest candidate, Brown has so far avoided the
scrutiny routinely applied to other contenders. He speaks in
metaphors rather than in the nuts-and-bolts details of position
papers. Early in the campaign, he did not even have an economic
policy -- "That's coming, we're working on it," he used to say,
before returning to decrying the corruption of the status quo.
His most innovative proposal -- a 13% flat tax coupled with a
13% value-added tax -- is in its way reminiscent of
Reaganomics, beguiling on the surface save for the awkward
problem that the numbers do not add up. Liberal critics
persuasively claim that Brown's regressive plan would raise the
tax burden of lower-income Americans while cutting it in half
or those who earn more than $567,000.

    Unburdened by an excess of specifics, Brown can dance away
from criticism with a disarming and alarming
hey-it's-only-politics admission of error. Challenged last week
on his support for the Bush Administration's controversial ban
on fetal-tissue research, Brown displayed a sound-bite-deep
understanding of the issue. Asked for the basis of his position,
he confessed, "Well, you get asked these questions and you have
to answer real quick." In his meeting with TIME editors last
week, Brown dodged and wove through an imprecise discourse on
energy, the economy and global competition before adding with
implacable logic, "I have pilot-tested most of the political
programs. I know which ones work and which don't." That remark
harks back to Brown's hidden strength -- he has been there,
through eight years as California Governor and two prior
presidential campaigns. His governing style was not too much
different from his current posture as a candidate: innovative,
intense, intuitive and sometimes incoherent. A Brown win in next
week's New York primary would halt Clinton's march to the
nomination and trigger a frenzied effort by party regulars to
find, somehow, another candidate.

    Despite the two men's different backgrounds, there are odd
affinities between Brown and Perot. Both live outside the normal
realities of campaign finance: Brown because he can live on so
little, and Perot because he has so much. They are both
influenced by the same political guru, Pat Caddell, the former
Democrat wunderkind who has been shunned by frontline
presidential candidates since he advised Joseph Biden in 1987.
Caddell sounds almost as if he is reciting Perot's script when
he declares, "The thunder coming out of Texas is the thunder not
of a third party but [of] an alternative to business-as-usual
Washington politics."

    But America, despite the current ferment and frustration,
remains bound to a two-party system. A fall campaign between
Bush and, presumably, Clinton may not send the adrenaline
racing, but it will not have to degenerate into a
lowest-common-denominator sound-bite sweepstakes. The appeal of
Brown and Perot -- and Tsongas and, yes, even Buchanan earlier
-- is a reminder that large groups of voters in both parties,
along with the disaffected at home, long for something more than
they are being offered. If mainstream political leaders cannot
speak to the nation's restless uncertainty about the future,
then both parties have no one to blame but themselves if they
face a full-scale voter rebellion.