TIME - Man of the Year/CompactPublishing-TimeMagazine-TimeManOfTheYear-Win31MSDOS.iso/moy/051892/05189929.000

Text File | 1992-10-19 | 10.5 KB | 203 lines

                è┴                                                        ╚THE CAMPAIGN, Page 35

Two Ways to Play the Politics of Race


Bush may talk compassion, but he's thinking law and order. As
for Clinton, he sounds like he's planning the Great Society,
Part II.

By MICHAEL KRAMER


    They've walked the walk and talked the talk, and now
they're picking pictures. The candidates and their handlers have
toured Los Angeles, and they agree on almost nothing, except the
fact that the events there will dominate this year's battle for
the White House. In their critiques and responses so far --
embryonic and still evolving -- the campaign to define the
images they hope will linger is under way with a vengeance.

    For the Bush team, the televised scenes of looters running
from stores, their arms laden, demonic grins on their faces,
are film from heaven. Never in the past have the Republicans
had available such a record -- but they are past masters at
exploiting the revulsion such travesties spark. The G.O.P. has
been running tough-on-crime commercials since the riots of the
1960s first permitted them to rail against permissiveness as
they played to white America's nightmares. Twenty years before
Willie Horton, the 1968 Nixon campaign ran an ad in which a
white woman, her purse gripped firmly in hand, hurried down an
empty city street as an announcer said, "Freedom from fear is
a basic right of every American. We must restore it." That spot
was staged. The recent video of a white truck driver being
beaten senseless by a marauding mob is real, and several Bush
aides say they would "not be surprised" if some snappy
voice-over were contrived to run along with that tragedy, played
again and again in the fall as a reminder of the horror that
awaits "us" if "they" are not contained.

    "No pun intended, this will be a base election," says a
senior Bush adviser. "It will take time and constant repetition,
but we will communicate with our base of white and Asian
voters. Law and order will eventually win for us because
hard-working, honest people are scared and deserve protection.
In the end the question will be, Who is better positioned to
afford that protection?" In other words, while it is possible
to read Bush's saying "We must make sure this never happens
again" in various ways, the President's team hopes that by Nov.
3, one meaning alone will predominate -- and Woody Allen will
have been proved correct again: "No matter how cynical you are,
it's hard to keep up."

    It won't all be dark, of course. "Campaigning," said a
manual used by Nixon's political staff, "is symbolic, i.e., it
is not what the candidate actually does as much as what it
appears he does." Bush will do what he has already begun doing.
He will speak of addressing the "causes of unrest" and the
importance of "understanding hopelessness." This much he can do
in his sleep. Bush has always spoken about compassion and
opportunity and fairness. As Vice President, he told a friendly
biographer that "as long as there are people hurting out there,
out job isn't over . . . we will never be a truly prosperous
nation until all within it prosper." When he accepted the 1988
Republican nomination, he said, "I've seen the urban children
who play amid the shattered glass and the shattered lives . . .
We need a new harmony among the races in our country." After
his Inauguration, in his first address to Congress as President,
he said, "We must care for those around us. A decent society
shows compassion for the poor." Kind and gentle words all, yet
today 2 million more Americans live in poverty, and the poor are
even poorer than when Bush became President.

    For content, or at least for its semblance, the White
House is renewing its call for enterprise zones and tenant
ownership of federal housing projects -- ideas Bush has
rhetorically supported for years but has never pushed in any
meaningful way. He has already rediscovered Jack Kemp, the
Housing and Urban Development Secretary slighted and scorned for
three years because he too frequently and too passionately spoke
of the need for a domestic policy worthy of the term. In his own
departure, Kemp will fulfill his new role as the
Administration's ultimate team player. "Don't try to divide me
from the President," Kemp fairly screamed into the phone last
week. "The President has adopted my whole agenda. I'm not the
pitcher, but the ball has finally been hit to me. Don't expect
me to look back in some self-serving way and ask me to say, `I
told you so.' "

    While this much of the game plan seems smart, it ignores
a painfully obvious fact: the Republicans have been in power for
12 years; the fire this time has occurred on their watch. "This
time," says Republican strategist Kevin Phillips, "the pitiful
lack of an urban strategy is Bush's fault, and most voters are
smart enough to know that that's at least a part of the problem.
Nixon talked tough, but he expanded food stamps, supported a
guaranteed annual income and generally gave the impression that
he cared. Bush simply isn't credible on these issues."

    A heavy dose of feigned compassion, coupled with appeals
for law and order, is only half the game plan. The other half,
already on full display, is designed to nail Bill Clinton, and
it too borrows from an old Nixon campaign maxim: It is not what
the opposition candidate actually stands for, it is what he can
be made to appear to stand for. The President has backed away
from his spokesman's attack on the Great Society, but he has
repeated the charge that Clinton represents a return to the
failed, big-spending solutions Lyndon Johnson favored. As
congressional Democrats propose answers that could cost upwards
of $100 billion, the Bush forces are delighted. "Clinton can
say, `That's not me,'" says a White House aide, "but before he
can get to what he's really for, he's going to have to distance
himself from the Democrats in Congress. And when he does that,
he'll jeopardize his base by upsetting the blacks he needs to
turn out in droves. When he turns back to recapture them, we'll
hit him for supporting the conventional Democratic response of
throwing money at the problems. The people who vote, the
middle-class swing voters, hear `city' as a code word for blacks
and decay, for everything they've run to the suburbs to avoid.
They're upset with the King verdict, sure, but they're more
upset about their being the next white victim when they drive
through the areas they've mortgaged their lives to escape from."

    While Bush's strategists "would not be surprised" if the
electorate sees a "white truck driver" ad, the Clinton camp has
an image it will "definitely" use this fall. "What we're all
about is the post-riot video," says deputy campaign manager
George Stephanopoulos, "the shots of blacks and whites and
Hispanics and Asians pushing brooms together in the cleanup. In
a nutshell, that's our whole campaign. Everything else is
secondary. The way to defeat wedge issues is with web issues.
The Republicans are geniuses at playing to people's fears. But
this is not 1988. Today the decline is everywhere, and
everywhere evident to everyone. We think people want hope. We
think the G.O.P. is stuck in the past. I hope we're right."

    To his credit, Clinton has been preaching racial harmony
from the outset of his campaign, and before many audiences ill
disposed to applaud his appeal. He has also advanced a coherent
plan for economic renewal that insists on reciprocal
responsibility, a nothing-for-nothing program that strays far
from traditional liberalism. In the current context, and in
addition to his support for the enterprise zones and
tenant-ownership schemes that Bush favors, the elements that
matter are these: an earned income tax credit that would ensure
that those who work full time cannot fall below the poverty
line; a proliferation of community financial institutions
modeled on Chicago's South Shore Bank that would provide capital
for inner-city businesses; welfare reform that would reduce
benefits substantially for those who won't work; drug treatment
on demand; national service, the plan that offers a college
education to those who will "pay" for it with a period of
community service at below-market wages; apprenticeship
training for those who don't want a university education; and
strict child-support enforcement of the kind Clinton has
introduced in Arkansas, where a father's Social Security number
is entered on birth certificates to ensure collections when Dads
become deadbeats. And, adds Stephanopoulos, in an effort to be
"smart as well as tough on crime," Clinton has been among the
first to call for increased community policing, for getting cops
back on the street. "Unless crime is controlled in urban
areas," says Clinton, "no amount of tax incentives will lure
significant businesses there."

    Clinton hopes that enlightened self-interest will cause
swing voters to buy his agenda. He tirelessly repeats a
statistic popularized by New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley: by the
year 2000, only 57% of those entering the work force will be
native-born whites. "It has become increasingly clear that the
economic future of whites is tied inextricably to that of
minorities," says Clinton. "From now on, we all rise or fall
together, economically as well as morally."

    Will any of this work for Clinton? History suggests he's
playing a losing hand, that civil disturbance favors those whose
first priority is law and order. But Phillips says that the
bankruptcy of Bush's urban record may mean that as "the
spotlight of morality shifts from Clinton's personal failings
to racial detente -- where Clinton has a clear advantage -- it
is hard to see how it will not get hot for the man who
introduced Willie Horton into the lexicon of American politics."

    In 1971, three years after he left the White House, Lyndon
Johnson said, "Nothing makes a man come to grips more directly
with his conscience than the presidency. The burden of his
responsibility literally opens up his soul. In the White House,
a man becomes his commitments. He learns what he genuinely wants
to be." So far, all Americans really know about George Bush (who
began his political career by opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act
as a "radical" intrusion on states' rights) is that he wants to
be President for four more years and that, as he has said, he
will do "whatever it takes" to win. But it is not too late. It
is never too late. Like nations, souls can always be saved.