Blurring the Differences

September 12, 2000

Much to the surprise of George W. Bush, George W. Bush is no longer the front-runner in the presidential race. Until recently, Bush had it easy: he became the Republican front-runner even before the primaries, won the nomination without much opposition, and looked as if he could coast to victory in November by posing as an innocuous “compassionate conservative.”

Al Gore was a stiff, tainted by his servile connection to a tainted president. Bush wouldn’t even have to refer openly to Bill Clinton or engage in “negative” campaigning against Gore: he could win on sheer niceness. He wouldn’t even have to discuss those boring “issues” in any detail. He only had to keep reassuring the voters that he was a decent fellow, muting his differences with the Democrats. Destiny would do the rest.

Shades of Tom Dewey, 1948 — the most famous Republican shoo-in. But Gore decided to play Harry Truman and put up a fight. He shrewdly picked Joe Lieberman as his running mate, acted as if he’d never met Clinton, and went on the attack against Bush. All his efforts to “reinvent” himself, the stuff of mockery for the past year, actually paid off. He pulled slightly ahead in the polls.

Now Bush seems not to know what to do. It hadn’t occurred to him that he might have to explain to the voters that there are significant differences between himself and Gore that make him preferable to Gore as a president.

Does he believe it himself? Does he have a creed that really distinguishes him from the Democrats? Which of the Democrats’ premises does he vigorously reject?

Such questions aren’t easy to answer. Despite his avowed conservatism, Bush is an oddly undefined man. In this respect he resembles most Republican presidential candidates — Nixon, Ford, Dole, and his own father — who have counted on vague conservative sentiment and inarticulate disgust with left-wing Democrats to carry them across the finish line.

The British political philosopher Michael Oakeshott used to explain why he voted for the Conservative Party against Labour: “The Tories are likely to do less harm.” That might seem a sufficient reason when Labour, like the Democrats, was led by doctrinaire socialists; but in the age of such successful pragmatists as Clinton and Tony Blair, with no Soviet threat abroad, more specific reasons are necessary.

Bush doesn’t understand this. He took pains to exclude articulate conservative speakers from the Republican convention. When he wanted to reach out to blacks, he trotted out Colin Powell — a liberal, who delivered a speech endorsing Democratic policies — and gave the passionate, eloquent Alan Keyes the night off. He muted all talk of abortion.

Like his father, Bush assumes a conservative base that has nowhere else to go. So he is repeating his father’s mistake of failing to keep that base satisfied, energetic, and enthusiastic, as he angles for “moderate” voters.

Contrast the most successful Republican of our time: Ronald Reagan, who defied Republican “wisdom” by insistently defining himself in opposition to the Democrats. In 1980, Gerald Ford — a certified loser — warned that “Reagan can’t win.” Reagan proceeded to win two landslides and enabled his successor, the elder George Bush, to win one too.

When the two parties stand for the same philosophy, elections become personality contests. Nobody thought Al Gore could beat a rhinoceros in a personality contest, but he may do just that. If not exactly charming, he is at least decisive, while Bush is bland and floundering.

Gore wants the federal government to keep growing indefinitely. Instead of making this an issue, Bush shrugs and agrees, except that he wants the government to grow in slightly different ways (with a larger role in education, for example). Gore, not Bush, is the one who is eager to debate — the Alpha Male, as it were.

Republicans win when the two parties stand in sharp opposition to each other; Democrats win by blurring basic differences. Bush is doing the Democrats a favor by blurring those differences for them.

The voters may be pardoned for thinking there is little to choose between the parties, when the Republican standard-bearer himself appears to think so. Move over, Tom Dewey: you’ve got company.

Joseph Sobran

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