Election '92: The Values Behind the Issues

[Woodstock Report, March 1992, no. 30, pp. 3-9]
Copyright © 1992 Woodstock Theological Center
All rights reserved

The March 24, 1992, forum of the Woodstock Theological Center gave voters an opportunity to rethink and reflect on the values underlying the political issues and choices to be made in the upcoming presidential election. Moderator for the discussion was Cokie Roberts, a senior news analyst for National Public Radio and special correspondent for ABC News. Our three panelists were William A. Galston, a professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland's Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy; John P. Langan, S.J., a senior fellow at the Woodstock Center; and The Honorable David E. Price, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from North Carolina. We present edited versions of their talks, along with a small sampling of the questions and answers which followed them. The views expressed at a Woodstock forum do not necessarily reflect the views of the Woodstock Theological Center.

Candidate's Dilemma: Campaigning v. Governance

The Honorable David E. Price is a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from North Carolina. Mr. Price He is a former political science and public policy professor at Duke University and is an author of several books on government. He has a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Yale University.

The first theme that I want to touch on is the relationship between campaigning and governance. In a way, that theme sets the context for everything else we are talking about. The question is not so much what position is being taken by one candidate or another as whether the matters being discussed in the campaign have any relationship to the actual decisions of governance.

Campaigning and governance, of course, are not the same thing. The transitions that a candidate must make as he or she enters public office are often quite large. But a more radical discontinuity has developed in recent years. It is the nature of political campaigns to polarize and to simplify, but the negative attacks, the distortions, have increased markedly. And the link between what candidates say in their campaign advertisements and the decisions they face once in office has become more and more tenuous. George Bush's 1988 campaign, which focused on Willie Horton and on the Pledge of Allegiance, demonstrated that this tendency had reached the presidential level, that a successful presidential campaign could subsist on manipulation of symbols with scarcely a word about the major decisions the new government would face.

New technology of politics

This suggests, I'm sorry to say, a modern campaign style that perhaps has become a national norm. It is not a gift that I would wish us to give the nation. This trend has been reinforced by the new technology of politics: 30-second television ads and direct-mail financial solicitations. These put a premium on hard-hitting, oversimplified appeals, pushing symbolic hot buttons on behalf of candidates and against opponents. I have had three tough congressional races, had to do a good bit of direct-mail fundraising and, I assure you, we don't raise much money by writing letters talking about what a moderate, reasonable fellow I am and how we try to balance all the considerations. We try to make people angry, we try to excite. So the technology of campaigning has contributed to this trend. And the emergence of cultural value questions that lend themselves to symbolic appeals has also contributed to the diversion from economic and quality-of-life issues.

The growing gap between campaigning and governing, I think, bespeaks a certain public alienation and cynicism. Voters, to be sure, complain a lot about how they don't like this stuff. In fact, we've shown in my campaigns that you can make an issue out of campaigning itself and voters will respond to that. But we all know that voters also respond to the negative, to the personal ads. And sometimes this response contributes to a vicious cycle of distrust and alienation.

People who don't think much of politics are perhaps more likely to follow the lead of modern campaign advertising. E.J. Dionne's new book Why Americans Hate Politics is quite suggestive on this point. He says, "Campaigns have become negative in large part because of a sharp decline in popular faith in government. To appeal to an increasingly alienated electorate, candidates and the political consultants have adopted a cynical stance which they believe with good reason plays into popular cynicism about politics and thus wins them the votes. But cynical campaigns do not resolve issues; they do not lead to remedies. Therefore the problems get worse, the electorate gets more cynical, and so does the advertising. A dreary downward spiral."

Well, if modern campaigns reveal a dangerous decline in democratic accountability, so does modern governance, but not always in the way one might think. Ironically, the result of the campaign-governance gap is often not governance in disregard of the popular will, but a failure of governance based on an exaggerated sensitivity to the anticipated campaign use of difficult policy decisions. That tendency is fully operative these days, both in Congress and in the White House. The debate over the budget agreement in late 1990 and the crime bill at the same time illustrate what I mean. The debate was never referred to in neutral terms. It was always the budget debacle, the budget disaster, the budget fiasco. It struck me that the barbs of the journalists were largely misdirected during those months. They were skewering Congress for the budget debacle when in fact members deserved considerable credit for making some tough decisions on matters of governance.

Defensive voting

But the pundits hardly said a word about the most glaring failure of governance in that whole end-of-the-session scramble, and that is the handling of the omnibus anti-crime package, where memories of Willie Horton sent members scrambling to vote for the most extreme amendments they could find, on the death penalty, on habeas corpus, on anything else. This really bears witness to the kind of gap that I'm talking about, a kind of defensive voting.

The main electoral pressures perceived by members of Congress these days, and I think to a large extent by candidates for President, don't push them to be active and productive in areas of positive concern as much as they push them to avoid difficult issues or votes that might serve as the basis for an opponent's attack. This does not bode well for democratic governance.

Now, are we seeing some improvement this year? I guess the evidence is mixed. The recession does seem to have forced a certain seriousness on the candidates. The temptation will become enormous as the campaign goes on to revert to symbolic politics and to an attempt to undermine the opponent personally. There are of course legitimate questions of character, legitimate questions of credibility. The limits of an appropriate and desirable campaign emphasis are very, very difficult to draw. So there are ample grounds for concern, I feel, that the presidential campaign might yet be diverted into the realms of symbolism and personality, with the character issue becoming a caricature of itself and the larger issues of governance going begging.

A trend toward community

Secondly, a few thoughts on campaign content. There have been some portentous suggestions lately that a new paradigm is emerging in the course of this campaign, mainly focusing on the responsive communitarian platform and some of the themes in the Clinton campaign. Although it's hard to draw philosophic consistency out of anybody's campaign, there are some interesting ideological straws in the wind. And I think they're not only worth noting, but worth nurturing, and worth nudging along. As many of you know, there is a persistent kind of dissenting voice in American political thought. It emerges in different ways in different historic eras. A voice that has suggested that we are not simply atomistic individuals striving for our own rights and our own wants and our own interests, but somehow that we are bound together in webs of interdependence and in community.

All over the ideological spectrums there has been a sense that politics and public policy ought not only to address individual wants and interests as expressed in the political marketplace, but ought to somehow nurture and enhance a community. The idea is not to diminish individual liberty, but rather to do fuller justice to the context in which and the ends for which liberty is exercised. Individuals are to recognize their interdependence both as fact and as ideal, to enhance their sense of mutual sympathy and shared purpose, to assume responsibility for one another's and for the collectivity's well-being.

Communitarian thought is not liberal, it's not conservative. It takes as its point of departure some irrefutable facts about human nature which politics often does not reflect. By the way, when we think about the deterioration of campaign dialogue and some of the problems of governance, we sometimes need to look to those ideas. What does it mean to be a citizen? What does it mean to assume a role in politics, not just by indicating what one wants and what one must have, but also by internalizing the idea of the common good, the classic notion of citizenship.

A new language

The speech which Governor Clinton gave on this campus, the "New Covenant" speech, is to a large extent a new language. Not the sort of thing we're accustomed to. Talk about national purpose and the individual's obligation for some kind of national service has very specific policy implications: a lot of talk about reciprocal rights and responsibilities, the obligations on the part of the recipients of government benefits, from college students to welfare recipients, asking that question about reciprocal obligations. The notion of accountability in public institutions, the notion of racial inclusiveness as a fundamental premise of American democracy. The notion of support of families as a very real and tangible goal of public policy. I think it's quite a contrast to a lot of what we've heard in recent presidential debates both on the Democratic and the Republican sides, from both liberals and conservatives.

These ideas are worth noting, worth encouraging, and worth talking about here tonight.

Political Wisdom: New Policies, Old Values

William A. Galston is a senior professor in the School for Public Affairs and senior research scholar at the University of Maryland's Institute of Philosophy and Public Policy. He is currently a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the author of numerous books.

As I read public opinion today, at its heart is a profound dissatisfaction with the status quo. The American people are now experiencing and revolting against what might be called a triple squeeze. First of all, an economic squeeze as no-growth or slow growth persists, inequality widens, employment prospects grow increasingly uncertain, fears about our international competitiveness mount, and prices increase for the basic building blocks of middle class life. In particular, costs of health care and higher education continue to outpace growth in family incomes. Secondly, a cultural squeeze, in which pressures such as violent crime, drugs, family dissolution, and what I regret to say is perceived as the intrusive media, make it increasingly difficult to lead safe, decent lives and to raise children properly. And third, a political squeeze, as popular participation and the public interest are shoved aside by what is widely viewed as a special interest establishment of large institutions, public and private, that are corrupt, unresponsive, wasteful, and feckless.

What makes 1992 such a complex and interesting political year is that these three dissatisfactions don't fit neatly together into any single conventional ideological category. The economic squeeze evokes in many cases liberal responses. The cultural squeeze evokes in many cases conservative responses. And the political squeeze evokes in many cases populist responses, as symbolized, I think, by the Buchanan campaign on the one extreme and the Brown campaign on the other. Another way of putting this point would be the following: establishment liberalism speaks to economic questions but not to cultural worries. Establishment conservatism speaks to cultural questions, but not to economic worries, and neither addresses the mounting populist ire against political corruption and manipulation.

Principles and virtues

Well, in a famous last question first stated by Lenin, an honorable question nonetheless, what is to be done? What we need, I suggest, is new policies undergirded by some pretty old and honorable values. Now, we hear a lot about this term "values." A better way of talking about what that term means is to talk about principles and virtues. What are the principles that should guide our political conduct, and what are the virtues that we need as individuals and citizens, as political leaders, in order to make those principles effective in our public life? To speak of values, principles and virtues is to deny either implicitly or explicitly the proposition that our institutions, whether our political institutions or our economic institutions, can operate on the basis of self-interest alone. I think we've spent more than a decade testing the proposition that our institutions can operate on that basis, and we didn't need Gordon Gekko to show us that it was just not possible.

Now these principles and virtues have got to be rooted in the American moral tradition; it's not just something we can make up. The virtues have to be the virtues of our history and our community. But at the same time, we dare not assume that these principles and virtues are just there like fruit ripe on the tree ready for plucking. These principles and virtues are the ones we need, but not necessarily the ones we now have. We have to concern ourselves with the sources of moral education for liberal democratic life. And this question of moral education is a very long one, but I do know this: the American public believes overwhelmingly that the heart of moral education occurs in the family, and therefore it believes that trends toward the dissolution of the American family are having profound effects on the capacity of our republic to function in the long term.

The economic agenda

In the economic sphere, we clearly need enhanced investment in education and training, linked to performance-oriented reform of our educational institutions. We need increased attention to our infrastructure, both traditional and forward-looking, such as telecommunications. We need greater rewards for work; an important goal of public policy is to reduce and ultimately eliminate altogether the category of "working poor." We clearly need a reform of our financial system. We need a renewed assault on the federal deficit to set it on a sustainable downward course. We need to try to accelerate the application of technological innovations in our actual practical economy, and we need a renewed focus on management. One of the biggest differences between the Japanese economy and the American economy is not the quality of its workforce, but the quality of its managers.

Now, what are some of the values that underlie this kind of economic program? Well, first of all, truth-telling. Second, the capacity for at least moderate delay of gratification, rather than the demand for instant gratification of all and every whim. A rejection of the proposition that federal budget or politics or our public life or indeed our market economy can be a one-way street. There ought not to be a moral category of entitlement, even if there must be a budget category of entitlement. We need a notion of rewards linked to contributions to the society, and perhaps most of all, we need a renewed sense of sharing a common fate.

Cultural policies

In the realm of culture, we need policies that focus on family as the place to raise children. What are some elements of a pro-family policy for the 1990s? Child-centered tax relief, a sustained effort to relax the tensions between family and work, and if I may offer a partisan comment, I think that the least justifiable move of the Bush administration has been the continuing opposition to the family and medical leave act. I think we need to revisit, and here I will sound like a conservative, no-fault divorce laws. We need policies that emphasize parental responsibility in areas such as child support and truancy. And finally, and perhaps most controversially, we have to revisit the virtual deregulation of children's media that occurred during the 1980s. In a recent survey of American parents, two percent thought that the media, TV and movies in particular, should have the most influence on our children, but 56 percent thought that they in fact did.

Now, what are some of the values that would underlie these kinds of policies? A balance of responsibilities with the rights we cherish and take for granted; a notion of duties, the duties of parents and family members that are binding upon us without necessarily being chosen by us; and the notion of care and concern for others, the idea of deferring the present for the future. Finally, and this is what American parents stress the most, the idea of respect for selves, for others, and for authority when it is legitimate and beneficial.

Political reforms

Third and finally, the category of politics. What we need to do most is to strive to restore a sense of trust, connection, and efficacy in our political life. And this is going to involve some very controversial policy ideas. We're obviously going to have to look much harder at real campaign finance reform, both as a moral question in itself and as the eye of the needle through which policies such as genuine health care reform must pass. We're going to have to take a look at what might be called de-institutionalization in both the legislature and the executive branch, with attention to issues such as perks and staff. And if the voice of the people in 1992 is not as effective as some of us hope it will be and believe it will be, we may have to take a hard look at even bigger changes, such as term limits and even constitutional changes that link the fate of senators and representatives in the electoral process to what happens to the party's presidential nominees.

In conclusion, let me return to my initial remarks. In a representative democracy, public opinion is the beginning, I said, but not the end of political wisdom. An essential role of leadership, not the only one, but certainly a key one, is to educate the American people on the relationship between their long-term goals on the one hand and on the other, public policies that they may not currently be considering or may even actively oppose. I have something very specific in mind here. In our current preoccupation with our domestic ills, we dare not lose sight of the connection between our long-term national well-being on the one hand and the promotion of democratic institutions around the world. With just a few honorable exceptions, members of Congress and the executive branch have all but conspired to remove aid for global democracy from the public agenda. In my judgement, it is vital to put it on and to put it to center stage because global democracy in the long-run is the world most conducive to the America we all want.

Goals for the Church: Vision and Conversion

Fr. John P. Langan, S.J., is a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center and is the Rose Kennedy Professor of Christian Ethics at Georgetown's Kennedy Institute of Ethics. His most recent publication is The American Search for Peace co-edited with George Weigel.

It is worth underlining the liabilities of both candidates: the vision thing in the case of the President; the character question in the case of Mr. Clinton. And, as we think about candidates, we also think about ghosts. We're in a situation where FDR, speaking about a third of the nation, ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, is still relevant to a nation where you can say this, probably, about a sixth of the people. There is also the desire of a large part of the public and the media for a JFK, for the candidate who will sweep us forward to something new and different. In some sense that may be the issue between the Republican and the Democratic candidates this year. There is also another ghost in this campaign. And that is, "none of the above," who seems to carry many precincts across the country. So we inevitably have to focus upon the candidates, but we want to move beyond that.

Some basic resentments

When we look at the views of the electorate and their feelings, we should probably start with feelings rather than views. The first feeling I would point to is resentment. Resentment against privilege, which fuels the current brouhaha over the House bank and which shows up in reactions to levels of executive compensation that are quite astonishing, even by the standards of professional athletics and entertainment. Resentment of government and the taxes it imposes is dramatically illustrated in the New Jersey election. This resentment has been a continuing theme in our political lives since California passed Proposition 13, resentment against rising costs, particularly in health care, a feeling very relevant to the outcome of the Pennsylvania senatorial election. In that case, I think there was resentment of insecurity, the prospect of being unable to cover the costs of a serious illness. And another form of insecurity that has a very debilitating effect on our body politic is the fear of crime and the anxieties connected with that.

There are also tensions that make the mood of the electorate in this year rather sour. The cultural wars between modernity and conservatism are carried on in the electoral process. They're carried on within the churches, they're carried on in the academy and in the media, and they will continue to be with us for a very long time to come. And they produce a high level of mistrust which people, for various political ends, try to divert to support particular candidates and causes. We also have a lot of tension about our long-term economic competitiveness and prosperity, which leads us to fairly nasty reactions against some of our competitors. We have a sense of uncertainty about how effective our leadership will be in the emerging new world order, and about how effective American forms of leadership, persuasion, and imagination will be now that the Cold War is over. And we have to regard the conduct and the outcome of the Gulf War as a very incomplete answer to that kind of uncertainty and anxiety.

A series of needs

When we look out at the country, we see a landscape which is marked by a whole series of unmet needs, which are the basis for a lot of the tension that's felt, in education, in health care, in the basic structure of urban life, and in the infrastructure that's necessary for sustaining American business and productivity. These are matters of concern both to conventional liberals and to the business leadership. We're also looking at a situation of continued financial stringency, in which we have to find the money to cover untoward but deeply troubling, because they reveal a lot of the values and uncertainties about our society, things like the S & L crisis, and the mortgaging of the future that continues as the budget deficit accumulates. When people think in their midnight thoughts about what they're leaving to their children and what the long-term possibilities are for the future generations of Americans, they are deeply troubled.

We continue to be divided along racial lines and this is indeed a very dark shadow, something that may not be politically destructive in the short-term. David Duke is not about to move into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but it's interesting that the patterns of racial division show up even in things like golfing patterns in Little Rock. I think we confront a situation in which the country is on the one level victorious and on another level profoundly confused and unhappy.

Toward a more just world

What can be the religious meaning of all this? The church has an opportunity to move to a less violent world and to a new form of collective security. We have an opportunity to shape a more just world, taking more seriously the concerns of our own poor and of people in the South, the South understood in global terms, not in national terms. So we have to aim at producing forms of society that will be less environmentally damaging, that will distribute the benefits of prosperity more evenly, and that will take seriously the needs of enormous numbers of people so that they may participate productively in the economy in the 21st century. We also are moving into a time in which we will have to practice a certain discipline, or asceticism, in order to meet the great needs of our country and the world, and this will have to be done with a generosity of spirit. We will have to learn to recognize the values of humane moderation and a generous and ecumenical imagination.

In religious terms, we are called to a metanoia, to a conversion. This is not simply a conversion from evil to good. Life, especially political life in the United States, rarely offers stark and simple contrasts of that sort. Rather, we have to recognize the evil that has accumulated as a result of the too avid pursuit of certain economic goods. And we also have to get beyond the good and evil polarization which marked a great deal of our recent foreign policy. The evil empire is indeed no more, and we have to find other rationales and other causes that will make sense. The role of leadership and the responsibility inevitably falls to the United States.

We also have to be converted from illusion to honesty, to recognize the large number of unsolved problems in our own society, and to recognize our need to learn from other competitive forms of society. In short, we're called to a deeper renewal of our people and our society and to a new coming of age. Maturity, in whatever form it takes, nearly always comes painfully. And this struggle, which I suspect will see us through to the end of the millennium, is going to be a difficult one. Because right now I don't see a person or a movement with the combination of vision and credibility to bring about this sort of metanoia that is deeply needed.

Questions

Cokie Roberts: What we see in these years of divided government, which I think the American people are very happy with, is that people are essentially saying, "We want every government program and we don't want to pay for it." And we elect a President who says, "no new taxes" and a Congress that says, "we'll give you everything." Where is the desire for truth-telling and asceticism in the American electorate?

John Langan: Well, to some extent I think we do get the candidates that we deserve. And that's embarrassing but, again, honesty has to begin with honesty about the American electorate and the fact that people are very capable of having lots of incompatible desires. If we're looking for leadership, I would say we need somebody with the experience of Mr. Bush and the aspirations of Mr. Clinton.

William Galston: I think that truth-telling is a lot harder for candidates running for office than it is, in principle anyway, for leaders who are actually in office. The President of the United States, with all the media resources and attention he can command, with all of his ability to bring together disparate questions and disparate interests into a general program that might conduce over time to the common good, has to be the locus of truth-telling in our public life. It is very difficult as a candidate for office to go from one community to another, one state to another, delivering unpleasant news to one interest group after another. If you're the President, you can begin to organize the debate in a way that might make if possible for everybody to come together and give a little something. It is possible through that kind of process to diminish fear, which I think is one of the major things driving this process.

David Price: We have an obligation not just to vote "no." We have an obligation to vote in the way we think is in the public interest and then to explain ourselves. And we can usually do that quite successfully . . . It's simply not acceptable to always say, "I'd rather vote against that than have to explain that." Obviously we have that reaction sometimes, but if we find ourselves saying that too often, or on matters of genuine significance, we have to question what we're about as an elected official. But we do need to tell the truth. We need to make the tough decisions and then to take on the responsibility of educating, explaining what we're doing.

We also have the obligation to put people's demands in a broader context. Again, that's easier said than done sometimes. The kind of constituent or the kind of group representative who gains my respect is the one who comes to me with some sense of the broader context into which his want or his interest needs to be placed. And if he doesn't come to me with that sense, then it's my obligation to put it there nonetheless . . . to make some decisions about what's in the public interest.

And finally, we have an obligation to campaign on the real issues. We don't have to sink to the lowest common denominator in our campaigns . . . If we can't make education and health care and environmental protection and fiscal responsibility and the real issues, the real concerns of real people, if we can't make those exciting and compelling, we're in the wrong line of work.

Q: When you have a party that has as part of its public platform support for killing innocent human life, . . . how can we not make abortion a major issue in the campaign? Does this not influence the cultural way and the spiritual way that this nation will go?

John Langan: Well, I agree with you that abortion is a great evil and I think it's important that it not be trivialized in American society. I think we also have to recognize that there are profound divisions of opinion among honorable people about this question. We're also looking at a procedure that can be carried out anywhere in the country and the primary means of opposing abortion has to be persuasion, persuasion working through the political process but also persuasion working informally. The elimination of abortion has to be carried on in a way that respects the consciences of people who believe differently. Part of this is done by changing the circumstances in which these new lives are to achieve maturity and by dealing with some of the evils of ignorance and poverty that threaten to blight these lives in other ways after birth and that make abortion for many poor women seem a very attractive option.

David Price: Religious and political judgements are not necessarily the same thing. They obviously inform one another in all sorts of ways. But I suggest that it is not an inconsistent position for an opponent of abortion on moral or religious grounds to conclude nonetheless that that prohibition should not be enacted into civil law. Because in areas where there is this kind of profound disagreement, sometimes it is prudent, sometimes it is preferable, to leave the individual and communal conscience free.