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[Woodstock Report, October 1996, No. 47]
Copyright © 1996 Woodstock Theological Center
All rights reserved
In May 1996, the Woodstock Theological Center sponsored this forum as an opportunity to reflect on the values that underlie the political issues and choices now being debated by the presidential candidates. The moderator for the discussion was Thomas J. Reese, S.J., a senior fellow at Woodstock. Panelists were Thomas B. Edsall, a national correspondent for The Washington Post, Peter N. Skerry, a visiting fellow in governmental studies at the Brookings Institution, and Mary McGrory, a syndicated columnist for The Washington Post. We publish here an edited and abridged version of the forum.
Thomas Edsall is a national correspondent for The Washington Post. He is the author, with Mary Edsall, of Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes in American Politics. He also wrote Power and Money: Writing About Politics, 1971-1987.
To prepare for this forum, I asked both the Dole and the Clinton campaigns for relevant speeches and documents on the broad question of values. From Clinton I got back approximately 150 pages; from Dole I got back nine pages. Nevertheless, this election is going to be largely about values, I think.
The 1994 election was very clearly about values and it was an election in which the values were defined from a sharply conservative point of view. A substantial portion of the electorate went along with those views which were tough, anti-statist, and individualistic.
Welfare was a central issue in that election as were immigration and crime. Gun control, which in theory has majority support in this country, in fact worked unquestionably to the benefit of Republicans. The stage had been set by Clinton's raising the issue of gays in the military. Then the health care proposal became an effective vehicle for the Republicans to portray Clinton and the Democratic Congress as proponents of an intrusive and liberal managed state.
Elections are won in this country by two, three, four, or five percent of the electorate, so very small swings make a big difference. In 1994 a small swing moved toward a very assertive antigovernment, anti-statist point of view. There was a stress on individualism, in perhaps the pure American revolutionary sense, that is, a stress on the responsibility of the self and not on the community or the public sense of obligation.
A recent study links these themes together. The Washington Post did a survey trying to explore trust in government, and especially what has led people to be distrustful. One question we asked was: "Are you the child of divorced parents?" It produced some interesting results.
One of the most interesting was the discovery of a partisan allegiance of white men and white women who were the children of divorce. We found that white, male children of divorced parents were overwhelmingly Republican, more so than the average white male or those of other demographic characteristics. White, female daughters of divorced parents on the other hand turned out to be overwhelmingly Democratic, more so than their normal demographic counterparts would have been. This suggests that in this country there is a gender difference in response to very stressful circumstances. Parental divorce is one such stressful circumstance.
We are also seeing a substantial gender difference in the response to changes in the economy, to downsizing, to all the issues that Clinton emphasizes, and also to those that the Republicans emphasize: Newt Gingrich's Third Wave, for example. All men do not stand on one side and all women on the other, but these tendencies are unusually strong and they have emerged over the past 20 years.
As he goes into this 1996 campaign, President Clinton is an assiduous reader of polls. He has some very smart people working for him, and he is acutely aware of the values issues that are likely to dominate this election. He is starting to construct an architecture of values. He has constructed a scheme that tries to allow the government to play a role, but a modest one, in this new era of the Third Wave, this information age, when both parents are working. He is supporting, for example, the V-chip, which would give parents a way to prevent their children from seeing unsuitable TV shows when they are not home. This is partial government intervention but allows parents to retain control. Clinton also has regulations pending to restrict and limit tobacco sales and promotion to children, like prohibiting vending machines and color advertisements directed to children. Again, this is an attempt to have government intervene modestly to help parents, given the pressures of the Third Wave.
One can argue that it is not the role of government to step in here, and it is perhaps even a usurpation of individual responsibility, but it is having a favorable effect. The proposal for school uniforms, which Clinton supports, fits this pattern. These proposals are all an attempt to recapture a values agenda that the Democrats had pretty much lost in 1994. And at the moment, as measured by poll data, Clinton is doing pretty well.
Dole has his nine-page approach, and it almost lends itself to parody. In the transcript I received, the typist has inserted the word "inaudible" in every sixth line. And the message itself, to some extent, is inaudible. It is not an architecture or structure or over-arching notion of what it is to try to build a set of value themes. The message is really Dole-like assertions: "And what happened then? Welfare reform. Passed. A balanced budget. Passed. Tax cuts for families. Passed. And then what happened? Welfare reform. Vetoed." These may be legitimate issues, but they do not resonate at this moment with the electorate. His own people know this. Dole is going to have to severely revise these values themes.
For the moment, Clinton has muted the tough issues, especially the tough issues for Democrats: affirmative action, immigration, and crime, just to name three. But the largest one of all is the problem of the underclass. This is really an ongoing nuclear problem within society that causes a great deal of anxiety. We don't know if this issue will come up in the campaign. Clinton's success so far clearly has been to avoid polarizing issues and to avoid having these kinds of questions thrown at him. His genius has been to take every pitch and punch back a line drive, not necessarily a home run, but at least a base hit. And Dole has yet to be able to get an edge on any of these things. There are a lot of people writing Dole off. I don't; I expect things to get much closer.
Dr. Peter Skerry is a visiting fellow in the governmental studies program at the Brookings Institution. He has been a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
I'm going to challenge the very premise around which we are convened here this evening. I want to question whether we should be as concerned with "values" today as we certainly seem to be.
Values are obviously important in our social and political life, and they need to be discussed and examined. As a dues-paying member of the chattering class, I like to think I can talk about values with the best of them. But I do believe that we've reached the point where we need a moratorium on all this "values talk." At a minimum, we need to back up a bit and examine why we are so preoccupied with our values and whether to be thus preoccupied is a good thing.
Why we are obsessed with our values, especially in politics? One brief answer is that we now value "values" so highly because we have devalued interests. That is to say that we have gone a long way toward delegitimizing the role of interests, especially material or monetary interests, in politics. Whether the topic is campaign finance or Social Security, many of us have concluded that the pursuit of such interests has gotten out of hand and that we need some means of reining them in. So we have turned to a discussion of our "values," whether we are talking about self-restraint, equity, or compassion-to understand both where we have gone wrong and where we might find some relief. The tension between interests and values is an old and familiar story in our political life. But the emphasis now is definitely on values.
Values talk also tends to crowd out other ways of looking at politics. For example, our preoccupation with values has led us to downplay or ignore the importance of our political institutions-for instance, the condition of our political parties or our civic institutions more generally. Certainly, there are exceptions to this tendency. But the major actors in contemporary politics, the political consultants and pollsters, the politicians, and of course the media, are much more geared up to examine or discuss what our citizens espouse as values than how we conduct our day-to-day political business. This is particularly true in the pervasive electronic media, where pundits, commentators, and mere anchorpersons hold forth.
This drift is not hard to understand. It is much easier, certainly less time-consuming, to deal with what people say they believe and what they say they will do, than to analyze what they actually do or how the two relate to one another. I say this as a political scientist who has learned that it is much less boring and much more entertaining to talk about our views and values than about how we actually deal with and act upon controversial issues, or how our behavior is influenced or shaped by our interests and the institutions within which we must operate. What, then, are the implications of these observations?
Values can be hard to pin down; by definition, they are not precise but broad guides to action or thought. Stop and think for a moment what "family values" are. Even if you can come up with a specific answer, someone else can come up with an equally valid, and conflicting, definition. In politics this means that values lend themselves to distortion and posturing. It is easier for a politician to "fake it" with an emotional, value-laden issue than with a matter of concrete, material interests. This is not to say that interests talk does not become distorted, but merely that values talk is particularly susceptible to such treatment.
It may be hard to see what's wrong with values talk today because many who engage in these discussions and debates regard themselves as on the "right" side of the issues. But this temptation to self-congratulatory high-mindedness, and the resulting self-deception is, I would argue, inherent in the politics of values, which so self-consciously contrasts its concerns with the more mundane and crass politics of interests.
Ultimately, I would argue that a preoccupation with values leads to the conclusion that we lack a consensus on our values. At least that's been our experience. That search for consensus has often resulted in quite the opposite of what is being sought. For example, in my current area of research, U.S. immigration policy, I am reminded of the contrasting approaches to immigration exhibited by Massachusetts and Pennsylvania early in our history. There was the "Massachusetts idea," which was to accept as newcomers only immigrants who were religiously pure. Alternatively, there was a "Pennsylvania idea," which was to seek out immigrants who would be good citizens regardless of their religious background. Massachusetts was concerned with a value consensus, Pennsylvania with interests. As a result, Massachusetts and New England generally were initially much less welcoming to immigrants and consequently much more homogeneous than Pennsylvania and similarly oriented mid-Atlantic colonies. And when immigrants did arrive in Massachusetts in substantial numbers in the 19th century, they found a much harsher environment.
In somewhat a similar manner at the turn of this century, progressive era reformers again raised the issue of values and value consensus to the top of the nation's agenda. They too were concerned that millions of newcomers did not share the values of native-born Americans and would not soon do so. Imbued with such concerns, many such progressives agitated successfully for coercive Americanization programs and then eventually for a drastic cutoff of immigration from Europe.
My point is that a preoccupation with values and agreement about them, however well-intentioned or high-minded, can lead to such drastic policies. An alternative view is that a nation as large and diverse as the United States is also held together by interests, by bonds of reciprocity and mutual needs that result in free exchanges between consenting individuals. This is not to deny that agreement on some basic values is necessary for such exchanges to take place. But it is to say that these exchanges, or relationships based on interests, occur when there is much less agreement on values than high-minded reformers have been content with.
In this era when the word "empowerment" is heard as often as the word "values," I would urge you to consider whom exactly such values talk benefits and em-powers. Is it the mass of ordinary citizens struggling to sustain their families as best they know how or is it the politicians and members of the chattering class who are skilled at manipulating the words and symbols of values talk?
Mary McGrory is a syndicated columnist for The Washington Post. Before joining the Post, she had been a reporter for The Washington Star. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for "trenchant commentary spread over more than 20 years as a reporter and columnist." She has also received numerous Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild Front Page Awards.
I find this election season endlessly intriguing and provocative. It's the first one I ever saw where one side was working for the other. The Republicans are, as far as I know, not being paid by the Democrats, but they should be. Can you imagine, in your wildest dreams, a House speaker, Republican, who closes down the government because he was asked to leave a plane by the back door? No mortal hand could have devised that succession of events. It is beyond belief to me that he should have gotten off the plane by the back door, the servants' entrance, and that he should, within two days, close down the government. And then admit that people might think this was a little bit petty, in case they hadn't noticed. Then the White House quietly trotted out its photographs. The Speaker complained that he had wanted a good, chewy discussion with the President on the budget on the way to Mr. Rabin's funeral, and that he hadn't seen him--and there was the picture of the President, the perfect host, standing, while Newt Gingrich was seated comfortably in the chair, with his mouth open. No, your most expensive public relations person could not have devised that.
Then we have the wonderful trip of Robert Dole to the nation's largest state, California. He started at San Quentin; there's a nice, upbeat note for you. And he was walking through the jail, gawking at men who were about to die. Now, these men had lost everything, but they had not lost the right of privacy, and the right not to be a photo op for a man they probably wouldn't vote for. And then the man who has based his entire campaign on character goes on a pilgrimage to the grave of Richard Nixon, the only president in American history to resign because of malfeasance in office. Now you can translate that for me. I asked Senator Dodd, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, I said, "Who devised that itinerary?" He said, "I did."
Then Dick Armey, the Republican leader of the House, said something I had to read three times before I could credit it, but he said that he thought, yes, they should dispose of the gas tax, these fripperies, you know, these silly things. And he said that the revenue that would be lost could be taken from education funds, thereby making an ally of every parent of a school-age child in America. I mean you can't buy that kind of stuff, you just cannot. You can get yourself the best consultant in the world and he or she couldn't produce anything like that.
I've had two moments of genuine enlightenment this year. I went to New Hampshire, which is always the most fun because there they love politics, they take it seriously. They have a strong tradition of self-government: town meetings, exercises in pure democracy. I was invited for lunch at Heritage Heights, a community retirement home in Concord, and I committed a frightful social error. I asked if, after lunch, we might ask the people for a show of hands as to their presidential preferences. Well, the residents were horrified; no New Hampshire person would ever tip his or her hand in public. What if they could write down their preference? That would be different. The editor of the Heritage Heights house organ said, "Well, you know about half of them are registered Republicans, you know that, don't you?" And I said, "Well, yes, I would think so." We tallied the results--Clinton, 32; Dole, 8. And we were all stunned. No one had been coming clean on their secret thoughts.
So what we found out was what we should have known. One of the big issues there is the environment. If you know the New Hampshire landscape, it's just lovely. All those birch trees and stone walls, so naturally they care about it. But there were two additional reasons at Heritage Heights for caring for the environment. Two baby owls had come to nest on the property. The entire group was just seized with their welfare; they were feeding them and watching them and talking to them and, you know, it was practically a total obsession. The other was that there was a colony of rare blue butterflies just a little way away and they had settled, most inconveniently, on an Army base, which, of course, had no thought for them. Heritage Heights was united as for war to preserve these blue butterflies. The environment really matters in New Hampshire.
I think the worst thing Republicans did was to cut fuel assistance for the elderly poor. Whatever we think of ourselves as a nation, I think we like to think we're thoughtful and kind to our very young and our very old. The Republicans managed to alienate both ends of the spectrum, school lunches for the children and the House voted six times to zero out fuel funds for the elderly poor. Result: a picture in The Washington Post of an older lady wearing six sweaters, sitting in her Vermont kitchen before her stove with the oven door open. What? People look at that and they say, no, really, that's not what we are about.
So anyway, they have just made such a mess of it, in my opinion. The trouble is, it's ideological, it's not practical. They are not interested in outcomes. If you ask, "Well, what are the elderly supposed to do if they can't keep warm?" they haven't gone that far in their thinking. They stop at the point where you have cut a government program, because when you have cut a government program, you have done something wonderful. Well, unfortunately, that's not the way to go, as far as values are concerned. We like to think that we would not freeze our seniors to death. That's sort of a basic thing.
The other enlightenment I had was at a focus group in New Jersey. You all know what a focus group is? You get 12 people, as nonpartisan a group as possible, and you ask them every conceivable question. Poor Bob Dole, said "If you had to leave town or anything, which of us would you like to leave in charge of your children?" And of course, people with two-year-olds instantly opted for Bill Clinton, who would probably throw them up in the air and maybe forget about them a little bit. I think they felt that Bob Dole might not be much of a hand with a two-year-old.
Peter Hart, the pollster, asked them what they cared about most. To a man and woman, they said health care. Now supposedly health care had just left the screen of American consciousness. They were furious about health care; it seemed to coalesce all their feelings about the Clintons, about the Republicans, and they were angry with the President and Mrs. Clinton for blowing the health reform plan. They're mad at doctors, they're mad at HMOs, they were all talking at once. It was so vehement and so extensive that Peter Hart had to cut it off.
The Kennedy-Kassebaum bill is the very least we could have done, the most tiny of incremental steps. Now you have to sell insurance to people with preexisting conditions, with chronic illnesses. And also, if you are employed, you can carry that insurance from one job to another. Bob Dole never said he opposed it, but he made it almost impossible to pass. In the process, he publicized his animosity to Nancy Kassebaum. For a man with a large gender gap to behave in a hostile manner to the most popular woman senator perhaps in history doesn't seem the best thing. It's another one of those little gifts that the Republicans keep pressing on Bill Clinton. Can the President win? I think if he were to officiate at a same-sex marriage, he might be rejected. Otherwise, he looks like a very good bet.
Fr. Reese: In light of what you've all said, are we being naive in even having a forum like this? Why should we discuss values or interests, when 80 to 90 percent of the people have already decided how they're going to vote? Is the whole purpose of this campaign to motivate only that 10 or 20 percent to vote in a particular direction? Is it possible to have intelligent debate and discussion in a political election on issues, on values, and even on interests?
Dr. Skerry: I certainly don't think you're naive to have this forum or that it's naive to think about having public discussions, even in a presidential election year, about values or interests. They're obviously both of critical importance. But I do think we have to be mindful that the games politicians inevitably play are easier to play with value-laden issues than they are with the more concrete, mundane, run-of-the-mill kinds of interests I talked about. Tom Edsall gives me proof positive of that. The 150 pages that he got from Clinton and the nine pages from Dole are proof positive of who can play the best game with values and who's most adept and slippery about these things.
Obviously, Bill Clinton knows what he's doing in a way that Bob Dole doesn't. But that doesn't make me feel any more comfortable, because I think in a political era that is so dominated by media and so dominated by individuals for whom accountability is more problematic than ever, values are so slippery that it makes it all the harder for us to keep the guys honest. I think we have to talk about values, but we have to be mindful of how we can be manipulated by the discussions.
Mr. Edsall: I disagree. My own impression in talking to voters is that the public is concerned about values; people are very concerned about how government affects individual behavior and the values of individuals. The welfare debate is largely about that, the crime debate is largely about that, the education debate is largely about that, and the immigration debate is about that. All of these have very much to do with values: what are appropriate values, what kind of values are "American?" People are concerned about how the media violates the values of the country. And they're concerned about how politicians behave; the House check-cashing scandal had to do with values.
Dr. Skerry: Values are very important to me in the work I've done. My concern is that when you get into the realm of values in politics--welfare, crime, immigration--they reach into so many areas of our lives, the solutions are so illusory, and the possibility of holding anyone accountable for reform or action is so difficult, that it works to the advantage of politicians who are clever enough to grab onto these issues and use them in ways that they know they won't be held terribly accountable for down the line.
Ms. McGrory: Sometimes I think that the values question has left us a little disoriented. In 1992, many people, including me, thought that character would be the overriding issue in the campaign. In the end it wasn't. And again, the campaign in New Hampshire was very instructive.
The point is that Clinton carried as much baggage as any human being could possibly have carried into that campaign. But I remember sitting beside an Episcopal clergywoman at the Bedford town hall who said, "I am much more interested in his programs than in his private life." And that was the judgment made in New Hampshire and it held in the campaign. The electorate said that it is more important to have somebody who recognizes our problems and is going to do something about them. And I think that may have thrown the values discussion a little off stride.