Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 6, 1992 TAG: 9203060459
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAXTON DAVIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Bush and his minions will explain it away as a "protest vote," no doubt, and will even claim it is really a vote against Congress; but no sophistry can avoid the conclusion that an incumbent president who can get no better than 64 percent of his own party's vote is a president in whom confidence has fallen dangerously.
Bush need not complain, however. He brought it on himself - with foolish campaign pledges of "no new taxes," with support of Saddam Hussein only a few months before he dubbed Saddam a new "Hitler," with perpetual waffling on issues that he had dubbed life-or-death problems for the nation, with an inability or unwillingness to recognize economic problems until too late, with outbursts of hysteria and foolishness that revealed, even to his admirers, that he is a man who cannot grasp the simple value of taking a position and standing by it.
Pat Buchanan has exposed such weaknesses mercilessly but clearly, and to the revelation he has added a scorn for Bush that is not only unsparing but unapologetic. Bush, protected and isolated within his own party, clearly has no idea how to combat "attack politics" when he is not doing the attacking. Accustomed to being the playground bully, he now encounters a playground brawler who is unafraid, in contrast to most of Bush's Democratic opponents, to fight back.
Buchanan's strong showing, first in New Hampshire and now in Georgia, Maryland and Colorado, undoubtedly contains a strong element of "protest"; but his appeal to the Neanderthal simplicities in which many Americans bask is real and, it is clear, will not soon go away. His claw marks and his persistence continue to leave wounds that will follow Bush into the November election.
On the Democratic side, the pot goes on boiling, to my mind for the ultimate good of the party in the fall. Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, apparently badly bumped from the "front-runner" position awarded him by the national press, piled up a whopping 58 percent of the Democratic vote in the five-man race in Georgia. He now has a handy if not conclusive lead in delegates and becomes again, if only for the moment, the Democratic front-runner.
But his lead is not so commanding that he can take further primaries and caucuses for granted. Former Sen. Paul Tsongas proved in Maryland that he can win beyond native ground, and he did well also in Georgia, Utah and Colorado. His campaign for economic recovery gives voters throughout the country a thoughtful alternative not only to Clinton but to Bush, and thus keeps the campaign, at least in part, a campaign of ideas and programs as well as personalities.
Clinton, Tsongas and the other Democratic aspirants - Sen. Tom Harkin and former Gov. Jerry Brown - slipped into some name-calling of their own recently, but they seem to have put that in the past; and the issue-based Democratic campaign, confronting real if by no means all national problems and proposing ways to deal with them, remains a refreshing reminder that national campaigns do not have to rest on flag-waving and Willie Horton.
The surprise, amongst the Democrats, is the strength shown by Brown, the gadfly of the campaign, a few months ago dismissed generally as a dreamer. Now the winner of two primaries despite a shoestring operation, he too is a "protest" candidate whose ideas about systemic government corruption clearly touch voters' nerves.
Some Democratic regulars now lament the failure of the campaign to identify a true front-runner by this time. My own belief is that contests are good for the party and the nation, and that they not only encourage the development of ideas, but heighten the contrast with wimpy George Bush.
Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
Keywords:
POLITICS
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