ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, October 23, 1996 TAG: 9610230035
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GORDON E. SAUL
OPINION makers in both the print and electronic media are busily spinning poll results that indicate this year's race is over: Clinton wins; Democrats win the House of Representatives, and Republicans barely hold on to the Senate.
Is it possible there is a deep undercurrent of public dissatisfaction with the Clinton administration that pollsters fail to detect? Could we have in November an upset of Truman-Dewey proportions? Ray Fair of Yale University is the author of a study, printed in the most recent edition of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, that suggests such an outcome is likely.
For more than 20 years, Fair has studied every presidential race from 1916 to 1992. He uses analyses of elections between 1916 and 1960 to make predictions of election returns after 1960. The comparison of his model predictions with actual voting results is impressive.
His model indicates that two economic/political variables largely determine the outcome of presidential elections. First, elections are influenced by the status of the economy during an election year, as indicated by economic growth and the rate of inflation. Second, weight is given to the considerable advantage enjoyed by an incumbent when fending off challengers. Using the model, Fair predicts a very close race this year with a narrow Dole victory.
What does such an analysis say about the president's claims concerning the remarkable performance of the American economy during his term in office? I suspect his description of economic matters is as disingenuous as his explanation of how his aides illegally collected the classified FBI background files of 900 Republicans and then conveniently lost the log indicating who had reviewed those files.
Or perhaps his description of things economic could be compared to Vice President Gore's telling of the president's heroic decisions at critical moments during the Haiti invasion. Haiti, of course, being one of the smallest and impoverished countries in the world, reportedly had only one operational helicopter at the time of the "invasion." This expenditure of billions of American tax dollars to reinstate an ousted Haitian leader who remains a controversial presence in Haiti.
A further example of presidential disinformation is Clinton's frequent reminders of deficit reduction during the past four years. Could he please tell us how much of this decline in the yearly addition to the national debt is the result of his reduction in government expenditures, and how much relates to long-predicted surpluses in the Social Security trust fund, as well as the government's sale of real estate, loans and securities it assumed during the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s?
Fair's model may correspond with an intuitive feeling on the part of the American people that structural flaws in our economy need intelligent reform, not the same old ``tax and spend'' policies the president has advocated. If Fair's model is correct, and the opinion makers are wrong, I say it could not have happened to a nicer bunch of guys.
Gordon E. Saul of Roanoke is a retired Army officer.
LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines KEYWORDS: POLILTICS PRESIDENTby CNB