IN HIS ACCEPTANCE SPEECH AT THE REPUBLICAN Convention in August, George Bush promised to work for a "kinder, gentler America." He then presided over arguably the cheapest, dirtiest political campaign in a hundred years. (The 1888 presidential campaign could vie with his for top honors.) For three months I saw George Bush's version of a kinder, gentler America, and (to employ theological terminology) it scared the hell I out of me.
We are now supposed to be in the "healing period," when the wounds and scars of the campaign are put behind us. I do not think we should do that too quickly, for although George Bush won the election, he lost respect, and that is the part of his campaign legacy that may be the hardest to overcome.
His campaign vision was a tarnished one. It was built on people's fears (the morally and racially flawed Willie Horton ads), on cheap shots (the scathing attacks on the American Civil Liberties Union), on obfuscation of the real issues (the adolescent flap about saluting the flag), and on the consistent trashing of a noble part of our heritage (the tradition of "liberalism").
It is a measure of the success of his tactics that the reason most frequently offered for Dukakis' defeat is that he waited too long to respond to the sleaze. Score one for Dukakis: Although he lost the election, he retained respect.
A second campaign casualty was Bush's selection of a running mate. Before announcing his choice, he told us that his selection (which he had many months to ponder) would "tell all" about his candidacy. It told many of us more than we wanted to know.
It is a measure of the flawed nature of Bush's judgment that once Dan Quayle's name had been announced, most Republican leaders not only displayed a marked lack of enthusiasm for the choice, but engineered the campaign so that Quayle was excluded from national appearances (save for his disastrous encounter with Lloyd Bentsen). He was kept out of reach of voters, and particularly the press, with an assiduousness surely never matched in the history of political campaigning.
If such a choice is our clearest clue to Bush's acumen in designating the one most fit to succeed him in the event of death, we are in a precarious situation. Long life and good health to George Bush.
A third casualty of the campaign was Bush's failure to give us a sense of where he stands on important issues. We have made a national decision to "let George do it," and we have scarcely a glimmer of what George intends to do or how he proposes to get it done.
Rather than hearing about how flag sales went up in the Reagan-Bush years, we were surely entitled to hear how Bush proposes to implement those words in the flag salute that call us to "liberty and justice for all"--which includes racial and ethnic minorities, the poor, single mothers, children (one out of four of whom live in poverty), and vast numbers of unemployed and homeless people. We experienced a calculated silence on the complex issues we must face in relation to Central America, South Africa, the "feminization of poverty," the Third World debt crisis, our mounting national deficit, and plant closures; not to mention such close-to-the-bone issues as doing business with drug traffickers and selling arms for hostages--matters on which Bush has even yet failed to give satisfactory accounts of his own involvement.
SO, WHERE DOES THIS leave us? We cannot restore respect for Bush; he will have to earn that. And we cannot undo his choice of a vice president, though we must hope he will make Quayle's functions chiefly ceremonial. But we must do everything we can to create Bush's agenda, by insisting that our own agendas be espoused on the public scene in ways that cannot be ignored. We must be "his majesty's loyal opposition," not in order to be partisan but in order to be responsible.
The fact that our constitutional principle of "checks and balances" worked in the election--Bush has to deal with a solidly Democratic Congress--means that there is a vehicle within the process through which pressures can be exerted on the president. While the Republicans had to accept Bush's choice of a running mate, no matter how much they privately (and sometimes publicly) deplored it, the American people do not have to accept his choices for Supreme Court justices, for example, without long and fair congressional hearings. Let us hope that a knowledge of this will sway the new president from purely doctrinaire appointments.
Are there any areas of hope in this gloomy analysis? Yes. It is still God's world, and it is an entertainable theological proposition that God and the world can survive a Republican victory. (We have had a lot of chances to test that proposition in recent elections.)
It is also an article of faith that no human being is so cast in concrete that change is impossible. People often grow when new demands are made upon them; Harry Truman and even Gerald Ford did better in the presidency than advance assessments would have suggested. We must hope that that will be true of George Bush and even of Dan Quayle, and support them when we can even as we oppose them when we must.
There is another way to go, and in the aftermath of this issue-less campaign it assumes a new attractiveness. It is to say, in effect, "a plague on both your houses"; neither candidate offered a stirring-enough vision of the future to enlist our full-hearted support, and even if we felt that Dukakis came closer, the size of the Bush landslide suggests that nothing even slightly to the left of center has a chance within present political alignments. So one implementation of this concern would be to say, "Run, Jesse, run!" and begin to develop a third party. (The Democrats' freezing Jackson out of a significant campaign role indicates that his future with them is dubious at best.)
The disturbing price of such a move, however, and one that makes me still reluctant to embark upon it, is that if the liberal forces within the country were to gather under a Jackson (or any other) banner, this would virtually guarantee a succession of Republican victories on the national scene, since third parties do not become viable within four or even eight years. The consequence would be even greater entrenchment of privilege and lack of concern for the poor, as eight years of Reaganomics has illustrated.
In politics it is difficult to get many good things done, and we often have to settle for using the process to see that a few less evil things are done. That may sound like a modest goal, but for those who would otherwise be destroyed, it is the most important one.
Robert McAfee Brown was Professor Emeritus of Theology and Ethics at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California, when this article appeared.
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