Signs of the Times

It really is quite a show. An American presidential campaign is a production of gigantic proportions. The time, energy, money, analysis, and media attention devoted to these extravaganzas are simply beyond calculation.

In no other country I'm aware of is the process so long and drawn out, or so exhaustingly recorded and reported. The election of a president in the United States is treated as an epic of major proportions, whether or not its outcome is likely to justify all the attention. Despite the many flaws in the process (some quite lethal to the success of genuine democracy), the whole spectacle is indeed something to behold.

I went to both political conventions this year and have followed the whole drama quite closely. And Sojourners has given considerable attention to the campaign this year. That suggests we think this election campaign has been important, and we do. Elections are important, but often less for what they produce than for what they reveal. What is happening under the surface of the events, issues, and personalities the media focus on can easily be missed. And the interpretation of what it all means, beyond who might win, is seldom understood or discussed very clearly. It must also be said that who wins and loses is important, especially to the victims of destructive policies.

There is also another motive for election coverage. Garry Wills, who was covering both conventions for Time, said to me in New Orleans, "America-watching is fun." He's right. America-watching is fun, as well as being instructive. I confess that I've always had the political bug. There are fewer things I enjoy more than staying up late with a few similarly afflicted friends to watch the election returns. Sometimes it's like watching basketball--pure entertainment. Other times the watching is with the keen awareness of lives at stake. Most often it is a little of both.

When I was in Atlanta and New Orleans, I was conscious of feeling less like a reporter and more like a theologian. It was really political theology that was emerging in my note-taking rather than pure journalism. How do we discern the "signs of the times" in this election year? That became the question.

From that vantage point of political theology, the two most significant things to watch during this election year were the campaigns of Jesse Jackson and Pat Robertson. The Jackson campaign was an enormous success and achieved more than anyone, even the candidate, had first imagined. On the other hand, Pat Robertson's entry into electoral politics was an embarrassing failure and fell far short of the achievements that many expected.

Both candidates represented constituencies that perceived themselves to be outside of the mainstream of political power. Both not only brought those new constituencies into the process but also articulated issues and concerns that otherwise would have been mostly left out of the political discussion. And, obviously, both men are also preachers who injected religious values and moral issues into an otherwise passionless and very secular campaign. In the end Jesse Jackson had shaped the rhetoric and the agenda of the campaign more than any other candidate, and Pat Robertson was forced to retreat back to the narrow religious culture of televangelism from which he came.

Jesse Jackson

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING ABOUT THE election year of 1988, regardless of the outcome, is the Jackson campaign. Indeed, the new political forces Jesse Jackson's campaign gave rise to and what they portend for the future is the most critical development in many years. As one Jackson staffer noted in Atlanta, "Jesse Jackson's campaign is the first event of the 1990s." It is certainly ironic that at the end of the Reagan era, the most dynamic political figure in the nation is Jesse Jackson.

Even conservative spokespersons such as Richard Viguerie and Howard Phillips are saying the hoped-for conservative realignment under Ronald Reagan did not occur. It was the president's personal popularity and not his policies that sustained his administration. That uncertain legacy has now been handed to an even more uncertain heir in George Bush. His candidacy has never stirred the passions of the ideological forces that lifted Ronald Reagan, nor is Bush likely ever to have the emotional appeal among so many voters enjoyed by his boss. Even if George Bush wins, his ability to "finish the mission" of Ronald Reagan is greatly in doubt. The policies of the Reagan era will be much more vulnerable without the Reagan charisma to promote them.

But it is also true that old-style Democratic Party liberalism is making no comeback. That is evident in watching how Michael Dukakis keeps running from "the L word" and how desperately George Bush keeps trying to pin it on him. Voters do seem more concerned this year about issues such as health, education, and homelessness, but they aren't sure old solutions will work. There are good reasons for public confusion and skepticism.

Neither the Democratic attraction for top-down welfare bureaucracies nor the Republican love for "free market economics" has proven to be a match for the pervasive social injustice of American society and the widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots. Social control on the one hand and social abandonment on the other have failed miserably to make justice more possible for those referred to in Matthew's gospel as "the least of these."

It is in those gospel terms that the Jackson campaign takes on most significance. In 1988 Jesse Jackson offered "good news to the poor." It is the poor themselves who overwhelmingly support Jesse Jackson, and it is they who find in his candidacy most hope for their future. And it's not hard to understand why.

In Jesse Jackson's vision, the poor are a priority. They are important. Indeed, in the Jackson campaign, the down-trodden and disenfranchised, the forsaken and forgotten, are the first priority. His "Rainbow Coalition" is an alliance of those who have been left out of the American dream and those who have been drawn to their cause. In Atlanta, the Jackson delegates were indeed a rainbow. In the opening lines of his historic convention speech, Jackson said, "I see the faces of America: red, yellow, brown, black, and white. We're all precious in God's sight."

THIS YEAR JACKSON captured the black vote almost entirely and gained great support among Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans. But unlike 1984, white farmers facing foreclosures and white workers confronting displacement joined the rainbow. The campaign attracted many women, most peace activists, and a surprising number of union members. Blue-collar workers and farmers linked arms with progressive white-collar workers around a belief that America can do better.

A political campaign which places its priority on justice for the poor and the marginalized is a rare thing in the United States, or any other nation for that matter. The Old Testament prophets say a nation will be judged not by its wealth or military might, but by how it treats the weakest and most vulnerable in its midst. That biblical standard almost completely reverses the logic of modem election campaigns, and this year was no exception. Jesse Jackson's campaigns campaign here stood unique and was the closest by far to the biblical priorities. True national greatness, he told his country, comes hot from the accumulation of power but through doing justice and showing mercy.

Jesse Jackson's vision became even more powerful than his oratory. That vision cannot rightfully be called either liberal or conservative. It more accurately stands in the American populist tradition and, in particular, derives its strength from the redemptive history of black America, which has always been the greatest source of the nation's conscience and soul.

Jesse Jackson's electoral victories in the Democratic primaries--seven million votes, 13 states, 100 congressional districts--make his the most significant populist movement since the turn of the century. "He put the concerns of little people on the map," one of his delegates told me (herself one of those little people). His delegates believe they are the beginning of a new majority as they broaden their base and diversify their constituency.

Jesse Jackson spoke directly to the poorest of Americans when he said, "When they put my name in nomination, they put your name in nomination." I heard that feeling expressed again and again from delegates on the floor of Atlanta's Omni, and not only from the delegates, but from the people who cleaned their hotel rooms, made their beds, cooked their food, washed their dishes, and drove them around in buses and cabs. All felt represented by Jesse Jackson.

I've said before in these pages that you can't understand the Jackson campaign until you understand what Jesse means to the children on the streets of inner-city neighborhoods like my own in Washington, D.C. It was indeed the poorest, most unrepresented, most voiceless people in the nation whom Jesse Jackson spoke to directly at the end of his now famous Tuesday night speech--people who had probably never really felt spoken to before by anyone at a national political convention, especially by someone they believed was one of them. It was, I thought, the most moving point of either convention:

I have a story. I wasn't always on television....When I was born,...no writers asked my mother her name....You see, I was born to a teenage mother who was born to a teenage mother.

I understand. I know abandonment and people being mean to you, and saying you're nothing and nobody, and can never be anything. I understand...I really do understand. Born in a three-room house, bathroom in the backyard, slop jar by the bed, no hot and cold running water. I understand. Wallpaper used for decoration? No. For a windbreaker. I understand....

I understand. At 3 o'clock on Thanksgiving Day we couldn't eat turkey because Mama was preparing someone else's turkey at 3 o'clock....Around 6 o'clock she would get off the Alta Vista bus when we would bring up the leftovers and eat our turkey around 8 o'clock at night. I really do understand.

Every one of these funny labels they put on you, those of you who are watching this broadcast tonight in the projects, on the corners, I understand. Call you outcast, low-down, you can't make it, you're nothing, you're from nobody, subclass, underclass. When you see Jesse Jackson, when my name goes in nomination, your name goes in nomination.

I was born in the slum, but the slum was not born in me. And it wasn't born in you, and you can make it. Wherever you are tonight, you can make it...You must not surrender....Keep hope alive....I love you very much.

Jesse Jackson has registered more people to vote than anyone else in the country. The commitment he gained from the Democratic Party to support universal, on-site, same-day, voter registration holds out the possibility of registering many more of the multitudes of the poor in America.

Jackson says his campaign is not just for a new president but for a new direction. On drugs, jobs, education, health, farms, factories, and taxes, his domestic agenda is bold and concrete. He wants "a foreign policy not foreign to values," demands a single standard for human rights, consistently endorses self-determination for the Third World, chooses peaceful negotiation over military intervention, and calls for reversing the arms race. Jackson's clear leadership on South Africa has caused the Democrats to support strong action against apartheid.

In his approach to foreign policy questions, Jesse Jackson takes up the wisdom of yet another biblical injunction, to see not only the speck in your adversary's eye, but also the log in your own. However, while Jackson's shift on abortion made him more acceptable to the Democratic mainstream, it remains a painful inconsistency to many of his supporters in the churches.

Both Jackson and his delegates pledge that their campaign did not end in Atlanta, nor will it end on November 8 or January's inauguration day, regardless of the outcome.

THE DAY AFTER THE CONVENTION, I sat in on a Rainbow Coalition board meeting. Most of the talk was about the future. But combined the campaign's hopeful vision of the future is its rich sense of the past.

Mike Espy, the young congressional representative from the Mississippi Delta and his state's first black member of Congress since Reconstruction, made a stirring speech to the delegates. Espy gave all the credit to his being in Atlanta to Fannie Lou Hamer, his state's famed civil rights leader who, along with other Mississippi blacks, was shut out of the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. He recalled her tearful cry 24 years earlier: "Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave?"

Now Mike Espy answered her, "The same hands outcome, that picked cotton now run for mayor, Congress, governor, and the presidency. Change is here, Fannie Lou! It's a new Mississippi. It's a new party." Conversation with Espy and other members of the Mississippi delegation, both black and white, campaign. seemed to bear him out.

At 25, Cleo Fields is the youngest state senator in the country. He was actually elected to his seat in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a year earlier, when he was 24. In the untelevised party platform debate, Fields addressed the convention as a supporter of a Jackson alternative platform plank calling for a promise of no first use of nuclear weapons. The plank failed, with the opposition of longtime liberals such as California Sen. Alan Cranston and Massachusetts Rep. Edward Markey, a former nuclear freeze supporter, who both spoke on behalf of the Dukakis forces and pleaded to give the new candidate "flexibility." Fields called on the delegates to "look at your conscience." Markey and Cranston ignored his advice.

Fields told me he was too young to have marched with Martin Luther King Jr., but he couldn't let the opportunity go by to join with Jesse Jackson. He believes Jackson has opened the door for young blacks like himself. "Booker T. Washington started to teach so Rosa Parks could take her seat. Rosa Parks took her seat so Fannie Lou Hamer could take her stand. Fannie Lou Hamer took her stand so Martin Luther King Jr. could march. Martin Luther King marched so Jesse Jackson could run. Jesse Jackson is running so America can win," beamed Fields.

"Sounds like you've said that before," I smiled. "Yeah," the young politician replied confidently, "it's my stump speech."

Fields went on to say how a few years ago, Jesse Jackson came through Baton Rouge and gave his familiar "I Am Somebody" speech. "I'll never forget that," Fields recalled. "I often wonder if Jesse hadn't passed through for a brief moment how my life might have been different. He really understands....Jesse once told me, 'Cleo, you can do anything but don't forget, only what's done for Christ will last.' We can't afford to be pragmatic and forget from whence we've come, we cannot forget the struggle and the price so many like Martin Luther King Jr. paid. My mission is to be an advocate for the poor, disenfranchised, damned, doomed, and locked out. I was ordained to the mission by Jesse--to keep hope alive."

Beatrice Wood, a 72-year-old great-grandmother, and her 71-year-old husband, Tom, were both delegates. For her, Jackson's nomination makes worthwhile her "sacrifice over many years." Jackson himself introduced Rosa Parks on many occasions, including before his prime time speech seen by more than 100 million people. He often said we are now standing on her shoulders. I had a chance to ask Mrs. Parks what she felt at the moment of Jackson's nomination. "Fulfillment," she said.

THE UNITY DISPLAYED at the Democratic Convention was real but fragile, with the choice of running mate Lloyd Bentsen being an especially sore point for many Jackson supporters. The process of how his selection and announcement occurred, along with his record on questions such as military policy, contra aid, southern Africa, and domestic economics, filled some with a deep and angry sense of betrayal.

A scheduled final meeting between Jesse Jackson and his delegates on the Friday morning after the convention was given little attention in the media. But it provided a dramatic glimpse of the changes the Jesse Jackson campaign had wrought.

I arrived at the hotel a few minutes late, and Jackson had just begun speaking. He spoke proudly about how the Rainbow campaign had expanded the party, opened up the Democratic National Committee, reformed the rules for future primaries, and won their constituency a real influence in the fall campaign and in a new Democratic administration. Cited specifically were the gains in obtaining the party's commitment to the Conyers bill for on-site, same-day voter registration, the Dellums bill for comprehensive sanctions against South Africa,"economic set-asiders" for minorities, child-care legislation, and statehood for the District of Columbia. He reiterated again how their campaign had called for nothing less than a fundamental change in direction and would continue to pursue that vision. "I wish Dr. King could have been here," Jackson said.

Suddenly, I noticed something I hadn't at first. Sitting at the table at this Jackson event were Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen, the winners from the night before. Dukakis had just given the speech of his life on Thursday night; he and Bentsen were affirmed as the Democratic Party's nominees for president and vice president, and now they were both listening quietly at a Jackson delegate meeting.

The issue of Bentsen and contra aid had been very hot the day before on the convention floor, and now Jackson said, "What does the selection of Lloyd Bentsen mean to me? He represents a wing, we represent a wing. It takes two wings to fly. Hawks and doves are both birds who must breathe the same air. What does it mean to me in practical terms? It means the contras have lost a vote in the Senate." Wild cheers erupted, and Bentsen just sat there. "It means D.C. statehood has gained a vote, and Mandela has another ally."

Finally, Jackson introduced candidate Dukakis. He praised Jesse Jackson and said, "Many of you have made history." The Massachusetts governor spoke glowingly about his civil rights record and that of Lloyd Bentsen. Then he asked for the support of Jackson's delegates. "We need you, want you, and can't live without you."

Jackson rose again and commented positively on the relationship and trust that had been built up with Dukakis that week. He recalled that neither Richard Nixon nor Ronald Reagan would ever even meet with the Black Congressional Caucus. With Gov. Dukakis, there was access.

Then Jackson started to introduce Bentsen. He recalled painful history. "When Kennedy died, black people thought we died twice. Kennedy was dead, and a Texan named Lyndon Johnson was president. We knew his record. But because of the circumstances of life and history, Johnson rose to the occasion. Sen. Bentsen, your occasion is now. You ask us to trust you. All we can ask of anyone is that they not betray that trust."

Bentsen commended Jackson for his leadership. He then recalled the earlier Massachusetts-Texas connection in Kennedy and Johnson and credited them with doing more for civil rights than any other administration. "We can do it again," claimed Bentsen.

Jackson rose to conclude. "Blacks have always had the paradoxical burden to save a nation in order to save ourselves. If a car is going over a cliff and you're in the car, you've got to save the driver to save yourself. You can't take solace in it going over the cliff--if you're in the car. You have to keep the driver from driving off the cliff.

"Yes, Kennedy and Johnson changed things, as Sen. Bentsen said. But it was always a combination of the White House and street heat!" At that point the crowd erupted. Jackson recalled how after Dr. King won the Nobel Peace Prize, Johnson told King there wasn't enough support in Congress to pass a needed voting rights act. "So we put on the street heat in Selma and got the voting rights bill. We've got to keep on the street heat." The crowd cheered as Dukakis and Bentsen got a history lesson.

"Kennedy signed the civil rights bill," Jackson continued, "but the children of Birmingham wrote it. Johnson said he couldn't get a voting rights act. He didn't. The people of Selma did. We always need the combination of enlightened leadership and street heat!"

The son of a poor black teenage mother was teaching two white nominees for the highest offices in the land-educating them about their role in the long historical process of social transformation. And he did it without malice or disrespect.

The Jackson campaign spent a fraction of what the others spent. The primary rules, winner-take-all contests, and superdelegate system all worked against them. (These are the things that will be changed next time due to Jackson-inspired reforms.) Yet the impact on the party, the platform, the campaign, and the nation was obvious to all. The Rainbow Coalition would stay together, expand, mobilize at every political level, and "run for everything that's open."

At the "family meeting" that followed, next steps were discussed, and it was clear how much this movement was maturing. "The whole world has been watching you," said Jackson. "We'll never stop campaigning, it's never going to stop. We'll suffer together, and our suffering will not be in vain. We are going to win. We're winning every day. I feel like preaching now [laughter]. The only thing that's lasting in this thing is our self-respect. We have grown tremendously. God has blessed us beyond measure. It's so clear we're going all the way. I may not make it, but our children will. That's the deal. Our minds are changed. We have a new imagination. It's just a matter of time, and time is on our side."

A bishop was asked to close this political gathering in prayer. He thanked God that those who had been locked out were now around the table and prayed that the nation would now become what it's never been but always had the potential to be.

Pat Robertson

THE CAMPAIGN OF CHRISTIAN broadcaster Pat Robertson was the first foray of the Religious Right into electoral politics. As such, it was the first real and measurable political test of the influence often claimed by that movement.

Robertson was thought by most to be the best candidate among the array of television preachers. Jerry Falwell has a mean streak and turns too many people off. And Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart...well, that's obvious. Robertson is the son of a former senator, has a degree from Yale, and possesses a smiling, telegenic persona that his people hoped would be persuasive with voters.

But Robertson made a very poor showing. Despite organizing more loyal and energetic state networks than any of his rivals (his "invisible army") and raising impressive sums of money (some of it potentially violating federal non-profit regulations), Robertson's campaign fell far short of his claims and expectations.

After a dramatic second-place finish in the Iowa caucus, the campaign quickly went downhill. Robertson lost in South Carolina, where he had confidently predicted victory. And in the southern Bible Belt, where his strongest support should have been, Robertson suffered crushing defeats. The preacher who emerged victorious after the Super Tuesday southern primaries was not Pat Robertson but Jesse Jackson.

Robertson's failure was certainly not due to a lack of good organization or money. Wild statements made by the candidate about missiles in Cuba, American hostages, and George Bush's alleged involvement in triggering the Swaggart scandal certainly didn't help. But the central failure of the Robertson campaign was the failure of his message.

Even among evangelical Christians, Robertson couldn't win a majority of votes. If Pat Robertson had galvanized even his own most natural evangelical-charismatic Christian constituency, as Jesse Jackson did blacks, the election could have been explosive. While Jackson proved he could expand beyond his base constituency, Robertson showed his appeal was limited to a small hard-core cadre of the religious right-wing.

Robertson's vision scared more people than it inspired. Despite his early certainty that God was behind his campaign, most Christians, black and white, voted for others instead. It certainly wasn't God's message for the nation they believed they were rejecting, just Robertson's. In the end, Pat Robertson's right-wing religion failed to convey its authenticity beyond his own television viewing audience built up over many years.

THE FAILURE OF the Robertson campaign can, in my view, be taken as a good measure of the Religious Right's influence more generally. The political power of the Religious Right is not simply in decline; it has always been overestimated. Its success has been rooted in the power of television and the spotlight of excessive media coverage, and both always tend to exaggerate things. The Religious Right's own estimation of its political influence has always been inflated. (Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority are notorious in this regard.) But the media have generally swallowed the hyped figures and statistics and simply reported them as fact.

The love-hate relationship between the Religious Right and the so-called "secular media" has been fascinating. The press tends to hate television evangelists, but it loves to cover them. In showering their acts, antics, scandals, and media events with attention, the media itself has become one of the Religious Right's most important power bases.

The appeal and danger of the Religious Right is its ability to ask many of the right questions and then provide the wrong answers. That was true this year of the Robertson campaign. The most important political issues at stake are indeed moral questions. Religious values and moral purpose are indeed lacking in American public life today, which has become increasingly secularized and self-centered. Let's even use the Right's favorite phrase and affirm that "liberal secular humanism" cannot provide an adequate moral basis and framework for social life and instead creates a moral vacuum. The highest vocation of politics is building community around a moral purpose for social life.

But in response to the need for a new moral vision, Pat Robertson offered unbridled nationalism, militarism, and capitalism. Where is the moral vision the country needs in that? Michael Dukakis' preference for "competence over ideology" simply evades the moral questions, and George Bush is concerned about the pledge of allegiance. It remained mostly for Jesse Jackson to call the nation to be better and to live up to its best religious and political heritage.

In New Orleans I talked to many Robertson supporters. It is true that some of them would turn the country into a modern theocratic state, with their own interpretation of the Bible made into law. Others, though, are less dogmatic but feel deep moral concerns about the future of the nation.

Abortion continues to be a very primary passion for many. Jesse Jackson is criticized for his inconsistency on this sanctity of life question, a profoundly religious issue for many Christians. But here on the Right, as on the Left, morality tends to become narrowly and ideologically defined. One group of Robertson delegates I met had a hard time seeing poverty, homelessness, or the arms race as "moral concerns."

In Robertson's speech to the delegates, he attacked Mario Cuomo's 1984 Democratic Convention keynote address and Jesse Jackson's message for suggesting that America is a "tale of two cities--the haves and the have-nots, the rich and the poor, the upper class and the lower class." That isn't true, said Robertson, and it is "a message of defeat, division, and despair."

Well, Pat Robertson is wrong. Those words are true of the United States and of the rest of the world. The biblical prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos spoke the same way and their message was one of judgment and repentance. Robertson's failure to see that, and his inability to comprehend economic injustice and violence as fundamental moral issues (as much as sexuality or abortion) is the ultimate reason why his message has failed on religious as well as political grounds.

What's Left

JACKSON'S RAINBOW WILL VOTE FOR Michael Dukakis (though some reluctantly) because of South Africa, Nicaragua, a little better deal for the poor, and a little more access to the country's direction. The cautious, managerial, and increasingly centrist Massachusetts governor does not represent their vision but will allow more space for it.

Almost as soon as the convention was over, tension seemed to emerge again between Michael Dukakis and Jesse Jackson. The Massachusetts governor appeared to be more interested in the strategy of winning over "Reagan Democrats" than reaching out to Jackson's constituency, which the Democratic Party apparently still believes it can simply take for granted. That could prove to be a serious mistake, as the extent of voter registration and turnout among the poor and lower-income people could be a decisive factor in this election.

Regardless of the election outcome, however, the political constituency mobilized by the Jackson campaign is here to stay. At this writing it is still not clear how much of a role Jackson supporters will play in the Dukakis campaign. And, of course, it remains uncertain how much real influence and access the Rainbow constituency would have in a Dukakis administration.

It seems clear, however, that Dukakis as president would feel more accountability to the political forces Jackson represents than would George Bush. With the Democrats in the White House, the Rainbow Coalition would enjoy more legitimacy while being a persistent voice for more fundamental change.

In a Bush administration, Jesse Jackson and his constituents could easily become the principal national voice of political opposition--at least the most articulate and visible. If present political and economic policies continue or become even worse, that opposition voice could galvanize yet more support and become even stronger. The tensions between an electorally focused political campaign and a prophetic social movement are very real and always just beneath the surface in Jackson's Rainbow Coalition. A Dukakis White House might tend to accelerate the success of the former while a Bush America would call forth more of the latter.

Robertson's disciples will vote for George Bush (though some reluctantly) because of abortion, prayer in schools, a little better deal for their conservative agenda, and a little more access to power. The very establishment, bureaucratic, and politically adjustable vice president does not represent their vision but will allow more space for it.

Robertson's forces won impressive victories in a handful of states and in some instances gained substantial influence over or even control of the party apparatus. But if Robertson's message does not become more successful, it is hard to imagine how his supporters will be.

During the 1972 presidential campaign, George McGovern's supporters achieved some similar success in their party. But the Democratic establishment soon reasserted its control, especially after McGovern's poor showing. Political establishments don't like losing candidates and messages and are unlikely to entrust their future to their proponents. Robertson's people (often described as inexperienced but full of energy) will either gain political experience and move closer to the mainstream of the Republican Party (as many are already doing as part of the Bush effort this fall) or they will probably be pushed out by the Republican pros.

What the Robertson campaign could instead become is a strong protest movement, as other political minorities often have. With George Bush in the White House, Robertson's people would be able to extract some legitimacy and accountability, just as Jackson's constituency would with Dukakis. If Dukakis wins, they will be forced to the outside and probably to a more dramatic public profile. The beginnings of more direct-action strategies in the pro-life movement could be a precursor of this. Robertson already has supported the controversial new wave of sit-ins and demonstrations that target abortion clinics.

PERHAPS THE MOST creative undertaking in such a future will be to find the connections and kinship between some of Jackson's constituents and some of Robertson's, especially the more in both camps. There is actually a great deal more in common between a black Baptist and a white evangelical than many suspect. Neither will feel much sympathy for a highly secularized, technocratic state that cares little for moral values and even less for the system's victims, be they inner-city children or the yet-unborn.

But for most other American voters this election year, a decision will be made on what seems best for them. Unfortunately, a real discussion of issues or, even more important, vision for the country, is unlikely to take place.

The political debate has already deteriorated into media-hyped attacks by each side against the other. The pattern has now been set. One candidate makes a charge against his adversary that is at best only half true. The next day, the other responds with a half-truth of his own, and a quick poll among the voters is taken to see who won the latest skirmish. The topics shift as fast as the stops on the high-flying campaign schedule. Even the debates promise to be more like media interrogations than genuine political discussions.

Defense, for example, has become a big campaign issue. George Bush has been hitting Dukakis hard, charging that he is an inexperienced liberal who is soft on defense. In California, Bush cut to the substance of the issue when he charged that Dukakis "thinks that a naval exercise is something out of Jane Fonda's workout book."

A few days later, in Michigan, Dukakis showed he was no softy by riding around in a tank for the TV cameras. The Democratic nominee has now revised his position on SDI (he is now for research) and is speaking more of "modernization" than cutbacks in weapons systems.

Neither candidate has offered any more serious discussion of military policy than Bush's "You gotta be tough," and Dukakis' "Yeah, well I'm tough, too." And, of course, nobody challenges the U.S. doctrine of national security.

On the home front, Bush keeps talking about economic recovery and American prosperity, while Dukakis continues with a vague promise of "good jobs at good wages." In the midst of the non-debate about the real state of the economy, the 1987 Census Bureau report was announced in early September and confirmed what lonely voices have been saying during the entire period of Reaganomics--the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

Not since Jesse Jackson left the race has anyone really asserted that the plight of the poor and lower income people is an urgent moral and political issue that ought to be in the center of this campaign. Neither candidate is even discussing the issues, much less putting forward a social and political agenda for the nation.

What is lost in all this is a real discourse on the nation's most serious public issues and political choices. The most significant questions are unlikely even to be named.

This year, highly negative campaigning seems to be the preferred and predominant style. In the process the candidates for the presidency of the United States are lowering themselves to embarrassing and frightening levels of pettiness and immaturity.

Neither convention, and neither presidential campaign, has generated serious dialogue about public policy. And the way the media cover the events hasn't helped. Personalities, perceptions, images, and styles predominate. That is a great tragedy, because there are substantial questions we need to deal with.

How can we best lift inner-city families, and especially their children, out of the seemingly endless cycle of poverty and despair? What kind of government programs work, and what kind don't work? What does prosperity mean when unlimited economic growth is no longer possible? What do the failures of both capitalism and socialism mean for economic development? What really brings national security, and by what moral standards do we measure the concept of security? How do we resolve the inevitable conflicts between nations, and what now is the United States' best role in the world? Such questions call for rigorous discussion and the application of our highest moral values.

The self-serving rhetoric, caricatures of the adversary, and triumphalism that have characterized both conventions and subsequent campaigns will not help us much. The social visions we most need now will also be spiritual ones.

These visions will be based on values that will hold together families, communities, and nations. They will go beyond the present definitions of Left and Right but won't be in the middle, either. They will take special notice of those at the bottom and will remind us that we are all connected. They will see conflict from more than one vantage point and regard coming to terms with one's adversaries as an ultimate necessity. They will move us toward common ground and finally to higher ground.

Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners.