by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
First of PBS’s two political shows last night was the third episode of The Contenders, “The Technocrats,” which profiled (in that order)
Mitt Romney and Michael Dukakis, both candidates who ran for the Presidency
after having been relatively successful governors of Massachusetts and who — at
least in this program’s analysis — lost largely because they let their
opponents’ campaigns define them for the voters without hitting back. Dukakis (to
restore the chronology of real life instead of the sequence of this show) comes
off even today (they interviewed him extensively and he’s got grey hair but
still has that little-boy look that made him seem ludicrous in that infamous
image showing him driving a tank — he was actually trying to make a good, and
prophetic, point, that the next wars the U.S. was going to fight would be on
land in desert environments and therefore a buildup of our tank and helicopter
forces would be necessary, but he looked all too much like Alfred E. Neuman to
pull it off) as almost terminally naïve, saying that he had wanted to run a
campaign on policy and talk about the issues. Well, as soon as a Presidential
candidate says that he (or she) wants to “talk about the issues” you might as
well start measuring their political grave: Americans really don’t vote for
President on the basis of “issues,” though they like to say they do. They vote for President on the basis of how
the various candidates make them feel about themselves, their country and their
future, and while sometimes a candidate can pick out an issue and use it to
define him- or herself the way Donald Trump has done so successfully this year
with immigration (his fierce anti-immigrant stance has worked for him by sending
white voters the signal, “This country has been taken away from you, and I will
bring it back for you”), Presidential campaigns (all American campaigns, actually, but Presidential
campaigns essentially) are based on the images the candidates project and the
feelings those images evoke in would-be voters. That’s the difference between a
political system like ours which is based on the personalities of individual
candidates and one like those in most European countries that are based on
ideologically coherent political parties (and more than two of them!); most
Europeans vote on the basis of parties and their ideologies rather than
individual candidates, and most European countries have some sort of
proportional representation so that minor parties can achieve real
representation and real power and voters aren’t faced over and over and over again with the damnable choice between just two
significant parties the way we are. (Great Britain is the great outlier on this
one: they have a parliamentary system, in which the majority party in the
legislature is automatically the
governing executive party and therefore the split governments that bedevil the
U.S. are impossible under their system, but they’ve copied us — we copied them, actually — in electing the legislature in single-member
winner-take-all districts and therefore they have a system in which only two
parties at a time are really significant.)
The 1988 Presidential election was
an odd one in that both major-party nominees were really colorless people — I
remember a Los Angeles Times
cartoon of Dukakis and George H. W. Bush in which the punch line was, “You said
you wanted a Presidential election that wasn’t about personalities? You just
got one” — and this profile of Dukakis focused on the horrendous negative
attack ads run against him by Lee Atwater and the Republican “dark arts”
operatives (I remember saying when Karl Rove was running similar black magic
for George W. Bush against John Kerry that “Karl Rove isn’t doing anything Lee
Atwater didn’t do before him, who didn’t do anything H. R. Haldeman hadn’t done
before him, who didn’t do anything Murray Chotiner hadn’t done before him”), including dredging up Willie Horton — though the
show didn’t mention that Horton’s case was first discovered by Al Gore’s
opposition research team while he was running against Dukakis in the Democratic
Presidential primaries. Certainly the Horton ad hurt — one commentator on this
show notes that there were white
criminals who also took advantage of Dukakis’ work-furlough program and
committed additional crimes, but Atwater picked the Black one to touch on
voters’ primal fears of Black men raping white women — as did Dukakis’ own
missteps (like the tank photo op), but the main thing George H. W. Bush had
going for him during that campaign was the incredible popularity of Ronald
Reagan and the fact that, barred by the 22nd Amendment (that
short-sighted bit of political legerdemain pulled by the Republicans in 1947 to
ensure there’d never be another Franklin Roosevelt — the irony being that the
two Presidents since then who could
have won third terms if they’d been constitutionally eligible to run for them
were both Republicans, Eisenhower and Reagan) from running for re-election
himself, Reagan was pushing hard for Bush as his successor. Reagan even
answered the question about what Bush had done during his administration quite
differently from Eisenhower’s infamous quip about Nixon — “Give me a week and I
might think of something” — instead he anointed Bush his successor and Reagan,
unlike Obama, had enough political coattails to get his voter base (or enough
of it) to vote for Bush and elect him. (Four years later, when Bush had to run
on his own record — and after he’d pissed off the easily offended Republican
Right by breaking his “read my lips” promise not to raise taxes — Bush lost.)
The segment on Mitt Romney featured interviews with him and with people who
knew him who said he was one of the most charitable people they’d ever known,
and resented the way he was caricatured by the Obama campaign as an insensitive
rich guy who gloried in putting people out of work to boost his own bottom
line. That was somewhat unfair to
Romney — whose record as a hedge-fund entrepreneur revealed not so much a glory
in putting people out of work (it’s hard to imagine Romney hosting The
Apprentice and getting such sick joy out of
telling someone every week, “You’re … FIRED!”) as a total indifference to it. The mission of
Romney as head of Bain Capital was to maximize shareholder value in the enterprises
he took over, and if that meant boosting them with new capital and hiring more
people, he would do that. If it meant drastically cutting them back and firing
people, he would do that. If it meant dismantling the company completely and
selling off its assets, thereby leaving everyone who’d worked for it out of a job, he would do that.
As Matt Taibbi wrote in Rolling Stone during the 2012 campaign, “Mitt Romney, it
turns out, is the perfect frontman for Wall Street’s greed revolution. He’s not
a two-bit, shifty-eyed huckster like Lloyd Blankfein. He’s not a sighing,
eye-rolling, arrogant jerkwad like Jamie Dimon. But Mitt believes the same
things those guys believe: He’s been right with them on the front lines of the
financialization revolution, a decades-long campaign in which the old, simple,
let’s-make-stuff-and-sell-it manufacturing economy was replaced with a new,
highly complex, let’s-take-stuff-and-trash-it financial economy. Instead of
cars and airplanes, we built swaps, CDO’s and other toxic financial products.
Instead of building new companies from the ground up, we took out massive bank
loans and used them to acquire existing firms, liquidating every asset in sight
and leaving the target companies holding the note. The new borrow-and-conquer
economy was morally sanctified by an almost religious faith in the grossly
euphemistic concept of ‘creative destruction,’ and amounted to a total
abdication of collective responsibility by America’s rich, whose new thing was
making assloads of money in ever-shorter campaigns of economic conquest,
sending the proceeds offshore, and shrugging as the great towns and factories
their parents and grandparents built were shuttered and boarded up, crushed by
a true prairie fire of debt.”
And, like Donald Trump, Romney was a true
practitioner of Orwellian doublethink, being able to square his take-no-prisoners tactics in the
business world with his faith, and in particular his sense of obligation under
his Mormon religion to reach out to individual poor people and volunteer for
charities to help people in need. In fact, a lot of people who called Romney a
hypocrite for practicing individual charities while proposing to decimate the
social safety net and lambasting the “47% of the people who will vote for the
president no matter what … who are dependent upon government, who believe that
they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for
them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing,
to you name it,” missed the point. The Libertarian ethos to which both Romney and his 2012 running mate,
now-Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, subscribe holds that it is morally wrong to
tax successful people in order to fund government programs aimed at helping
not-so-successful people, and instead the not-so-successful people should be
helped by churches and other organizations funded by voluntary contributions. So Romney saw no contradiction between
helping people through his church and calling for radical cutbacks in
government social programs because, as a good Libertarian and a good Mormon, he believes the job of helping the less
fortunate should be entirely private. One other fascinating thing about Mitt
Romney in this program was the comment of one of the talking heads that he was
a rich person who looked like the
public image of a rich person, and that turned a lot of non-rich people off of
voting for him. It’s an interesting comment precisely because it shows why
Donald Trump has been able to run a far more competitive race that Mitt Romney
and has a real shot at winning: Trump is a rich person who doesn’t look like a rich person and certainly doesn’t talk like
one. Romney’s public persona was a
gentleman; Trump’s is a thug, and to his core supporters — all those white
working-class men who, ironically, have been undone economically by the kinds
of business tactics Romney and his generation of rich people have been pulling
and who see Trump not as another rich
person who’s screwing them over, but as one of them, with his truculent manner, his unashamed racism and
sexism, and his bravado and braggadocio. Indeed, as I’ve written in these pages
before, the appalling glitzy tastelessness of Trump’s buildings is itself a key
source of his appeal; people — the kinds of people who would vote for him,
anyway — look at them and say, “That’s what I would do if I had his kind of money.”
