Presidential Politics at Their Nadir

In August 1996, Norman Mailer published in Esquire his interview with Pat Buchanan, a brave effort to explore what common terrain can be shared by left and right in America, against the center. The article ended with Buchanan’s remark that “left and right come together basically in opposition to big business, government, big corporations--against the oppresive weight of gigantic institutions upon the individual. You get a broad coalition of left and right. They feel they are going to lose the country they grew up in. That is the underlying focus.”

Mailer ran Buchanan’s quote, then closed with the line: “Four years to the millennium!”

Buchanan went nowhere in 1996 and the left’s anticorporate crusader, Ralph Nader, ran a pro-forma listless campaign. Now we’re six months from the millennium and things are, at least on the surface, even worse. Politics always draws its vitality from the extremes. George Wallace and Malcolm X, even though he was killed three years earlier, set the political thermostats in 1968. In every spavined sentence in the Democratic and Republican party platforms there lurks, albeit often in barely detectable volume, the DNA of what was once a robust, even “extreme” political idea. But today the trace elements of such DNA have become so infinitesimal that even the most powerful microscopes scarcely register a presence.

Take Al Gore and George W. Bush, currently favored as the presidential contenders in 2000. The only real difference between them is the fact that at this point in the political season George W. has raised twice as much money as Al, who himself has hauled in record-breaking truckloads of cash.

Oh, at the level of rhetoric there are minute deviations. George W. just took a swing through the Pacific Northwest and declared himself a friend of the chainsaw and the logging deck, thus sending a message to big timber money that George W. is a better investment than Gore the Tree Hugger. And the timber men will no doubt pony up for George W., happily aware that for them there’s no downside, since the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest have been cut down at a bracing rate all through the Clinton-Gore years.

We can say with some certainty that at the level of political performance in the White House, 2001-2004, it will make not an iota of difference whether Gore or Bush is the leaseholder. Corporations will plunder the Earth at the same rate, embryos will be dislodged from their mothers’ wombs at the same pace, constitutional rights and freedoms will be abused with the same frequency. The same small countries will be bombed, the same infants die, the same men and women--mostly black--will pass from death row to their graves, regardless of whether Al trounces George W. or George W. trounces Al.

As a force capable of reinvigorating our political DNA, the left is in terrible shape. The radical right, which has contributed 80% of the political energy in the country for the past 20 years--is almost as impotent, although more healthily endowed with a hostility to state power. The left will never break away from the Democratic Party to any important degree, since the institutional ties between labor and the Democrats will never allow it. The right might well tear itself loose from the Republicans. Bob Smith of New Hampshire is now leading such a break-away.

Who else might precipitate an invigoration of the system? Gov. Jesse Ventura of Minnesota fulfills at least one initial part of the requirement, by his evident capacity to speak directly in a way that people can understand and believe. Here’s how he dealt with the death penalty issue, on Geraldo Rivera’s show on July 6: “If you sentence someone to die, and five years later it’s proved that they didn’t do the crime, I would have a hard time living with that.” In the same conversation he came out, in coherent terms, against the drug war and in favor of medicinal use of marijuana.

So here we have Al Gore, who campaigned in New York in 1988 by pasting Michael S. Dukakis as soft on crime. And we have George W., who’s never met a death warrant in Texas he hasn’t liked. And we have Ventura who actually admits he doesn’t want to be the man who puts to death innocent people.

Six months to the millennium, and right now we have the prospect of ultimate political Y2K, plunging us into mental darkness: Al versus George W.

Run, Jesse, run!