In 1993, Richard Ben Cramer finished the most detailed account of modern American politics ever published. In “What It Takes: The Way to the White House” he crafted a Proustian narrative of life inside the 1988 presidential campaigns of George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, Dick Gephardt, Joe Biden, Gary Hart and Michael Dukakis, artfully weaving their back stories into the triumphs and miscues of that summer. For neutral readers, the unlikely hero of the resulting 1,047-page masterpiece was not the dull patrician Bush – who went on to win – but the nearly forgotten Senate majority leader, Bob Dole.
Overshadowed by more charismatic Demo-crats and grimly edged out by the charisma-free veep’s plodding efficiency, Dole nevertheless kept at it to the bitter end, enduring the physical and emotional grind of the campaign with something akin to grace. He emerges from Cramer’s book as the dogged war veteran that he was, a dependable insider whose instincts tended towards compromise and whose patience could have advanced any political agenda that his administration might have chosen to pursue.
Biden’s 1988 campaign foundered after he repeated part of a Martin Luther King speech without attribution; Hart fell to a sex scandal; Gephardt failed to muster enough grassroots support by Super Tuesday. Eventually Dukakis and Bush were the last men standing. A brainy, principled but unappealing process politician versus a largely unknown bureaucrat whose main selling point was that he’d been a quietly efficient deputy leader during the Reagan years.
A generation later, a campaign season that began with a diverse and impressive field has ended on an equally depressing note. Now a sha-dow of his former self, Biden is largely running on Obama’s coat-tails. Meanwhile the loathed incumbent president has few options to stave off a resounding defeat other than doubling down on his base’s racial grievances and attempting voter suppression on an unprecedented scale.
Pundits like to say that every US election is the most important of our lifetimes. The catastrophic potential of a second Trump term lends the cliche some urgency this year, but it downplays the challenges the next president will face. Obama came into the presidency at a similar moment of crisis and brought with him transformative hopes. But these were soon squandered in one ineffective compromise after another with his implacable adversaries.
Candidate Obama was smart, eloquent and often inspiring. He and his highly credentialed technocrats – the conservative columnist David Brooks gushed about a ‘valedictoracy’ credibly promised something new. But president Obama was a timid centrist. He put the neoliberal elite who had ruined the economy in charge of restoring it. He refused to scale back the national security powers acquired by his predecessor. He continued fruitless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and chose not to prosecute torturers. The stabilized economy and reformed healthcare that he handed over in 2016 have both been imperilled by Trump. The next president will have the unhappy task of sifting through the current chaos to salvage what little of value remains.
Neither candidate for the upcoming US elections has Obama’s charisma, intelligence or energy. Yet whoever wins will face crises that are arguably much worse. It is tempting to assume, given Biden’s commanding lead in current polls, that the result is a foregone conclusion. But Hillary Clinton’s triumph looked equally certain on the eve of her defeat. Furthermore, even within the swelling ranks of disenchanted former Republicans, there is a grudging acknowledgement that the GOP is Trump’s party now and he will fight dirty, and to the bitter end.
Bill Kristol, director of Defending Democracy and a leading GOP dissident, recently spoke of Trump’s “abandonment of any constraints and even more important, perhaps, his having people around him who’ve abandoned any constraints on the way in which they’ll use the federal government, the executive branch, to say things, do things, pretend to do things.” Others warn of a perfect storm of economic instability, a pandemic and foreign interference as the country heads to the polls in November.
Whatever lies ahead, it is clear that America’s political system is even more dysfunctional and divided than it was in 1988 and that its ability to solve domestic crises, much less international ones like climate change, is lower than it has been for at least half a century. One of the few upsides of the current mess is the political backlash which Trump has occasioned. It is hard, though not yet entirely impossible, to imagine another election in which two uninspiring septuagenarians compete for the leadership of the free world while their country stumbles from one crisis to the next. It also seems unlikely that either party’s tepid leadership will survive the reality checks of the last few years. In the interim, however, the best America can hope for is a ‘managed decline’ – one that has been considerably hastened by its impulsive, divisive and profoundly incompetent leader.
