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Why Winners Win
| Article
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21940 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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5 / 1993 |
2,853 Words |
| Author
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Daniel James
Daniel James has written extensively on Cuba. He is the author
of Cuba: First Soviet Satellite in the Americas and Che
Guevara: a Bibliography, and editor-translator of The Complete
Bolivian Diaries of Che Guevara and Other Captured Documents. |
POPULISM AND ELITISM
Politics in the Age of Equality
Jeffrey Bell
Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1992
202 pp., $21.95
Had George Bush read Jeffrey Bell's Populism and Elitism as his popularity plummeted during the 1992 presidential campaign--by Labor Day, at the latest--he might have eked out a victory in November. Bill Clinton, it turns out, knew exactly what Bush's central weakness was and how to exploit it, probably instinctively. The key to winning, as Bell (and Clinton) saw it, is contained in this paragraph:
Because of the numerical dominance of the popular opinion stream, public opinion is oriented toward issues--which usually means combating public--evils-rather than personalities. The larger the public evil is, the more issue voting there is. An incumbent administration that fails to provide an answer to a valence issue--that is, a public evil widely acknowledged as such--is certain to grow in unpopularity. As every politician knows, in assessing the strength of incumbent political elites any time in any democracy, the first questions to ask are: is something widely perceived a very bad happening in the country--a depression, a collapse of standards, extreme vulnerability to enemy invasion?
The public did indeed perceive that something very bad was happening to the economy, call it a depression or a recession, but the incumbent political elite headed by George Bush did not share its perception. It also believed that there was a collapse of standards though not of the family values the Bush campaign stressed; rather, it was concerned with ethical standards in government and abuse of political power by federal officials.
Bell's book could not be more timely. It contains what amounts to a compelling composite portrait of Clinton as populist, and so becomes must reading as Ronald Reagan's natural successor commences to govern. Although Reagan and Clinton belong to opposing parties, they are brothers under the skin: They have a natural popular appeal that transcends partisan beliefs and a knack for taking the lead on issues the public will support. They even share a tendency to mistrust and distance themselves from the media (whereas Bush, who also mistrusted them, in fear clutched the media hungrily every chance he got--witness his record number of press conferences).
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