Upside Down and Inside Out - 1992 Elections and American Politics

196 Pages·1993·7.111 MB·English

by  James W. Ceaser

BUENA VISTA COL
STORM LAKE, iOWA 5058*
Upside Down and
Inside Out
The 1992 Elections and
American Politics
James Ceaser
Andrew Busch
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
Published in the United States of America
by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
4720 Boston Way, Lanham, Maryland 20706
Copyright © 1993 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may
be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the publisher.
British Cataloging in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ceaser, James W.
Upside down and inside out : the 1992 elections and American
politics / James Ceaser, Andrew Busch,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
I. Presidents—United States—Election—1992. 2. United States
Congress—Elections, 1992. 3. Elections—United States. 4. United
States—Politics and government—1989- I. Busch, Andrew.
II. Title
JK1968 1992c 324.973’0928—dc20 93-9292 CIP
ISBN 0-8476-7846-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
To
Adeline Maedler
Ruby Busch
and
Helen Ceaser
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Chapter One
American Politics in Another Dimension 1
Chapter Two
The Republican Nomination 29
Chapter Three
The Democratic Nomination 55
Chapter Four
The Strange Career of Ross Perot 87
Chapter Five
The 1992 Congressional Elections 127
Chapter Six
The Presidential Election and the Future of
American Politics I59
Index 189
About the Authors
193
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Andrew Hall, George Monsivais, Brad Watson,
and above all Brian Menard for their assistance in preparing this
manuscript. Brian proved to be a source of endless knowledge and
ideas about American elections. As many of our closest contacts were
inside the Bush administration, we owe a special debt of gratitude
to all the colleagues and graduate students who claimed to be Friends
of Bill, of which, it goes without saying, there are too many to mention.
The editors of Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Jonathan Sisk and
Lynn Gemmell, provided welcome assistance and advice. Support in
typing the manuscript was provided by the Salvatori Center at
Claremont McKenna College. Last, but certainly not least, Ms. Blaire
French lent her usual sharp pencil and warm encouragement to the
enterprise.
IX
CHAPTER ONE
American Politics in
Another Dimension
George Bush is wrong about most things, but he is
right when he said this is a “weird year.”
—Bill Clinton, July 27, 1992'
November 3, 1992 marked the end of an Alice in Wonderland year
in which American politics seemed to be turned upside down and
inside out. A President boasting victory in one of the nation’s most
successful wars was rejected for reelection with the lowest percent¬
age of the popular vote of any incumbent since William Howard
Taft. A Governor from Arkansas began as the Democrats’ frontrunner,
was nearly knocked out of the race by a series of scandalous rev¬
elations, then rebounded to win. An idiosyncratic Texas billionaire
“ran” without declaring, withdrew, changed his mind again, and ended
with a higher percentage of the popular vote than any third-party
candidate since Teddy Roosevelt in 1912.
The key to understanding the topsy-turvy 1992 national elec¬
tion lies in the emergence of a new dimension of American politics
that combined and interacted with the traditional dimension. The
traditional dimension is made up of the familiar axes of partisanship
(Democratic, Independent, and Republican) and issue positioning or
ideology (liberal, moderate, and conservative). These two axes tend
to coincide with and reinforce each other, with Republicans being
more on the conservative side of the political spectrum and Demo¬
crats more on the liberal side. The fit is far from perfect, however,
as political leanings on different issues provoke cross-pressures. These
cross-pressures produce the conflicted voter groups known by such
, 1
Chapter One
2
hybrid labels as “Reagan Democrats,” “liberal Republicans,” “pro¬
life Democrats,” and “pro-choice Republicans.”
The new, second dimension of politics that emerged in 1992
has no single recognized name, hardly any institutionalized form,
and—because this plane is devoid of conventional ideology—no clear
left-right significance. As far as partisanship is concerned. Repub¬
licans and Democrats are as likely to be found at one end of this
dimension as at the other. Yet there is a vigorous, if curious, kind of
politics at work on this plane. The defining cleavage is variously
referred to by the distinction of amateur versus professional, the
unconventional versus the conventional, the people versus the es¬
tablishment, life beyond the beltway versus life within the beltway,
and—perhaps most commonly—outsider versus insider.
In one of the first essays ever written on political parties, the
British philosopher David Hume identified the underlying division
in Great Britain in his age as one between the court and the country
parties. The court party backed the monarchy inside the moatway,
while the country party claimed to stand for the great bulk of the
people beyond.2 If one substitutes “Washington” for the court, some¬
thing of the spirit of the second dimension of American politics begins
to come into focus. America’s court party in 1992 was the “party”
of insiders, while her country party was the “party” of outsiders.
Outsiderism as a theme of American politics in one sense has
roots as old as the republic itself. The outsider appeal, which relies
heavily on a down-home commonsense populism, resonates with fun¬
damental elements of the American tradition that can be traced back
to certain themes of the revolutionaries, the anti-federalists, the
Jeffersonians, and the Jacksonians. (In fact, if one wished to make
a long academic detour, it would probably be possible to locate the
roots of the lineage of outsiderism directly with the “country” party
in Britain, from which Americans early on borrowed a whole dis¬
course of anti-insider thought.3) Outsiderism declaims against the
overblown perquisites and privileges of those in office, against the
systematic use of political power to keep and maintain power (cre¬
ating a “political class”), against corruption and an easy reliance by
those in office on double standards. Outsiderism as a theme seeks
a government that is somehow “in touch” with the people.
In another sense, however, outsiderism as we know it today
originated in the 1976 presidential campaign of Jimmy Carter, when
the term “outsider” began to acquire wide currency. Not by acci¬
dent, perhaps, three of the major strategists of that campaign (Patrick
Caddell, Gerald Rafshoon, and Hamilton Jordan) all were active for
American Politics 3
a time as advisers to “outsider” candidates in 1992. And Jerry Brown,
who jumped in late in the 1976 nomination campaign and ran to the
outside of Carter’s outsider campaign (nearly derailing it), reappeared
in 1992 to push the appeal further, only to be superseded by a yet
higher form of outsiderism in the person of Ross Perot.
The modern variant of outsiderism, while it incorporates many
of the earlier elements, adds something new. It functions almost en¬
tirely as a symbol, devoid of any specific content. Its essence is the
appeal of being “not part of,” and thus not tainted by, the inside, or
the establishment, or the way things are done. Outsiderism is used
in the first instance to distance oneself from the corruption of the
court that little group of Washington insiders, lobbyists, and pro¬
fessional politicians who think of the national government as their
own private playground.”4 Outsiderism is then employed to “tap into”
the anger that exists against Washington, which in turn is connected
to a more diffuse resentment of the conditions of society. Once this
act of distancing has been accomplished and the bond of common
sentiment forged, outsiderism is then used to lay a claim to putting
one “in touch” with some deeper and purer wellspring of the Ameri¬
can spirit. Outsiderism is a moral as well as political category.
One may object to this idea of symbolism by citing the case of
Ronald Reagan. Reagan managed to appropriate much of the appeal
of outsiderism, both while running for office and while governing,
but Reagan tied outsiderism, at least some of the time, to a more
specific meaning. For Reagan, being against the “inside” or Wash¬
ington meant getting government “off of our backs and out of our
lives,” which is to say reducing the scope of government. Insofar as
Reagan and the Republicans linked outsiderism to this specific pro¬
gram, rather than relying on pure form, it may be said that they de¬
viated from the development of strict modern outsiderism. The proof
of this last point is found in the character of outsiderism in 1992,
which had no clear connection to Reagan’s views and proved broad
enough to hold a David Duke, a Ross Perot, and a Jerry Brown, as
well as congressional candidates of virtually every political stripe.
Outsiderism has a powerful attraction in part because it is so
amorphous and multifaceted. It is like an empty box with a false
bottom from which most anything can be pulled. Some outsider
positions may be serious and thoughtful, others meaningless or
downright dangerous. But much of the time, it is not a question of
position, but merely of positioning. What strategists and candidates
understand is that with the use of a vague symbol, they can appeal
to diverse positions united only by a common mood or discontent.
4 Chapter One
The hope is that everything that is mixed up in this vast vessel of
discontent will somehow hold together long enough to get one to the
next stage of the campaign.
Being against “politics as usual,” outsiderism quite naturally
stresses what is wrong with how things are done in Washington. Failures
of policy are often ascribed to defects of process, ranging from charges
that the electoral process is corrupted by money and special inter¬
ests to criticisms that the institutions have fallen under control of
one elite group or another. In the wake of the savings and loan de¬
bacle and the House bank scandal, 1992 proved an especially appro¬
priate time to raise an outsider appeal against court politics, espe¬
cially against Congress. Few citizens could close their ears to
complaints against “our elected officials who have allowed this great
system to be mired in the mud of special interests, who have padded
themselves with perks at our expense, and who have rigged the election
system to avoid answering to the people.” This was Ross Perot speaking,
but it could just as well have been any one of a number of candi¬
dates, all of whom recycled the same charges and relied on the same
alliterations.
The ground for an outsider institutional appeal, however, had
been prepared by a decade of relentless “populist” attacks, from both
the right and the left, on different parts of the political system. The
right, believing that its positions generally enjoyed majority support
in the country and that the left could succeed only by attaching itself
to nonmajoritarian institutions, had partisan reasons to support populist
attacks on bureaucracies, courts, and even legislatures. The left, ever
mindful of being outflanked on questions of popular control, kept up
attacks on wealth and on the “imperialism” of the presidency. Both
sides engaged in a populist bidding war, which was often good politics
but which left the “inside,” even in its legitimate constitutional forms,
undefended and unprotected.
This populist sentiment was “tapped into” by the general cur¬
rent of outsiderism in 1992, in ways that often dismayed those who
had engaged in the bidding wars. In Duke, Brown, and finally Perot,
outsiderism at times reached beyond normal institutional channels.
If there were problems with the parties, why not just forget the parties
altogether and run outside them? If there were blockages in Wash¬
ington, why not just consult the public by electronic town meetings?
If there were differences of opinion, why not set them aside and
“just do it”? Institutionally, outsiderism takes place at the juncture
between a legitimate quest to reform the political system and a species
of attack on it that begins to depreciate representative political in-
American Politics 5
stitutions as such. Outsiderism can thus manifest itself at one mo¬
ment in reasonable populist argument for institutional change and in
the next in an unreflective and intemperate “bashing” of constitu¬
tional forms.
It was in 1992 that country-court politics emerged full-blown
on the American scene as a virtual faction inside each party and then
as a virtual party of its own. One can locate three basic positions on
this dimension, the outside, the middle (inside-outside), and the inside.
Running with a strong appeal to the outside were presidential can¬
didates David Duke, Jerry Brown, Pat Buchanan, Paul Tsongas (kindly,
gently, and thoughtfully), and Ross Perot, whose independent can¬
didacy garnered 19 percent of the popular vote. In congressional
races, almost all of those who challenged incumbents relied on an
outsider strategy. In addition, there were the proponents of the state
initiatives for term limits for Congress. The insider party consisted
of the anti-term limits position and, despite their best efforts to escape
the label, the Washington-based members of the Democratic primary
field (Senators Kerrey and Harkin), George Bush, and many of the
less fortunate members of Congress. Indeed, the election year “opened”
in November of 1991 with the stunning defeat in the Pennsylvania
senatorial race of a highly touted insider, former Attorney General
Richard Thornburgh, who had either the temerity or the naivete to
run as an insider. He would be the last candidate to do so. Running
a bit more to the middle on this dimension were Bill Clinton and
some congressional incumbents who managed to separate themselves
from the odium associated with Congress.
While the outside position was usually the one more coveted
by candidates, this was not invariably the case. For as much as the
great majority of the people wanted to punish the court in Washing¬
ton, many Americans also sought the reassurance of knowing that
their elected officials possessed adequate political skills and reli¬
ability to handle the offices for which they sought election. Thus,
many Democratic voters during the primary were “wary of Jerry,”
preferring Bill Clinton at least partially because he was more of an
insider. And while almost all candidates who were on the inside were
fighting to get further out—this characterized Bush’s strategy—there
were also a few on the outside who were struggling to get in, at least
partially. This was Ross Perot’s strategy at the high point of his
campaign in June, when he hired the noted strategists Ed Rollins and
Hamilton Jordan and promised to choose a well-known (read slightly
insider) vice-presidential candidate. (Ultimately, of course, Perot
returned to a pure outside strategy in the fall, when he was content