It is possible to look at the flotsam and jetsam the political process has tossed to the surface as presidential candidates and feel a certain sense of despair for America. These are not first-rate leaders or intellects, folks.
The fact that so many people view Al Gore -- an intellectual drone who has always had to work extra hard to keep up with the really smart kids and still doesn't know the difference between mastering some details and understanding a subject and being able to think originally -- as a bright policy wonk suggests how degraded our expectations have become. Al Gore is not only not very bright, he views certain policy matters more as religious beliefs (e.g., global warming and the environment) than as subjects of analysis and intelligent prescription, a typical failing of the third-rate intellect confronted with complex phenomena.
Conservatives desperately want to view Dubya as another Reagan, which is dubious. Reagan was brighter and more engaged in policy matters than most people knew or choose to remember. My friend Martin Anderson at the Hoover Institution is working on a book that he says will display a much keener intellect than most people give Reagan credit for. Still, conservatives tend to romanticize the Reagan presidency. There were tax cuts and there was economic growth. Despite his grasp of the big picture and his gift for rhetoric, however, the government continued to grow under his watch. He changed the terms of debate, but institutionally we were treading water.
Rather than cause for despair, I find the fact that politics is no longer a haven for the best and the brightest a hopeful sign. It is just possible that after several generations of the growth of the state in American life and a concerted effort to place the state at the center of all human activities, that we are beginning to see the importance and influence of the state recede. Therefore, government not only ceases to attract people of real talent and ability, the country can survive quite nicely with mediocre pretenders at the helm.
To be sure, there is evidence to the contrary. Government spending is at an all-time high, and the people seem relatively lackadaisical about ambitious plans to spend every penny of what we have overpaid before we bestir ourselves to demand a refund. Young people, most of them socialized in brain-numbing and soul-rotting government schools, seem lacking in moral character and intellectual curiosity. Regulations are more intrusive, arbitrary and destructive than ever, and resistance to them is more passive than principled. Democracy is more than ever a contest among special interests and organized pressure groups to divide the spoils plundered from the productive. The rule of law seems to have degenerated into a competition among trial lawyers to identify vulnerable deep pockets and use twisted interpretations of laws that should never have been passed in the first place to loot them.
Add one more item that has driven conservatives and neocons crazy for the last eight years, the fact that a president who is morally indistinguishable from a Mafia capo in numerous ways more politically significant than womanizing has remained not only in office but apparently popular enough that some want him to go campaigning in a last-ditch effort to save his Clown Prince from defeat at the hands of the Garbler. It's all enough to make you wonder whether the country has a future.
And yet ... and yet.
Let's handle the president thing first. I remember back in the early 1960s, when Vaughan Meador came out with a comedy album twitting President Kennedy and the first family in ways that by now seem gentle and almost affectionate. My uncle, who despised President Kennedy profoundly, was outraged. Some of his outrage was directed at Jack Kennedy for being such an inviting target, but most was directed at the comedian who had been so bold as to make such fun of the highest office in the land.
The presidency then was considered by most Americans to be almost a sacred office, a representative of the nobility of the American people, a repository of dignity, wisdom and national pride. That's not the case anymore, except among a deluded few. Presidents get more rough treatment on late-night television every single night than JFK got during his entire term. And it didn't start with Clinton. If anything, it started with LBJ, was reinforced by Nixon, Ford and Carter and grew to a fever pitch with Reagan.
What has happened over the course of those years, I would suggest, is that the presidency has become de-sacralized. People no longer treat either the office itself or the current occupant with the almost worshipful respect that was routinely accorded to presidents from the New Deal to the end of the 1950s (which is not to say incumbents didn't come in for healthy criticism during those days, just that the criticism came with less cynicism about the office itself).
I would argue that this is a healthy development. The POTUS is the person who has managed to climb a particularly slippery pole in a particularly dirty game whose essence is taking what others have rightfully earned and distributing it amongst his henchmen and camp followers. He is morally indistinguishable from the head of an organized crime family (remembering that godfathers try to cloak themselves in dignity, respect and the granting of favors as well). Presidents therefore deserve more opprobrium than dignity and respect, and most Americans came to understand this long before Clinton came to the office.
The lack of outrage over President Clinton's antics, then, reflected a widespread understanding that presidents are not moral examplars but closer to moral reprobates. Did President Clinton treat the office as his personal fiefdom, as a way to get away with things rather than as an opportunity to serve the people? Of course, but by the time he came into office that was the way most Americans expected a president to behave. So while he was a scoundrel, that was not surprising, and he was a charming scoundrel. Most Americans chose not to waste their outrage on a president who was maybe a little more over-the-top than some others, but essentially behaved in the outrageous, almost criminal fashion they expected presidents to behave.
I would argue that is a healthy development. American freedom is more likely to survive and even expand if Americans view political leaders as natural-born scoundrels than as almost-sacred leaders worthy of automatic respect and obedience.
The interesting thing is that widespread cynicism has grown even as most of the chattering classes (who through most of history have been courtiers rather than independent thinkers or freedom fighters) have continued in a decades-long campaign to promote reverence for the office of the presidency as the highest embodiment of the sacred secular state. (I know that's a contradiction, but getting us to see the secular state as sacred is just what they've been trying to do; perhaps people with common sense have seen through the contradiction even if they haven't quite pinpointed its nature.)
Meanwhile, candidate Gore brags (when it's convenient or opportune) about the Clinton-Gore administration reducing the number of people employed by government. Conservatives respond, accurately enough, that it's mainly been because of downsizing of the military and that the number of people doing government work as contractors rather than employees has grown, and spending is up. The dirty little secret nobody wants to acknowledge is that government, despite bloated pay, almost surreal job security and wildly generous pension plans, is having a harder time attracting people, especially quality people. The State Department has complained about the difficulty of recruiting top-flight people. Morale is down and recruitment increasingly difficult in every branch of the military.
There was a time, and not so long ago, when nearly everybody who considered themselves part of the intellectual elite or who went to elite colleges, planned to spend at least some time in government "service." There was a certain snooty noblesse oblige in the attitude of some, but in part it was because government was where the exciting actions was, where you could do things that might have an impact on the world at large, where you could dream big dreams and hope for large-scale accomplishments. From the New Deal right through the end of the Cold War, bright, talented, accomplished people viewed government as a place to be not necessarily for a lifetime, but at least for part of it.
Now, government might be a place to get your card punched so you can make some connections and then make some real money as a lobbyist or elsewhere in the private sector. But for bright, ambitious people, government is a place for time-serving drudges, bureaucratic serfs. Bright people in government, except for a few at the pinnacle of the policy shops, can't wait to get out.
So government is no longer where the action is, and this also is a healthy development for freedom. And I haven't even talked about technology and the development of the Internet, which makes it increasingly difficult for government to control the flow of information, which is the lifeblood of maintaining the fiction of consent on which government power ultimately rests to a much greater extent than either government partisans or critics generally acknowledge.
So we've got a couple of doofuses with third-rate intellects who have never succeeded in the private sector (I don't count Dubya's convenient profits with the Texas Rangers, which had more to do with name recognition and political connections than business acumen) running for the highest office in the land? Fine. Properly understood it's an acknowledgment that politics is no longer so close to the center of American life as it has been for the last 70 years or so. And that's a healthy development.