This is being written before George Dubya Bush gives his acceptance
speech, and that speech might contain a surprise or two. But I doubt it
will invalidate the discussion. I suspect that the Bushlet will do
better than most early handicappers might have suspected and probably
well enough to allow most Americans to ease whatever worries they might
have had about his ability to handle the job of president -- a worry
already eased by the choice of Old Bull Dick Cheney as vice president
and the fairly remarkable coalescence of most GOP factions around his
candidacy. The nation survived four years of Jimmy Carter, for heaven's
sake, so it can probably survive a second Bush.
Even so, I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't a few moments of
ineffable lightness in the presentation and in the campaign to come that
will make people wonder if he really has much heft -- especially
intellectual heft. Some of the questions will be unfair. George I
sometimes had only a nodding acquaintance with the proper syntax of the
English language, and there were times when he said marvelously goofy
things. But nobody doubted that while he was hardly a deep intellectual
type he was plenty smart enough to hold his own in the hurly-burly of
politics.
The language-mangling gene appears to have been passed on, and
connoisseurs of fractured syntax can no doubt expect delightful moments
from both a Dubya campaign and a Dubya presidency. But that doesn't
necessarily mean he doesn't have a certain degree of native intelligence
-- probably plenty to get him through at least a term in the Oval
Office. He has certainly run an intelligent and assured campaign. One
could even argue that a campaign of relatively fuzzy themes and blurred
issues was the best way, even the smartest way, for him to get where he
wanted to go.
So Dubya isn't a moron by any means. But it would be difficult to
make a case that he is a first-rate political thinker. He's not stupid
and people I've talked to who have talked to him claim he even has a
certain comfort level with fairly intricate policy discussions. But he's
not an intellectual heavy hitter.
Neither, of course, is the other candidate with a realistic chance of
becoming president. Al Gore has cultivated the image of a bright and
engaged policy wonk, and he has had the cooperation of numerous people
in the media and elsewhere who are no doubt brighter than he is in
selling that image. But listen to him, or read his goofy book on the
environment, "Earth in the Balance," in which he seems to have seduced
himself or allowed himself to be seduced into accepting as truth any
number of scientifically illiterate notions. Way down deep, he's
shallow.
But while Gore might be modestly more complex than merely the spoiled
rich kid, he has been a Senator's Son as long as he can remember, and he
has been treated accordingly. People have flattered him all his life,
treated him as special, hardly ever told him he is simply wrong or
misinformed or inclined to embrace what might seem obvious to a
half-educated kid but is fallacious if you think more deeply. So, like
many second-rate intellects, he has come to believe that he really must
be thinking deeply and getting at real truths. He thinks Mother Earth is
in deep trouble due to the internal combustion engine and considers that
a profound insight rather than a shallow hypothesis based on incomplete
information that is almost surely incorrect.
So we have two intellectual second-raters running for president. Is
that a tragedy? To the contrary, it might well be viewed as a symptom of
cultural health rather than cultural decline. Maybe America is free
enough and healthy enough and sound enough in the fundamentals -- though
I still have plenty of complaints -- that we don't expect or need Great
Men as political figures. That could be a profoundly healthy attitude.
Tyler Cowen, the economist who was at Harvard until his recent move
to George Mason University, wrote a provocative and mostly right-on book
about modern art and culture a couple of years ago called "In Praise of
Commercial Culture." He has a new book called "What Price Fame?"
excerpted in the May issue of Reason magazine. In it he makes a
surprisingly persuasive case that the divorce of fame and merit, a
phenomenon of modern Western culture most observers have deplored, might
not be such a bad thing.
A hundred years ago schoolchildren, when asked whom they would like
to resemble, chose figures like Abraham Lincoln or George Washington,
with Clara Barton, Julius Caesar and Christopher Columbus figuring in.
Only two sports figures were mentioned. By 1948 sports figures accounted
for 23 percent of the answers. In 1986 American teen-agers, when asked
whom they admired most, picked all actors, with only Ronald Reagan, a
former actor, making the top 10.
Alarming? Winston Churchill thought so as long ago as 1932. "Can
modern communities do without great men?" he asked. "Can they do without
hero-worship? Can they provide a larger wisdom, a nobler sentiment, by
collective processes, than were ever got from Titans? Can nations remain
healthy, in a world whose brightest stars are film stars."
Cowen would argue that maybe they can: "When commerce de-links fame
from merit, merit does not disappear from social discourse. We can talk
about merit without talking about fame in the same breath. Although
separating fame from merit may be perceived by some as negative, it can
also be viewed quite differently. It can be seen as the liberation of
merit from fame, and from depending on the famous for moral
instruction."
Fans aren't as clueless as some commentators believe. They know
famous characters like Madonna or Prince or Michael Jordan are not
heroes or moral exemplars. People don't follow "role models" blindly,
but use famous people for their own purposes, whether for something as
simple as admiring athletic skill or chutzpah or to justify pre-existing
preferences. And they can separate various aspects of famous peoples'
behavior -- admiring Michael Jordan's basketball skills and focus on
winning while deploring his tendency to gamble too much. Most people
know famous people aren't perfect or even likely role models, so they
search for role models among more suitable candidates, like parents,
relatives, teachers, software designers, even businesspeople.
The idea that fame and merit should be tied tightly together was
never as true as myth would have it. "Kings and queens were the
best-known people of their times," Tyler Cowen writes, "but hardly worth
praising in many instances. Commercialized fame, while taking relative
recognition away from moral leaders, also has taken renown away from
tyrants and violent rulers." Conquerors used to be viewed as heroes, but
now they are less admired than singers -- and often enough viewed as the
thugs and brutes many of them really are or were. Is that a bad
development?
In the process of commercializing and perhaps trivializing fame, we
have also stripped away a good bit of the romantic aura from political
leaders. Bill Clinton may be expert at using the pliant lackeys in the
media to protect him from serious repercussions, but almost every
peccadillo has been reported and he is not an admired figure. The polls
were probably right that most Americans didn't want him impeached, but
almost nobody sees him as a moral exemplar. Virtually no political
figure is viewed as such except by a few deluded groupies.
That's not an unhealthy development and it might even be healthy.
Politics is by its very nature a sleazy business, involving the use of
deceit and force to separate people from their money and using it to
reward one's allies and lackeys. The less politicians are surrounded by
mystique and the tendency to worship them as heroes, the better for
society at large.
The Republicans this week have spoken bravely about restoring dignity
and integrity to the Oval Orifice, of making the presidency a source of
pride and admiration. But the personage they count on to do it is not
only a second-rate intellect, his campaign is built on a utopian lie
that he has to know is a lie. Can he really believe that if he is
elected no child will be left behind? That's a nice utopian vision, but
it's not one a politician can deliver. Indeed, if a politician had
enough power to make a serious effort to deliver on the promise he would
be genuinely dangerous to the body politic. But even with all the power
in the world and the best will, you know some children are going to be
left behind under any circumstances short of the Second Coming.
A society is healthier, and has a better chance to be free if most of
its members view the inhabitant of the White House as simply the most
successful practitioner of an inherently dirty and corrupt profession --
the capo of an unusually successful criminal gang -- than as somebody to
be admired or emulated. Lots of things are wrong with this country, but
the fact that fewer kids want to grow up to be president than was the
case a few generations ago isn't one of them.
The government is still far too large and far too influential on the
rest of society that we can quite afford to ignore politics completely.
But the fact that the political process can't produce a first-rate
leader for the "top" office in the land might be a sign that politics is
becoming less relevant -- and less hallowed, less mystified, less wrapped
in a cloak of statesmanship and moral leadership -- than it has been in
recent years. We all know politicians don't create anything, they simply
appropriate and transfer wealth and resources created by others. The
best they can do is to create conditions amenable to the production of
new ideas, new inventions and new wealth -- mainly by staying out of the
way and reducing their depredations.
We haven't, as a society, taken that insight to its logical
conclusion by demanding that government get out of our lives and shrink
to the vanishing point. But most of us understand that politicians are
more parasite than moral leader, leaving us relatively complacent about
the fact that only second-raters now aspire to political leadership. We
know that what really matters, what really stands a chance to improve
society will come from scientists, artists, and high-tech innovators
rather than from politicians.
We may be wrong in our complacency, especially if we are too
complacent about the continual growth of government. The government --
despite its current inability to regulate (read strangle) cutting-edge
high-tech industries -- could yet wreck our prosperity and make us
regret our complacency. But so far the residual of freedom in this
country has made it possible to endure second-rate and even massively
corrupt and immoral political leaders. Whether consciously or not, most
Americans understand that our current prosperity and the hope of better
times come in spite of rather than because of the current crop of
politicians. So we don't require or especially desire first-rate
political leaders because we don't expect crisis.
And maybe that's not as unhealthy as most commentators would have us
believe.