Of course, campaigns have a way of erasing easy mathematics from the blackboard. At bottom, issues still count. Candidates win when they frame them most sharply. The challenge for the rest of us is how we should frame them-how to separate the real from the phony. To do that, let’s divide issues into three categories: genuine, gut and grafted.
Genuine issues are those that a president might actually be able to do something about. In 1993 and beyond, that means problems like the deficit, demobilization, trade and banking. These sound boring, but reporters need to ask about them, instead of just assuming that the only news of the day is in gaffes or attacks. Look what happened when everyone ignored the S&L crisis, a classic “genuine” issue from 1988. The most genuine issue of all is, “How might he govern?” But in the perverse universe of political reporting, that’s not often considered “news.”
George Stephanopoulos, Clinton’s communications director, has a point here: " The paradox is, you can’t be seen as trying to make news-that’s manipulative. But if you don’t make news, they [the reporters] complain about it." For both candidates, the solution is easy enough: new details on genuine issues like health, education and national service even if it departs a bit from the “message.” And lard them with some new one-liners for the press.
Gut issues may have nothing to do with a president’s duties, but they reflect what the voters really care about. This year’s gut seems to favor meat and potatoes: jobs, health care, paying for college, resentment of foreign aid. When I knocked on the doors of voters recently in the middle-class town of Niles, III.-made up of Polish, German and Italian Catholics who fled Chicago-it was clear that Bush was in real trouble with these Reagan Democrats. But my overwhelming impression was of people who believed that the election had little to do with Bush or Clinton, neither of whom gets their juices flowing.
Instead, the whole thing-to the extent that they were paying attention-was about them. Irv Furmanski, 70, a retired dental technician, worries about the $97 a month he pays out of pocket for a single prescription for his wife. Donna Sitko, 30, an office clerk, admits to knowing “almost zero” about the candidates, but is curious whether taxes will soon eat half her paycheck. Joe Schwartz 67, a German immigrant who lost his job when Motorola moved a plant to Mexico, despairs over the prospects of the younger generation: “All the politicians do is promise and blame, but they don’t tell you specifically how they’ll get the jobs back.”
Grafted issues-or “campaign issues”-are a mix of genuine and gut concerns that are tested in focus groups for their utility , then superimposed on the election. The Republicans-who grafted crime and patriotism onto the 1988 campaign-are now experimenting with a series of different patches, to see which one is taking. So far, “family values” isn’t, and Bush’s “big spender” argument against Clinton was undermined last week by Bush’s own porkfest. Clinton, in turn, must take care that one of his grafted issues-scaring the elderly-doesn’t become a “read my lips”-style trap that prevents him from confronting budget-busting entitlement programs if he becomes president.
Some issues fit into all three categories but still manage to seem phony. That’s because the dynamics of the campaign play out on a planet several galaxies removed from the people in Niles. With faxes, satellites and say-anything surrogates, the news cycle has been reduced from a day to as little as an hour. On the trail, it’s now launch-on-warning. When Dan Quayle campaigned in Michigan against AI Gore as an environmental extremist, Gore butted into his trip via satellite from Texas. When Clinton tried to stress education, the Bush forces made sure TV had plenty of sound bites pounding him on the draft. This hand-to-hand struggle seems all important to the combatants, but it doesn’t necessarily “cut”-the strategists’ term of art-with the voters.
The ones I met saw the tax issue, for instance, as a wash. They didn’t believe Clinton could enforce the tax hike on the rich, who they assume always find a way around paying. And they didn’t believe Bush would suddenly start caring about people like them, after four years of neglect. The air war of TV ads, now commencing, could change that. So might the debates. But by and large, the genuine and the grafted seem less important this year. And the election will be decided where it usually is: in the gut.
