uExpress.com: Richard Reeves by Richard Reeves -- (07/16/1999) THE NEW POLITICS OF 1999

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THE NEW POLITICS OF 1999

07/16/1999

THE NEW POLITICS OF 1999

WASHINGTON -- In the old days, when politics was the business of citizens, they used to say that only 10 percent of what a candidate did worked. But no one knew which 10 percent.

Today consultants tell candidates they know what works, but they won't tell until they get paid. Then, after they get the cash, the consultants reveal the secret: Collect more money to pay me and do what I tell you.

That works -- half the time.

They also used to say that money is the mother's milk of politics -- "they" in that case was Jesse Unruh, a California Democratic leader. But now money is politics and politics is money -- or so it is being reported this year. The conventional wisdom is that the presidential candidates in the year 2000 will be the current leaders of the money snipe hunt. The current issue of The Weekly Standard comments wittily on that in a cartoon -- by P. Steiner -- showing the Founding Fathers seated around a table in 1789. Thomas Jefferson or someone is saying:

"How about this: The guy who raises the most money gets to be president?"

Predicting elections is a tricky business in any election. Political reporters and political consultants usually manage and cover elections the way generals fight wars. We all get ready to fight the last one.

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That is particularly dangerous this time around for at least three reasons:

1. The rules have changed. The last couple of nonincumbent nomination contests in both parties have been won, more or less, by the last man standing after the little political skirmishes of the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire's "first-in-the-nation" primary. But this year big states, particularly California, will be holding their primary elections early, rather than late in the game -- a game that has been over before it reached California, Illinois, New York or Texas.

2. It may be the economy, stupid -- as it was when Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 -- but that little adage works best when voters think the economy is bad. Now it's good, and it got that way under a Democratic president, that same Bill Clinton. As usual, of course, it was Republicans who made most of the good times' money, or the people who made the good times' money became Republicans. Such folk like to say that government had nothing to do with rewards they gained, but are they going to vote against the party that gave them Robert Rubin and kept Alan Greenspan?

3. The Clinton baggage. I start with the premise that America's relationship with the Clintons, Bill and Hillary both, is too complicated to be calibrated by poll numbers. At the end of the day, as the British say, will Vice President Gore be helped or hurt by his (former) honorary Clintondom? The Clintons have been in our faces for seven long years. It's as if we are all related to them or even married to them. What do we think about them and Al Gore's mostly good soldiering? I don't know the answer to that, because I've not gotten to the bottom of my own very tangled feelings about them.

The beginnings of the political year 2000 seem to me to be something like the early going in 1972 and, to a lesser extent, 1976. When the race began in 1972, Edmund Muskie, the Democratic senator from Maine who had won national name-recognition as an admirable candidate for vice president in 1968, seemed to be Al Gore and George W. Bush combined. He, or his consultants, some working now for Gore, collapsed because they fought the previous election. More or less, they ignored or misunderstood new rules created by a party commission headed by Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota. Muskie lasted less than a month after the New Hampshire primary (which he won), and McGovern won the nomination -- with no chance whatever to beat the Republican incumbent, Richard Nixon.

Then in 1976, Jimmy Who? -- as Jimmy Carter was known for a long time -- came from nowhere to the White House because he had a momentary fix on revised rules and on the national mood. He was not Richard Nixon and had not been tainted by having anything to do with politics beyond the boundaries of the state of Georgia. He was, in some ways, a short Bill Bradley.

I am prepared to be surprised this time. All of us in politics and the political press might be well-advised to declare a moratorium on prognostication this time around.