Bush League

ELECTION Day has come and gone, with its results surprising to only the most tenacious idealists. George Bush can finally add President of the United States to his already formidable resume. He won every state in the South, most states in the Northeast, all but a few states in the Midwest and virtually every Western state including California. It may not amount to a mandate for him, but it does equal a monumental rejection of the Democratic Party's national agenda.

For most of our generation, the results were not shocking. Indeed, most members of our generation that did vote pulled the lever for Bush. It has become almost routine for Republicans, and conservative ones at that, to crush Democrats in national elections. They have beaten a Southern neo-liberal in Jimmy Carter, they have defeated a traditional Midwestern liberal in Walter Mondale, and they have now crushed a Northeastern technocrat.

The Democratic party is at a crossroads, having totalled less than 20 states in the last three presidential elections. It must decide either to unabashedly pronounce its liberalism and appeal to voters' class interests, or it must choose to go with the tide and look to its Southern conservative members to bring it victory. In the first option, there is great danger. In the second, little inspiration.

What hurts most about this year's election is that the party studiously avoided making either choice. Deep down most Democrats probably do not feel Michael S. Dukakis deserved to be President. He did not make a case for liberalism. He did not attempt to go down in a blaze of glory, fighting the good fight. He simply tried to wish ideology away, marching along in the hope that he could almost slip into the White House through the back door. His defeat inspires anger rather than mourning.

But at the same, many who did vote for Vice President George Bush cannot feel that he entirely deserved to win either.

TWENTY years ago, Joe McGinnis explained to the nation how our presidents could be sold to us like so much soap. The same soap-peddlers who gave us President Richard Milhouse Nixon have now also given us President-elect George Herbert Walker Bush. They marketed the same product twice, and the nation bought it both times.

The connections betwen Bush and Nixon are sufficiently numerous to be distressing. Nixon himself was a close advisor to the Bush campaign, and the President-elect's aides proudly point to their party's elder crook as the one who gave direction to their campaign strategy. Among the first people President-elect George Bush contacted was none other than Tricky Dick. Former Nixon men, including Fred Malek and Dwight Chapin, played a part in Bush's campaign.

But the connections between Bush and Nixon are as much ideological as personal. Vice President Bush stressed throughout his campaign that America was separated by a "Great Divide." His cries for a mainstream mandate are in many ways similar to Nixon's own faith in a silent majority. Nixon won on a "law-and-order" platform, and George Bush did the same. The Willie Horton case, brought to you courtesy of Roger Ailes, did matter. Fully three times as many Americans said they voted based on fears of crime than anxiety over relations between the superpowers.

After witnessing the 1968 campaign, columnist jimmy Breslin was angry. His assessment of that election applies equally well to this one. One need only substitute "George Bush" for "Richard Nixon".

"We are two nations of equal size...[George Bush's ] nation is white, Protestant, breathes clean air and advances towards middle-age. [Michael S. Dukakis'] is everything else..."