Not Ready for Prime Time
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, September 23, 2003
The second-best film about American politics is "The Candidate," which starred Robert Redford. (The best was Alan Alda's "The Seduction of Joe Tynan," which I had a hand in and in which, briefly, I appeared.) In the Redford movie, he plays a political neophyte who unexpectedly wins a Senate race -- a stunning development to him and his backers. The movie ends with a dismayed Redford asking, "What do we do now?"
Alas, that's not a question that occurs to some prominent political candidates nowadays or, especially, their supporters. Increasingly, it is somehow taken for granted that the campaign is all that matters, and that the gifted amateur can win. What happens next is not, as the expression goes, their department.
At the moment, the political firmament twinkles with amateurs. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the most famous of them, by virtue of a movie career. Arianna Huffington is another, by virtue of little ideological virtue. They are both running for governor of California, where, should either win, neither would have the slightest idea of what to do next. That's not because they are dumb. It's because they have never done anything remotely similar.
Something comparable can be said about Wesley Clark and, to a degree, Howard Dean. Clark has never campaigned for anything -- and already his inexperience has shown. He stepped all over his overriding message -- that he's the antiwar candidate who has actually been to war -- by saying, and then retracting, that he would have voted for the congressional resolution authorizing the Iraq war. With his first campaign shot, Clark got himself right in the foot.
This game of politics is complicated. From time to time, the gifted amateur comes along -- Eisenhower, Reagan -- but it is no accident that the two are often likened to each other. They were enormously appealing presences, and they both had more than a smattering of political experience -- Ike as supreme commander in World War II, Reagan as a union and anti-communist activist.
More important, both Ike and Reagan had important constituencies that urged them to run -- and when they did, they won big. Reagan beat his first gubernatorial opponent by almost 1 million votes. Ike swamped Adlai Stevenson. No one is predicting that kind of win for Schwarzenegger -- and no one is predicting anything for Huffington, who nonetheless has the backing of some very smart people.
What are these people thinking? Huffington could not govern. The Democratic-controlled legislature is not going to play ball with someone who once swooned for Newt Gingrich and helped run her former husband's Republican senatorial campaign. As for Schwarzenegger, that same legislature is going to be there for him, too. Maybe he can be persuasive, but that's impossible to say from his record. He has none.
For illustration, let us turn to New York City, where Mike Bloomberg, a former Democrat turned Republican, is the mayor. As will any governor of California, Bloomberg has had to raise taxes and cut services. He has a near-fatal 57 percent disapproval rating. Some of that is no fault of his own -- who likes higher taxes? -- but some of it is. He's been learning how to be a politician while on the job. It has cost him.
Or look at Jesse Ventura, another relative amateur who became governor of Minnesota on the basis of straight talking and a to-hell-with-politics persona. It turned out a big mouth was not enough. Ventura could not get along with the legislature -- actually, with almost anyone -- and is now back in show business, from which, it can fairly be said, he never departed.
I can appreciate the yearning for the outsider, the gifted amateur, as too many politicians become so burdened by experience that they can't say anything straight. But the tendency to see all issues as contemporary Gordian knots -- one slash of the sword will do it -- severely underestimates the complexity of governing. After you win, you actually have to do something.
In California, the swallows come back to Capistrano -- and the chickens come home to roost. The state has term limits, which means it has an ineffective legislative leadership and lobbyists hold enhanced power. It is increasingly ruled by propositions, which means by voter snit. It confuses celebrity with political talent, because somehow all fame is the same. It has made a mess of itself.
Wes Clark plunged into the presidential race without the foggiest notion of what he thinks on a range of domestic issues. Schwarzenegger mutters "details, details" while reading up on what he should already know. Huffington would govern from the left . . . or maybe the right. "The Candidate" was a drama. What's happening now is a farce. |
