THE END OF POLITICS?
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Roosevelt, is that the Republican Party has been the party of business and
the Democratic Party has been the party of government. The Republican
Party thinks that if you give
all
power to business, it will solve all the
problems of the country. And the Democratic Party believes that you
have to assign a role to government in order to protect the public in–
terest against the greed and depredations of business.
In that sense, Bill Clinton believes in government, unlike Jimmy
Carter, who did not believe in goverment. Jimmy Carter was the most
conservative Democratic president since Grover Cleveland. He sounded
rather like Reagan. Clinton seems to me to be very much in the
Roosevelt-Truman-Kennedy tradition. We must remember that
Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson
all
seemed more conservative
when they were running for president than they turned out to be after
they were elected.
Fred Siegel:
Traditional liberalism developed in opposItIon to the
overwhelming power of manufacturing corporations. I'm not sure of
the relevance of that tradition to the New World, where for the first
time in our history we have more people employed in manufacturing
than government.
Harry Kahn:
I'd like to return to the question of the decline of poli–
tics, and I wonder whether the problem isn't a combination of the me–
dia and the phenomenon of opinion polls. Here we are today, with a
new poll every week. People listen through the media and learn what
the score is. You're getting an assumption that the polls are always right.
There was a time, I think, twenty years ago or more, when people were
skeptical about polls. Now polls seem to be completely accepted. Since
they are accepted, people say, "Well, since we know what the score is
going to be, why bother to vote?" I think that the very fact that we
have this combination of the polls, with their presumed accuracy, and
the media, makes for a spectator interest but not a participatory interest.
I'm not sure what we're going to do to change this; it should be
changed, but I think it's a big problem.
Eric Breindel:
That is a very interesting point.
It
is, after all, improper
in New York State for a candidate to release part of a poll; he has to
release the entirety of the poll . That's for the specific purpose of not
being able to secure partisan advantage by releasing incomplete figures.
On Election Day, there is at least a convention that results aren't re–
ported until everyone has voted; there is an effort to allow people on
the West Coast to cast their ballots without feeling that the election is
already over. Yet excluding exceptional cases, the polling today is so ex-
