THE END OF POLITICS?
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think it will largely depend on whether Clinton is elected, what he pro–
poses to do, and the extent to which he will be able to hold the Party
behind him. I don't suppose that what would please Ken Galbraith
would necessarily please Ben Wattenberg, but I think Clinton has a
great chance, and I think he is a professional, in the sense that FDR was,
Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson were. That is, he understands how to
bring people together and get them working in the same territory. So I
think that Clinton's success, not only in the election but also in the
presidency, would do a great deal to revitalize the party system.
Eric Breindel:
If I may comment; I think that Stephen Koch made an
interesting point about the Carter administration. It's true indeed that
when Carter campaigned for president, he was assailed by many for
seeming to speak the language of the right, for seeming to represent the
Democratic Party in its most conservative incarnation. Yet in terms of
the political ideology with which we associate Carter, what we mean
when we say that Clinton won't be Carter the Second is that there
won't be a return to the left-wing governance.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.:
I would say that Carter, like Bush, is a perfect
example of the Henry Adams illustration of a case where there was no
course to steer and no port to seek. Conservatives regarded Carter as a
liberal, as you do; liberals regarded him as a conservative, as I do.
David Sidorsky:
May I comment on the analogy of the successful
presidential term to the properly charted voyage? Perhaps I understand
the analogy too simplistically, but does not its application miss the his–
toricallesson that Arthur Schlesinger, citing Reinhold Neibuhr, has often
taught, about the irony of history? One of the many reasons for ironic
results in history has been that setting the right course and implementing
it does not imply that what has been accomplished will have been ap–
propriately seen or judged. Along these lines, Joseph Conrad, in his
novel,
Chance,
portrays a retired sea captain in London at the turn of
the century, who discovers that "newspapermen (he seemed to think
them a specially intellectual class) never by any chance gave a correct ver–
sion of the simplest affair." Since Conrad's sea captain thinks of the press
as being the "ship's log" of the British Isles, he believes that if the British
Isles were afloat, they would certainly sink. Great Britain appears to
Conrad's seaman as a society that believes itself sufficiently secure to freely
indulge in error, "for they see that no matter what they do, this tight
little island won't turn turtle on them or spring a leak and go to the
bottom of the sea with their wives and children."
