THE END OF POLITICS?
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Wallace was a protest candidate. None of these people were about to
be elected president. Ross Perot was a very real possibility in this respect,
and as such he has to be regarded in and as himself as an altogether dif–
ferent phenomenon.
Harold Ehrlich:
Despite sometimes being a professor, I would like to
break with tradition. Instead of making a speech, may I ask a question?
Since we have two distinguished political analysts here, and both seem to
agree that the parties' importance has diminished greatly, why is it that
George Bush, who in the past has seemed a rather moderate person in
many ways, who was sort of balanced whether you agreed with his point
of view or not, in this campaign allowed the extreme right wing of his
party - when they had no place to go - to play such a big role, even
though he didn't have to do so?
Eric Breindel:
The degree to which Bush has been over-responsive to
the demands of what is called the far right in the Republican Party is
going to be, I suspect, one of the great post-election debates in GOP
circles, over the next four years, should Bush lose. There are already
people advancing the notion that the great errors of the campaign - the
formal campaign - started with the national convention: allowing the
Buchanan speech to set the tone the first night is said to have been divi–
sive and unnecessary. The perception at the time, for what it's worth,
among the why-did-he-have-to-do-it crowd, is that it was believed to be
a very real possibility that the radical right, or the hard right, in the
Republican Party, would bolt. Bolt where? Bolt in the sense of staying
home. There was a Buchanan candidacy. Bush had been challenged from
the right. There was a strong sense that Reagan had become president in
part by managing to put together a coalition that included the
"religious right." If these people didn't participate and provide the
cadres that they had provided for Reagan, it was thought that you had a
much weaker candidacy.
Bush was responsive. We take as a given, an assumption, that Bush's
alliance is an unwilling one: I suspect that, on certain levels, it is. Yet I
also suspect that we're probably exaggerating the degree to which he is
uncomfortable with the right. I'm not altogether persuaded that Bush
has been insincere in recent weeks: he takes very seriously this notion that
he's raising important issues about Bill Clinton. The assumption that he
doesn't believe in the rhetoric and merely says what he is compelled to
say is, I think, untrue . I suspect that Bush feels very strongly about the
way Bill Clinton conducted himself in 1969, even though the issue does–
n't resonate now; it's a generational proposition. It doesn't mean that
Bush is insincere in that respect. But you point to an issue that people
