Then There Were Four

After months of bounding off buses and into gaggles of strangers, the presidential candidates should by now feel much as Job did after he lost his camels and acquired boils. But the candidates manage, most of the time, to resemble human sunbeams, up and doing with a heart for any fate. Now their fates will come with a rush, beginning next Monday when some actual voters, all of them Iowans, will finally be able to intrude upon the nominating process. The fates of all but four candidates are already known.

Bill Bradley's task against Al Gore is difficult. John McCain's task against George W. Bush is even more so. Bradley is trying to be nominated without much help from two substantial portions of the base of the Democratic Party--African-Americans and organized labor. McCain is running against much of the Republican nominating electorate.

McCain favors campaign-finance reforms opposed by most Republicans. And he criticizes Bush's large proposed tax cut in language (the cut, he says, puts Social Security at risk) that borders on plagiarism from President Clinton and congressional Democrats. Which goes far to explain media sympathy for McCain.

For example, this was a question to him on "Good Morning America" from Diane Sawyer: "However brave a stand campaign-finance reform may be, members of your own party have rejected it. What's the matter with them? Why don't they get it?" A New York Times story on McCain's tax proposal began this way: "After decades in which Republican presidential candidates have reflexively promoted tax cuts as the key to prosperity and electoral success, Senator John McCain of Arizona is betting that there is a more potent issue this time around: Social Security." Note the word "reflexively." A reflex is a nonrational response to stimuli. People who act reflexively are not acting thoughtfully. In contrast, McCain...

McCain is called "unconventional," but in stressing campaign-finance reform he is following the conventions of populism, practicing what can be called gentrified populism. It is without the crudities of, say, Ross Perot's populism, but the gentrified sort relies, as populism generally does, on denunciations of "special interests," denunciations long on heat but short on explanations of how the adjective modifies the noun.

Criticizing Bush's proposed tax cut as too big, McCain wants to use much of the surplus to pay down what he calls the "crushing" national debt of $5.6 trillion. But what, exactly, is being crushed? Certainly not the economy. It might be nice for the nation to be debt-free, as it has not been since 1835, when Andrew Jackson brought the nation to the sunlit uplands of frugality, briefly. But would that be important?