Bad News for the Doomsayers
By Hugh Sidey
The Presidency
Walter Mondale is a preacher's son from Elmore, Minn., who with little strain became Vice President. Before he began running for President, he made a million bucks in a couple of years for not doing much of anything. Yet when he looks out over America from the stump these days, he sees mostly desperation.
Gary Hart rose out of the dusty streets of Ottawa, Kans., survived the austerities of Yale's Divinity and Law schools, became a U.S. Senator, and is now a political legend-in-the-making, stalking the Mondale "juggernaut." When Hart mounts the campaign pulpit, he thunders often about a discouraged and crumbling America.
John Glenn, the plumber's son from New Concord, Ohio, became a world-class hero before he was 50 and a millionaire after 50 as a hotel owner and business executive. Before Glenn dropped out of the Democratic race last week, he 5 frequently warned that the American people are frightened and hesitant.
Even allowing for the normal campaign hyperbole, this year's litany of despair about the U.S. is ridiculous. The material and professional attainments of the Democratic candidates disprove their own notions of national despondency. As they have searched for dark corners over the past months, often dominating the public dialogue, the American people were quietly going in the opposite direction. George Gallup a few days ago released a survey concluding that "the mood of the nation today is the brightest it has been in five years, with 50% now saying they are satisfied with the way things are going in the nation, compared with only 26% who felt this way in 1979."
No one, of course, can ignore the perils of the nuclear age or domestic problems like poverty, hunger and crime. But the candidates and their aides should at some point be concerned with summing up the whole. The presidency is macropolitics. The whole right now is pretty darn good by almost anybody's standards. As Horace Busby, who used to counsel Lyndon Johnson, said the other day, "What I have begun to hear in this decade is a wonderful chorus of celebration. Americans are newly proud of their country, they like their work, they feel good about themselves . . . a miracle is occurring before our eyes. We are becoming a new people."
Ben Wattenberg, another of Johnson's young brain-trusters, has a book coming out titled The Good News Is the Bad News Is Wrong. Using census data, polls and economic research, Wattenberg concludes that any way you measure values and quality of life, America comes out a "pretty strong and healthy society." He believes that programs like those L.B.J. started have done wonderfully well but that Washington, which needs despair to feel useful, refuses to see the successes clearly. "Back in the 1970s we went through a period of 'the carcinogen of the month,' from Love Canal to acid rain," relates Wattenberg. "All we heard about was the evils of Big Government and big corporations. Now we learn that during those very years, the life expectancy of adults went up faster than at any time in history. The image did not match the reality."
Maybe one reason those Democratic politicians are so sour is that they have heard the good news and know it bodes ill for anyone challenging the incumbent. For instance, John Naisbitt, the author of the bestseller Megatrends, is going around saying such things as "1984 has arrived just in time to witness an explosion of bottom-up entrepreneurialism and the dawn of an era that may offer our best hope yet for world peace."
If that is not enough to frighten a dour presidential challenger, then consider this Naisbitt depth charge: "As we enter 1984, no one has to be President. The American people are pretty much in charge of their own lives."