All Right, What Kind of People Are We?

By LANCE MORROW

Once a reporter asked the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson to describe the man she envisioned as the perfect husband. Her ideal, she said, would be over six feet tall. He would be a handsome man, a preacher, and he would be able to play the trombone.

Walter Mondale does not play the trombone. The rhetorical music that issues from him on the stage sometimes sounds like the comedian Pat Paulsen playing a candidate, or like Hubert Humphrey on the verge of tears. Even the delegates who cheered Mondale most ardently at Moscone Center would admit that, whatever his strengths, he is not entirely the candidate of their dreams. But who would be? Jimmy Carter? George McGovern? Lyndon Johnson? John Kennedy? There may be something in the last. The Democrats' model of the perfect candidate, a Platonic form buried somewhere in the subconscious of the party, may indeed be John Kennedy, the slain prince. Gary Hart seemed to think as much during the campaign. He quoted and even impersonated Kennedy, trying to tap into underground wells of memory and longing in the souls of the baby-boom generation.

Certain expectations, models of an almost Freudian kind, do ghost around just below the surface of political consciousness. Why is Ronald Reagan so popular? Why is he, as some say, coated with Teflon, so that his blunders don't stick to him? One reason (impossible to prove but worth considering) is that Reagan strikes many Americans, almost without their knowing it, as the perfect idealized father. He is that strong, amiable guy who never raises his voice, is wonderfully sure of himself and makes self-deprecating jokes even when he gets shot. And if he does mine harbors in Central America now and then, well, that is just something Daddy does at the office. Never you mind.

A fatherly certitude is crucial to Reagan's appeal. He believes in something. He seems to make decisions while standing upon the solid ground of his beliefs. Even Americans who disagree with Reagan's decisions may be attracted by the (apparent) firmness of his point of view.

If Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro are to have a chance of winning the election, their advisers have been telling them, they will have to work at standing for something fairly definite themselves. That may involve them in a complicated task of self-definition. They represent a party that is an alliance of many fractious tribes--"from Yuppie to lunch pail," as Mondale said in San Francisco. The ideas and interests of, say, white steelworkers coexist rather sullenly, if at all, with those of blacks, or of feminists. In the pageant of unity last week, one speaker after another recited a Whitmanesque litany of races and classes and minorities and interests and occupations--or unemployments. Some speakers, in fact, made the nation sound like an immense ingathering of victims--terrorized senior citizens, forsaken minorities, Dickensian children--warmed by the party's Frank Capra version of America: Say, it's a wonderful life!

Representing the idea of diversity may not prove very productive for Mondale. He suffered all through the primaries from the charge that he was the captive of assorted special-interest groups. Besides, when an Administration makes a point of rewarding diversity, it usually winds up being forced to lay out an enormous amount of money.

The election, Keynote Speaker Mario Cuomo told thedele gates, "will answer the question of what kind of people we want to be." The Democrats knew what kind of people the Reaganites wanted to be. They portrayed Reagan's faith as a crass and self ish individualism. The Democratic way, as described in San Francisco, is a compassionate sharing, a mutuality, the nation seen as a family, each member precious and worthy of care.

Which kind of people do we wish to be? Both kinds. An energetic and sometimes ruthless individualism has always coexisted in the U.S. with the communal and compassionate impulse. Yin and yang.

It may be, however, that the Democrats in San Francisco misplaced their emphasis. They accused "the Reagan Gang" of pillaging the American economy and environment. But the Democratic rhetoric sometimes fell oddly on the ear. For all the talk of compassion, there was in the Democrats' words and attitudes an insistently selfish sense of entitlement. If, in the Democratic version, the Reagan Republican is a sleek, smug, oblivious Darwinian, the Democrats left themselves open to being regarded as a collection of tribes endlessly brawling over things for themselves. Even the feminists demanding the nomination of a woman vice-presidential candidate acted for reasons that were selfish -- as well as perfectly valid and historically necessary.

There is a higher order of political involvement that the Mondale-Ferraro campaign might consider. In all the rhetoric at the convention, there was little mention of sacrifice. Ferraro at one point echoed John Kennedy by saying, "The issue is not what America can do for women, but what women can do for America." But she was talking about passage of the Equal Rights Amendment -- again, self-interest, not sacrifice.

It is, of course, fatuous or cruel to call upon the poor to make sacrifices. They don't have much that they can squander in that direction. But in the broad American middle class, and in the enormous generation that came of age in the '60s, that fought on both sides of the Viet Nam question, there is a reservoir of latent idealism waiting to be tapped. Gary Hart almost found it. Mondale and Ferraro may be able to do so if they are sufficiently imaginative and creative to devise the forms into which that idealism might be poured.

What kind of people do Americans want to be? They want to be a great deal better than they are -- not only better paid or better clothed, but better. Not merely passive recipients of favors from the governmental All-Daddy, or, on the other side, shrewd looters cooking the books and snickering through the loopholes. The potential idealists inhabit the middle between those two caricatures. They crave material wellbeing, certainly. But they also want to be, saying it plainly, active participants in the larger enterprise of their nation. They want to do some good, to make changes. The candidates who stir this energy will have discovered fire. Mondale and Ferraro may not be able to do that. But if they do, the results could be astonishing.

-- By Lance Morrow