Subject: (Editorial): Off the Tracks
Date: Published: 3/31/92 (96 lines)
Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc.

    REVIEW & OUTLOOK (Editorial):
    Off the Tracks

    The train carrying Campaign '92 is roaring around New York
 City right now, which may be as good a place as any for the
 country's political culture to finally go off the tracks.  How
 have we arrived at such a pass?  How has the U. S. political
 system gotten itself to the point that its most important
 event, a presidential election, is dominated by scandal,
 moonbeams, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot and a President all at
 sea?  Is it us, or is it them?  
    Of them, we have had plenty lately.
    The scandal in the past 24-hour news cycle, reported by
 WCBS New York, is that Bill Clinton smoked marijuana while he
 was a Rhodes Scholar, evoking images of "Brideshead
 Revisited" in which yet another innocent falls prey to the
 depraved delights of ancient Oxford.  But amid the screaming
 headlines, it fell to Hogarthian radio humorist Don Imus, a
 careful observer of the Clinton candidacy, to point out that
 the pot smoking itself meant nothing; it was Governor
 Clinton's insistence that he somehow never inhaled that
 deserved derision and disbelief.
    Meanwhile, someone else was reporting (it might have been
 the Washington Post but then again it could have been the Los
 Angeles Times; this train has become a blur) that Jerry Brown
 once belonged to the board of directors of a drug company
 that -- got into trouble with the FDA.  Not only was Mr. Brown
 associated with a company trying to develop a beleaguered
 AIDS drug, he made phone calls to Rep. Henry Waxman on the
 company's behalf.  The "scandal" of this aside, we're almost
 inclined to think better of Jerry Brown for figuring out that
 the FDA isn't part of the Bush administration but of Henry
 Waxman's office.
    Meanwhile, H. Ross Perot has ridden into town, threatening
 to clean up Tombstone.  Mr. Perot brought along a posse of
 heavily armed phone banks, suggesting there might be millions
 of furious supporters riding this way.
    Meanwhile, someone who was once Miss America has scheduled
 a TV-camera conference in Little Rock to say her Playboy
 interview doesn't say she slept with Governor Clinton, who
 meantime has been answering questions about an obscure
 Arkansas ethics law that the New York Times was interested
 in.  Governor Clinton also spent part of last week shouting
 down an AIDS activist in New York.
    Of course, other things are happening in America.  Mike
 Tyson is getting six years for rape, the New York Mets are
 battling sex charges, the Academy Awards were being
 threatened with demonstrations by the omnipresent AIDS
 activists, the country's intellectual life is taken up with
 entertaining battles over the meaning of feminism, and in the
 spirit of the times Teddy Kennedy is getting married.
    We seem to recall that not long before all this commenced
 reporters were writing books and articles about how the 1980s
 were our long national nightmare.  If so, what does that make
 this?  
    At the risk of departing from the wisdom borne ever
 forward by the nation's press, we would say that the great
 effort of late to expunge the Reagan years from this
 country's political life accounts for quite a bit of the
 current craziness.
    Ronald Reagan not only waged two successful presidential
 campaigns; he governed successfully for two terms.  Love him
 or hate him, Ronald Reagan knew what he believed, he repeated
 it in utterly clear terms and he seemed content to let the
 American elite rant and rave its opposition.  For all that, he
 was elected twice, overwhelmingly.  Ronald Reagan must have
 represented something that a lot of voters wanted.  Are we
 supposed to believe now that they no longer want any of it?  
 That can hardly be possible.
    The Bush presidency has made little effort to create a
 sense of public continuity between the Reagan presidency and
 its own policies.  And political commentators have been happy
 to contribute to the fiction that it was indeed a daydream.
 But the Reagan years were real enough, and until the
 political culture finds some way to come to grips with that
 fact and accord it the legitimacy it earned in two elections
 and 90 months of economic growth, we suspect there is going
 to be a vacuum in the nation's political life.
    It would be nice to think that governance is so easy that
 the political and media establishment could declare two terms
 of economic success invalid because it disliked the President
 and merely plug in another cassette of "policies," such as
 the various grand plans of Bill Clinton, Jerry Brown or Ross
 Perot.  But we suspect the truth is that if a political
 culture spends too much of its time running up and down blind
 alleys, it is going to get a little crazy.  And the American
 electorate, which wasn't born yesterday, will become evermore
 furious.

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