Economy Could Define Election

Every four years, the New Hampshire primary is accompanied by a deluge of news stories detailing why the state is an unlikely choice to have such a disproportionate say in selecting the next president. But New Hampshire residents take their responsibility seriously, and they love to shock the world. This year's New Hampshire primary campaign showed the best and worst sides of our election process. Candidates may rise and fall in the coming weeks, but no one should take Tuesday night's primary results for Granite.

Although the New Hampshire primary is always full of surprises, there are some constants. Every eight years, like clockwork, Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) descends on the Granite State so that the voters can hand him his hat. Above all else, this year the New Hampshire results proved the immense weakness of Dole's campaign.

Even with the endorsement of 24 of the nation's 31 Republican governors and a campaign that employs a super-abundance of the top G.O.P. operatives, Dole has been unable to accomplish much other than blowing a 50 percent lead in the polls. Once and for all proving my old piano teacher wrong, Dole shows that practice most certainly does not make perfect.

First elected to office during the Truman administration, Bob Dole has just lost the New Hampshire primary for the third time. Imagine the glazed eyes of primary voters who trudge out to a Bob Dole "rally" and hear the candidate explain in excruciating detail the process of getting the START II Treaty out of subcommittee. Dole has never understood that the presidency is not the prime ministry.

Early on in this campaign, Bob Dole decided that he would rather be to the right than be president. He backed off from his lifetime of positions on affirmative action, rejected a donation from gay Republicans and signed the same nefarious New Hampshire anti-tax pledge that he had forthrightly and courageously refused to autograph eight years ago. Now, knowing that the 2004 campaign is something of a longshot for him, Bob Dole is seeing his last chance for the job he knows he deserves slip away. At this point, he'll be anyone to be president.

So, on the day after the Iowa caucuses, Bob Dole stepped out of the pressurized cabins of the corporate jets that, until very recently, shuttled him across the country, and pretended that he was a certain talk show host from the suburbs of Washington. "Corporate profits are setting records--and so are corporate layoffs," he said.

As senator, Dole has steadfastly opposed any rise in the minimum wage, allowing it to fall to a forty-year low in buying power. He has tried to curtail the Earned Income Tax Credit, a way to ensure that no parent with children can work a 40-hour week while remaining mired in poverty. But now on the campaign trail, Dole is nice enough to point out that, "the real average hourly wage is five percent lower than it was a decade ago."

If things get any worse for Bob Dole, don't be surprised to see him wearing Lamar! Alexander's plaid shirt or Pat Buchanan's brown one. Even the Granite State results have not been able to shake Dole into coherence. Still flailing the day after New Hampshire, Dole boldly declared that "intolerance cannot be tolerated."

Although Dole probably will not win the nomination, the real story out of New Hampshire, and potentially one of the biggest stories in American politics, is the victory of Pat Buchanan. Here in the hallowed halls of Harvard and among the nation's elite pundits, one can hear the chorus of snickers and see the synchronized head-shaking deriding the Buchanan candidacy. His campaign can all too easily be dismissed by, and might eventually be sunk by, Buchanan's flirtation with authoritarianism, if not outright racism and anti-Semitism. True enough, Pat Buchanan's success has been a boon to all those who can almost hear the strains of "Sieg Heil to the Chief" wafting through their minds as they ease into bed at night.

Yet the vast majority of the men and women who are supporting Buchanan are not racists. They are scared and scarred by a changing world. The Buchanan voters are animated by his calls to protect them from an economy that is no longer playing by the old rules. For all its promise of plenty, thus far, the global Information Age has hurt more people than it has helped. The growing pains of a transforming world have not been equally shared.

Some have gained spectacularly, but most are struggling to find out where they went wrong. Commercials for AT&T predict a future where all the amenities of the globe are no further than a computer console. In the same breath, AT&T lays off 40,000 workers, and the connection between the two seems all too obvious. The Buchanan voters consider themselves roadkill on the Information Super-highway.

Four years ago, candidate Clinton said, "People are working harder and harder and falling further and further behind." Unfortunately, that's still true. Yet until Pat Buchanan started talking about these issues, most national leaders seemed to be clueless about what was going on in America. Prostrating themselves at the altar of a balanced budget, the politicians in Washington paid little attention to what was happening to the family budget. Then, Pat Buchanan steps forward to be the "voice of the voiceless," and the peoples' quiet desperation seems muted no longer.

Exactly a century ago, the United States was undergoing a transformation from the Agricultural to the Industrial Age. Populism spread through the farm states like a prairie fire. In a huge shock, the Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan who transformed the party and realigned American politics. He called for term limits, attacked federal judges and harshly castigated the corporations. The Democrats, in 1896, aligned themselves with a vanishing world, and the Republicans went on to hold the White House for all but eight of the next 36 years.

The new Information Age economy could well be the defining issue of the next generation. Pat Buchanan's candidacy raises the possibility of a party realignment that would unite those who hold a dim view of the new world (like the supporters of Buchanan, Ross Perot, Jesse Jackson and Ralph Nader) against forward-looking optimists like Bill Clinton and Jack Kemp. Far-fetched? Perhaps, but when Pat Buchanan's economics are to the "left" of Ted Kennedy's, American politics is ripe for a change.

Andrei H. Cerny '97 believes in the power of puns for political change.