Here’s a trade secret.
Writing about politics is a cushy job. Somebody else pays for you to wander around America, staying in fancy hotels and eating in gourmet restaurants so that you can shmooze with famous, important and occasionally even interesting people, the better to inform your readers or listeners.
OK, OK, sometimes the hotels aren’t so fancy and the food is awful. It still beats working for a living.
Alas, in this cruel world there is a down to every up, and in this case the down is the temptation to fool either yourself or the boss into thinking that what is happening must be important. Never is this temptation less resistible than in that November after the one in which a president is elected. Such are the peculiarities of the political calendar that only two states and a few cities hold elections for major office, a sparsity all but impossible to invest with great significance.
Which is, nevertheless, promptly invested, perhaps to justify the hotel bills.
So here, from a former practitioner who on occasion fell to that temptation, is the real deep, national, cosmic significance of last Tuesday’s election results:
Nothing.
Well, maybe a little something. The defeat of New York Mayor David Dinkins is yet another sign that a certain variety of urban liberalism-call it interest group-whiney-has run its course. This is the politics of treating various constituencies as distinct subcultures and assuring each of them that it is uniquely put-upon and in need of special help.
Dinkins was an honorable communicant in this faith. He never pilloried one group in serving another. Still, his devotion kept him from being a good mayor, and another lesson which might be pulled out of Tuesday’s results is that those who do not do a good job may not be re-elected, regardless of party.
Had Dinkins been a mediocre white mayor instead of a mediocre black one, being the Democratic nominee might have been enough. Tuesday proved once again that race is not irrelevant in American politics. But it proved as well that race is not always decisive. Otherwise the voters of Seattle, most of whom are white, would not have so easily re-elected Mayor Norm Rice, who is not.
Republicans tried to find more meaning in the results than Democrats. For this there is some justification; there is no way to interpret three Republican victories as bad news for the GOP. But those contests were in two states and one city whose populations comprise less than 10 percent of the country’s. Two of the three were extremely close and all three turned overwhelmingly, if not entirely, on parochial matters and on the relative strengths of the candidates.
It is true President Clinton campaigned for two of the Democrats who lost. What this says about his political standing is that it is rather like the standing of his predecessors at a similar juncture.
Or any juncture. When the president is running, he can help his party win other races. When he isn’t, it’s every candidate for him- or herself.
As ever, over-interpretation knows neither partisan nor ideological bounds. Liberals looked at the defeat of California’s school voucher proposal and pronounced the idea dead, and not just there.
Premature. Even being badly outspent can’t entirely explain a 3-to-1 drubbing. But this result, also, was influenced by local peculiarities-a state budget crisis, a worried governor, a Republican Party in dissaray. Perhaps scaled down a bit, the voucher idea will resurface.
The easiest election to over-interpret was the one in New Jersey, where Christine Whitman defeated Democratic Gov. Jim Florio, who had raised taxes during his first year in office. So did Clinton. Voila! It’s the same thing.
No, it isn’t. First of all, Clinton did pretty much what he said he’d do. Florio did the opposite, and he didn’t just raise taxes. Using the extraordinarily strong powers of New Jersey’s governorship, he rammed through, with little opportunity for discussion, a program which all but revolutionized the entire system of public finance in the state.
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This disturbed people. The impact was not just economic or political, but psychological. So their reaction was visceral. Florio was not simply disagreed with; he was detested by a clear majority of the electorate. In a sense, it’s amazing that he got 48 percent. His approval rating a couple of years ago was in the teens.
These details have been scantily reported, perhaps because of a general assumption that New Jersey’s hotels and restaurants aren’t worth the trouble. This, too, is incorrect. Those who know where to go can eat as well in New Jersey as anywhere, but some secrets a man keeps to himself.