Collected Essays

by Joan Didion

  The correct answer, since the forward flow of the narrative here demanded the appearance of a genuine contender (a contender who could be seventeen points “up”, so that George Bush could be seventeen points “down”, a position from which he could rise to “claim” his own convention), was yes: “The best speech of his life,” David Broder reported. Sandy Grady found it “superb”, evoking “Kennedyesque echoes” and showing “unexpected craft and fire”. Newsweek had witnessed Michael Dukakis “electrify­ing the convention with his intensely personal accep­tance speech”. In fact the convention that evening had been electrified, not by the speech, which was the same series of nonsequential clauses Governor Du­kakis had employed during the primary campaign (“My friends . . . son of immigrants . . . good jobs at good wages . . . make teaching a valued and honored profession . . . it’s what the Democratic Party is all about”), but because the floor had been darkened, swept with laser beams, and flooded with “Coming to America”, played at concert volume with the bass turned up.

  It is understood that this invented narrative will turn on certain familiar elements. There is the con­tinuing story line of the “horse race”, the reliable daily drama of one candidate falling behind as another pulls ahead. There is the surprise of the new poll, the glam­our of the one-on-one colloquy on the midnight plane, a plot point (the nation sleeps while the candidate and his confidant hammer out its fate) pioneered by Theo­dore H. White. There is the abiding if unexamined faith in the campaign as personal odyssey, and in the spiritual benefits accruing to those who undertake it. There is, in the presented history of the candidate, the crucible event, the day that “changed the life”.

  Robert Dole’s life was understood to have changed when he was injured in Italy in 1945. George Bush’s life is understood to have changed when he and his wife decided to “get out and make it on our own” (his words, or rather those of his speechwriter, Peggy Noonan, from the “lived the dream” acceptance speech at the 1988 convention, suggesting action, shirtsleeves, privilege cast aside) in west Texas. For Bruce Babbitt, “the dam just kind of broke” during a student summer in Bolivia. For Michael Dukakis, the dam was understood to have broken not during his student summer in Peru but after his 1978 defeat in Massachusetts; his tragic flaw, we read repeatedly during the 1988 campaign, was neither his evident sulkiness at losing that earlier election nor what many saw later as a rather dissociated self-satisfaction (“We’re two people very proud of what we’ve done,” he said on NBC in Atlanta, falling into a favorite speech pattern, “very proud of each other, actually . . . and very proud that a couple of guys named Du­kakis and Jackson have come this far”), but the more attractive “hubris”.

  The narrative requires broad strokes. Michael Du­kakis was physically small, and had associations with Harvard, which suggested that he could be cast as an “intellectual”; the “immigrant factor”, on the other hand, could make him tough (as in “What it means is that I’m tough”), a “streetfighter”. “He’s cool, shrewd and still trying to prove he’s tough,” the July 25, 1988, cover of U.S. News & World Report said about Du­kakis. “Toughness is what it’s all about,” one of his advisers was quoted as having said in the cover story. “People need to feel that a candidate is tough enough to be president. It is the threshold perception.”

  George Bush had presented a more tortured narra­tive problem. The tellers of the story had not under­stood, or had not responded to, the essential Bush style, which was complex, ironic, the diffident edge of the Northeastern elite. This was what was at first identified as “the wimp factor”, which was replaced not by a more complicated view of the personality but by its reverse: George Bush was by late August no longer a “wimp” but someone who had “thrown it over”, “struck out” to make his own way: no longer a product of the effete Northeast but someone who had thrived in Texas, and was therefore “tough enough to be president”.

  That George Bush might have thrived in Texas not in spite of being but precisely because he was a mem­ber of the Northeastern elite was a shading that had no part in the narrative: “He was considered back at the time one of the most charismatic people ever elected to public office in the history of Texas,” Con­gressman Bill Archer of Houston said. “That cha­risma, people talked about it over and over again.” People talked about it, probably, because Andover and Yale and the inheritable tax avoidance they sug­gested were, during the years George Bush lived in Texas, the exact ideals toward which the Houston and Dallas establishment aspired, but the narrative called for a less ambiguous version: “Lived in a little shotgun house, one room for the three of us,” as Bush, or Peggy Noonan, had put it in the celebrated no-subject-pronoun cadences of the “lived the dream” ac­ceptance speech. “Worked in the oil business, started my own. . . . Moved from the shotgun to a duplex apartment to a house. Lived the dream—high school football on Friday night, Little League, neighborhood barbecue . . . pushing into unknown territory with kids and a dog and a car ...”

  All stories, of course, depend for their popular in­terest upon the invention of personality, or “charac­ter”, but in the political narrative, designed as it is to maintain the illusion of “consensus” by obscuring rather than addressing actual issues, this invention served a further purpose. It was by 1988 generally if unspecifically agreed that the United States faced cer­tain social and economic realities that, if not intracta­ble, did not entirely lend themselves to the kinds of policy fixes people who run for elected office, on whatever ticket, were likely to undertake. We had not yet accommodated the industrialization of parts of the third world. We had not yet adjusted to the economic realignment of a world in which the United States was no longer the principal catalyst for change. “We really are in an age of transition,” Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s leading foreign policy adviser, told Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times in the fall of 1988, “from a postwar world where the Soviets were the enemy, where the United States was a superpower and trying to build up both its allies and its former ene­mies and help the third world transition to indepen­dence. That whole world and all of those things are coming to an end or have ended, and we are now entering a new and different world that will be complex and much less unambiguous than the old one.”

  What continued to dominate the rhetoric of the 1988 campaign, however, was not this awareness of a new and different world but nostalgia for an old one, and coded assurance that symptoms of ambiguity or change, of what George Bush called the “deterioration of values”, would be summarily dealt with by in­creased social control. It was not by accident that the word “enforcement”, devoid of any apparent aware­ness that it had been tried before, kept coming up in this campaign. A problem named seemed, for both campaigns, a problem solved. Michael Dukakis had promised, by way of achieving his goal of “no safe haven for dope dealers and drug profits anywhere on this earth”, to “double the number” of Drug Enforce­ment Administration agents, not a promising ap­proach. George Bush, for his part, had repeatedly promised the death penalty, and not only the Pledge of Allegiance but prayer, or “moments of silence”, in the schools. “We’ve got to change this entire culture,” he said in the Wake Forest debate; the polls indicated that the electorate wanted “change”, and this wish for change had been translated, by both campaigns, into the wish for a “change back”, a regression to the “gentler America” of which George Bush repeatedly spoke.

  To the extent that there was a “difference” between the candidates, the difference lay in just where on the time scale this “gentler America” could be found. The Dukakis campaign was oriented to “programs”, and the programs it proposed were similar to those that had worked (the encouragement of private sector in­volvement in low-cost housing, say) in the boom years following World War II. The Bush campaign was ori­ented to “values”, and the values to which it referred were those not of a postwar but of a prewar America. In neither case did “ideas” play a part: “This election isn’t about ideology
, it’s about competence,” Michael Dukakis had said in Atlanta. “First and foremost, it’s a choice between two persons,” one of his senior ad­visers, Thomas Kiley, had told the Wall Street Journal. “What it all comes down to, after all the shouting and the cheers, is the man at the desk,” George Bush had said in New Orleans. In other words, what it was “about”, what it came “down to”, what was wrong or right with America, was not a historical shift largely unaffected by the actions of individual citizens but “character”, and if “character” could be seen to count, then every citizen—since everyone was a judge of character, an expert in the field of per­sonality—could be seen to count. This notion, that the citizen’s choice among determinedly centrist candidates makes a “difference”, is in fact the narrative’s most central element, and also its most fictive.

  3

  The Democratic National Convention of 1968, during which the process was put to a popular vote on the streets of Chicago and after which it was decided that what had occurred could not be allowed to recur, is generally agreed to have prompted the multiplication of primaries, and the concomitant cov­erage of those primaries, which led to the end of the national party convention as a more than ceremonial occasion. Early in 1987, as the primary campaigns got under way for the 1988 election, David S. Broder, in the Washington Post, offered this compelling analysis of the power these “reforms” in the nominating pro­cedure had vested not in the party leadership, which is where this power of choice ultimately resides, but in “the existing communications system”, by which he meant the press, or the medium through which the party leadership sells its choice:

  Once the campaign explodes to 18 states, as it will the day after New Hampshire, when the focus shifts to a super-primary across the nation, the existing communications system simply will not accommodate more than two or three candidates in each party. Neither the television networks, nor newspapers nor magazines, have the resources of people, space and time to describe and analyze the dynamics of two simultaneous half-national elections among Republicans and Demo­crats. That task is simply beyond us. Since we cannot reduce the number of states voting on Super Tuesday, we have to reduce the number of candidates treated as serious contenders. Those news judgments will be arbitrary—but not subject to appeal. Those who finish first or second in Iowa and New Hampshire will get tickets from the mass media to play in the next big round. Those who don’t, won’t. A minor exception may be made for the two reverends, Jesse L. Jack­son and Marion G. (Pat) Robertson, who have their own church-based communica­tions and support networks and are less de­pendent on mass-media attention. But no one else.

  By the time the existing communications system set itself up in July and August of 1988 in Atlanta and New Orleans, the priorities were clear. “NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE,” read the typed note given to some print reporters when they picked up their cre­dentials in Atlanta. “Because the National Democratic Convention Committee permitted the electronic media to exceed specifications for their broadcast booths, your assigned seat’s sight line to the podium and the convention floor was obliterated.” The net­work skyboxes, in other words, had been built in front of the sections originally assigned to the periodical press. “This is a place that was chosen to be, for all intents and purposes, a large TV studio, to be able to project our message to the American people and a national audience,” Paul Kirk, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said by way of explaining why the podium and the skyboxes had so reduced the size of the Omni Coliseum in Atlanta that some thousand delegates and alternates had been, on the evening Jesse Jackson spoke, locked out. Mayor Andrew Young of Atlanta apologized for the lockout, but said that it would be the same on nights to follow: “The one hundred and fifty million people in this country who are going to vote have got to be our major target.” Still, convention delegates were seen to have a real role: “The folks in the hall are so important for how it looks,” Lane Venardos, senior producer in charge of convention coverage for CBS News, said to the New York Times about the Republican convention. The delegates, in other words, could be seen as dress extras.

  During those eight summer evenings in 1988, four in Atlanta and four in New Orleans, when roughly 80 percent of the television sets “out there” were tuned somewhere else, the entire attention of those inside the process was directed toward the invention of this story in which they themselves were the principal players, and for which they themselves were the prin­cipal audience. The great arenas in which the conven­tions were held became worlds all their own, constantly transmitting their own images back to themselves, connected by sky walks to interchangeable structures composed not of floors but of “levels”, mys­teriously separated by fountains and glass elevators and escalators that did not quite connect.

  In the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans as in the Omni Coliseum in Atlanta, the grid of lights blazed and dimmed hypnotically. Men with rifles pa­trolled the high catwalks. The nets packed with bal­loons swung gently overhead, poised for that instant known as the “money shot”, the moment, or “win­dow”, when everything was working and no network had cut to a commercial. Minicams trawled the floor, fishing in Atlanta for Rob Lowe, in New Orleans for Donald Trump. In the NBC skybox Tom Brokaw floated over the floor, adjusting his tie, putting on his jacket, leaning to speak to John Chancellor. In the CNN skybox Mary Alice Williams sat bathed in white light, the blond madonna of the skyboxes. On the television screens in the press section the images reappeared, but from another angle: Tom Brokaw and Mary Alice Williams again, broad­casting not just above us but also to us, the circle closed.

  At the end of prime time, when the skyboxes went dark, the action moved across the skywalks and into the levels, into the lobbies, into one or another Hyatt or Marriott or Hilton or Westin. In the portage from lobby to lobby, level to level, the same people kept materializing, in slightly altered roles. On a level of the Hyatt in Atlanta I saw Ann Lewis in her role as a Jackson adviser. On a level of the Hyatt in New Or­leans I saw Ann Lewis in her role as a correspondent for Ms. Some pictures were vivid: “I’ve been around this process awhile, and one thing I’ve noticed, it’s the people who write the checks who get treated as if they have a certain amount of power,” I recall Nadine Hack, the chairman of Dukakis’s New York Finance Council, saving in a suite at the Hyatt in Atlanta: here was a willowy woman with long blond hair standing barefoot on a table and trying to explain how to buy into the action. “The great thing about those evenings was you could even see Michael Harrington there,” I recall Richard Viguerie saying to me at a party in New Orleans: here was the man who managed the action for the American right trying to explain the early 1960s, and evenings we had both spent on Wash­ington Square.

  There was in Atlanta in 1988, according to the Democratic National Committee, “twice the media presence” that there had been at the 1984 convention. There were in New Orleans “media workspaces” as­signed not only to 117 newspapers and news services and to the American television and radio industry in full strength but to fifty-two foreign networks. On every corner one turned in New Orleans someone was doing a stand-up. There were telephone numbers to be called for quotes: “Republican State and Local Of­ficials”, or “Pat Robertson Campaign” or “Richard Wirthlin, Reagan’s Pollster”. Newspapers came with teams of thirty, forty, fifty. In every lobby there were stacks of fresh newspapers, the Atlanta Constitution, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Washington Post, the Miami Herald, the Los Angeles Times. In Atlanta these papers were collected in bins, and “recycled”: made into thirty thousand posters, which were in turn distributed to the press in New Orleans.

  This perfect recycling tended to present itself, in the narcosis of the event, as a model for the rest: like American political life itself, and like the printed and transmitted images on which that life depended. This was a world with no half-life. It was understood that what was said here would go on the wire and vanish. Garrison Keillor and his cute kids would vanish. Ann
Richards and her peppery ripostes would vanish. Phyllis Schlafly and Olympia Snowe would vanish. All the opinions and all the rumors and all the housemaid Spanish spoken in both Atlanta and New Orleans would vanish, all the quotes would vanish, and all that would remain would be the huge arenas themselves, the arenas and the lobbies and the levels and the sky walks to which they connected, the incorporeal heart of the process itself, the agora, the symbolic marketplace in which the narrative was not only written but immediately, efficiently, en­tirely, consumed.

  A certain time lag exists between this world of the arenas and the world as we know it. One evening in New York between the Democratic and Republican conventions I happened to go down to Lafayette Street, to the Public Theater, to look at clips from documentaries on which the English-born filmmaker Richard Leacock had worked during his fifty years in America. We saw folk singers in Virginia in 1941 and oil riggers in Louisiana in 1946 (this was Louisiana Story, which Leacock had shot for Robert Flaherty) and tent performers in the corn belt in 1954; we saw Eddy Sachs preparing for the Indianapolis 500 in 1960 and Piri Thomas in Spanish Harlem in 1961. We saw parades, we saw baton twirlers. We saw quints in South Dakota in 1963.

  There on the screen at the Public Theater that eve­ning were images and attitudes from an America that had largely vanished, and what was striking was this: these were the very images and attitudes on which “the campaign” was predicated. That “unknown ter­ritory” into which George Bush had pushed “with kids and a dog and a car” had existed in this vanished America, and long since been subdivided, cut up for those tract houses on which the people who were not part of the process had made down payments. Michael Dukakis’s “snowblower”, and both the amusing fru­gality and the admirable husbandry of resources it was meant to suggest, derived from some half-remem­bered idea of what citizens of this vanished America had laughed at and admired. “The Pledge” was an issue from that world. “A drug-free America” had perhaps seemed in that world an achievable ideal, as had “better schools”. I recall listening in Atlanta to Dukakis’s foreign policy expert, Madeleine Albright, as she conjured up, in the course of arguing against a “no first use” minority plank in the Democratic plat­form, a scenario in which “Soviet forces overrun Eu­rope” and the United States has, by promising no first use of nuclear weapons, crippled its ability to act: she was talking about a world that had not turned since 1948. What was at work here seemed on the one hand a grave, although in many ways a comfortable, mis­calculation of what people in America might have as their deepest concerns in 1988; it seemed on the other hand just another understanding, another of those agreements to overlook the observable.