TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=91TT2759> <title> Dec. 09, 1991: Why Americans Hate Politicians </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991 Dec. 09, 1991 One Nation, Under God </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> ESSAY, Page 92 Why Americans Hate Politicians </hdr><body> By Charles Krauthammer Why does America so hate Congress? With everyone from Jerry Brown to George Bush running against Washington, it is obvious that the most powerful political current today is simple disgust with politicians. Elections last month sent incumbents packing in New Jersey, Virginia and Mississippi. In Pennsylvania, Harris Wofford succeeded in making former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh a stand-in for the Washington establishment and won a stunning upset. Term limits suffered a setback in Washington State, but will be back on the ballot next year in at least a dozen states. Why this cresting revulsion with politicians? The usual explanations, scandal in Washington, D.C., and recession in the country, simply will not do. We have had far worse scandal in the past. Bounced checks at the House bank do not compare with Watergate. And we have had far worse downturns. Forget the Big One of the '30s. Even the 1981-82 recession was far worse; unemployment then was 10.8%, vs. 6.8% today. What is new? In a word: advertising. A decade or two of negative advertising has finally had its cumulative effect. We have really come to believe that politicians are as bad as their opponents have been telling us in a thousand 30-second spots. It is easy to discount advertising on the grounds that no one could be so stupid as to believe it. But if advertising didn't work, corporations wouldn't spend billions on it. Can anyone really believe that beer makes men attractive to women? Yet that pitch continues to be made, year in and year out, for the simple reason that it works. So does negative political advertising. And it works not just to discredit individual candidates. A generation of negative advertising has poisoned our view of politicians in general. True, negative political advertising is not new. Lyndon Johnson's "daisy" ad of 1964 said in effect that Barry Goldwater would rain H-bombs on the heads of little blond girls. But that ad ran once. Today it would be a mini-series. What is new about negative advertising today is that there has never been so much and it has never been so good. In the early days politicians would use television to say how right and good and wholesome they were. But when they took to the air to show, convincingly, how venal the other guy was, the perception of the modern politician changed from mere pompous ass to loathsome crook. How could it not? Imagine that McDonald's and Burger King had spent 15 years and billions of dollars showing not their own happy burgers but, in close-up, a death-inducing variety dripping with fat that was attributed to the other guy. Imagine Pepsi ads featuring the rotted teeth of kids who imbibed too much Coke. Imagine Delta commercials showing grieving widows saying, "Don't ever fly Pan Am." It wouldn't take 15 years for public confidence in fast food, soft drinks and air travel to decline. Which is why no industry has been so stupid as to devalue its product in pursuit of market share. Except politics. Finely honed negative campaigning has left a TV generation not just cynical about politics--why, even Frank Capra was cynical about politics--but positively revolted by it. Perhaps an extraordinarily productive government might overcome that revulsion. But for a generation, government has been structurally incapable of productivity. In the West divided government is a rare luxury. Yet since Nixon it has become the norm in the U.S. For most of the past 23 years, the White House and the Congress have been controlled by opposing and mutually negating parties. The Founding Fathers established a government heavily checked and balanced, paralysis being a fine bulwark against tyranny. But now it goes too far. After all, a machine built for gridlock that spends just a few million dollars a year, as did the fledgling republic of the 1700s, is an annoyance. But a machine built for gridlock that consumes $1.4 trillion a year is a scandal. Wastefulness and inactivity suit minimalist Jeffersonian government just fine. But for an all-intrusive welfare state, they are a cause for rage. Divided government is characterized by either total inaction or mindless compromise. Consider the compromise on the B-2 bomber that just came out of Congress. Liberals wanted to kill it. Conservatives wanted to build more than the currently allowed 15. The compromise stops production at 15 but allocates hundreds of millions to "maintain the vendor base." Translation: Congressmen will keep the pork flowing to contractors in their district, but the country will have nothing to show for it. B-2 parts will be built by the thousands--but the Pentagon will not be allowed to assemble them into planes! Faced with such nonsense, multiplied daily, the cry has gone out for term limits. But this is to fight nonsense with nonsense. The case for term limits rests on the proposition that if you scramble eggs, you reduce the cholesterol. Throwing out today's rascals is cathartic but hardly a solution. There is not a shred of evidence that newer, less experienced politicians will make more effective legislators. In politics as in any other enterprise, the best prescription for getting a better product is competition. It makes far more sense to level the playing field with campaign spending limits and free television time than simply to bar from competition a whole cohort of candidates. Of course, candidates will undoubtedly use any free television time to accuse one another of food poisoning. There's the rub. We can fix and fiddle all we want, but even if we succeed in overcoming gridlock and fielding a higher caliber of legislator, the American voters are likely never to get the message. The message they do get comes from TV advertising. It comes from the politicians themselves. And it insists, with increasing frequency and sophistication, that politicians are crooks and fools. Any wonder we believe it? </body></article> </text>