GEORGE WALLACE, the comedian (of no relation to the late governor), does a monologue based on the dumb things people say. One of his favorites is, "Don't kick a man when he's down." That's stupid, Wallace reasons. Why shouldn't you kick a man when he's down? After all, "your foot is closer to his head."
This seems to sum up Bill Clinton's situation as he looks up at the big foot of impeachment hovering over his head.
Day after day, Clinton's critics blame him for everything from Wall Street's woes to America's moral decay to government gridlock. Clinton is responsible for it all, they say.
Some political pundits predict that the Clinton scandal will depress voter turnout in the November elections. Perhaps their predictions will ring true, but they're overlooking an important point. In election after election, the United States ranks near the bottom among Western nations in voter participation.
In the recent German elections, 82.3 percent of the eligible voters went to the polls.
In 1996, less than half of America's voting -age population - 49.08 percent - cast ballots in the Clinton-Dole race. In 1992, after many Americans had lost jobs to corporate downsizing and a lingering recession, only 55.23 percent sought redress at the ballot box.
Just a generation ago, U.S. voter participation was higher. The 1960 Kennedy-Nixon race drew 62.77 percent of the possible voters, the highest since 1920, when women got the vote. The figures remained in the low 60-percent range during the 1964 and 1968 presidential races, but 1972 signaled a downward trend when only 55.21 percent cast ballots. Since then, roughly half of the voting-age public has gone to the polls during presidential elections.
Participation in off-year elections is worse. Only 36.52 percent turned out for the 1990 House races, a fraction higher than the 36.40 percent in 1986 - the lowest figure since 1960.
Ironically, nonvoting has increased despite efforts to stimulate voting. The National Voter Registration Act went into effect in 1995, requiring states to make registration easier by allowing people to mail in their forms or register when they obtain or renew drivers' licenses or apply for welfare or disability services.
The 1996 presidential election was the first to be held since the voter bill was enacted; yet voter participation dropped. In Maryland, though the act has added 300,000 voters to the rolls, turnout has seen no appreciable increase, said Tom Surock, the state election board's director of voter registration.
Surock said more Marylanders have registered, but turnout percentages have dropped. He said unofficial figures show that only 29 percent of the registered voters came out for last month's gubernatorial primary. In 1994, 40 percent voted in the primary.
"Of the 21.3 million [Americans] who reported that they registered, but did not vote in the 1996 election, more than one in five reported that they did not vote because they could not take time off work or school because they were too busy," said a U.S. Census Bureau survey.
Some 17 percent said they were "not interested or didn't care" about the elections; 15 percent said they were ill, disabled or had a family emergency; 13 percent did not prefer any of the candidates; 11 percent said they were out of town; 4 percent said they forgot to vote; 4 percent said they had no way to get to the polls; and 1 percent said the lines at the polls were too long. The remainder cited other reasons for not voting or declined to give a reason.
Donald F. Norris, a professor of policy studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, said the drop in voter participation "is not a good statement" about the health of the U.S. political system.
Nonvoting indicates that many Americans have lost faith in the government, Norris said, adding that nonvoters often believe that their votes don't count because the politicians don't listen to them. The people who vote tend to be driven by partisan politics and are more affluent and better educated than nonvoters.
Frederick L. Voigt, executive director of the Committee of 70, a watchdog group in Philadelphia, said television has changed campaigning for the worse.
"Television does not communicate ideas. Television communicates emotions," Voigt said. He added that candidates' ads are designed to push the "hot buttons" of the people most likely to vote for them. Consequently, the candidate's identification with a political party is not as important as how his or her personality clicks with potential voters via television.
Voigt pointed out that candidates are concerned only about energizing their constituencies, not the entire electorate. "It only takes 51 percent of the vote to win," he said.
Not everyone is convinced that nonvoting is a problem. Some academics and political commentators, such as George Will, maintain that nonvoters make as strong a statement as voters do. By staying away from the polls, they're saying they're happy with the status quo. The defenders of nonvoting maintain it's better to have a smaller number of well-educated voters than a high turnout with many ill-informed voters. Extremely high turnouts would make the political process too volatile, they argue.
Curtis Gans of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate disagrees with the notion that nonvoting poses no problems. He said voter participation was higher in bygone days, when people were more confident that life was improving and identification with the political parties was stronger. Today, cynicism prevails.
Gans said many Americans are also turned off by the shifting of the political parties. The Republicans, he said, have moved so far to the right that they've alienated voters who saw it as the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower and Rockefeller. The Democrats have recast themselves as advocates for the middle class, abandoning the poor and minorities.
Gans sees voting as "the lowest common denominator" in a democratic society. When citizens don't vote, they're less likely to do volunteer work or to participate in other activities that better society, he said.
In their book "Why Americans Don't Vote," Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward trace the historic roots of nonvoting. They point out that the United States was the first nation in the world where the franchise began to be widely distributed, a remarkable achievement.
"Everywhere in the West, the hopes of peasants, artisans, and the urban poor were fired by the essential democratic idea, the idea that if ordinary people had the right to participate in the selection of their state leaders, their grievances would be acted upon," Piven and Cloward write. "For just that reason, the propertied classes feared that the vote would give the 'poor and ignorant majority' the power to 'bring about a more equitable distribution of the good things of the world.' The right of ordinary people to vote was, in other words, sharply contested. However, the franchise was ceded earlier in the United States because the propertied classes had less ability to resist popular demands. The common men who had fought the Revolution were still armed and still insurgent. Moreover, the American elites were unprotected by the majesty and military forces of a traditional state apparatus."
Roots of nonvoting
Throughout the early 19th and 20th centuries, the right to vote was extended to more and more Americans - unpropertied white men, women and blacks. By the 1920s, though, voting by immigrants had dropped sharply in the North, and blacks and poor whites had been disenfranchised in the South.
Political machines had mobilized voters in the cities - particularly immigrants - producing "peak participation rates of about 80 percent in the presidential elections of 1876, 1888 and 1896," Piven and Cloward note. The political machines wielded enormous power because they controlled patronage jobs and other plums that generated voter support. The machines, however, were corrupt and fell victim to reform campaigns.
"The American South," by William J. Cooper Jr. of Louisiana State University and Thomas E. Terrill of the University of South Carolina, explains how Southern blacks and poor whites were disenfranchised.
In 1890, the Mississippi legislature called a constitutional convention to devise a plan to circumvent the 14th and 15th amendments, which gave blacks citizenship and the right to vote.
The legislators created the "Mississippi Plan," and it served as a model for other Southern states. Sen. James Z. George, the state's foremost political figure, said the constitutional convention met "to devise such measures, consistent with the Constitution of the United States as will enable us to maintain a home government, under the control of the white people of the state."
The plan created a $2 poll tax, a residency requirement, a requirement that all taxes must be paid two years before registration, and a literacy test that required registrants to interpret the state constitution.
Rise of Populists
The plan was aimed at blacks, but poor whites also were victimized. The disenfranchisement of both groups coincided with the rise of the Populists, a grass roots political party that challenged the feudalistic fabric of the antebellum South. The Populist agenda called for the secret ballot, government ownership of railroads and utilities, an end to monopolistic land ownership and a coalition that included farmers and laborers. The Populists ran white candidates but sought the support of black voters and gave blacks leadership roles in the party. Populism streaked like a meteor across the southern sky but disintegrated.
In Western Europe, a different pattern emerged.
"There the working classes were enfranchised at the beginning of the 20th century, and their enfranchisement led to the emergence of labor and social democratic parties that ultimately exerted considerable influence on the policies and political culture of their nations," Piven and Cloward write. "In the United States, the partial disenfranchisement of working people during
the same period helps explain why no comparable labor-based political party developed, and why public policy and political culture remained narrowly individualist and property-oriented."
One might presume from reading Piven and Cloward that nonvoting has become a tradition among poor, blue-collar and minority Americans because of the historic efforts to drive them away from the polls.
Thus, nonvoting is another symbol of the widening socioeconomic chasm between America's rich and poor. If the poor feel they have no stake in America, why should they vote?
And if the affluent go to the polls to vote for candidates who reflect their narrow interests, is the United States really a model for democracy?
The wish for kings
Gans maintains that nonvoting has turned the United States into a "weakened democracy," but a democracy nonetheless.
Roberto Michels, the socialist political scientist, would probably argue that nonvoting is another sign that the United States is an oligarchy - a government controlled by a few people or a dominant class.
Michels was born in Cologne in 1876 and as a young man participated in the German trade union movement. Later he formulated the "Iron Law of Oligarchy," which says that all democratic organizations evolve into oligarchies. This happens because organizations cannot be administered effectively unless a few people are empowered to make decisions.
Leaders emerge, and they tend to share power with people who have similar views. The rank and file become complacent and lose interest in the organizations, leaving the leaders to run them. Soon, the leadership positions are held by people who abandon the organization's ideals in favor of personal interest.
Lewis H. Lapham, the editor of Harper's Magazine, is a vocal proponent of the idea that the United States is an oligarchy. In his book "The Wish For Kings," published in 1993 by Grove Press, Lapham describes the United States as "a government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich." He maintains that by 1990, largely because of the Reagan administration's tax policies, "10 percent of the population held at least 70 percent of the nation's wealth, and 5 percent of the population owned all of the nation's capital assets."
Lapham writes: "Measured as a percentage of the population, the presiding oligarchy is small - probably not more than between 2 percent and 5 percent - but measured as an absolute number of ambitious and well-connected individuals, the oligarchy is large - possibly as many as 4 million people. I By and large, they are the people who manage the government, own the media and the banks, operate the universities, print the money and write the laws. I don't know why so many people fail to take PTC the point. Among the current advertisements for America the beautiful and America the good, none seems to me more ludicrous than the one that presents the United States as a classless society."
Lapham says Americans are smitten by a wish for kings, the wish for a benevolent monarch who can quiet our fears and answer our prayers.
Perhaps the wish for kings explains why so many Americans adored the Reagan years.
"Reagan taught the country that it wasn't necessary for a president to know anything about law, or foreign policy, or free speech, or trees, or black people, or whales. Government was a salesman's smile and a gift for phrase," Lapham writes.
Perhaps the wish for kings also explains why so many Americans don't vote and why so many of us adore Clinton, a likable but oversexed monarch running amok in the palace.
Clinton's popularity persists despite the fact that less than 25 percent of the eligible voters re-elected him in 1996. "He only lied about sex, and the economy is good," we tell ourselves. But can we really afford to have another president elected by a smaller turnout of so-called enlightened people? Or maybe we should just give up on democracy and openly embrace the Iron Law of Oligarchy, or even worse - the wish for kings.
Mike Adams is the editor of Perspective.
Pub Date: 10/11/98