Running Against Washington

Politicians accustomed to swimming in the relatively predictable shallows of the American voter's mood must now be thinking of it as a kind of Loch Ness. This year something is down there. Something unexamined, a different psychological species. An ancient coelacanth of conservatism? Or some entirely new breed? In this volatile, often surprising primary season, one thing is clear: there has been a fairly fundamental change in the way that Americans look at their leaders and Government.

The theme of repudiation runs strong--rejection of old faces and old methods. Many, if not most Americans --devout liberals as well as professed conservatives--now regard their Government as a huge, inefficient, tax-guzzling and somehow hostile presence. For a long while, of course, Americans have been in at least rhetorical revolt against Big Government, big bureaucracy and big programs. What is new is the success of the candidates who have grasped and stumped on this issue. Jimmy Carter's early runaway, Ronald Reagan's rebound and Jerry Brown's recent prominence can be credited at least as much to their appeal as non-Washington, untainted, somewhat iconoclastic candidates as to their substantive programs. Beaming at Brown, Barbara Mikulski, a candidate for Congress from Baltimore, said, "At the risk of sounding a little Buddhist myself, people are attracted by this new energy. I am too."

False Promises. There are three strains of the anti-Washington sentiment. One is the sense, building for a dozen years, that Washington has betrayed the people, dragging the nation through war and Watergate, CIA and FBI abuses and, to insult the injured, has consistently lied about it. Vanderbilt University Chancellor Alexander Heard puts it succinctly: "Washington is simply shorthand for the unsuccessful part of our past." Now, says Lawyer Charles Morgan Jr., an Alabama-bred civil libertarian, "any good outsider can beat the establishment of elitists whose interest is to keep the people in the dark."

Beyond the question of betrayal, Washington is seen as a failure, even though the Government has helped effect enormous social change in civil rights and other areas in the past decade. A Harris poll last week found that by overwhelming margins, Americans are willing to vote for a candidate who promises little more from Government than "to improve the quality of life." People are not so much against politicians--after all, Carter and Reagan are politicians--as they are suspicious of false promises and Government intervention in their lives and enterprises.

The New Deal-Great Society approach that led the nation to look to Washington for solutions is now in real--though sometimes unrealistic--disrepute. Nebraska's Democratic Governor J. James Exon echoes the new truism: "The candidate who can clearly spell out how to restrain Government and Government spending can win it all in 1976."

A third, related element is the astonishingly widespread conviction that Government meddles too much in Americans' lives, overregulating, intruding. At Dayton Malleable Inc., a large independent foundry company, President John Torley faces a frustrating dilemma. Says he: "The law says that in order to correct the noise problem, we are to supply earplugs or earmuffs, which we do. On the other hand, we have a lot of lift trucks that are required to have beeper alarms on them when they back up. And when you put earmuffs or earplugs on guys, they can't hear the beep, so you have an irreconcilable difference. The law doesn't tell you how to rationalize these things --they just tell you what you must do."

Out of Touch. Of course, notes Historian James MacGregor Burns, the people have always grumbled loudly at Government; back in 1932 Challenger Franklin Roosevelt attacked President Hoover's bureaucracy and big spending. But now the complaints are that the Government has lost contact with the people. Says Jack Spalding, editor of the Atlanta Journal: "It's not that the people are especially mad at Washington. Rather it is that Washington is so out of touch with the country. Those elitists up there are in orbit by themselves." Minneapolis Tribune Editor Charles Bailey feels that Washington fails to understand that a new self-confidence has developed in many communities, where people reckon that they can manage their own affairs.

Washington is seen as a sort of oblivious company town devoted more to its own perpetuation than to the interests of the country as a whole. Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk, now a University of Georgia professor, notes sadly that Washington (and the governments of Western Europe and Japan) "appear to be afraid of their own people. My mind goes back to Harry Truman. He had a fundamental confidence in the American people. He thought that at the grass roots the people would do what had to be done by the end of the day if they were told what to do and why it had to be done. Truman thought Americans were good people."

Somewhat contrarily, Americans still look to the Government for a vast array of services and would surely not tolerate reductions in many of them. Often they desire still more--nationwide health insurance, for example, and federally financed jobs. Moreover, Hubert Humphrey, who has spent a generation as a disciple of the big-spending New Deal religion, retains a wide following. Ted Kennedy, another Washington fixture, might have had the Democratic nomination if he wanted it.

Daniel Yankelovich, the public opinion analyst, finds a different emphasis: "What we're seeing is not a revolt against Washington and the Eastern establishment. It's simply that the fresh faces make sense." Despite the popularity of some incumbents, says Yankelovich, there is "an anti-incumbency mood, one that extends not only to the people in office but to the old ideas and styles, to almost everything that has been part of the kind of thinking associated with past problems." Rumbles Oregon Teamster Leader L.B. Day: "We're looking for someone with guts who will tell these galoots, 'Look, we've had it with people who lie and with people who spy.' We want Washington to get back to the way it once was."

Older Values. In various ways, Carter, Reagan, Brown--and Gerald Ford--promise to restore older and simpler values and return the Government to the people. Thus the emerging issue of the campaign may well be what Yankelovich calls the moral issue: the desire to restore a sense of purpose, trust, fairness, lawfulness and public responsibility to American life.

Americans seem to be on a cusp now: discontented about problems that Government has failed to solve and very much in the mood for change--and feeling hopeful about prospects for it. National surveys show a marked rise since last fall in the people's optimism and confidence in the nation. The recuperating economy seems to be restoring the nation's equilibrium; not so many months ago, oppressive inflation and deep recession haunted some Americans with Weimar visions of disaster. Equally important, new hopes are sprouting in the spring of campaign oratory, which holds out the prospects of new policies and, quite likely, new personalities. Perhaps the mood was summed up best not by the politicians, pollsters or pundits but by an IBM executive in Danbury, Conn., who wondered aloud: "Are we giving the country back to the people at last? I think so. I like what has happened in the primaries. The people are having their say again."

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