AMERICA'S MESSAGE

By Roger Rosenblatt

Democracy may not prove more durable than other forms of popular persuasion, but it is more fun to watch. When someone casts a vote, for instance, he thinks he is doing one thing, is told by the experts he is doing another, and history decides he has accomplished a third. The fascination for the voter lies in functioning simultaneously as the individual and the mass, in pulling the lever for the candidate who will presumably do him the most good, then discovering his vote is part of a trend, which suggests in turn that everyone carries within his precious encasement a national consciousness, a common sense.

So we turn to the bone fossils of last week's off-year election, shocked to learn that while you Alaskans were voting in Governor Bill Sheffield because his opponent Tom Fink wanted to cart the state capital from Juneau to Willow, and while you New Yorkers were voting out Congressman John LeBoutillier because he gave you the creeps, all of you were also sending Ronald Reagan "a message." The message read: reduce unemployment, bring down the deficit. The President was being told what practically all U.S. Presidents are told two years after their chiefdom is hailed: no mandate is forever. In presidential elections one votes for the sky. In off-year elections one looks at the street.

This minor truism was handed the Democrats as well. Twenty-six new seats in the House is fine, but not as heartening as 40 or 50 would have been, and a wash in the Senate is plain discouraging. Despite Tip O'Neill's pro forma yawp that the G.O.P. loss was "disastrous," it wasn't. The Democrats (and moderate Republicans) have simply been given more rope with which to hold the President in check, not to hang themselves or the nation. Profligate Government spending looks no more attractive today than it did two years ago. And the Republicans have been told that yes, there is some patience left for Reaganomics, but 1) that patience is not infinite, 2) it does not extend to far-right menaces, 3) it does not imply that Americans will drown the unemployed in order to stay the course.

In retrospect, items 2 and 3 should be especially gratifying for a people who spend so much time worrying about the quality of their collective character. Two years ago, the President's victory seemed to beckon every junior demagogue from his cave and crevice. Oh, the seething and panting of the NCPAC hit squads, the rough stuff of Jesse Helms. No more. Hardly a "right-wing kook," as they are dangerously dismissed, won national election last week. Neither, for that matter, did a left-wing kook. Wherever else the body politic has wandered lately, it seems now to wish to congregate at the center, and if the center has shifted to the right, the new centrists are still a long way from looking to the wild men for guidance.

As for the down and out-of-work, there can be little doubt as to the country's feelings in voting as it did last week. A jobless rate of 10% is simply too high to accept for long. The figure is not merely beyond the toleration of the unemployed, but of the employed as well, the majority who for the moment are enjoying lower taxes and slower inflation. The fact is that many of the haves in this election were voting for the havenots. A vote like that is never solely practical.

How much of these decisions is conscious, no exit polls disclose. Political analysts have long proved it is de rigueur to shake up the parties in power, so in a sense this election was merely traditional, and in any case, a voter's mind is as often impelled by intuition as by will. Yet whenever that intuition seems to operate as part of a whole, one sees that nations do, after all, bear some relationship to human nature. Like the girl of the song, last week's electorate didn't say yes and it didn't say no. Nor did it say Democrat or Republican. What it did say is that after two years of whoops, recriminations and a lot of empty ideological howling, we are ready to see what this Administration can do under the normal constraints of caution and conscience. Most people live with such constraints, and in off-year elections we vote the way we live. --By Roger Rosenblatt

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