December 07, 2000|By Susan Baer | Susan Baer,SUN NATIONAL STAFF
WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON- From an electorate that produced a virtual stalemate at the presidential and congressional levels to the U.S. Supreme Court that failed to find unanimity on the election query it had been asked to decide, the country has split down the middle at every turn.
Viewed through the prism of the continuing 2000 election, the nation thus appears to be profoundly divided. But the numbers that point to sharp polarization may actually reflect a different, paradoxical political landscape.
The nation, in fact, has rarely been as unified, or as bunched together in the middle of the road, as it is now, many political and sociological analysts say. And in the absence of any critical foreign policy or economic issues confronting the country, the so-called "cultural" debate over social issues such as abortion - only marginally addressed through policy and politics - has emerged as the most notable fault line in American politics.
"We're divided because we're so undivided," says Rutgers University political science professor Benjamin Barber. "This period is defined by a peculiar kind of harmony."
Throughout the neck-and-neck presidential campaign, there was little fervor for the candidates or the issues, few raised voices and, except on the fringes, more apathy than anger. In this time of relative peace and prosperity at home, there are no burning issues - no war, no riveting civil rights debate, no economic crisis - to stir passions. Instead, the most heated debate was over whose prescription drug plan was better or how to best spend the budget surplus.
Even now, the historic epilogue to this election has unfolded with little chaos or sense of crisis or urgency - or even intense interest - from the public.
"People are mad at each other, but it's over whether you count chads or not, nothing substantive," says Francis Fukuyama, a professor of public policy at George Mason University. "Substantively, people are probably closer to each other on most issues than they have been for some time."
Barber says this dearth of any searing issues dividing the country has resulted in a public that is relatively blasM-i about the continued uncertainty of the presidential race.
"Other countries don't understand it," he says. "They wonder when people are going to start shooting each other in the streets."
Far from a polarized country, the public seems so attracted to the center these days that the candidates on the left and right flanks, Green Party candidate Ralph Nader and Reform Party candidate Patrick Buchanan respectively, garnered barely 3 percent of the vote between them.
Both Al Gore and George W. Bush were well aware of that fact as they vied for center stage. In fact, the closeness of the vote reflects what public opinion analyst Tom W. Smith calls "a triumph of information."
That is, the political strategists did such a superb job of collecting information about the electorate - through surveys and focus groups and demographic studies - that they figured out exactly how to position their candidates to win 50 percent of the vote plus one.
"They made the calculation extremely accurately," says Smith, director of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. "The campaigns were so sophisticated at identifying how to get the middle voters that they ended up splitting the middle."
Although there have been moments and issues of great division in this country - the Vietnam War and civil rights top the list in the last half-century - the nation's politics have long played out around the middle regardless of who has been in office.
"Between two 40-yard lines," says George Washington University political scientist Lee Sigelman, "with not that much action on either end of the field."
But standing in contrast to an increasingly weak sense of partisanship within the electorate, the nation's political institutions and parties are rife with sharp and bitter divides, Harvard political scientist Michael J. Sandel says.
In fact, he says the voters' near perfect split in this election "does not reflect deeply held partisan beliefs, but reflects an ambivalence about partisan solutions and impatience with partisanship itself."
Ironically, the close vote has only intensified the very partisan clashes the public deplores.
"It's a besetting dilemma of American politics," Sandel says.
As traditional dividing lines between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives - such as welfare and crime, foreign policy and economics - have blurred, the "cultural war" over issues surrounding sex, family and abortion has remained the most distinctive fissure within the electorate.
"What is forming in the U.S. are two very different communities with moral principles that are incompatible," says Patrick Fagan, a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "Neither presidential candidate wanted to make those principles a high-profile issue, yet people were aware of it."
