About the Election

There is something fundamentally wrong in the country, and the country knows it. It is not that families sit around the dinner table talking about deindustrialization and federal deficits and the new underclass. It is rather that people feel what is wrong in their daily lives. They feel it in supermarket parking lots where Toyotas outnumber Chevrolets. They feel it in cities where they pass the homeless sleeping in doorways. They feel it in suburbs where second salaries are cut in half by the cost of day care.

It is a feeling that the Republicans are trying to deny, and it may well cost them in 1988. The GOP may be able to explain the Crash of ’87 as a necessary correction in the stock market and Irangate as a diplomatic ini...