This article ran in the Tallahassee Democrat on October 27, 1996.

The Clinton-Dole race is the first presidential campaign since 1968 in which the voters have not been encouraged to relive the symbolic and cultural antagonisms produced by the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and the student counterculture.. Part of the reason is that Bob Dole, until the final few weeks, refused to pursue victory by dividing the nation. But without the cultural debate the GOP campaign has wandered aimlessly. As a result, Bob Dole's dutiful march to the November election will be considered a more minor footnote to the history of 1996 than the introduction of the macarena.

Stung by this realization, Republican leaders are now trembling in their eagerness to reinvigorate the cultural war for future elections. They need it. Already by the end of the 1960s Republicans understood that they could gain electoral power if the cultural struggle, between student activists and civil rights workers on one side, and middle America on the other, began to inject itself regularly into presidential campaigns. GOP advisors such as Kevin Phillips and Patrick Buchanan realized that these animosities would be played out more in the symbolic than the economic realm.

So in past decades, in elections for the White House and Congress, Republicans have paraded such symbolic issues as national defense (because the New Left was against the Vietnam War), prayer in the schools (to offset a godless countercultural ethic), opposition to gun control (to curb the 1960s liberal peace impulse), a flag-burning amendment (to battle the insufficient patriotism of the 1960s), and opposition to welfare mothers, immigrants and beneficiaries of affirmative action (who Republicans portrayed as the constituency of the 1960s liberals).

It has been a savvy strategy for the GOP, because from the beginning the young Democratic activists (labeled the New Politics) didn't have a large constituency. In simple terms, the New Politics coalition was constructed out of the upper-middle class white liberals and the lower-class minorities and disenfranchised. But this coalition didn't add up to enough to defeat the Republican constituency it faced: a combination of the conservative working class, the business community, and the conservative, middle-American Silent Majority.

As early as 1968 the Democratic candidacies of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy pulled young reformist activists into the political sphere. Four years later those same New Politics forces were led by Democratic nominee George McGovern's attempt to unseat Richard Nixon and his Silent Majority constituency. Since McGovern's loss it has been easy for Republicans to paint all Democrats as heirs of the counterculture--from Jerry Brown to Jesse Jackson, from Walter Mondale to Michael Dukakis.

Reagan, who had made a career of disparaging the student radicals and environmentalists when Governor of California, was the perfect leader of the cultural war against the Democrats in the 1980s. The cultural struggle did not abate after Reagan. In the 1988 contest against Dukakis, the Bush forces campaigned on symbolic issues such as whether it should be constitutionally illegal to burn the flag. Again in 1992, in the race against Clinton, the Bush forces sent Vice President Dan Quayle to warn that the campaign was a war between traditional values and a "cultural elite" who mocked families, religion, and patriotism. "The changes in our culture in recent decades," Quayle reported, have "created a cultural divide in our country."

But for the first time in the memory of most voters, the GOP's cultural strategy failed in 1992--because the Democrats finally devised a strategy to sidestep those cultural accusations. Clinton and others had formed a group called the Democratic Leadership Council to carve out a moderate political agenda that wouldn't be able to be attacked easily as soft-headed cultural liberalism. A centrist Clinton was a difficult target for the GOP's cultural cannon.

Still, the GOP did not abandon the strategy. After the Republican Congressional victory in November 1994, Newt Gingrich told the New York Times that the Clinton White House was staffed by McGoverniks. Perhaps, GOP leaders thought, Clinton could be wounded by a cultural battle in 1996 as he had not been earlier. But with the choice of Dole as their nominee this year--and Dole's refusal, until the final weeks, to set Americans against each other--that hope was dashed. Republican howls of frustration and outrage can already be heard in the autumn wind.

The party regulars now have as much affection for Dole as for Madonna. Preparation is beginning for a renewed move into symbolic issues, and Jack Kemp probably won't be the Moses to lead that journey. As Frank Rich noted in the New York Times recently, there has already been an anxious rustling heard among that group of GOP cultural visionaries that includes Pat Robertson, Robert Bork, William Bennett, and Ralph Reed. And Quayle is again lending his prestige to the cultural denunciations.

Even formerly composed Republican conservatives such as George Will are wringing their hands about the anemic cultural war. Earlier this month Will fretted about Dole's "unease with cultural questions" and the nominee's conversations with the insufficiently fiery George Bush. Kemp's avoidance of "divisive issues" such as affirmative action and abortion, Will bleated, cast doubt on the moral leadership of the Republican party.

The quiet softening of divisive tensions recently in American politics, like a peaceful and silent breath of air before dawn, will not last. Enjoy the tranquility while you can. Renewed cultural hostilities are around the next corner.