Mr. Smith Comes to Harvard

I saw the future of politics last week. His name is Bruce Babbit, and he will lose the Democratic nomination for President in 1992.

Make no mistake about it, Babbit is now biding his time, preparing to make a run for the Oval Office the next time he gets a chance. His speech at the Kennedy School was full of goodnatured self-effacing humor about his poor showing in 1988. Babbit told the story about and eager supporter who informed the former Arizona governor that the only problem was that by the time she knew who he was, he was out of the race.

In an age of hypocrisy and partisanbased sniping, Babbit took unusual stances for a politician--as when in 1988 he stood out from among the droves of Democratic dwarfs early in the campaign by standing up for a tax raise.

Babbit, for one, called for the end of the Presidential primary system that gives the conservative votes of the state to our immediate north incredible clout. Opposition to this unrepresentative method of electing our presidents is a position advocated by everyone concerned with politics--everyone, that is, except for those who ever hope to become president.

He also threw a well-deserved barb at House Speaker Jim Wright for the manifest ethics problems which soon will engulf him and the rest of the Democratic leadership of the House. Opposition to Wright is advocated by everyone concerned about ethics--everyone, that is, except for anyone who hopes to rise within the Democratic Party.

But there is method to Babbit's apparent madness. He is in the process of honing a straight-talking image, something sure to play well after eight years of Reagan and the recent campaign of George "Read My Lips" Bush and his spate of media advisers. (This plain campaign style could help Rudy Giuliani, the well-known former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, become the city's next mayor.)

BABBIT is a smart, thoughtful, articulate politician. Even so, during his speech entitled, "The End of Idealism," I couldn't get the picture out of my head of Jimmy Stewart as the Mr. Smith who went to Washington. The particular comparison with Stewart I would make was more like the famed actor's stump speech after the sequel, Mr. Smith Goes to the White House, which didn't do well at the box office. (As it turns out, unfortunately for this prissy good-government scenario, Babbit is now a Capitol Hill lobbyist for a group of healthy savings and loans institutions.)

What I saw was an aw-shucks style, enhanced by Babbit's drawl and the way he would summarize a complicated point by explaining exuberantly, "don't ya see..."

In this guise Babbit eloquently pleaded for a more caring American government--pointing out the poignant irony of Chileans who care more about the franchise than Americans jaded by protected freedoms; of a Japanese economy that innovates better than the great original innovating, entrepreneurial power, of Paraguayans who recognize the centrality of human rights more than Americans did under Reagan. He used the success of America's principles in the world to show our own lapses. It was powerful rhetoric, if necessarily incomplete.

You see, one of Babbit's prime criticisms of President Bush (somehow that expression still sticks in the throat) was that he was traveling around the world, by-passing the problems in the U.S. of A. Thus Babbit also had to discuss domestic issues, not the world's acceptance of "American values," as he put it.

SO, Babbit related his experience of standing in line with his young son at a shelter for the homeless. When they encountered a 12-year-old kid by himself, the son turned to Babbit in amazement. His basic ideals about his nation had been shattered. The solution for the father-son duo was to return to those basic ideas, in the form of the Lincoln Memorial, which Babbit explained in Stewartesque cadence, "isn't a memorial, it's a shrine." They read the Gettysburg Address together, and psychically restored by the words of a president who had lost many elections before the final triumph, the elder Babbit went off to do political battle.

The problem, alas, is that the Lincoln Memorial is not an ideal, it is a cliche. It was cliched when Frank Capra had the wide-eyed Mr. Smith prevented from seeing the corruption all around him in the Senate by being taken on a tour of the Capitol where he fawned over the same memorial. It is cliched today.

Babbit will be a crucial figure in waking America up from the years of wayward leadership. He will say things that need to be said--and I don't think that will cost him an election in the future. But for the troubles confronting America, we will need a new brand of idealism--a purpose able to unite a country never before so divided along issues of race and class. Such a solution would be so tied into today's problems that it would leave Mr. Smith, crumpled hat held off to his side, scratching his head in amazement.