YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION---YOU KNOW WE ALL WANT TO CHANGE THE WORLD---Episode 4

     MORE RECENT EXAMPLES OF THE KIND OF PUBLIC            OUTRAGE THAT MIGHT SPUR A REVOLUTION ---cont

Of Bill Clinton's Democratic 1992 primary opponents, Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas talked of competitiveness, exaggerating that "the cold war is over---Japan and Germany won." Former California governor Jerry Brown blistered the elite, charging that, "The ruling class has lost touch with the American people. They have lost touch because they float in a world of privilege, power, and wealth." Clinton himself was said to have become furious after reading a New York Times analysis that the top 1 percent had received over half of the additional income generated in the United States between 1977 and 1989.

The race between Clinton, Perot,and Bush sparked a five-point jump in the percentage of eligible-age Americans voting --- up to 55 percent in 1992 from a meager 50 percent in 1988. At least temporarily, this suspended the argument that nonvoters had become the nation's most important party as turnout kept sinking among low and middle-income Americans whose previous inclinations, at least, had been Democratic. But in 1996,when Perot had become old hat, turnout dropped back to 50 percent. 

Clinton's first years in office seemed to worsen the disillusionment. He retracted his middle-income tax-cut promise and, by 1994, the scandals touching the White House and his personal life together with ongoing weakness in the economy --- median household income was stagnant --- made him an albatross for Democrats in midterm elections. "Washington" itself by this point had become a focus of public contempt, with trust in the capital gang dropping to record (19 percent) lows.  Some 57 percent told pollsters that "lobbyists and special interests" controlled Washington, not the president or Congress. In 1993, polling for the Boston-based Americans Talk Issues Foundation reported the citizenry so contemptuous of Congress that one-third of those sampled thought the offices might as well be auctioned to the highest bidders. Half thought Congress could be chosen randomly from a list of eligible voters. The emergence of rightwing "militias" in states from Michigan to Montana was still another sign of popular frustration.

Middle American Radicalism had one more late -twentieth- century moment in the sun. As popular insurgent Buchanan beat the eventual nominee,Senator Robert Dole, in the 1996 Republican primary in New Hampshire, one issue caught hold --- Buchanan's appeal to the middle class with criticism of corporate chieftains whose pay had risen to two hundred times that of workers. Even Dole started speaking about "greedy CEOs" and Clinton called together a hundred of them to discuss the matter. But as left-leaning Mother Jones magazine said a half year later, "after Pat Buchanan shocked the political establishment by prying open the Pandora's box of slow growth,wage stagnation, globalization, and increasing inequality, the lid is back on." After New Hampshire, Buchanan faded, and although Dole and some Republicans made off-and-on comments about how median family income had stagnated in 1993-94 while male earnings had continued to fall, their counterpoint hardly mattered. By mid-1996 the economy in general and the stock market in particular were visibly on the rise.