George Will Looks at the State of the Nation
THE NEW SEASON A Spectator's Guide to the 1988 Election By George F. Will Simon and Schuster. 223 pp. $17.95</br></br>IN THESE four essays, George F. Will, political commentator and Chicago Cub loyalist, provides an elegant intellectual context for the forthcoming presidential campaign. His approach to politics is much the same as to baseball: "Politics is not everything, but it is something. It is something good, and agreeable, and fun, and serious."</br></br>In this civilized spirit, Will deprecates excessive passion and takes the long view. Quoting Earl Weaver, the former manager of the Baltimore Orioles who said: "This ain't a football game. We do this every day." Will adds: "Baseball's best teams lose about sixty-five times a season. It is not game you can play with your teeth clenched."</br></br>I am not sure I agree. As a Boston Red Sox man, a condition only a shade less masochistic than being a Cub fan, I found my teeth clenched frequently during the 1986 World Series. Many Democrats, whose party has lost four of the last five presidential elections, may also find it more difficult to stay as loose and amiable as Will, whose benevolence toward Ronald Reagan and the Grand Old Party is well-known. This book is dedicated to former U.S. senator Gordon Allott of Colorado, for whom Will once toiled as a young legislative assistant. Allott was first elected to the Senate by means of a nasty bit of red-baiting in 1954, a year when Richard Nixon was working his anti-communist hustle in the mountain states. Allott, a basically decent if uninspired conservative, was always slightly embarrassed by the dingy circumstances surrounding his first election. Suitably enough, he disappeared from the Senate in 1972, partly because Nixon in that year of the China visit and the Moscow summit (and Watergate) was so grand that he did not deign to campaign for anyone, not even himself.</br></br>There is no gross partisanship in Will's comments, and there is much good sense and even wisdom. Will is a conservative in the school of Edmund Burke. He recognizes that government is necessary, respects tradition and has a skeptical if not pessimistic view of what human beings can accomplish to change the human condition. He rightly chastises Reagan for frequently citing Thomas Paine's most un-conservative thought that we can make the world anew. In short, Will is not a libertarian or a radical right-winger who believes that a revival of the gold standard or one more giant tax cut will usher in utopia.