A Candidate with a Vision

Hard as it is to take, the reason that none of the presidential candidates is . espousing a vision of America's future may be that there is no vision of America's future to be espoused. Citizen complaints suggest otherwise; if there is a general grousing point about the current 13, it is that much of the time they sound like tinkers or social science teachers, including candidates like Paul Simon and Pat Robertson from whom, for quite different reasons, the public might expect the expression of some grand comprehensive picture of national prospects. But, in fact, by speaking practically, the candidates may be doing all that is possible and advisable. Bruce Babbitt asks voters to stand up, literally, for economy-curing taxes. Robert Dole mocks "the v word." The closest any candidate comes to articulating a vision is when he calls upon America's compassion for the needy, but such calls seem meant to indicate that the candidate is warmhearted, and not, as Martin Luther King Jr. would have said, that he has a dream today.

One can pin the omission of a sweeping vision on the disinclinations of this particular batch of candidates, but the whole expectation of a national vision may be misplaced, as Charles Krauthammer suggested in a recent column, and it is worth considering why. Of use in certain industries is the phrase "mature product," customarily employed by a realist to deflate an optimist. The optimist will say that such-and-such commodity, although long on the market with a steady rate of buyers, still has a growth capacity in the millions. The realist will counter that the commodity is in fact a "mature product," and if it tries to overextend its natural reach, it will either flop, twist itself out of shape, or both.

Is America in 1988 a mature product? That is: Has it reached certain stations of progress to which dreamy visions are simply inapplicable? I am far from suggesting that the country has arrived at perfection, only that its most serious problems have attained stages of growth where no single comprehensive view may intelligently embrace them. Vision these days may be the modern equivalent of the prairie; it is what an empire looks for when it wishes to recall the thrill of expansion, and yet has no place to expand.

But look around and note the saturation points. American farming, which took so steep a tumble in the early 1980s, has recovered lately but only to a level where the surviving farmers look toward anxious stability, not flush times. Good news for American farmers and bad news factor each other out continually. Exports are rising, but the price of corn, for instance, is less than half what it was in 1982, and wheat has fallen 33% since 1980. The Wall Street Journal described the farm issue in a Jan. 8 headline: WHAT WAS A CRISIS BECOMES ONLY A PROBLEM. For every farmer unable to pay his debts, three or four others can actually buy more acreage. Debt delinquencies are lower, but so is the price of farmland, except in areas where developers want in. The entire farm economy operates as if in a vast container, a silo; and since places like Iowa rely so heavily on Washington subsidies, you can be sure that for the near future, a small improvement is as good as life will get.