# The John Anderson Phenomenon **URL:** **By** Thomas Hazlett **Published:** August 1, 1980 --- “The other candidates were making small splashes too, and here and there a small wave.” The meteoric rise of John Anderson as a national presidential contender began very calmly in early December with a small splash in _Newsweek_ and the _Times of New York_ and _Los Angeles_. The other candidates were making small splashes too, and here and there a small wave. But John Anderson spilled right into “Doonesbury” and “Saturday Night Live”! By the second week in January CBS had begun saying how marvelous a fellow this Anderson was, but of course he didn’t have a chance because he wasn’t getting any publicity. After that, Anderson went on “Meet the Press” or one of those other Sunday interview shows and complained again that the media was ignoring him. And the _Washington Post_ and the _New York Times_ published editorials saying the same thing, and reporters reported this fact as news all around the nation. You couldn’t turn on the radio or television or pick up a magazine or newspaper without seeing or hearing or reading how strange and terrible a country it must be where an upfront, outtasight guy like John Anderson can’t get the coverage he needs to get his message out. By the time of his “60 Minutes” spot Anderson was getting so much coverage that he’d been forced to stop talking about how little coverage he was getting and begin addressing issues somewhat more general in scope. By springtime, even the members of the Fourth Estate had had to sheepishly take a half-beat pause and rest their Anderson trumpets. If they took a look around, they were doubtless surprised to find that there were still half a dozen other contenders for the throne. The fact of the matter is that the John Anderson phenomenon has relatively little to do with John Anderson. The Anderson campaign is actually the front page’s answer to NBC’s “Big Event.” It’s a smashing improvisational production that is playing to packed houses in fancy neighborhoods everywhere, and it boasts a script that’s a group effort of assorted city editors, political reporters, columnists, feature writers and editorialists around the nation. The opening scene goes like this: A pack of groveling hand-squeezers and child-touchers—all G.O.P. presidential aspirants—goes forth into the New Hampshire tundra in pursuit of the treasured “Big Mo” (political jive for “momentum”). They appear in a candidates’ panel before 2,000 citizen-activists of the Gun Owners of America, New Hampshire chapter. Reagan, Bush, Crane, Baker, Dole and Connally all cruise in with six-shooters smokin’: “You’ll get my gun when you pry it from my frozen, sticky fingers as I lie dead in the red snow” is the standard applause line. Ronald Reagan goes on to capture 1,900 of the 2,000 votes up for grabs (how’re you gonna ace a nationally prominent gunslinger on this one?) and the other five candidates split the remaining 100 votes. Then in walks St. John of Anderson. “I believe we should register all your guns, and take away your pistols” he says, with the air of a part-time Evangelical pastor (which, as it happens, he is). But not even connections with higher-ups can save him from this crowd. He doesn’t get one single vote! Okay, you’re the reporter. What do you report? If you’re Eleanor Randolph and John J. Goldman of the _Los Angeles Times_, you write your story under the front page headline, “Anderson’s Campaign: Saying the Unsayable.” If you are John B. Oakes you fill the _New York Times_ op-ed page with tribute to a “quintessential man of principle.” If you are the _Washington Star’s_ Garry Wills you point out that “Anderson did not help himself in electoral terms. He just proved that he is too good for this gaudy and not quite reputable trade.” If you’re Sally Quinn of the _Washington Post_, you describe Anderson as “right in there looking you in the eye, talking straight, telling you what he believes whether you like it or not.” If you’re James P. Gannon of the _Des Moines Sunday Register_, you describe him as “a silver-haired orator with a golden tongue, a 17-jewel mind, and a brass backbone ... a man of charm, grace and intellect whose Achilles heel is a passionate attachment to the issues and a willingness to argue his viewpoint when it would be shrewder to shut up.” But would it have been shrewder? John Anderson won not a single vote in New Hampshire, but he won the endorsements of the _New York Times_, the _Washington Post_, and just about every other journalist this side of Bill Buckley. It took John Anderson more than one year of intensive work to raise his first million dollars of campaign booty, but in the two weeks following his hallowed display of principle in New Hampshire, his campaign war chest took in more than another million in contributions. Talking gun control to the Gun Owners of America has proved an eminently profitable tactic for John Anderson—a fact which has not been lost on his campaign treasurer, though it certainly seems to have eluded the sophisticated analysts of the news media. But then, perhaps we should expect no better of them. After all, these same analysts have swallowed the seemingly unbelievable proposition that, as the Anderson campaign puts it, “The Time Has Come to Reject Old Ideas and Old Politics,” and to turn instead to the New Ideas and New Politics of John Anderson. In fact, the time is long past to reject old ideas and old politics, and that’s the best of all the many available reasons to reject John Anderson. See for yourself. Witness Anderson in prime form, one-on-one with _Playboy_: Anderson: I think there still are a heck of a lot of people out there who are tired of the same old approach, who would like someone to level with them and drop the old pizzazz and form a new coalition that— _Playboy_: Come on. That sounds just like Jimmy Carter in 1976, telling us he’d never tell a lie, that he’d always level with us. Anderson: Its funny, it does sound a little like Carter now that I think about it. It sounds more than a little like Carter; it sounds a lot like him. And the longer you look at Anderson, the more he resembles our born-again chief executive. To begin with, Anderson is also born-again—has been since he was nine. (He’s also been working since the days of tailfins to impose his religious beliefs on all the rest of us. In the Congresses of 1961, ‘63, and ‘65, he courageously called for a constitutional amendment to declare America “A Christian nation” and make Jesus Christ our legally recognized Saviour, to put our faith in the Almighty right in there next to our right to keep and bear arms.) And, like Carter, Anderson sees the American people as greedy sinners whose salvation lies in a “politics of sacrifice.” He views the Sunday drive, for example, as America’s Original Sin, and has indicated that as President he would shoot for a megatax on gasoline to shift us back toward Divine Compliance. So convinced of the evils of the internal combustion lifestyle is Brother John, in fact, that he unhesitatingly offers it as the root of all _other_ evil— especially inflation, recession, and our foreign policy woes. It has often been noted that nations with higher energy prices than ours and greater dependence on OPEC—Germany and Japan, for instance—are not in comparably pathetic shape as we all tumble into the 1980s. But this refutation does not refute Anderson’s thesis in the slightest, of course, for his is not a testable hypothesis. His politics spring not from the head but the viscera. They are based not on an analysis, but on a mood. For people in this mood, it seems obvious that no matter what our problem, sacrifice is the answer: big sacrifice, born-again sacrifice, sacrifice which involves “pain” and “discipline.” Anderson talks of “harsh truths” and of a future that “will require an element of sacrifice and discipline that we have not known in our society in many years.” He promises to whip our “wasteful” preference for the automobile with a 50 cent per gallon penalty. He tells us that we _can’t_ have the Kemp-Roth tax cut (which even _he_ thought was a helluva good idea back in 1978 when he faced a rough primary fight against a G.O.P. right-winger), that we’ve just got to start consuming less and saving more. But Anderson’s resemblance to Carter doesn’t stop with his religious beliefs and his Puritanical (if not actually Cromwellian) conception of lawmaking. He has endorsed the President’s grain embargo of the Soviet Union, a policy which will have virtually no impact on the Russians but which will guarantee some sacrificing by Midwestern farmers. He’s picked up Carter’s inspirational 1976 campaign cry, “Why Not the Best” (leaving out the question mark Carter had employed at the end of the phrase). And if any sacrifices have to be made, you can bet Anderson wants them made by American people, not by the politicians who “lead” them. He’s learned a valuable lesson in this regard from no less a formerly important man than Jerry Brown, the politician whom Anderson seems at times to resemble almost as strongly as he resembles President Carter. Nowadays Brown sits in Sacramento pondering his dizzying European nation has taxed gasoline at that rate or even higher. If the Federal Trade Commission were enforcing the fraud statutes for political claims the way they enforce them for Saturday morning cereal ads, the Anderson for President campaign (it actually calls itself “The National Unity Campaign”) would be up to its silver-haired orator in lawsuits. If Bristol-Meyers or Colgate-Palmolive attempted to pop “new and improved” on the package of a product which had been introduced in identical fashion only three years before by a competitor... well, we have a whole cadre of government prosecutors who lie awake nights just dreaming about the chance to move in on such a case. What excuse can our enlightened ladies and gentlemen of the Fourth Estate claim then, when the facts make the truth so obvious that even the candidate himself acknowledges it: we’ve heard this tune before? How can the media continue to believe that Mr. Anderson is playing a new song? What is probably the most important reason for the ongoing media infatuation with John Anderson is most clearly de-lineated in a recent book on a seemingly unrelated subject: Tom Wolfe’s orbit ‘round the Mercury Project, _The Right Stuff_. Wolfe spends considerable space in this book on the lengths to which our newspaper boys went two decades ago to build just the proper mood in America to exalt seven fighter-jet jocks (who were simply on their way to military pensions before the space program rocketed them before the news media) to the status of intergalactic heroes. A NASA news conference in Washington, D. C. introduced these seven young men to America back in 1959, before a single ounce of human flesh had been launched, and none other than the _New York Times_’s James Reston bubbled: “What made \[the astronauts\] so exciting was not that they said anything new but that they said all the old things with such fierce conviction.... They spoke of ‘duty’ and ‘faith’ and ‘country’ like Walt Whitman’s pioneers.... This is a pretty cynical town, but nobody went away from these young men scoffing at their courage and idealism.” Certainly, at any rate, nobody in the media. As Wolfe comments: “It was as if the press in America, for all its vaunted independence, were a great colonial animal, an animal made up of countless clustered organisms responding to a single nervous system. In the late 1950s (as in the late 1970s) the animal seemed determined that in all matters of national importance the _proper emotion_, the _seemly sentiment_, the _fitting moral tone_ should be established and should prevail; and all information that muddied the tone and weakened the feeling should simply be thrown down the memory hole. In a later period this impulse of the animal would take the form of blazing indignation about corruption, abuses of power, and even minor ethical lapses among public officials; here, in April of 1959, it took the form of a blazing patriotic passion for the seven test pilots who had volunteered to go into space. In either case, the animal’s fundamental concern remained the same; the public, the populace, the citizenry, must be provided with the _correct feelings!_” There can be little doubt that today’s “correct feeling” is that we must prepare for Less—a message which, so long as the Washington, D.C. suburbs continue their phenomenal real estate boom, must be respected for its accuracy, if not its pleasantness. It is, in fact, refreshingly frank by contrast with the once common boasts of government planning “experts” that we could look forward to a time of plenty with them at the helm. At least now the prediction has the direction of change in our economic development right. The “correct feeling” is also today, just as it was four years ago, that our half-century experiment with welfare state capitalism has led government support for nuclear power, “on a single nuclear vote... since 1970.” Anderson proposes to tax petroleum so heavily that it can no longer be profitably produced and sold, and then use the new tax revenues to subsidize technologies like nuclear, solar, and synfuel which are already unprofitable (especially for large scale electrical generation) under present economic and scientific conditions. Anderson also proposes new U.S. meddling in the affairs of Third World countries in order to secure our access to energy. He has said: “I propose establishing an Agency for International Energy Development to promote energy exploration and development in Third World non-OPEC nations.” Yet this kind of intervention is precisely what has led to instability and crisis in the Middle East. As _The New Republic_’s Henry Fairlie has pointed out, “this naked proposal for economic imperialism is rather old-fashioned.” But then, Anderson’s entire approach to foreign policy is old-fashioned. He portrays himself as “anti-Cold War,” but he recommends policies of exactly the kind which have fueled the Cold War from its inception. He has called for more U.S. involvement in the Middle East, for example, including military aid, and the formation of a “quick strike force” or “Rapid Mobilization Force” which could intervene quickly in the event of “trouble.” He has gone on record as believing that Soviet occupation of Iran or other countries on the Persian Gulf would require prompt U.S. action, “including potential use of force.” He voted for the neutron bomb and the B-1 bomber. He defended the U.S. decision to introduce theater nuclear weapons into Western Europe, and his campaign literature asserts that he “strongly support\[s\] an increased United States commitment to NATO.” (Considering that we already subsidize the defense of Western Europe to the tune of some $65 billion per year, directly and indirectly, this suggestion is nothing less than astonishing.) Anderson has denounced President Carter for “ignominiously backing down” during the phony crisis over the Soviet troops in Cuba. He has supported the President’s foolish response to the crisis in Afghanistan, his boycott of the Olympic Games, and has to so much trouble that a man literally on speaking terms with God may be called for. Close ties to heavenly bodies may be just what presidential candidate Anderson is banking on in a campaign of “new ideas” like his proposed “temporary” form of federal direction of the economy, because “we’re going to have to impose more discipline—a sense of economic planning in this country.” As for inflation, John says, “I’m beginning to think I would be willing to accept a \[wage and price\] freeze.” But he would have you know that he’s no statist. “I’m essentially a believer in the market system,” he boasts. A believer in the market system who proposes central economic planning and political control of wages and prices. A born again believer in “sacrifice,” “discipline” and self-denial who promises a new prosperity to the bureaucrats and regulators who profit from the self-denial of working class taxpayers. A peddler of “new ideas” which in fact are shamelessly borrowed from his opponents’ wastebaskets and couched in the trendy phrases which can be expected to impress the mass media. This, really, is all there is to John Anderson, “the quintessential man of principle,” the straight-talking, golden-tongued, brass-backboned “man of charm, grace and intellect” who has “proved that he is too good for \[the\] gaudy and not quite reputable trade” which we call American politics. □ Tom Hazlett currently divides his time between completing his Ph.D. thesis in economics at UCLA; writing for a number of magazines, including _Inquiry_, _Reason_ and _National Review_, as well as _LR_; and carrying out his regular duties as a staffer at the Los Angeles-based International Institute for Economic Research.