Single issue groups - 24 May 1996

Two weeks ago, you may remember I brought up a topic that Senator Dole – who is always called these days the presumptive Republican candidate – a topic that Mr Dole and his team had decided to set on fire and define as a burning issue. It was to revive the great Reagan plan of Star Wars, that immensely ambitious programme of surrounding the United States with a protective of satellites that would pinpoint and shoot down with lasers, all incoming ballistic missiles.

I wouldn't really have brought this up if I wasn't able to report that Mr Dole's bill to start work on that shield, by asking for another five billions, the bill has gone kerplunk. First the military, the whole body of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said they were against it. But much worse was to follow. Senator Dole had to put up with an ordeal that is routine once you've composed a bill: the opposition usually, always if it doesn't like your bill, requests from a famous quango, an estimate of the bill, is going to cost. The reference authority is the Congressional Budget Office, which is an independent non–party body that gives its own estimate of any bill that's pending. Well the CBO came through with an estimate on Mr Dole's gallant laser defence bill. It would not, they said, cost five billion more dollars, but 60 billions to build and heaven knows how many more billions to operate.

Imagine, the secret joy with which the president and his aides heard that the Republicans in the House, who'd arranged a vote on the bill to be taken this past Thursday, were called to meet on Tuesday night to decide how to deal with the Congressional Budget Office's estimate of what Senator Dole had called, "a highly effective anti–missile system."

Well they cancelled Thursday vote and announced they would bring it up again after quote, "shoring up political support." You want to bet we'll ever hear of it again? The next day President Clinton was addressing graduation exercises at the United States Coast Guard Academy, needless to say he smacked his lips over the Republican retreat. They would, he moaned, have forced us to choose now a very costly defence system that could be obsolete tomorrow. The cadets applauded. Well there's one issue that's no longer an issue, certainly through the five months or more to the election.

Two correspondents from different ends of the earth ask a question that plagues all American elections – I don't know about your elections – and bugs candidates into distraction. What, an Australian and a Scot want to know, is a single issue constituency? Sounds heavy and abstract and dull, it is in fact what gives passion and mischief and bigotry to any cause.

You could begin by saying that everyone running in this country for the House of Representatives is usually a single issue candidate. He/she is only going to be in there for two years and usually has to campaign on the one grievance that more than another agitates its constituents: the need for a new farm subsidy for a favourite crop, in a heavily manufacturing state say, a new law for the better protection of factory workers. In the Carolinas just now, you can imagine with the tobacco industry under siege from several quarters, the people running for Congress from those states are first and last taking a stand to convince the tobacco farmers and graders and curers and packers and shippers that they're not going to loose their jobs. In South and North Carolina alone, there are I believe about 200,000 people engaged in the tobacco industry. There is a painfully literal example of single issue candidates and a single issue constituency.

But the phrase is used in a far wider sense and one more threatening to presidential candidates when you look over America as a whole and identify as a constituency, the people who organise as a national body in pursuit of a single cause. On crime for instance, people who approve the death penalty, and the ones who don't. On abortion, the pro-life organisation and the pro-choice people, both groups are represented by enormous numbers across the whole country. And any presidential candidate has to think twice or thrice and weigh the cost in votes of taking a firm stand one way or the other. Because it is a provable fact, after an election usually, that people who feel strongly on one issue tend, however civilised, however liberally minded, however educated, tend to let that issue override all others and dictate their presidential vote.

As much so, probably more so, with the homosexual vote. Now a recent national survey has reported that only two per cent of Americans identify themselves as gay, have come out of the closet. If that's all, I must say they've made an immense public to-do about it. I believe though, that the very effort of confessing as a creditable way of life, what was for so long thought as the sin that dare not speak its name, makes the true numbers much larger. But even if they're four, five per cent they could represent, scattered throughout the states, the difference in close elections. For breathes there a homosexual with soul so magnanimous, who would vote for a candidate who is against gay rights but is sympathetic to other concerns of theirs?

So many of these causes have such large national constituencies, the Christian right for instance, in many differently named subgroups that any candidate, however idealistic, however dogmatic, in private, has to run his campaign with one overriding aim: whatever he says in public his campaign is about, his aim is to alienate – especially in crucial states with decisive votes – to alienate as few groups, as few single issue voters as possible.

Hence, both candidates appear to dither on some issues because they know that a positive stand could, at once, lose a couple of million votes. For instance, every candidate for public office in this country knows that unless radical cuts are made in the Medicare budget – that's the free healthcare system for everyone over 65 – five, ten years from now, the only way to keep it going at all will be to impose massive taxes on the young, the younger. But neither presidential candidate dares abolish our drastically reform Medicare because there are proportionately more old folks who are voters than ever before.

Now this week, a decision of the Supreme Court and a warning bell from Hawaii, has suddenly brought hot onto the griddle two issues about homosexuality. The western state of Colorado had put into its state constitution, after a public referendum, a law that forbade the usual civil rights protections for homosexuals. It went eventually to the United States Supreme Court, which this week, by six to three said no state could single out a solitary class and deny to its members the famous equal protection of the laws clause of the US Constitution. Other states and many cities are planning similar exclusion laws and are likely to meet a similar fate. And then President Clinton, foreseeing trouble from Hawaii on the same front, made a startling announcement. First let me say what is, with, as Shakespeare said, with Hawaii. The state appears to be on the verge of passing a law that would legalise the marriage of people of the same sex. If it passed, an injunction in the United States Constitution calls on all other states to give due faith and credence to that law.

Now everybody on the mainland has seen this coming and in order to anticipate a flurry of same sex marriages in mainland states and the consequence stampede of appeals through state courts, President Clinton, a strong supporter of civil rights for gays, jumped in before Mr Dole and announced that if Congress, anticipating the Hawaii initiative, if Congress passed a bill which bans national recognition of same sex marriages, he would promptly sign it.

Thus, as with the Star Wars revival, he has trumped Mr Dole on what might have become a contentious issue. Of course, he's going to lose a lot of gay votes, but since according the polls the number of Americans who sigh with relief over the likely banning everywhere of gay marriages, outnumber the Americans who groan with grief by about 20 to one. That's one single issue constituency that the president can afford to split, or loose altogether.

He must have given a passing thought to California in general and San Francisco in particular. California he must win in November and he's out there month after month speaking adroitly on both sides of all their concerns. San Francisco has a neighbourhood, a single issue constituency if ever there was one: a 120,000 homosexuals who live mostly in a compact neighbourhood. But on second thought San Francisco is such a dependably liberal democratic town that even if every voting homosexual comes out for Dole, a very unlikely alternative, Mr Clinton would go romping home in northern California at least. So on same sex marriage, he can afford to be brave and bold on the side of 80 per cent of the population.

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