Pundits Crystal Ball: No One Can Win in ’96

Thanks to the wisdom of the pundits, one can know the outcome of the 1996 presidential election 10 months early. A preliminary hint: Voters are wasting their time.

As the candidates kick off three solid months of primary campaigns—very-early primaries, earlier-than-thou primaries and who’s-on-first party caucuses preceded by highly consequential and rigged party straw votes — followed by five months of history’s most extensive final election orgy culminating in November, one might wonder how it all is going to come out.

Here at Punditry Central, the task is to examine the predictions, polling and pandering of the nation’s most the winner of the 1996 presidential election will be … nobody. And by a landslide.

There is, however, still an outside hope that Homer P. Hickenlooper, about whom little has been heard heretofore, will be elected in a surprise squeaker — engineered by us pundits. Careful analysis shows, first, that Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, the Republican front-stumbler, cannot possibly win. The reason is that Dole is too busy serving as a word (usually a verb or adjective) to campaign seriously. The word Dole has three definitions:

1. “To Dole” – to employ one’s famous bitter wit in a way that simultaneously skewers an opponent and oneself (as in, “Boy, I sure Doled him! Oops! I Doled myself, too!”). This political knack has been hidden recently, usually behind the handy nearby facade of House Speaker Newt Gingrich
2. “To Dole out” – to assist influential Kansas constituents with their Washington errands (as in, you’re in town, can I Dole out a crop subsidy or something for you?”).
3. “Doleful” — a recent reincarnation, wherein soporific calls to duty replace sarcasm and log-rolling, perversely causing opinion polls to sink under prospects of balanced budgets as far as the eye can see.

So ol’ Bob Dole, 73, is finished, never to be heard from again, except maybe from the inaugural stand in January 1997.

Not much more can be said for Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, the candidate whose style is premised on the belief that people so loved listening to Jimmy Cahtuh’s Southern accent for four years and are so enamored of President Clinton’s Arkansas argot that they pine now for a Texas drawl that is mushier than either’s. Gramm bases his substantive appeal on making Dole look feeble in his budget-slashing, constantly raising the goal on any cutback the majority leader proposes. Cheering this on is an ardent claque, mostly from Dixie, known as Gramm crackers. Unfortunately, voters aren’t buying this bland cookie. Pundits know that Gramm could not even get elected senator. (What? He already did?)

Pat Buchanan, of course, is finished before he really begins. It is safe to say that his 1996 campaign peaked (or piqued) at the Republican Convention of 1992.

Lamar Alexander is the world’s first stuffed logging shirt. He doesn’t have a prayer either, if you will pardon an allusion to a perennial campaign issue. However, he is beginning to gain ground in New Hampshire now that cold weather has set in and he no longer looks like such a dweeb walking up and down highways in the same flannel getup day after day. The former Tennessee governor, University of Tennessee president, and secretary of education is running–er, walking–as the consummate outsider. This is just not selling, for some reason. His only chance now is a big victory in Oregon, where he is backed heavily by the Pendleton Shirt Co.

Arlen Specter? A political specter. Bob Dornan? Dormant. Alan Keyes? Oh puleease!

Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana is no Hoosier hooter, but a candidate painfully committed to irrelevancies such as the idea that America should have a foreign policy. However, aides recently persuaded him, as chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, to stake his presidential race on the make-or-break question of whether school-lunch money should be administered through the federal government or the states. (Lugar likes the federal grub better.) Unfortunately, this masterful grab for popularity totally escaped the attention of the voting public, thought it is said to be approaching 50-50 approval ratings in the crucial third grade.

Much more intriguing is the candidacy of magazine publisher Malcom S. “Steve” Forbes, “The Capitalist Tool.” Listening to Forbes carefully, or even barely at all, will make one realize that he is for a very flat tax which, like a very dry martini, is smooth and seductive. Forbes is rich, though only filthy rich, not unimaginably rich (as is Bill Gates, who isn’t running this year), but unless we pass a flat tax before the campaign goes much further, even Forbes is not going to have the scratch to outspend Dole. Besides, though his policies evoke Ronald Reagan, his presentation echoes Calvin Coolidge. It’s not sure that more TV exposure will help.

So, this is the consensus of the experts: No Republican can even be nominated for president on the Republican ticket in 1996–let alone elected

But then, Clinton is in even worse shape, and unless the Whitewater investigators get him, and soon, he’ll be the only Democrat in the race. Indeed we pundits believe that Clinton could not even get elected in 1992 and probably didn’t. That would explain why he never stopped campaigning. There is no possibility that Clinton can win in 1996, and if he becomes president, how would anyone know?

But a dark-horse scenario being touted in inside-the-Beltway bistros is the advent of mystery candidate Homer P. Hickenlooper. According to a caterwauling pugilist on The Capital Gang, who got it from a grating commentator on Washington Week in Review, who heard it authoritatively speculated about on Nightline, Hickenlooper is an undistinguished unknown who has never been elected to any- thing. In the pundits’ view, that is the perfect election strategy for 1996.

A stateside member of the Army’s 1st Armored Division, Hickenlooper’s campaign slogan is, “I will go to Bosnia—if Bill will.” Time magazine already has a cover portrait made up of Hickenlooper, resplendent in his private- first-class uniform, subtly reminiscent of Colin Powell. Bill Safire plans a series of teaser columns to announce him in the New York Times (for example, “Can a ‘Hick’ Be Elected President?”). The arrows on Newsweek‘s “Conventional Wisdom” column are spinning — truly spinning — out of control.

Will the Hickenlooper balloon take off? In the new Internet political chat rooms, you already can read the enthusiastic chant, “Hickenlooper, Hickenlooper, he’s our man! If he can’t do it, nobody can!”

But that’s just the problem. Nobody can. And nobody will. The pundits have spoken.