Word: vision
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...atmosphere of various maturing elements and tendencies, it is hard to conceive of a presidential candidate coming up with a vision that would project a beaming future unless he were able to make an extraordinary leap of the imagination and foresee the future of the entire world. So interdependent are the world's markets and functions nowadays that any vision of America in the 21st century must logically entail America and the European Community, America and China and Japan, America and the Soviet Union, America and the planets and the stars...
That leaves the possibility of a vision of the future that involves the past. In 1980, and to a lesser degree in 1984, President Reagan articulated a vision of the past, but divorced from a peculiarly appealing personality, that vision would be very difficult for anyone else to re-create, assuming that any candidate other than Jack Kemp would want to do so. After the Iran-contra scandal, the instances of criminality in the Administration, and, more relevantly, the stock-market crash and that alpine deficit, Reagan's past vision may also have played itself...
Theoretically, of course, a wholly different vision of past-future is conceivable, one that stresses personal and national frugality and emphasizes paying attention to political and business ethics and to the cracks in the nation's infrastructure. But few audiences rocket to their feet at the sound of the word bridge or tunnel, and even austere political visions have to be | inspired by something more than good housekeeping. Americans know visions when they see them, after all; we have had more of them hurled at us than any civilization can properly catch...
...wonder, in fact, if the public quest for a candidate with a vision is really serious and sincere or simply the outcropping of an unspoken national desire to experience something emotional about the campaign as well as about the country one believes in. The failures of the Reagan Administration may have made people wary of looking at their country emotionally, and so the search for a candidate with a vision may be the people's way of asking their leaders to create emotions for them. Because of their performances on television, particularly the Marvin Kalb interviews, several of the candidates...
Instead of demanding a candidate with a vision, we might more sensibly appreciate some of the candidates under our noses who merely have plain old vision and who see clearly that no comprehensive view of America is likely to encompass its most troubling issues: the uses of wealth and power, the components of education, the poor, the homeless, the aged, the ill. We are at a point in this country where all the visions, liberal and conservative, have come and gone, and we are left standing among the quite specific and various problems that those visions either created or failed...