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recent years that went before.

Five years ago, when the final phase of the 1988 presidential campaign formally began, both George Bush and Michael Dukakis saw an America many Americans never see.

For both candidates, America was a land of happy families and successful suburbs, where every child waves an American flag and every day is the Fourth of July.

But there was then and is now another America, a shadow America neither candidate dared to show or tell.

As the '80s began, the nation chose a president whose terms could hold awful parallels with the end of Reconstruction almost exactly 100 years before. Then and now, a president, desperate for power, entered into an illicit arrangement, not just with the unreconstructed South, but with the national unreconstructed mentality which believed then as it does now that private profit and public arrogance could be pursued at the expense of those living on the economic edge.

The 1980 election was won by an amiable incompetent whose sole intent was removing the government from every aspect of American life. He intended to take the government out of the business of enforcing equal opportunity. He intended to eliminate affirmative action for women and minorities. He intended to erase the laws and programs written in blood and sweat in the quarter century since Martin Luther King became the premier figure in the freedom movement and an American majority became single-minded in pursuit of human freedom.

For those who came to power with him, conflict of interest