For GOP, Reliable Wedge Issues Suddenly Fall Flat
Assaults on Obama from the right have been unrelenting, including charges that he "pals around with terrorists"; that he is a lockstep liberal bound by the orthodoxies of the left; that his party caused the economic crisis by requiring banks to give subprime mortgages to "unqualified minorities"; that he is a closet Muslim or Muslim sympathizer who will sell out Israel; that he would accept defeat in Iraq in order to court the antiwar vote; and so forth.
One of the toughest punches was thrown by McCain running mate Sarah Palin when she told a crowd in Clearwater, Florida: "This [Obama] is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America... I'm afraid this is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country."
"When Palin squints her eyes, tells her supporters Obama 'pals around with terrorists,' calls him 'exotic' and invites us to wonder with her who he really is, it's that code all over again. It's a rhetorical rifle shot [revealing] a malignant mindset - us vs. them - and anyone who says otherwise is a damn liar," wrote Joe Cutbirth, ABC News commentator and adjunct professor of journalism at Columbia University.
Obama says of himself: "I'm not making an argument that the resistance is simply racial. It's more just that I'm different in all kinds of ways. I'm different even for black people... If I were watching Fox News, I wouldn't vote for me, right? Because the way I'm portrayed 24/7 is as a freak! I am the latte-sipping, New York Times-reading, Volvo-driving, no-gun-owning, effete, politically correct, arrogant liberal."
In another year, the onslaught Obama has been subject to might have brought down a Democratic nominee - as Willie Horton and the Swift Boat Veterans helped to bring down Michael Dukakis and John Kerry.
But this year, not only has Obama weathered the conservative bombardment, but Republican tactics are bouncing back against John McCain.
Take, for example, the New York Times story of October 15: "Poll Says McCain Hurts His Bid by Using Attacks." The Pew Research Center, in turn, found that "Obama also has an advantage in voter assessments of the tone of the campaign. Nearly half (48%) see McCain as too personally critical of Obama. By comparison, just 22% see Obama as too critical of McCain. Even among McCain's own voters, nearly one in five (19%) think he has been too critical of Obama. Fewer Obama voters (13%) think their candidate has been too hard on McCain. Perceptions about the campaign McCain is running are starkly different from what they were in June, when just 26% said he had been too personally critical of Obama."
The same assessment of the McCain campaign is being voiced by some of the Arizona senator's own allies. Writing on TheNextRight web site, conservative blogger "mindyfinn" argues that, "In the last month, McCain's favorability rating has dropped 6 points, from 56.4 to 50.1, and Obama's favorability has increased, from 55.3 to 57.4, according to the RCP polling average. The Obama-focused [GOP] campaign is not working. Now 'Election Politics 101' dictates that when you're down and your opponent is hovering at 50% in electoral polls, it's time to enlighten voters as to the negative aspects of your opponent, commonly known as 'negative' ads. The McCain camp followed this rule to a 'T.' And in this case, it did not work."
This is the first year in recent memory that the politics of race, as well as the politics of 'God, guns, and gays' appear to be falling on deaf ears.
Since the late 1960s, the GOP has been strikingly successful in demonizing all things liberal, especially on matters of race - relying on a presumption that, in many voters' minds, a Democratic candidate who supports affirmative action, welfare, and expansive civil rights, will also support abortion, an anti-war platform, higher taxes, gay rights, increased domestic spending, a less assertive foreign policy, and a general erosion - in this view - of traditional moral values.
Democratic consultant Bill Carrick told the Huffington Post, "For the last 40 years, Republicans have had a very consistent strategy of defining liberalism and Democrats as a failed political philosophy out of touch with mainstream American values and interest." Emory political scientist Alan Abramowitz expands on Carrick's argument: "There's no question that Republicans have been successful at associating liberalism and liberal Democrats with some causes and issues that are rather unpopular with a majority of Americans including affirmative action, gay rights, weakness on defense and higher taxes."
Republican presidential candidates and their allies have repeatedly painted Democrats into a far left corner -- in 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988, 2000 and 2004 -- raising the specter of Communism, crime, inner-city riots, anti-war protests, and more recently liberal weakness in the face of threats from Islamic revolutionaries.
This year the Republican Party is using similar tactics - why junk a winner? - but the tactics are not working.
There are a host of reasons for this failure. These include the collapse of the Republican brand; widespread hostility to President Bush; and above all, the emergence of the economy as an issue trumping all others. The current economic crisis is interpreted by many voters as a refutation of conservative laissez-faire ideology and of the deregulatory policies that such ideology spawned. These emerging convictions on the part of what may be a majority of voters are reinforced by a loss of faith in the GOP as a competent assessor and manager of risk; by continued doubts about the legitimacy of the invasion of Iraq; and by widespread repudiation of the Republican legacy of corruption (Abramoff, DeLay, Ney, Mark Foley, etc) in Washington.
"What's happened this year is that this [anti-liberal, wedge issue] strategy is not working well because voters are focused on economic concerns, and the economic side of liberalism -- stronger government regulation, job creation, universal health care -- has much broader support among the electorate, especially during hard economic times. So this year Democrats have been more successful at emphasizing their support for economic liberalism while downplaying other, more controversial positions," Abramowitz tells The Huffington Post.
In addition, Abramowitz says, it "helps that the conservative approach to economic and national security issues has been discredited by the policy failures of the Bush Administration. It's pretty hard for Republicans to argue against big government and for deregulation when a conservative Republican president is forced to support partial nationalization of major banks."
Along similar lines, Carrick notes that "the Republicans are viewed as the Party most responsible for both our current economic crisis and for an unpopular Iraq war. There is a Republican fatigue in the country. Republican strategies, tactics, and messages all feel very worn out. After all, most of them are decades old."
One of academia's foremost students of ideological trends, University of North Carolina political scientist James Stimson, contends that the crucial swing voters in virtually all recent elections are "conflicted conservatives," a generally white group made up of people who identify themselves as conservative but who believe that the government is spending "too little" on a range of domestic spending programs. Stimson calls these voters "symbolic conservatives" and "operational liberals." They make up, according to his calculation, 22 percent of the electorate.
Such voters - and their parents - arguably constitute a disproportionate share of the voters who abandoned liberal self-identification in the mid-1960s. Stimson, analyzing public opinion surveys back to the 1930s, found that the percentage of voters who identified themselves as liberals abruptly nosed-dived by a dramatic 10+ points from 1962 to 1966.
Stimson, exploring the reasons for the drop-off, writes:
"The Great Society was enacted in a rush, following the 1964 election. It included popular items like Medicare and voting rights -- popular outside the South -- but also a "Poverty Program" that was controversial... The response was terrible race riots in 1965, 1966, and 1967. Liberalism acquired a new clientele. Democrats of the "New Deal" had as a client the common man. The common image [was] a worker in hard hat carrying a lunch pail. The new client of the Poverty Program was a black welfare mom. She didn't work, didn't marry, and was angry over inadequate government benefits. That value-violating image is a burden for liberalism.
"The liberalism of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy...appealed to the self-interests of a majority of voters. Beginning with Lyndon Johnson, liberalism comes to mean support for the 'underclass.' It asks the majority of voters to sacrifice their self-interest for the good of others."
The result, according to Stimson, was a sharp drop in the percentage of people willing to call themselves liberal and an increase in the number of self-identified conservatives, making it "natural to conclude that this electorate...is ever-more conservative in all other aspects. But that conclusion is quite dramatically wrong. There is no comparable trend in policy preferences, which stand near an all-time high in liberalism."
The continuing support for a New Deal-type liberalism which calls for programs providing universal benefits -- in contrast to the far lower levels of support for Great Society programs -- can be seen in the following chart, which, according to Stimson, shows that: "Spending is popular. Americans, on balance, want more of it. [But] self interest appears to underlie spending attitudes. Programs that offer universal benefits (health, education, social security, environment) draw nearly universal support. More particularized benefits (mass transit, cities, highways, and race) produce more limited support."
"Conflicted conservatives decide most elections in the United States," Stimson says, and "when they think about symbols, they vote Republican. When they think about programs, they vote Democratic."
In the current election, not only is the Republican candidate severely hampered by the failings of the Bush administration and by the intensity of global economic turmoil, but McCain faces additional dilemmas: First, when he emphasizes conservative symbols, he risks identifying himself with an unpopular conservative president and, second, he has sought to "avoid discussions of specific programs and spending... But he can't be against spending on education, healthcare, cities, environment...and all the other popular programs," according to Stimson.
Conversely, Obama has been able to "avoid the symbols of liberalism -- and the word 'liberal.'" while emphasizing "specific programs and commit[ing] to doing more and spending more on them," Stimson says.
The question then becomes: how long will the current Democratic advantage last?
Abramowitz, for one, is optimistic about the party's prospects:
"For the next several years I think there will be broad popular support for an expansion of government programs aimed at alleviating the effects of the current economic crisis and assisting working and middle class families. And some of the hot button issues conservatives have benefited from in the past, such as gay rights, are losing their power due to shifting public attitudes.
I think race remains a potential danger area for Democrats, but Obama can finesse this by emphasizing class-based policies that benefit working class whites as well as blacks and Hispanics. He will also have to demonstrate a sure hand in dealing with foreign policy and national security threats to strengthen his image in that area.Overall, though, the severity of the current economic crisis and the extraordinary unpopularity of President Bush should give him some breathing room. He's bound to look good in comparison with the current incumbent, at least for a while and Democratic majorities in the House and Senate will be supportive for his first year in office, especially if, as now seems likely, his coattails help to bring many new Democrats into office."
It should not be forgotten, however, that major opportunities for Democrats in the relatively recent past have been lost. Most glaringly, Bill Clinton took office in 1993 positioned by to restore Democratic vitality only to fritter away his chances and see Republicans take over both the House and Senate in 1994, and the White House from 2000 to 2008.
Clinton's eight years in office never offered him the kind of game-changing event -- a war or an economic upheaval -- which can provide a president with the opportunity to establish greatness. That, clearly, will not be the case for Obama who, assuming he wins, will have the chance to achieve greatness, or to fail to master a major financial catastrophe, two wars, and the continuing threat of terrorist attack.
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First Posted: 10-16-08 12:49 PM | Updated: 11-16-08 05:12 AM