"Center-Right Nation" Watch - Doug Schoen Edition

Doug Schoen is the DLC-affiliated pollster for Republicans like Mike Bloomberg - the guy who bashes progressive organizations from the right, the genius strategist who makes his name on perpetually telling Democrats to capitulate to Republicans on major issues (Think about where Barack Obama would be if he had followed this genius's advice and supported the Iraq War, for instance).

Yet, because the media rewards anyone who is a reliable progressive basher, Schoen is still billed as a political "expert" on the pages of fringe publications like the Wall Street Journal's editorial page (not to be confused with the much more credible news section of that same paper):

"This election is not a mandate for Democratic policies. Rather, it is a wholesale rejection of the policies of George W. Bush, Republicans, and to a lesser extent, John McCain...As New York Sen. Chuck Schumer has made clear, we don't have the money or flexibility to do everything Barack Obama wants to do...If the Democrats govern as if there is no Republican Party, they are likely headed to the kind of reaction that Bill Clinton faced when he made the same misjudgment after the 1992 election victory."

Laughably, Schoen contradicts himself in a span of two sentences - saying a Democratic victory on Tuesday will mean no mandate for Democratic policies, even while admitting an Obama election would be "a wholsale rejection" of conservatism. That's like saying the 1980 election was a rejection of liberalism, but not an embrace of conservatism - an assertion that no pollster would ever make without expecting to be laughed at. In our (unfortunately) binary politics, referendum elections like this year's by definition couple rejection of one party and ideology with the embrace of another party and ideology.

Schoen knows all this - and so his column is yet another preemptive effort to claim that a Democratic victory on Tuesday obviously - self-evidently! - means America is more conservative than ever. While he doesn't employ the exact phrase "center-right nation" as the rest of the Punditburo has, he's echoing the same message: Namely, that no matter how big a progressive victory may occur on election day, no matter how many polls show Americans are progressive on issues, a President Obama will face "the kind of reaction that Bill Clinton faced when he made the same misjudgment after the 1992 election victory."

Of course, Clinton did not make a judgment that America was progressive after his election, nor did he decide to "govern as if there was no Republican Party." Indeed, before he ever tackled health care, his first legislative initiative was joining with the Republican Party to pass NAFTA (and I'm not picking on Clinton here - I'm just stating the undebatable facts).

But Schoen's version of the Clinton storyline is considered the assumed truth today, after a 15 year effort by conservatives and "centrists" to create a progressive-rejecting narrative out of it. Should Obama win, that same narrative will be used by the right to deter an Obama administration from pursuing any transformative progressive policies. It's actually brilliant from a marketing standpoint - self-declared conservatives like Krauthammer and Meacham tell Republicans we still live in a "center-right nation," while so-called "centrists" (read: corporatists) like Schoen use historical revisionism about Clinton and cite the Innocent Bystander Fables of people like Schumer to deliver the same message to Democrats.

Come November 5, this propaganda is only going to get worse.

Comments

[knowBuddhaU]

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2008_11/015492.php

Doug Schoen is already urging the party not to perceive potentially sweeping victories as an endorsement of the Democratic agenda.

Stated simply, if the Democrats conclude that they have a mandate to implement their agenda without real consultation with the Republicans, as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island suggested in an interview with the New York Times last weekend, the country will be headed for trouble.

Real trouble.

This election is not a mandate for Democratic policies. Rather, it is a wholesale rejection of the policies of George W. Bush, Republicans, and to a lesser extent, John McCain.

I see. So, if voters turn out in record numbers, elect Democrats to control almost everything, and deliver a "wholesale rejection" of conservative Republicans, Democrats shouldn't consider this a mandate for change. Indeed, as far as Schoen is concerned, if Democratic policy makers try to implement Democratic policy ideas after Democratic victories, the party will surely be punished by voters.

In a relatively short piece, Schoen used the word "consensus" seven times. As he sees it, the goal isn't to pass specific policy goals; the goal is to get Democrats and Republicans to agree on specific policy goals. According to this line of thinking, what's important isn't the result, it's the process. Americans don't want results, they want some amorphous "bipartisanship," even if they seem to support one party's ideas by virtue of election victories.

[RadCenter]

Leon Podesta was on NPR this weekend making essentially the same argument as Doug Schoen: be cautious, don't do anything too crazy, or there will be a backlash and the Republicans in Congress will turn obstructionist. I say, the difference between Clinton and Obama is that Obama has grassroots support going into office, whereas Clinton barely eked out a plurality to win in 1992. If Obama wins and does not make some substantial changes immediately (even before he's inaugurated), the public backlash will be huge -- and that's more important than any backlash from Congress.

[CitizenE]

Obama will lead domestically from a center left position. He will be a bit like Gore was as Veep in that we can expect wasteful government expenditures as well as good programs of lesser importance will be cut, not because of progressive or conservative, but because of the financial shape the United States is in. And because he will have serious majorities in the House and Senate, he won't have to compromise half as much as Clinton did.
The real danger will be in foreign policy. One hopes that Obama has among his advisors some serious progressives on foreign policy and, especially, the Middle East. The whole view of the Middle East continues to be at best centrist in regards to the Middle East, and Obama's best angels of pragmatism will be of no avail if he does not consult with serious scholars about the region.

[Herrington]

If you switch between Fox and evening MSNBC you get the impression that they were reporting on events on two different planets where, strangely, the names of people and places are the same. Even stranger, these contradictory positions are actually progress for the left, the left's voices having been essentially silenced for three decades.

I have labored under the utterly verifiably insane policies and mass Pavlovian conditioning of the right for a working lifetime. During this time they have taken a slightly slow witted but essentially well intentioned America and turned half of it into a pack of shameless snarling animals. Sarah Palin is the epitome of their work, too young to remember Goldwater and Kennedy and too brain washed to even doubt the veracity of her tutors. And 35% of Americans are exactly like her, angry, mean as a junk yard dog, unthinking, incurious and full of themselves ditto heads.

Electing Obama will put the fear of God into the Goldwater Republicans, but the Palin/Limbaugh Republicans were bred to thrive on fear.

The Republican mission, post Obama election, will be to prevent him from fixing the country's economy and foreign policy at all costs. Should Americans once again taste the fruits of populism, Republicans are doomed to wander in the wilderness until this generation forgets their crimes or passes away.

The public should never be allowed to forget, and the conservative ideology should be permanently branded for what it is, an apologia for pillage by the wealthy.

[knowBuddhaU]

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/6/3/uprising_an_unauthorized_tour_of_the
DAVID SIROTA: Right. What happened, in the chapter that I reported on the antiwar movement, is back in 2007, what we found is that you just had an election where the Democrats were elected promising to end the war, and what ended up happening was that the same Democratic Congress refused to really do what it takes to actually end the war. And part of that was, I think, a strategic decision on behalf of the antiwar organizations in Washington about how they said we could end the war. You had consultants who were simultaneously being paid by the Democratic Party and Democratic Party politicians.

AMY GOODMAN: Like?

DAVID SIROTA: You had Hildebrand Tewes. You had consulting firms. They were the lead consulting firm. And I don’t mean to pick on them. It’s just that they were the consulting firm that was heading up the major coalition in Washington of antiwar groups. And so, the strategy that came out of those antiwar groups was we have to simply bash the Republicans to end the war,