Perhaps the biggest surprise of Tuesday’s elections is that the Republicans somehow didn’t see it coming. It’s not like they couldn’t have foreseen this, particularly after the disaster that was the midterm campaign of 2006. But as has been made painfully clear the past few years, the party which has had the better of play in Washington for the past 28 years wasn’t terribly adept at handling coming storms. (More on that later.)
To consider just how far they’ve fallen, and just how full of themselves they had become, let us revisit this nugget which was dug up by Kos, written by Grover Norquist, one of my least favorite Republican sockpuppets, in Washington Monthly in 2004 about how Bush’s reelection would reshape the American political landscape:
"Redistricting in Texas and throughout the country ensures that Republicans will continue to control the House through 2012. Over time, the Senate — thanks to those wonderful square states out west — will trend toward 60 Republicans as the 30 red states elect Republicans and the 20 blue states elect Democrats. The anomaly of four Democratic senators hailing from Republican North and South Dakota will come to an end, as will the Republican-held Senate seat in Rhode Island. A Bush-Cheney win will lead to Republican governors from Colorado, Mississippi, Florida, Texas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New York to compete to be the most Reaganite governor — a positive result no matter who wins. And a Bush-Cheney win in 2004 will leave Terry McAuliffe and Bill and Hillary in complete and unchallenged control of the Democratic Party at least through 2008. This is good for the Republicans, if not the republic."
Hmm, Mr. Norquist was just a little outside with his pitch, don’t you think?
Now, it’s easy to pick on Grover here, and as much as I would like to dedicate an entire post to trashing this supposed conservative "thinker" for being little more than a crooked, hypocritical sleazebag who advocates shrinking government only when it doesn’t involve increasing the size of his bank account, I can do that some other time. What’s more important in that paragraph is the sort of ways in which he, and other GOP bigwigs, were thinking about the landscape. In fact, I would argue that it’s the sort of thinking there, which implies that success in American politics will come not through successful governance but through milking the political system, is what has directly contributed to this massive shift we’ve seen in the past four years, and what has helped turn the seemingly all-powerful GOP into a meek minority party.
The centerpiece and unifying force of the Republican Party in the mid-term elections in 1994 was a manifesto called the Contract With America. As a talking point and political argument, the Contract With America was remarkably effective – witness the massive gains made by the GOP in those elections, as they wiped out Democrat majorities in both houses of Congress. Like manifestos, of course, the actual content, in retrospect, doesn’t much matter. The Contract With America wound up being rather hollow and self-serving (witness the number of GOP legislators who violated one of it’s major points, which was only serving two terms in the House), but what persisted long after the Contract With America was forgotten about was the unity and intense discipline of the Republican party.
The leadership of the G.O.P. forces in Congress – Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, and particularly Tom DeLay – demanded party loyalty above all else. Through their wills they imposed an intense voting discipline among the Republican rank-and-file in the two houses of Congress, creating a devastatingly effective voting block that blunted or rendered moot virtually all of the Clinton administration’s legislative initiatives. One could make the argument, in fact, that the sole purpose of the G.O.P. in the late 1990s was to oppose whatever ideas came from the other side.
After the disputed 2000 election, and the ushering in of the accidental president himself, George W. Bush, the G.O.P. forces in Congress found themselves some ideal bedfellows now occupying the White House. Bush had a run a campaign that promised civility, compassionate conservatism, and an end to the partisan squabbling that had dominated discourse over the previous six years. Such promises, in fact, turned out to be as hollow as the Contract With America. Ideologically, the southerners who dominated the leadership positions in the G.O.P.-controlled Congress jibed perfectly with Bush. And so the Bush administration, in turn, could count on the House and Senate Republicans to back pretty much every political initiative that the administration put forth. Essentially, this gave free passes to the Bush administration to practice a zealous conservatism that was inconsistent with the thin, and somewhat dubious, majority they had been given by the electorate in 2000.
But that, of course, was perfectly OK with Karl Rove. Rove, one of the more savvy political operatives this country has ever seen, had been given vast power and authority within the White House during the Bush administration, far greater authority than a White House Chief of Staff probably should ever have. One of his goals, which he has stated, was to find a way to create, in his words, a "permanent Republican majority." This concept has been dubbed the 51% Strategy, because it transforms the will of the slightest majority of the electorate into a virtual iron-clad, invincible political mandate.
In my opinion, the 51% Strategy is wholly un-American and undemocratic. It’s the sort of attitude that leads to fledgling democracies turning into failed states after only one election, as one party wins and then sets about to do whatever possible to prevent ever being out of power again. Democracy only succeeds when the party that loses believes that they, too, can live to fight another day. In Karl Rove’s America, that wouldn’t have been the case. And I make no qualms about saying he’s un-American, because I know he would be pretty quick to take a look at my party affiliation and say the same about me.
With a deep bench loaded with solid political athletes, Rove and the Bush administration then set out to accomplish Rove’s goal of implementing the 51% Strategy. Since it was pretty much impossible to do that strictly through ideas (since the opposition was unified in its hatred for Bush, if in no other coherent way), the next best thing was to do it through such things as blatant gerrymandering, like occurred in Texas, and through politicizing every aspect of government. This included such things as the Justice Department, where at least some semblance of independence has always been considered paramount. (Note the continuing scandal surrounding fired U.S. Attorneys, all of whom claim that it was done as retribution for their refusing to carry out investigations against Democratic politicos.) Loyalty was far more important than anything else to the zoo of political animals located at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. And the G.O.P.-dominated congress was there to back the administration every step of the way, marching in time.
And, as it turned out, marching right off a cliff.
I’ve heard quite a few of the pundits and political observers lamenting the end of civil discourse in politics in America. But in a situation where one side is blatantly, unapologetically attempting to corner the political market, such discourse is rendered moot. The opposition, quite rightly, has no inclination whatsoever to work the dominant party. But the Republicans really didn’t need the Democrats during the first 6 years of the Bush administration. So long as they stayed disciplined and stayed on message, they could counter whatever challenge the Democrats could muster.
The potential problem with this willing to goose step is this: it only works if the ideas coming from the top are good ones. And, of course, the G.O.P. had all aligned themselves behind President Bush’s single worst idea of all: the war in Iraq. You can make all of the arguments you want to about whether or not the war was justified. I personally think it wasn’t, although I’ve heard some intellectual ideas justifying it that are at least thoughtful. And we can argue all we want to about whether or not the intelligence used to justify the war was fabricated and/or just plain wrong. The reality is, however, that none of that would have really mattered if the actual conflict had been handled competently. In victory, one can gloss over such problems. But then the war started to go really, really, REALLY badly, and it magnified every questionable decision the administration had made along the way. There was always going to be an ideological dispute in this country surrounding the war in Iraq, but the dismal results on the ground created a far more troublesome political problem for the administration. It wasn’t a question of ideology any more. It was a competence, or lack thereof.
The 2004 presidential election was best summed up by Mark Halperin of Time magazine, who said that George W. Bush because "he was a better political athlete than John Kerry." He and his campaign (orchestrated by Karl Rove) were better able to adapt and shift the campaign, better at ball control and dictating the tone. As I said, his administration was stacked three-deep with outstanding political athletes, but it was never clear before the Iraq war that this lot was actually competent when it gave to governance. Unlike the administrations of Reagan and the elder George Bush, which were staffed with seasoned government vets who you could at least count on to get something done regardless of their political views, there was very little functional governing experience among the high-ranking members of the Bush Administration. And the Iraq war cast the likes of Rumsfeld, Tenet, Ashcroft, et. al, as incompetent beyond a reasonable doubt.
And then Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, and the Bush administration bumbled the response. The world got to watch on live television as an American city essentially drowned while the government stood by helplessly, paralyzed by indecision and mismanagement. Katrina cast an incredible pall over the entire U.S. government. How could the Bush administration say that the country was safe from a surprise terrorist attack, for example, when it obviously wasn’t prepared to handle what was, for all intents and purposes, the most anticipated natural disaster in history. Everyone knew that New Orleans was vulnerable, and look at what happened.
Furthermore, it was another painful reminder of just how inept and meek this government really is. The Bush administration always liked to project that Texas swagger which bordered on arrogance, but the utter ineptitude of its handling of the Iraq war has made America look a lot more like a bully on a playground, the sort who talks tough but then runs to Mom after he punches you and you decide you want to punch back. In a world where the economy is going global and intertwining with foreign affairs, the U.S. has quickly discovered that, although its ideals are still fundamentally admires, its influence has rapidly decreased.
The twin national disgraces of the floundering war in Iraq and the flattening of a major American city, combined with a bulging federal budget and national debt and an economy that was showing signs of being to slow, left the electorate in a very, very foul mood as the mid-term elections of 2006 approached. And now we do some new math, where we discover that 50 is greater than 51. Howard Dean’s ascension to the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee brought along with it his new idea, which he called the "50 State Strategy." This struck some old-guard Democratic strategists as being cuckoo bananas, but given how lousy the party had wound up performing in the 2004 elections, they were willing to give it a go. The 50 State Strategy is based upon the old Tip O’Neill credo that "all politics is local." Whereas John Kerry had run a presidential campaign based focused entirely on just a handful of red states in the hopes of painting them blue, Dean argued that the party instead had to challenge in all 50 states, and in all 438 congressional districts, rather than simply conceding large swaths of the country to the G.O.P. He then set out to recruit Democratic candidates in every single district, candidates that would cater their messages specifically to the demographics at play in that particular region, even if that meant recruiting some more conservative types, or even convincing some Republicans to switch parties and run as Democrats.
This approach turned out to be brilliant, as the Democrats capitalized on discontent with the Bush administration and stunningly took control of both houses of Congress. In 2006, the Republican members of Congress began paying for their unabashed loyalty to the Bush administration. It was pretty easy for Democrats to pigeonhole them as being nothing more than lacqueys for an unpopular president, because they had the voting records to back it up. Systematically, the Democrats outflanked the Republicans, pinning them as being on the far right. Sure, it’s true that the incoming Democrats to the class of 2007 were moderates or even somewhat conservative. But every Republican they defeated was more conservative than they were. The Democrats had, in essence, captured the center of the political spectrum, although one discovers that the "center" is, in fact, a moving target – a centrist in Rhode Island and a centrist in Montana are two entirely different political breeds, yet both were perfectly willing to cast out their Republican senators who occupy very different locations on the "right."
Now, one would think that the Republicans would have learned from this in the past couple of years. Having ceded the political center, you would think they would then strive to somehow get it back. But, instead, the remaining Republican members of Congress decided instead to take up a defensive circle in Congress, and try to protect the president from the emboldened, embiggened Democratic majorities. All such a stance has done, however, is create further gridlock, as the Republicans have filibustered and used every other parliamentary procedure to prevent any Democratic legislative gains. Meanwhile, the state of the nation has continued to decline – the war has dragged on in Iraq, as the Bush administration stubbornly sticks to it guns; the economy slipped even further, and eventually began a free-fall as the all-important housing market collapsed; U.S. standing in the world reached all-time lows, as other nations viewed us not only as bullies and cowboys, but also as hopeless screwups.
Meanwhile, over on the Democratic side, they picked up right where they left off in 2006 – continuing to register new voters and build a political infrastructure from the ground up in all 50 states. Well, not all of them did that. Indeed, the one anointed to be the next presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, seemed to think it was 1992 or something, and began running a rather traditional Democratic presidential campaign (which, if memory serves me correctly, hasn’t worked really well in the past 30 years or so) that really wasn’t equipped to handle the political realities on the ground. The fact that Dean had trumped Rove and proven that 50 is greater than 51 made clear that new thinking was necessary on the campaign trail. And one candidate not only embraced Dean’s strategy and way of thinking about the campaign, but also embraced and mastered Dean’s other great skill, which was raising money online.
Enter Obama. We all know how that’s turned out.
Given the fact that the most unpopular president in modern times has rendered the name of the Republican party as unappealing as that of the Edsel or New Coke, the G.O.P. did, in fact, do pretty well in selecting John McCain as their presidential nominee in 2008. McCain, in my opinion, was the only candidate who could really even make it a race, with his reputation as being a "maverick" and someone who could actually make alliances across party lines to actually get things done.
McCain is, in fact, one of the more skillful politicians behind the scenes in the Senate, much more so than he is often given credit for. A great story about him is how he was so important in forming the so-called Gang of 14 – 7 Democrats and 7 Republicans – in order to push some judicial nominees through the Senate. At the time, tensions over the issue had gotten so high that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist was threatening to change the Senate rules in order for the Republicans to get what they wanted. McCain couldn’t give a shit about judicial nominations, but he also didn’t give a shit about Frist, so his creation of the Gang of 14 created non-partisan agreement and also essentially neutered one of the main political rivals in his own party. Such skills would suit him well were he to take office and have to trade blows with a feisty opposition in congress. And McCain had always been very popular with independents, and with the media, and had always given off an air of being principled above and beyond partisan rancor.
Well, unfortunately, when McCain’s new presidential campaign began to go south, he made what I think was one of his biggest mistakes of the overall campaign, which was to begin flaunting his conservative credentials in order to appeal to the base of the Republican party. All of the sudden, he started to spout the rhetoric of the Bush administration, which did, in fact, appeal to the base of the G.O.P. And yet, what should have been obvious to McCain and the rest of the Republicans after 2006, and again after special elections in Mississippi and Louisiana were Democrats captured seats in districts once thought to be untouchable, was that appealing to the base wasn’t really that important any more. The brand was so sullied that showing a way out of the mess they had created in Washington was ultimately far more important.
But instead, we got a dog-and-pony show from the Republican presidential candidates, as they all jockeyed for position and tried to claim they were the "real conservatives." Now, some would argue that McCain had to make that pitch at the time, so as to compete and ultimately win the nomination. But I’m not sure that’s necessarily so. The evangelical base was never, ever, ever going to enthusiastically support a Mormon from Massachusetts. Likewise, the fiscal conservatives weren’t crazy about a bible-thumping baptist former governor of Arkansas. The defeats of 2006 had cracked the coalition of conservatives that Reagan had carefully assembled in the 1980s. Instead of attempting to heal the rifts, the neocons and the sociocons and the fiscocons were all clannishly bickering and blaming one-another. But anyone with a brain on the political right in this country should have figured out pretty early that the only candidate who was even remotely electable was McCain.
In any event, McCain ultimately prevailed on the Republican side, but in doing so, he basically had hitched his ride to the Bush administration’s failed policies in a time when it was politically convenient to do so. But that created even bigger problems on the national stage. Not only his 90% voting record with the president, but also his sudden shift on issues like tax cuts and torture, essentially undermined the very thing which made him electable in the first place – his penchant for openness and principled thinking that could transcend partisanship. He then made one misstep after another, one miscalculation after another. America wanted the John McCain of 2000 on the campaign trail, not the John McCain of 2008.
And America certainly didn’t want the George W. Bush of 2000-2008, but that’s pretty much what they got when McCain decided to bring on old Bush campaign staffers. Sure, they were skilled at running negative, and even dirty, campaigns against underfunded and feeble opposition. But with his heavy bank account and his heavy organization behind him, Obama was the baddest dude on the block. And he certainly had muscle, in the form of a MASSIVE number of newly-registered Democrats.
See, all this time while the Republicans in power have been trying to rig the system and cheat the odds in lieu of having any good ideas, the Democrats have been engaging in a pretty fool-proof way of countering that – going out and saying to people "those Republicans, their ideas suck! Vote Democrat!" and registering new voters, a great many of them being young people. Now, the youth vote gets a bad rap in this country because it tends not to turn out. I happen to give them props for that, because they are inherently skeptical, and they believe, unlike the sheep who form the evangelical right in this country, that the politicians are only catering to them to get their vote and couldn’t give a shit about them otherwise. There is a difference, however, in the patterns of young voters and the patterns of newly-registered voters, who will, in fact, vote in large numbers. So for the Republicans to just sort of assume those folk wouldn’t turn out for this election is, well, just plain stupid.
Then again, not much of anything the Republicans have done this year has really made much sense. Sarah Palin? Really? Are you serious? In time, I suspect, McCain’s picking of Palin as his running mate will be viewed with the same scorn afforded Dan Quayle and Thomas Eagleton. The constant playing to the base, through the pick of Palin and also through the negative campaign against Obama along predictable, and tired, old conservative lines? Well, that isn’t going to play among an electorate that, on the whole, is looking for a way out, looking for something different. Looking not just for change in the business of governance in Washington, but looking for something that the Obama campaign offered right from the outset: hope. Obama ran an inclusive campaign that empowered people. McCain ran an exclusionary one that was cynical, divisive, incoherent, and didn’t posses a whit of a new idea in a time when new ideas are king.
I’m reminded of some of the congressional elections in California in the mid-90s, when more than a few Republicans lost their seats in gerrymandered, supposedly foolproof districts, because the Republicans had essentially pissed on the Latino community with the xenophobic, anti-immigrant Proposition 187, and the burgeoning Latino community had fought back by galvanizing and organizing. Suddenly, the conditions on the ground had changed. The demographics had changed, and the inflexible state G.O.P. was unable to cope. In politics, you have to take the temperature regularly, you have to adjust to adjusting conditions. And the McCain campaign, and the G.O.P. as a whole, have not been able to do that. Instead, they have clung to a narrow mindset and old ideas that have been rendered irrelevant by changing conditions. And you can see from the results where it has gotten them. All year long, we’ve heard about "shifting demographics" in places like Colorado and Nevada and Virginia and New Mexico and North Carolina, and the G.O.P.’s response to this was basically to go into the same sort of denial that the Democrats did in West Virginia and Tennessee in the late ’90s. So while some would argue that McCain was in this race up until the markets collapsed in September, I would argue that it was doomed to fail anyway, and that the market collapse simply showed everyone the extend of the ineptitude plaguing that campaign.
So what next? Well, for starters, something tells me that the Democrats aren’t going to be nearly as complacent as the Republicans were after 2004 in allowing their grassroots political machinery to get rusty and start to decay. Obama took the opportunity to build an entirely new base of voters for the Democratic party, but just take another read to Norquist’s spouting of reigning opinion of the Washington orthodoxy of 2004 and you’ll know that the conditions on the ground can change, and can change very fast. The Democrats capitalized on voter discontent and a demographic shift to propel them into political dominance, but that won’t keep them there. Smart governance, competence, and restoring America’s tarnished image both here and abroad will.
The most important thing that this now massive Democratic presence can do in Washington is share the political capital they have earned. Compromise amongst one-another, trade political favors among the caucus, and try to keep everyone happy while they move the agenda forward. There are a lot of new mouths to feed in Congress, and they all want a piece of the pie, but they should all start off by agreeing that they’re going to eat the damn pie, and not fight over it, and not discount the diversity of views the ruling coalition has amongst their members.
We now have a center-left coalition that is in charge of things in D.C. I am quite amused when I hear supposed experts say this is still a "conservative" country, when the results of the last two elections clearly indicate that it is not. Republicans are very good at expanding their realm of usefulness, but the reality is that, for most of the 20th century, they were a narrow and ideological party (one associated with racial discrimination, by the way), who would have been rendered utterly irrelevant once and for all in the 60s had JFK & LBJ not fucked up in Vietnam. First Nixon, and then Reagan, capitalized upon Democratic foibles are swung the political pendulum to the right, but clearly it’s moved away from that, back towards the center and to the left.
And what does that leave for the folks on the right? Well, quite honestly, the GOP is a mess. It’s a shrinking party, consisting mostly of southern whites and western kooks. There’s too much god talk, too narrow a focus, nothing that a moderate would ever feel connected to, and there aren’t really any stars out there to lead the party. A smart, thoughtful, competent Republican party could be really, really useful in this country right now. But any Democratic strategist is rubbing their hands together gleefully as they are watching the Mayor of Mooseville "going rogue" on the campaign trail and trying to somehow position herself as a future leader of the GOP. If what she represents is the future of the Republican party, then the party has no future at all.
I feel like this has the potential to truly be a transformational election, one which changes the way we do things in this country for years to come. Quite simply, Barack Obama beat the system. Even better, he refined what the system is. And, as I said before, the root of his campaign was instilling hope in a large number of people who felt totally disaffected by the selfish ways of the Republican elites. The unspoken danger for his opponents in this election, be it Hillary Clinton or John McCain, was that they didn’t ultimately want to be seen as the candidate who killed that hope, who squelched that fire while providing no tangible alternative. But neither Clinton or McCain could ultimately figure out how to do that.
And what does "hope" mean? Well, to give you an example: my father, who is a political science professor, has taught several times in China over the years, and he’ll be asking his Chinese grad students about things like U.S.-China relations or Chinese environmental policy or what not, and the standard response from the well-meaning student body is "well, surely the government has a plan for that," to which he responds, "yes, but at some point in time, you are going to be the government. You are here, in this class, because someday you are going to be running things, so what is it that you want to do?"
If Barack Obama’s greatest accomplishment of this election is to energize, mobilize, and empower an entire generation – particularly the young, but also the immigrants and the newcomers and those who lapsed into apathy – and remind them, and remind all of us, that we are the government, and that we ultimately have a say in what it is that goes on in Washington, well, then it was a transformational election indeed, and his impact will far exceed any policy initiative of the next four years.
And maybe, somewhere in that time, the Republican party will stop marching in time and start paying attention again to what’s going on. But then I read something like this in the Washington Post, which appeared about a week ago, and it makes me wonder:
Two days after next week’s election, top conservatives will gather at the Virginia weekend home of one of the movement’s most prominent members to begin a conversation about their role in the GOP and how best to revive a party that may be out of power at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue next year.
One of the topics of discussion will be how to fashion a "national grassroots political and policy coalition similar to the out Reagan years. "There’s a sense that the Republican Party is broken, but the conservative movement is not," said a source, suggesting that it was the betrayal of some conservative principles by Bush and congressional leaders that led to the party’s decline. But, this source emphasized, the meeting will be held regardless of the outcome of the presidential race. "This is going on if McCain wins, loses or has a recount — we’re not planning for the loss of John McCain."
Either way, Sarah Palin will be a central part of discussion. If the Arizona senator wins, the discussion will feature much talk of, "How do we work with this administration?" said the attendee, an acknowledgment that conservatives won’t always have a reliable ally in the Oval Office. Under this scenario, Palin would be seen as their conduit to power. "She would be the conservative in the White House," is how the source put it. Should McCain lose next Tuesday, the conversation will include who to groom as the next generation of conservative leaders – a list that will feature Palin at or near the top.
Few believe that the Republican party will respond to another brutal election by following a path of moderation, but conservatives are deeply dispirited and anxious to reassert the core values they believe have not always been followed by Bush, congressional leaders and their party’s presidential nominee . Many on the right, both elites and the rank-and-file, see a rudderless party that is in dire need of new blood and old principles: small government, a robust national security and unapologetic social conservatism.
Gads, they just don’t get it, do they?