The Key To Victory?
Motivate your base, says Mark Halperin in the NY Times:
If the Republicans want to keep their majorities in the midterm elections, their best chance is to stick with the old, base-driven Bush-Rove electoral strategy.
Why? In the eyes of the Bush team, America is a polarized country, one where there are fundamental divisions worth fighting over. A president — and a party — should not worry about slender margins of victory or legislative control. The goal is to accumulate just enough power to use the energies and passions of the base to effect ideological change in the nation’s laws and institutions, even if — sometimes especially if — those changes might be at odds with majority public opinion.
For the Republicans, this brand of politics works because the United States in many ways remains a fundamentally conservative nation. Polls consistently indicate that there are more staunchly conservative Americans than liberal ones. Republican politicians, therefore, have the advantage of being able to proudly announce what they really think. They can go on offense.
The party is helped, of course, by superior financial resources. And the Republicans have mastered micro-aiming rousing messages to ideologically sympathetic voters. These messages, generally on hot button issues like gay marriage and abortion, stir the kind of emotion and anger that provide the energy in Bush-Rove politics.
It’s important to note, though, that this strategy depends on something else: the inability of Democrats to play by the same rules, to go on offense.
If Democrats in Congress took a secret ballot, it is safe to say there would be overwhelming support for a variety of positions that, in theory, could rally the party’s base: a timely withdrawal of American troops from Iraq; a tax increase for the wealthy; universal health care; and increased rights for homosexuals. These are all positions in line with the activist wing of their party. And yet most Democrats will not openly espouse such policies, concerned that backing them could hurt their chances in 2006.
If they actually articulated what was in their hearts, Democrats worry that they would be marching into a buzz saw of negative political commercials and White House-led attacks. Democrats rightly believe that such attacks would energize the conservative base and also eat into their support among centrist voters. But their chosen alternative — in which they swallow their true beliefs on important national issues — demoralizes their own base.
If you have any doubts about the confusion of the Democrats, just look at the party’s midterm strategy. On the one hand, Democrats are reluctant to push for liberal policies that would motivate their base. But the core of their enunciated message — both vowing to stop the president’s right-wing policies and blurring their differences with Republicans on highly charged issues — has in recent elections been a recipe for defeat. Such equivocation is the kind of themeless pudding that does not match up well with the conviction of the White House message and is uninspiring to both the Democrats’ base and the center.
That’s a curious mixture of wisdom and willful ignorance; doesn’t a close reading of the above really imply that the Democrats don’t win because Americans don’t like their policies? If the Democrats have to softpedal their core convictions to win, doesn’t that mean their core convictions aren’t appealing to the mass of Americans?
The Democrats, then, don’t need to motivate their base so much as discard their 1960′s-era ideology…
A good example of the Dem’s disjointed strategy was apparent this morning with Rep. Harman’s interview with Chris Wallace on Fox. She was all over the place when Wallace asked her to try to define what they’re “for,” rather than just what they’re against. I’ve always appreciated her forthrightness in the past, but watching her spin this time was painful.
No, it means the Democrats think their core convictions aren’t sufficiently appealing. I firmly believe, however, that they’re wrong. The Democrats mistakenly think that they have to tailor every plank of their platform so that it appeals to at least 50.1% of the population. That’s their problem. The GOP platform contains all sorts of positions that would not, on their own, garner majority support. But GOP strategists long ago realized that voters, particularly swing voters, don’t know or care very much about the party platforms. They hold idiosynchratic beliefs on the majors (some liberal, some conservative) and they tend to vote based on perceptions of character and competence more than individual issues.
There is more than enough in the Democratic platform to appeal to a majority of the American people (probably moreso than the GOP platform). What they need to do come across as confident and competent, not so reticent and poll-driven. If Democrats just came out forcefully and in a unified way in favor of what they believe, they would do fine in elections. The GOP doesn’t play to the center, they bring the center to them.
Well, Anonymous, that’s well said…I don’t doubt the strength of your convictions, even if I disagree with your assessment of the two party platforms.
I’ll tell you straight up, though, that there is much in the Republican Party platform that I find distasteful, or at the least, not worthy of inclusion.
It’s the overall slant that makes me a Republican – i.e., when push comes to shove, I feel that the Republican Party is more likely than the Democrats to come out on the right side of the two issues that matter to me most on the national level: an economic policy that is as oriented more towards the free market than its rival, and a defense policy that tends to be more robust in putting American interests over those of ‘the international community’ (a foolish concept if there ever was one)…
If free market economics is so important to you, wouldn’t you agree that Bill Clinton should be your guy?
After all, Clinton did a lot to promote free trade, not only within this hemisphere but with the rest of the world. Bush has caved to the steel, pharmaceutical, cotton, ethanol, and apparel industries to impede free trade. He has given enormous subsidies to agricultural interests which distort free trade. American intransigence was a key reason why trade talks with the developing world have collapsed (although Europe shares plenty of the blame), which perpetuate unfair trade practices with poor commodity-based economies.
Finally, Clinton didn’t distort the free market with runaway deficit spending (and, of course, he achieved the first balanced budget of a generation). When the government has to compete with private industry for capital — and subjects the dollar to the whims of foreign central bankers — you’ve gone pretty far from letting the invisible hand do its thing.
If it’s the free market and fiscal discipline you want, I would think that you would do everything you could to get Robert Rubin back on the government payroll..
Clinton surely deserves some props for his handling of the economy, including Rubin’s appt. -but his many excesses were tempered by having a divided Congress during most of his Presidency.
Yeah, Peter, I would echo the idea that Clinton was a ‘good Democrat’ on trade issues (with his centrist DLC approach that is such anathema to the progressives), but I challenge your assertion that American intransigence is behind the collapse of the most recent round of trade talks. That’s simply not the case. French and EU intransigence is the biggest danger to worldwide trade at the moment…