A Prophet is Not Without Honor, Save in His Own Country
In my voting career, we've had six presidential terms, four Republican, two Democratic. The Democratic candidates in those elections were: Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry. Four out of five lost.
How was Clinton different from the other four?
- He was the governor of a southern state. Clinton's critique of Edwards during the primaries was that, as a Senator, he was out of touch with issues that mattered to ordinary Americans.
- He could "energize the base" with the best of them, but he also pushed the party to the center, even when it meant bucking the party establishment. He is the only one of the five you could say successfully stole Republican issues. He supported NAFTA, and he kept his promise to "end welfare as we know it."
- He switched political consultants and pollsters frequently, even bringing in Republicans like David Gergen. Amy Sullivan in Washington Monthly lays much of the blame for Kerry's loss at the doorstep of some of the Dems' pollsters and campaign consultants, people like Robert Shrum. Joe Klein was warning of this back in 2002.
And the man has left no legacy. This is a serious charge against someone I admire and who cares more about his legacy than almost anything else. But consider:
- Clinton's boy in the primaries, Wesley Clark, had nothing. Lieberman, who also had a Clinton-like policy outlook, got nowhere.
- Howard Dean, practically the anti-Clinton, has a good chance to run the party. I agree with practically everything Howard Dean says, but the Democrats already have the progressive urban professional vote sewn up. Give Dean credit, though, for saying what his followers don't want to hear: we gotta convince some of them Good Old Boys to vote for Democrats.
- The Democratic Leadership Council is screwing up. Its position is, shall we say, problematic. Marshall writes brilliantly about this here and here. I guess I'm in the treacherous evil DLC camp - you can't or shouldn't be America's president without at least some support from currently red states. Democrats didn't just lose the last two elections, they lost the wrong way - the GOP expanded its margins in Florida, Tennessee (despite it being Gore's home state), South Carolina (despite it being John Edwards' home state), and Arkansas (despite it being Clinton's home state). Folks, there's a reason we put southerners on the ticket - you've got to win down there at least a little bit...
- I listen to the liberal media every day, and haven't heard a single front-line Democrat utter a word of support for his current hot button issues, energy conservation and global warming. I think Clinton's right and the party's wrong to ignore him, but that willful ignorance is a measure of how his influence has waned.
- Social security and healthcare are Democratic issues, right? Despite a lot of talk, Clinton didn't get much done on either one. He left it for the next guy. And that guy turned out to be a Republican ideologue.
posted by Anonymous at 9:21 AM
1 Comments:
I've thought about this set of problems quite a bit, and I can't agree on using a centrist strategy.
Most importantly, with both the 2000 and 2004 elections in question at best and incredibly close, ideas about major strategies as failures or successes are very difficult to evaluate; the outcome itself is more or less random - a day earlier or later and the results easily might have been different. It was so close that it was in everyone's and no one's power to change.
It is true that Democratic consultants share blame, but you can make a compelling argument that it was in the other direction. Most Americans agree with the Democrats on most policies, if you go by the polls, even and maybe especially on the war. Incoherent? Sure. So was the public.
Kerry was attacked not on policy but personally, and with despicable, unethical bullshit. Abortion was not the wedge issue - we win that one in spades; the closest thing to a policy disaster for the D's was gay marriage, yet Kerry's position at the end was not far from Bush's.
The problem was the personal perception of Kerry as president, and the biggest problem for the uninformed center, although essentially a false one, was the perception that he would just tell people what they wanted to hear.
No policy of the Democratic party was as important to the election as the personal attack on Kerry's patriotism and intergrity, the one area that, in any reasonable view of reality, he absolutely excels.
Kerry could have gone considerably farther to the left on most economic issues, particularly in health care, corporate corruption, and economic justice, and easily won the election if he had been able to better defend the personal character he does, in fact, possess. I think it was the very quality of his character that blindsided him to how much damage was being done by evil, utterly false attacks on his leadership.
On consultant advice, he ran to the center on the war. I would argue that here, too, he could have been far more aggressive and if anything, it would have helped the public perception of his integrity; mostly I think it would have made little difference.
I am sad to say it, but if anyon, it was Newsome who set up the loss by pushing an honorable position into a disasterously ill-timed political stunt that motivated the right. With it, Bush motivated his evangelical base. The Democratic base was highly motivated enough to win, through some incredible organization made possible by Dean's early leadership (though I doubt he would have won), but not enough to absorb re-motivated evangelicals.
So I have to disagree. The election results do not indicate, especially in a cold political analysis, that Kerry, still less the Democratic party should have run to the center even more. It would have only reinforced public perceptions of gutlessness. The base would have been better motivated by more aggressive moves left. The middling middler voters were looking far more at personality than policies.
The two real failures I saw were the timing of the gay marriage push (most americans are now for civil unions, inadequate, sure, but an amazing shift already and huge social changes require time); and more importantly a failure to aggressively attack Bush personally and defend Kerry quickly and forcefully. I think in his heart, Kerry didn't believe that even Bush and Rove would be that ruthless, and it left the defense weak.
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