Karl Rove: Obama’s New Voters Changed Presidential Political Game

GOP political maven Karl Rove, the consummate political professional loved by Republicans, loathed by Democrats and not the favorite of Americans who seek politics fostering consensus versus power-politics divide-and-rule, says President-Elect Barack Obama got to be President-Elect because the highly touted new voters that Obama said would come into play did have a major impact.

What’s notable about Rove’s serious piece in the Wall Street Journal is that he analyzes it as one political professional admiringly looking at another political professional. His reaction isn’t filed with the demonizing call-to-political-arms rhetoric that now characterizes talk radio’s reaction to Obama’s win — or the attitude epitmozied by those now calling for Obama’s impeachment on Facebook...before Obama has been sworn in.

It’s worth looking at large chunks of Rove’s piece if you’re interested in politics as a game or are a serious student of political science. And you can bet Republicans are going to try to learn from Obama’s victory and incorporate what he did to win. Rove begins:

Intense and gripping, the 2008 election was also historic. The son of a Kenyan immigrant and an American mother has risen to the presidency of history’s most powerful nation. Who was not moved by the sight of Jesse Jackson standing silently among strangers with tears streaming down his face as he thought of a long journey towards equality and acceptance?

So how did Barack Obama win? Some of it was fortune: He was a fresh, gifted, charismatic leader who emerged at just the moment that people yearned for something entirely new.

Some of it was circumstance: The October Surprise arrived a month early and framed the election in the best possible way for Mr. Obama (and the worst possible way for John McCain).

Some of it was thoughtful positioning: His themes of bipartisanship and a readiness to tackle the country’s pressing challenges were enormously attractive, especially when delivered with hope and optimism.

And some of it was planning and execution: The Obama campaign, led by the two Davids — Plouffe, the manager, and Axelrod, the strategist — carefully built a powerful army of persuasion aimed at accomplishing two tasks.

A candidate can improve his party’s performance by getting additional people out to vote and persuading people inclined to support the other party to cross over. The first yields an additional vote; the second is worth two, the one a candidate gets and the one he takes away from his opponent.

And, if you note, Republican Sen. John McCain’s problem was that he did neither. In 2000 McCain was a hero on college campuses, speaking as a kind of politician hovering between two parties, and the hottest political figure among young people since the 1960s RFK or Eugene McCarthy. McCain was on the cover of newsweeklies, the press loved him and his problem was not support from independents or Democrats — but from Republicans. This time around McCain got stuck in appealing to his party’s existing base. Rove goes on:

So the two Davids registered millions of voters in states the Obama campaign picked as battlegrounds, especially where there were many heretofore-disinterested African Americans and younger Democrats. Messrs. Plouffe and Axelrod understood that over the last 28 years only 11 of 20 eligible Americans on average cast a presidential ballot. They focused on registering and motivating the other nine who don’t usually vote. This decision, perhaps more than any other, allowed Mr. Obama to win such previously red states as Virginia, Indiana, Colorado and Nevada. It forced Mr. McCain to spend most of the fall on defense, unable to take once-reliably Republican states for granted.

Second, Messrs. Plouffe and Axelrod pried away from the GOP ranks small but decisive slices of the Republican presidential coalition. We can’t be precise, because for the third election in a row the exit polls were trash. The raw numbers forecast an 18-point Obama win, news organizations who underwrote the poll arbitrarily dialed it down to a 10-point Obama edge, and the actual margin was six.

Rove notes that Obama did better in some areas that expected:

But we do know President-elect Obama ran better among frequent churchgoers (perhaps getting 10 points more than John Kerry did), independents (perhaps five points more than Kerry and eight points more than Al Gore), Hispanics and white men. He even made special appeals to gun owners and sent his wife to cultivate military families. This allowed him to carry previously red states like Florida, New Mexico and Iowa.

Rove believes Obama recognized that the United States is basically center right and kept his positions in that area. And, indeed, Obama’s stand on some issues wasn’t totally pleasing to progressives. Rove is correct about the role of the center in American politics. This has been impressively documented by centrist writer John Avlon in both his books and columns. He who eschews the center risks losing.

Rove rightly notes that for many Americans Obama has become a kind of vessel…or a blank slate. To put it another way, people fill in their hopes and dreams and believe — and assume — Obama will help them turn them into reality.

Many Americans were drawn to Mr. Obama because they saw in him what they wanted to see. He became a large vessel into which voters placed their hopes. This can lead to disappointment and regret. What of the woman who, in the closing days of the campaign, rejoiced that Mr. Obama would pay for her gas and take care of her mortgage, tasks that no president can shoulder?

The country voted for change Tuesday. But the precise direction of that change remains unclear. Mr. Obama’s victory was personal rather than philosophical. The soaring hopes and vague incantations of “change” that have characterized the last 21 months were the poetry phase; a prosaic phase is about to begin.

This should be an interesting few years. Let every American hope for the success of the new president and the country we all love.

Note that Rove’s tone is far more respectful and professional than that of many conservative talk show hosts who have virtually declared political war on the Obama administration before Obama is even sworn in and who are still talking about Reverent Wright, Bill Ayers and calling the upcoming administration a “Marxist-Socialist” regime before it has administered the federal government a single day.

You could almost see a three way division now shaping up in the GOP: between the far right in alliance with social conservatives and talk show hosts, the political technocrats most identified with the Bush wing of the party, and the traditional conservatives and moderates who want to see the Republican party get back to campaigns waged on principles and issues — and away from the personal demonization you can find by turning on your radio right now.