When Democratic Senator Barack Obama defeated Republican Sen. John McCain in Tuesday’s presidential election, it didn’t just signal an end to a chapter of Republican rule. It most likely put a “fin” — for now at least — on the extensive use of political polarization to turn out party partisans to win elections and get just enough support to shove through legislation.
If politics was always a numbers game it was more so under this theory of winning, legislating and governing. What mattered was to get just enough to win and that mean pushing hot-button issues, defining the other candidate as dangerous to the country. What mattered in legislation was to have the power to win a vote (even narrowly) and have a leader in the White House who could take out a veto pen legislation if you opposed it.
There are some who now believe that although power politics is here to stay, the era of intense polarization and frenzied demonization might begin to recede as a President Barack Obama goes back to that old standby of American politics used by so many Presidents: the task of trying to forge consensus. Consensus does NOT mean not taking strong stands or upsetting some who oppose specific policies. It means trying to get as many Americans from as many walks of life on board as possible by trying to woo, sway and win over, versus to simply politically dominate.
And, now, there are some who truly believe the U.S. is on the brink of returning to do at least some of that.
Writes Mary Ann Ostrom in the San Jose Mercury:
[Obama’s] election marks the end of the baby boomer presidency and emergence of a new, 21st-century American electorate the likes of which we’ve never seen before: It’s young, increasingly nonwhite and embraces a different kind of politics.
This election, social scientists and political observers say, points to the arrival of a coalition of voters who value action over partisanship, favor consensus over ideology and believe government can be a partner, not the enemy.>Goodbye to ’60s-style politics that shaped the baby boomers, punctuated by idealism and polarization, and the anti-government conservatism of the 1980s Reagan era.
“We are at one of those turning points we encounter periodically in our history where people have lost faith in the old order and are looking for something new,” said Morris Fiorina, a Stanford University professor of history and Hoover Institution fellow who studies changing voter habits. “And it’s often a generational change that leads to it.”
That doesn’t mean an Obama administration won’t take stands or upset some who advocate another path. Consensus doesn’t mean not taking a stand — just as being an independent voter, centrist or moderate does not mean not reaching a conclusion and taking a stand. It means thoughtfully focusing on substantive problems, issues and solutions and discussing them in the hopes of persuading opponents, rather than trying to gain support by making supporters fear opponents.
And, indeed, there are indications that the incoming Obama administration doesn’t intend to sit and ponder forever on important issues or balk at taking swift action.
The New York Times reports that the debate within the Obama camp is whether he should proceed step by step on his wish list or use a “big bang” approach — taking on important issues swiftly.
“Every president is tempted to take on too much,” said one Obama adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “On the other hand, there’s the Roosevelt example and the L.B.J. example, which suggest an extraordinary president can do an awful lot. So that’s the question: Is it too risky for the president to be ambitious?”
There is also the George Bush model, not mentioned in the Times piece. Shortly after Bush’s controversial squeaker of a 2000 victory, his administration raised many eyebrows when news reports came out quoting sources as saying Bush intended to govern as if he had a mandate. Some scoffed at that. But that is exactly what Bush did.
The argument for an aggressive approach in the mold of Franklin D. Roosevelt or Lyndon B. Johnson is that health care, energy and education are all part of systemic economic problems and should be addressed comprehensively. But Democrats are discussing a hybrid strategy that would push for a bold economic program and also encompass other elements of Mr. Obama’s campaign platform, even if larger goals are put off.
Congressional leaders want to move swiftly in January to pass a major expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program — a plan vetoed by President Bush — as a step toward the broader coverage Mr. Obama promised. Likewise, Democrats plan to incorporate his proposed middle-class tax cuts in the economic legislation or pass them in tandem. And Mr. Obama could increase investment in alternative energy as a down payment on a far-reaching climate plan.
“I believe it would be important to show fairly early on that change is here,” said Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, a member of the House Democratic leadership. “One of the very visible ways to show that would be to pass some of the bills George Bush vetoed.”
Given the number of votes Obama got — more votes than any other individual in American history — and his big electoral college margin, his backers will argue persuasively that he has a mandate. But even there that doesn’t mean (a)riding roughshod, targeting, and demonizing those who disagree with him, OR, (b)not taking a stand, advocating policies and enacting them.
The big change will be the departure from the Bush/Rove approach towards winning elections and governing — which was a constant “them against us” approach. The National Journal’s Ronald Brownstein argues that Bush’s approach has damaged the GOP way beyond this year’s elections — which is the same implication in the San Jose Mercury piece and the same contention we have argued on this site.
Here’s part of what Brownstein writes:
Bush and his chief political strategist, Karl Rove, dreamed of cementing a lasting Republican electoral majority. Instead, Bush has left his party in rubble.
The 2008 election represented a final grade on Bush’s bruising and polarizing political strategy. To a degree unmatched by modern presidents, Bush governed more by mobilizing his base than by reaching out to voters and interests beyond it. His legislative strategy centered on minimizing dissent among congressional Republicans; his electoral strategy revolved around maximizing his vote among Republicans and conservative independents. On both fronts, his guiding principle was deepen, not broaden.
This approach was truly synergistic with talk radio, leading to the creation of what I call “the talk radio political culture” where the message of talk radio and the White House became almost identical in many cases.
Indeed, it was notable during Bush’s terms that some Bush bigwigs would only talk to talk radio or to Fox News for major interviews, in a new twist to “preaching to the choir.” But, in this case, the goal was to make sure the choir showed up on time when the Bush administration wanted the choir. Meanwhile, in Congress, if Republicans wavered they could expect to be deluged with calls and emails from Republicans fired up by talk show hosts who in many cases echoed the views of the White House or seemed virtual spokespeople for the RNC.
Mobilizing is fine — but the rest of the county ALSO included moderates, independents and some Democrats who didn’t agree with the Democrats’ progressive wing.
FDR was far-sighted enough to try and develop a coalition including diverse groups and outlooks. So was JFK. So was Ronald Reagan. But the Bush-Rove style relied on making sure that those who agreed with you turned out in force in enough numbers to politically overpower the ones who didn’t agree or might partially agree. And if an olive branch was extended to critics, they were usually hit over the head with it.
LBJ had a saying:
He once told someone about a foe that it was better to have him on the inside of the tent peeing out than on the outside of the tent peeing in.
Bush/Rove kept a lot of people outside the tent. And the result when things got tough was: (fill in the blank yourself…)
Brownstein puts it more politely than yours truly:
The congressional Republican majority, demonstrating levels of party unity unequaled since around 1900, passed key elements of his agenda. A skillfully engineered surge in Republican turnout powered his re-election and GOP congressional gains in 2002 and 2004.
But through Bush’s second term, this insular strategy grew unsustainable. By targeting so many of his policies toward the priorities of his conservative base, Bush ignited volcanic opposition from Democratic voters and steadily alienated independents. Because he had done so little to court voters beyond his ardent core, he lacked a well of good will to draw on when events turned against him, first with Katrina and Iraq, later with the economy. His disapproval rating soared to heights unsurpassed in modern polling.
Will Obama learn from Bush’s mistake? In fact, there’s every indication is that he isn’t and has never played from the polarization playbook. His entire approach during the election and primary season was to try and build enduring electoral coalitions that went beyond one narrow ideological or partisan base.
The Washington Post’s David Broder sees signs concrete signs that the Obama era will be different:
The vice president-elect, with decades of Senate experience and a host of friendships, can help smooth his way, but more important, [Connecticut Sen. Chris] Dodd said, “Obama has a wonderful temperament. He knows he has to build real relationships for anything to happen. He doesn’t have them now, but his instincts are perfect.”
[Illinois’ retiring Republican Rep. Ray] LaHood was equally enthusiastic. He recalled that the same week Obama was elected to the Senate, he phoned LaHood and asked if he could come visit him in Peoria — in order to build a relationship that permitted them to work together on Illinois projects. “This year, we had six bipartisan dinners,” LaHood said. “I think he knows that he has to be bipartisan to deal with these problems. And I think he will surround himself with people like Rahm Emanuel (the Chicago congressman) who feel the same way.”
These insiders can judge Obama better than I can, but I think they read him correctly. The size of the expanded Democratic majorities in both House and Senate may tempt Obama to consider a mirror-image of the George Bush strategy of mobilizing his own party on Capitol Hill and simply bulling bills past the Democrats.
But that approach really didn’t work for Bush after the first year or two. I think there is much wisdom in the comment that Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts made on Meet the Press this week. He said that the difficulty of the challenges now facing Washington is such that the aim should not be to pound out narrow partisan victories but to negotiate for “85-vote majorities,” endorsed by all but the most extreme liberal or conservative senators.
After the hyper-partisanship of the Bush years, I think there are probably many members of both parties who would welcome the kind of approach Dodd and LaHood and Kerry are all advocating.
One more quote from Brownstein is worth nothing here. He notes the long term damage Bush has inflicted on the Republican brand:
Bush’s polarizing method of governing will likely reverberate for Republicans far beyond these immediate losses. His approach has severely narrowed his party’s electoral reach. Young people moved steadily away from the GOP under Bush and cast two-thirds of their votes for Obama. Likewise, Obama carried two-thirds of Hispanics and won comfortably among independents, reinforcing their Democratic tilt from 2006. And Obama reached 47 percent among white voters with college or post-graduate degrees — which keyed his game-changing routs in white-collar suburbs from Pennsylvania to Colorado. McCain dominated only among working-class white voters, many of them culturally conservative and hawkish, but they represented just 39 percent of voters — down from a majority as recently as 1992.
For Republicans, the geographic trends are even more ominous. The Southern evangelical face that Bush placed on his party accelerated the long-term GOP decline in the Northeast: Obama easily carried all 11 states from Maryland to Maine. Republicans now hold just four (of 22) Senate seats in those states and 17 (of 92) House seats, severe declines from as recently as 2002. In the Mountain West, Obama captured three states that backed Bush in 2004. Before 2004, Democrats held just three (of 16) Senate seats and seven (of 28) House seats across the eight-state region. After Tuesday, the numbers were seven and 17.
Under Bush, Democrats also solidified their hold on the West Coast (where they now hold all six Senate seats) and upper Midwest; now they are advancing in outer South states like Virginia and North Carolina, where Democratic House and Senate gains accompanied Obama’s breakthrough victories Tuesday. Only the most culturally conservative areas — the Deep South, Great Plains, rural Midwest and upper Rockies — remain reliably red.
As Brownstein notes, Bush can’t be blamed for all of the political ills that have befallen the GOP.
But Bush and Rove can be blamed for dismissing the long term importance of consensus and coalition building in creating not just support but a sense of national unity, versus the sense that the country was in a state of perpetual ideological war.
It now comes out that this kind of demonizing rhetoric could have had tragic consequences: according to reports, the Secret Service noticed that GOP Vice Presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin’s rhetoric about Obama led to a big spike in death threats against Obama.
Brownstein again:
But by focusing his agenda so intently on the center of his coalition, Bush lost the center of the country. That’s the cautionary lesson Obama will overlook at his peril.
In other words, Bush chose to downsize the tent and there were a lot of people outside.
Given his track record so far, it’s more likely that Obama will seek to put up a much bigger tent to invite more people inside — with more pleasing inside sanitary conditions.
UPDATE: One of the best bloggers on the left, Talk Left’s Big Tent Democrat, disagrees with one of Brownstein’s fundamental assertions (and our view also) about the Bush/GOP failure:
The problem with political reporters is they know so little about politics. Even the smart ones….This analysis is simply and undeniably wrong. How Bush got his policies through is not what has caused the Republican electoral debacle. It was the performance of his Republican policies. If Bush’s policies had been successful, Republicans would be expanding their majorities TODAY. It is ironic that political reporters never can accept that elections are judgments on the efficacy of the policies of the governing party, not the process by which policies are enacted.
A good point which needs to be taken into consideration. In fact, viewed in this context, it should be twined with the negatives of ruling via polarization. The bottom line is that polarizing politics leaves political leaders with no safety net among other voters if things go wrong — or if the polarized voters they count on start to become dissatisfied.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.