So, what exactly was that all about?
It’s probable that future historians will describe the long, debasing political season we just endured as “The Campaign About Nothing.”
As of this moment, it appears that President Obama has returned to the White House, along with a Democratic Senate and a Republican House of Representatives. Are you getting deja vu all over again?
The president has no clear mandate, no trump card he can display to Congress to break the gridlock or avoid the upcoming fiscal cliff everyone of us is going to hate, and say, “Folks, as the only candidate who won the votes across the country, this is what the American people want us to do.”
Had Romney been elected, he would have been unable to say that his vision was what the American people wanted.
That’s because neither candidate offered a vision for where to take the country.
Instead, ears wide open to consultants, they conducted “small ball campaigns.”
These guys weren’t swinging for the fences. They weren’t offering some new vision like Roosevelt, Johnson, or Reagan.
They just trotted out the cliches and buzz words they knew would energize their bases and played their parts out like cardboard cutouts of human beings.
Neither of them took chances.
And neither said, “You know, I think our party’s gotten this wrong.”
Rather, they carefully fed the appropriate amounts of red and blue meats to their respective bases. Just enough get those bases fired up and then, in the campaign’s waning days, tried to tell undecided who care about such things that they’d be willing to work with folks from the other party.
These candidates weren’t even willing to talk about the signal achievements of their political careers for fear of fostering animosity from voters who might disagree with them.
Romneycare really was the model for Obamacare, the federal health care program that Obama had hoped would gain Republican lawmakers would go for because of its Republican pedigree. But after it became clear that because the Tea Party faction had no use for Romneycare turned Obamacare, Romney had to orphan the plan, offering tortured explanations of how the two were different, later endorsing Obamacare’s most popular provisions.
But Obama also neglected to talk about the Affordable Care Act as an achievement of his first four years, totally neglecting mention of it in his final arguments for re-election.
Obama also failed to talk that much about his foreign and national security policy, arguably the most effective in those realms since Dwight Eisenhower, a realpolitik approach more like that of such Republicans as Theodore Roosevelt, Eisenhower, or George H.W. Bush than to some Democrats one might name, be it Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, or Jimmy Carter. It wouldn’t do for a Democrat appealing to his base to talk about being strong in this realm, it seems.
So, undoubtedly under the Svengali-influences of consultants who care little about history or the future, both campaigns played it safe. They said things they knew would make their bases pleased. They pursued the uninspired and uninspiring path of dancing the well-worn steps of the partisan kabuki dance, the object of which is to win, not to govern.
The question is, what can break this bad habit of electing candidates who voluntarily rein in their courage, their imaginations, and their capacity for leadership and of consultants who advise their clients to play it safe, controlling the body politic? Maybe some Republican folks are learning this lesson tonight, although I wouldn’t count on it.
I’m convinced that both Obama and Romney could have done better this campaign. Either one of them could have presented visions that would have led to big mandate-granting wins. But they didn’t.
Can Obama, who owns no mandate and yet is our president, break the mold and find a way to work with Republicans in Congress to do all that needs to be done? Will the Republicans work with him?
If the past is a reliable prologue, the answers that suggest themselves aren’t encouraging, which is why a lot of us so inclined are hitting our knees tonight, praying. We want our campaigns and the people we elect to be about something. We want our President and our Congresses to be successful.
I once foolishly ran for political office. A seasoned pol advised me then, “Don’t run if you’re not willing to lose.” I didn’t understand her at first.
Now I do.
No one should run who doesn’t want to win, of course. Don Quixotes are a waste of everyone’s time and money.
But no one who feels they have a shot at winning should run if they aren’t willing to take the chance to take stands that might lead to defeat.
A Republican should be willing to make a play for California and support things some in his base may deem anathema.
A Democrat should go deep in the heart of Texas and be willing to say, “We might be wrong on some issues.”
Candidates who adopted such strategies wouldn’t be selling out. After all, no political party has a monopoly on common sense or good ideas. And you know what? Some candidates may go down to defeat trying that.
But it’s also likely that others will win and that when they win, they will have irrefutable mandates to govern, to experiment, to fail, and to succeed!
We don’t need another campaign about nothing. Ideas should matter and they should be more than things that red or blue partisans applaud at proscribed moments.
We need politics and governance that means something, that stands for something more than poll-tested crowd-pleasers that leave us just where we are.
We didn’t get a campaign about something in 2012. Do we dare hope for one in 2016?
[I blog on altogether different things on my personal blog.]