The elite media appears willing to publish as many of these ‘America is a center-right country’ opinion pieces as they can solicit. Today, we get the editor of Governing magazine, Alan Ehrenhalt, informing us that:
…despite the Democrats’ remarkable gains over the last two national elections, the party remains to the left of the electorate.
Ehrenhalt offers no supporting information to bolster his thesis, but just tosses this trope out in tautological fashion. That’s a shame because it ruins an otherwise useful and informative essay. As I have written often, the new Democratic majority is both better and more cohesive than the old New Deal coalition of Southern Segregationists and Big City bosses. Ehrenhalt fully understands this:
But President Carter failed to grasp — or refused to confront — the mathematical reality that every reporter in the press gallery instinctively understood. That Democratic majority was almost totally illusory. Of the 292 House Democrats sworn in that January, about 70 were conservative Southerners with little personal loyalty to the president and none at all to a mainstream Democratic agenda. Perhaps 30 more were big-city machine Democrats, the last of a dying breed, with little interest in public policy at all other than offering an occasional vote to labor and asking politely for instructions from the party back home. To get anywhere, Mr. Carter needed help from what was then still a sizeable contingent of moderate Republicans. Yet, falsely confident in his majority, he made little effort to reach out.
In many ways, the political environment has turned upside down. The Democratic Party in Congress is no longer the fragile and ideologically disparate group it was in 1977 or even 1993; it is now a remarkably cohesive left-of-center majority, with the presence of several dozen fiscally conservative “blue dog” Democrats in the House only a minor obstacle to its unity.
Think about this for a minute. President Carter had bigger Democratic majorities than President Obama, but less actual support for his policies. This is in spite of Carter running as a conservative Democrat, while Obama ran as a liberal with a centrist tone. Any neutral observer would conclude that the current Congress is far to the left of the Congress enjoyed by Jimmy Carter. Any fair comparison of Carter and Obama’s mandates would conclude that Obama’s mandate is further to the left.
Ehrenhalt’s thesis is premised on two dubious assumptions. The first, which is implicit, is that the electorate, as a whole, has moved far to the right since 1977. The second, which he makes explicit, is that the current Congress is further to the left than the electorate. In other words, their mandate is illusory.
Now the question is not whether the next Congress will be willing to support President Obama’s vision, but whether this majority will want to move further in a liberal direction than the country wishes to move.
Barack Obama is a man of compelling gifts, but in the end he was elected primarily because the Republicans had made a hash of things, not because of his charm or elegance. If he shows any early signs of being the ideological left-wing president John McCain warned of, he will be stepping into his own kind of political trap, different from the ones that ensnared Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, but potentially just as debilitating.
Herein lies the true debate. Have the Republicans’ mistakes led to a non-ideological backlash? Or, has the electorate carefully observed the full fruits of unfettered conservatism and rejected it? Inside the Beltway, it appears that there is a strong preference for the former analysis. Obama’s mandate is a almost wholly negative one. People didn’t so much vote for Obama’s ideas as against more of the same Republican policies. Even though the electorate rejected the candidacy of Hillary Clinton as insufficiently different from the status quo, what people really voted for was a restoration of Clintonism. And, even if the electorate did elect this president and this Congress, they’re not going to like the result because it is further to the Left than what they really want. We’ve seen countless columns on these themes.
I think it is pretty obvious that the 2000 electorate didn’t vote for the kind of conservatism that they bought with Bush/Frist/DeLay. Bush didn’t even win the popular vote. But American politics is a constant game of calibration. Major events like the assassination of JFK, the Watergate scandal, and the 9/11 attacks, have a way of throwing political power out of calibration. One party may find that it temporarily holds power out of all relation to the actual positive support for their policies. Strong third-party candidacies, like Ross Perot’s, can have a similar effect.
I would argue that Obama and Congress are better calibrated to the mood of the public than most recent presidents. LBJ’s majorities were inflated by JFK’s assassination. Carter’s were inflated by Watergate. Clinton’s mandate was weak…a fact disguised in the strength of Perotism. And Bush’s power was distorted by the 9/11 attacks. We need to look back to Reagan and Eisenhower to find presidents that came into office with a mandate as well-calibrated to the public mood as Barack Obama’s mandate. There was nothing overly distorting in the 2008 campaign. The economy’s poor performance helped Obama, but the economy is a core reality of our current environment, and not some accident of history like an assassination, scandal, or third-party candidacy.
If the mood of the electorate has moved to the Left because of the economic conditions facing the country, then that is a true movement in ideology and not some illusory mandate. Moreover, if the electorate has observed Conservatism in action and rejected the results, that, too, is a true ideological movement. People no longer believe that the Republicans are better on foreign policy or the economy because they had a chance to see the GOP’s performance on those issues. People want health care because the health care system is broken.
In other words, Obama has a real mandate. The people have spoken and the next Congress will be, by historical standards, very well calibrated to their mood.
I think all the analyses of “mandate” err by taking a kind of determinist view of history, as if one flips Switch A and Event A happens. As if the American people are a bed of lettuce responding predictably to how much rain or sun they get, how many babies the rabbits are making, how much fertilizer the biped remembers to give them. It’s a viewpoint that makes it very easy to be a pundit: plug in the gross summary of events and eject a list of the same old litanies that have always kept pundits in gainful employment.
What is more difficult, and therefore largely discounted, is the nature of the actors in the drama. Nobody opines on the effect of having a stunningly stupid or psychotic individual in the Oval Office, or a smart one, or an actor who could do a convincing Norman Rockwell diorama figure.
Obama’s mandate will be determined largely by what he wants it to be, how much credibility he earns, how well he fends off attacks from the Right, how well he works with congressional majorities. People have always wanted health care, a safety net, government for the people. The vast majority of people have been stymied by extreme concentrations of money, and the power it buys, working against their interests.
With Obama we have the first very smart president since at least LBJ or Kennedy. (Some would say I’m forgetting about Clinton, but I think his intelligence was badly blunted by psychological issues.) We’ve gone through epic social, economic, and technological changes since then. We have no basis for predicting what a smart president can or can’t, will or won’t, do under present conditions. There is a whole generation of voters who have never experienced a smart and effective president. To my mind, Obama understands that the old bromides about “left” and “right”, “liberal” and “conservative”, no longer refer to reality. His basic outlook seems to fit with what Liberal used to mean, in a very broad sense: liberty, equality, community, justice. If he proves as skillful as president as he was as candidate, he will solve many fundamental problems in ways that satisfy classic liberal goals and confound the tired formulas of paint-by-numbers pundits.
A cartoon explains it.
There’s another point that will intensify the effect of Obama’s mandate. Correct me if I’m wrong, but compared to most politicians, Obama doesn”t “owe” anybody “big time.” He’s very much a self-made politician. From what I understand, he doesn’t even owe Mayor Daley, although he’s on good terms with him. Yes, he “owes” people in the sense of his own patronage power, but that’s different: they will look up to him, not vice-versa. Even his campaign contributors were widely distributed and diversified, and he avoided lobbyists. What all this means is that he doesn’t HAVE to pick this one or that one unless he really thinks they would be good for the country. And from what I’ve seen so far, he shows remarkably good judgement. Probably I’m exaggerating, but I really think he is free of those obligations to a greater extent than almost any major politician in living memory. This means he can make appointments based on merit and brains = a brain trust or meritocracy. If I’m wrong, set me right.
Well, I don’t think he can entirely escape the constraints of the bribocracy system that we enjoy in this country, and he will inevitably be thinking about the next elections. He does seem to see beyond those immediate factors, though, to a much broader view of what the country needs and what people will respond to. At the very least, I think we’ll have the smartest, most competent administration in nearly half a century.
Obama indeed has a mandate. that’s why, as I’ve been constantly saying, Lieberman must be removed from any position of power, because his continued chair of Homeland Security & Government Affairs jeopardizes Obama’s success.
That mandate ain’t gonna mean shit if Joe Lieberman is hounding President Obama with witch hunts and politically motivated investigations:
take action here. Stop Joe Lieberman.
But if Reid doesn’t want to get rid of him, what does that say about Reid?
I think the question comes down to this: Political power, political leverage, doesn’t exist in a vacuum. How much damage Lieberman can really do is pretty much dependent on how much power the forces that backed him (DLC, AIPAC, Republicans) still have. This will all become clear over the next few months.
It’s somewhat comparable to the situation vis a vis the Clintons when Obama won the Democratic primary. Everybody was so scared that they would hijack the convention. And they made ll kinds of threatening noises. But in the end they simply no longer had the power in the party to do so. They had lost it to Obama and his crew. My guess is that either Joe will discover his inner Obama, or it will truly be bye bye. Yes, I know, Obama doesn’t control the Democrats in the senate, but his people are going to have a lot of influence there.
It’s somewhat comparable to the situation vis a vis the Clintons when Obama won the Democratic primary. Everybody was so scared that they would hijack the convention. And they made ll kinds of threatening noises.
With all due respect you’re wrong and the analogy to the clintons is a poor one.
With the clintons, all of the worries about whether they’d hijack the convention were pretty much speculative and fueld by the media, which had it’s little pre-conceived narrative of “splits in the democratic party”. Atrios (IIRC) had quite a bit about that (Booman too, I think).
With Lieberman, it’s based on demonstrable evidence based on his actions.
When Hillary Clinton lost the nomination, did she then support McCain? NO. She supported Obama, and made a VERY good speech at the convention.
When Joe Lieberman lost his nomination in 2004, not only did he NOT support the democratic nominee, he ran against him with the backing of the GOP and won.
Ever since he has been a troublemaker. Hillary promised to support Obama and did so. Lieberman promised not to attack Obama, and broke that promise.
he has to go: anyone who believes he won’t be the Iago of the Senate is fooling themselves.
Not even Iago. Nobody had reason to suspect Iago of treachery. With Lieberman he might as well be wearing a big neon sign. He has no right to any committee chair slot or anything else. He is not a Democrat, and he has shown himself to be an enemy of the party. I don’t quite get why the Dem leadership is walking on eggs about this. Lieberman has no leverage that I can see — no credibility with members of either party. If Reid and the rest of the Senate Dems lay down the law, he’s got no choice but to obey or make his fall from relevancy complete.
he’s actually nothing right now. he got kicked out of connecticut for lieberman. he represents no constituency whatsoever. He’s like that guy from “Dazed and Confused” who graduated years ago but keeps hanging out at the high school trying to pick up chicks.
“With the clintons, all of the worries about whether they’d hijack the convention were pretty much speculative and fueld by the media…”
How soon we forget.
Bill Clinton couldn’t even bring himself to campaign with Obama until October fu–ing 25th. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/25/bill-clinton-and-obama-pl_n_137821.html
Comin g out of the convention, Hillary had the sense to realize that her political future depended on being (at least for the time being) a team player. Bill, on the other hand, realized that he no longer had any political future and was just plain pissed off.
The Clintons would have split the convention if they could have. But the idea was very unpopular with everyone in the Dem party except themselves. Bill Richardson was the first to jump ship, remember that? Bit by bit, superdelegates were pledging for Obama. It was a choreographed message to the Clintons from Howard Dean — this is the Democratic party. not the Clinton party, we want to win this year.
It became clear that the Clintons had no chance, so they didn’t try it. The media often do what you claim they did here, but in this case it was a real threat and a real fear among Democrats for months.
So I think it’s a good analogy, especially since Lieberman and the Clintons have a lot in common, being DLC’ers and sharing the tendency to be concerned first and foremost for numero uno rather than the party.
The parallel is that, as a couple of our commenters here have just pointed out, Joe bet on the wrong horse. He can do his damnedest, but he’s just not as dangerous as he used to be. So why not make nice to him? I wouldn’t have thought of this myself, but Obama’s a better politician than I am.
But remember, it’s only an analogy, I don’t claim it’s a carbon-copy.
Why Joe Lieberman must go
Obama reaches out to Netroots.
Huffpost
Hires Mike Lux, blogger, OpenLeft as Adviser and Progressive Liaison for Transition Team
They believe that the center does not move. And that Ronald Reagan (or George W. Bush) defined the center forever.
The center just moved. Substantially. Obama center-right in the new location of the center. Events and the consequences of his own policies will move his results leftward. Healthcare reform can only end in some form (even de facto) of single-payer healthcare and a dramatic reassessment of fee-for-service financing. Given any government sponsored plan, employers will shed people and high insurance costs quickly, much faster than they shed defined benefit pension plans after the introduction of 401(k) plans.
The financial bailout will force reintroduction of regulation. The condition of the budget will force increases in taxation; the only question is whose taxes will be increased.
The center has moved because the public can no longer afford the luxury of living in a conservative illusion.
BooMan, Wasn’t Reagan’s power inflated by the hostage crisis?
You can look at these things two ways.
What is accidental or incidental, and what is fundamental?
The hostage crisis was part of a more general listless and failed foreign policy. Reagan ran on restoring American strength, which was on the wane. In that sense, he ran on something fundamental and won a mandate for higher defense spending and a more interventionist foreign policy.
He also ran against a quite real state of stagflation. He won a mandate to try something different.
That’s a lot different from the kind of temporary insanity caused by the JFK assassination, Watergate, or 9/11.
You’ve got it, Booman. The commentary I heard in blue collar bars back then was,”I don’t know if Reagan’s ideas will work, but we’ve got to try something.” People were fed up with stagflation, the nightly “America held hostage” broadcast, and the President hiding in the Rose Garden while blaming the American people’s “malaise”.
Same thing happened in Weimar Germany. Did the country suddenly take a rightward jump? No, the country was in chaos and they voted for anybody who promised to end it.
A lot of parallel here. Is the country suddenly DLC? Or were people fed up with Bush and voted for the charismatic man who promised change?