The argument continues. Washington Post reports on a new study (.pdf) issued by a group called the Third Way.

The liberals’ hope that Democrats can win back the presidency by drawing sharp ideological contrasts and energizing the partisan base is a fantasy that could cripple the party’s efforts to return to power, according to a new study by two prominent Democratic analysts.

:::flip:::

The Third Way group is sponsored by six Democratic Senators:

Our Honorary Senate Chairs:

Blanche Lincoln U.S. Senator, Arkansas
Evan Bayh U.S. Senator, Indiana
Tom Carper U.S. Senator, Delaware

Our Honorary Vice Chairs:

Mary Landrieu U.S. Senator, Louisiana
Mark Pryor U.S. Senator, Arkansas
Ken Salazar U.S. Senator, Colorado

According to the study, Democrats cannot win national elections anymore.

Over the past thirty years, the ideological segmentation of the electorate has barely budged, but the authors found that ideology is a far greater predictor of voting behavior than in years past. For Democrats, the ramifications of the great sorting-out are mostly negative as there are three conservatives for every two liberals. Thus, compared to a generation ago, blue states are bluer, red states redder, and swing states fewer. Citing one example, the authors note that Jimmy Carter captured 72% of the liberal vote and won, while John Kerry captured 85% of the liberal vote and lost.

Let’s talk about Jimmy Carter. Carter barely won. He ran for President as a southern Christian at the end of a period of national trauma. Vietnam was lost, Nixon had resigned, the country was learning about abuses of power by the FBI, the CIA, and the IRS. Gerald Ford was a third-string President who barely fought off a primary challenge from Ronald Reagan. And Ford had pardoned Nixon, to the outrage of much of the country. In spite of all this, Carter won by a nose and then was solidly thumped in 1980. In hindsight, Carter’s victory looks like an aberration. In hindsight, after the Democratic Party split over the Vietnam war, the country took a turn to the right and never looked back. That conclusion leads to analysis like this:

Democrats must “admit that they cannot simply grow themselves out of their electoral dilemmas,” wrote William A. Galston and Elaine C. Kamarck, in a report released yesterday. “The groups that were supposed to constitute the new Democratic majority in 2004 simply failed to materialize in sufficient number to overcome the right-center coalition of the Republican Party.”

Now let’s look at George W. Bush. Bush won election after a long period of national prosperity and relative peace. The most pressing issues seemed to be how to spend an enormous budgetary surplus, and how to restore moral values to a White House besmirched by the l’affair Lewinsky. Bush lost the popular vote; he only won the electoral vote through a combination of luck, fraud, voter suppression, and the intervention of the Supreme Court. He had no mandate at all. And then 9/11 happened:

On defense and social issues, “liberals espouse views diverging not only from those of other Democrats, but from Americans as a whole. To the extent that liberals now constitute both the largest bloc within the Democratic coalition and the public face of the party, Democratic candidates for national office will be running uphill.”

Simply put, the above is not altogether true. We know that the liberals’ position on abortion (that it remain legal) is the majority position. The liberals’ position on gay-marriage is the minority view. The liberals’ position on Iraq is now the majority view, but the liberals’ position on the defense budget and global posture is probably a minority view. It’s a mixed bag.

Galston and Kamarck — whose work was sponsored by Third Way, a group working with Senate Democrats on centrist policy ideas — are critical of three other core liberal arguments:

· They warn against overreliance on a strategy of solving political problems by “reframing” the language by which they present their ideas, as advocated by linguist George Lakoff of the University of California at Berkeley: “The best rhetoric will fail if the public rejects the substance of a candidate’s agenda or entertains doubts about his integrity.”

· They say liberals who count on rising numbers of Hispanic voters fail to recognize the growing strength of the GOP among Hispanics, as well as the growing weakness of Democrats with white Catholics and married women.

· They contend that Democrats who hope the party’s relative advantages on health care and education can vault them back to power “fail the test of political reality in the post-9/11 world.” Security issues have become “threshold” questions for many voters, and cultural issues have become “a prism of candidates’ individual character and family life,” Galston and Kamarck argue.

Their basic thesis is that the number of solidly conservative Republican voters is substantially larger that (sic) the reliably Democratic liberal voter base.

I agree completely about overreliance on ‘framing’. I even considered banning the use of the term on this site before I thought better of it. Yet, the importance of framing cannot be denied completely. I don’t see any fall-out for Republicans for naming their programs ‘Iraqi Freedom’, ‘Healthy Forests’, or the ‘Patriot Act’. I don’t see the public concluding that such abuse of usage indicates a lack of integrity. Framing is important, but it should not be relied upon.

On Hispanics, Catholics, and married women: the question arises, ‘are these voters voting for the GOP for rigid ideological reasons?’ Or are they picking and choosing in each election cycle? It seems to me that the GOP has made inroads into these groups by wedging abortion and gay marriage. But they haven’t put them firmly in their camp. Hispanics still vote Democratic, and their numbers are growing. Liberals shouldn’t rely on mere demographics to take them over the top, but neither should they despair of creating a new electoral majority by utilizing a southwest strategy.

On the post-9/11 world: the aftereffect of 9/11 is starting to wear off. Gas prices, rebuilding the Gulf Coast, health care, good-paying jobs…these issues are slowly reemerging as the primary concerns of the American electorate. Still, having said that, the liberals need to articulate a defense strategy that the electorate can accept. There is probably no bigger gulf between liberals and mainstream America than over our military posture in the world.

Are we to be an empire, with troops stationed in over a hundred nations around the globe? Should we sacrifice some of our sovereignty to join with multilateral organizations to tackle the world’s pressing problems? The American public is still very much infatuated with our post-World War Two myths about ourselves. Despite humbling experiences in Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, and Iraq, we still have an abiding can-do belief in our ability to exercise power without consequences. Even 9/11 did not make us question the costs of empire, but rather led us to demand more (or at least to go along with more). Attempting to articulate a more humble foreign policy, a smaller defense budget, and more multilateral cooperation is difficult and easily demagogued in an environment rife with terrorism.

So, there are difficulties that liberals face, but we should take a lesson from George W. Bush. Bush’s policies are far out of the mainstream, and his budgetary policy doesn’t have any relationship to his party’s ideology. Despite coming into office with less than a plurality of the vote, he was able to move the country dramatically to the right and still win reelection.

Likewise, a Democrat could win an election by a tiny majority and then govern much further to the left than they had led people to believe. The Republicans rely on stealth (look at the SCOTUS nominees) to push through many radical policies. They are willing to push a forceful agenda without any popular mandate. And they have been successful, so far, in enacting much of their agenda without paying any price on election day. There is little reason to believe that a Democratic President and Congress could not do the same.

The public has not backlashed (until recently) at the Bush administration for several reasons. Primary among them, is the extreme self-confidence with which the Republicans pursue their aims and exercise their power. To be sure, the GOP soft-pedals some of their more controversial policies, and they distort the nature of their policies (what they do, what they cost, who benefits).

To me, the lesson of the past two elections is that the country is equally divided, but it can tolerate being ruled from the far right or the far left. We have failed to win the Presidency not for any systemic reasons, but through a combination of factors. If the Palm Beach County election board had not used a butterfly ballot George W. Bush never would have been President and we would not be talking about the inability of Democrats to win national elections. If John Kerry was just a tiny bit more charismatic he would have won in 2004. We should not overanalyze our recent failures. Neither should we conclude that we must make significant changes on social issues (like abortion or gay marriage) in response to tiny electoral defeats.

The Democrats are positioned to win elections in 2006 and 2008 utilizing either a progressive strategy of mobilizing the base and projecting strength and confidence in our beliefs, or in muddying the waters and playing to the middle. However, as long as we are out of the mainstream on defense issues (empire, huge budgets) we would do better to run to the left and project our strength and confidence in the validity and correctness of our beliefs.

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