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.
