There are intended and unintended consequences of the Party of No Strategy that was hatched by Mitch McConnell prior to Obama’s inauguration.
“Their goal,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the Democratic whip, “is to slow down activity to stop legislation from passing in the belief that this will embolden conservatives in the next election and will deny the president a record of accomplishment.”
The strategy is intended to fire up the Republican base, but also to demoralize the Democratic base. It’s also intended to keep independents from seeing what Congress produces as the result of compromise.
“It was absolutely critical that everybody be together because if the proponents of the [health care] bill were able to say it was bipartisan, it tended to convey to the public that this is O.K., they must have figured it out,” Mr. McConnell said about the health legislation in an interview, suggesting that even minimal Republican support could sway the public. “It’s either bipartisan or it isn’t.”
Mr. McConnell said the unity was essential in dealing with Democrats on “things like the budget, national security and then ultimately, obviously, health care.”
By refusing to allow debate on anything, the Senate Republicans have forced the Democrats to make their vulnerable moderates walk the plank on every major piece of legislation. But that’s a mirror image of what McConnell has done to his less-vulnerable moderates. An unintended consequence is that the middle of the road has become a highway of death. On the left, Blanche Lincoln is headed to an epic defeat because she has pleased neither the progressive base nor the conservative center. On the right, candidates like Charlie Crist, Mike Castle, Lisa Murkowski, and Bob Bennett have been bounced out of the party. This phenomenon is what leads Gerald Seib to talk about Middle of the Road radicals.
In American politics, people tend to think of “radicals” as those on the ideological fringes of the left or right. But what happens when the radicals are smack in the middle of the political spectrum?
That may be the picture we’re looking at today. Many of those seriously estranged from the political system and its practitioners appear to sit in the political center. They are shaping this year’s campaign…
In one sense, these middle of the road voters are not shaping the campaign. After all, the candidates that would reflect their views did horribly in the Republican primaries and not much better in the Democratic primaries. But, that’s not what Seib is referring to.
But the other big force is political independents—voters who have no particular allegiance to either party and who don’t tend to have strong ideological leanings. These are the voters who drifted toward the Democrats in 2006, allowing them to take over control of the House from Republicans. Then they jumped firmly onto Barack Obama’s bandwagon in 2008, ousting Republicans from the White House and making Mr. Obama the first Democrat to win a majority of the national vote since Jimmy Carter.
Now they have turned again, and are pushing the system the other way. “For the third national election in a row, independent voters may be poised to vote out the party in power,” summarized the Pew Research Center in a recent study of independent voters.
These independent voters have become something like a band of nomad marauders, roaming across the American political landscape, hungry, angry and taking out their frustrations on the villages of the Democrats and Republicans in turn.
The Republicans may have rejected the candidates who would best represent the middle of the road, but the polls indicate that independents are going to vote for the radical candidates anyway.
Despite Obama’s decision to honor the constituency that elected him by keeping on Robert Gates and bringing other centrist Republicans into his cabinet, and despite making an effort to win bipartisan support for his agenda, he has failed to convince the independent swing-voter that he’s on their side. This is what all the racially-charged birth certificate-ACORN-Shirley Sherrod has been about. It’s what all the charges of socialism are about. It’s what the Party of No Strategy is about. All of this crap has done what it was intended to do.
I can’t think of a way the strategy could have failed. It was pretty close to foolproof. But it’s also a Faustian bargain. The costs of injecting all this cynicism, fear, and hate into our political discourse will be felt for a very long time. And, I am optimistic that it will do real damage to the Republicans in the long-term. If we had better turnout in midterms, it would hurt them right now.