I found this piece by Stanley Kurtz for National Review to be oddly interesting. At first, I was mildly confused because he seemed to be making erroneous characterizations without even creating a predicate for them. But then I remembered that his audience has already been primed with a bunch of fake facts and weird interpretations, so they don’t need to be reminded why they hold their peculiar worldview.
The basic idea behind the piece is that Barack Obama is subtly changing the very nature of American society and that the Republicans need to point this out or they will lose. However, the Romney team supposedly has a different theory, which is that the truly undecided voters in this election are mostly people who voted for Obama and like him personally. As a result, Team Romney feels that Tea Party-style attacks on the president will be counterproductive. Insulting him or calling him a socialist or accusing him of nefarious plots is only going to alienate otherwise accessible voters.
Mr. Kurtz concedes that he doesn’t have access to the focus group data and that the Romney campaign may be correct in their assessment of the battlefield, but he’s skeptical.
One thing that stood out for me was Kurtz’s commentary on the 2010 election.
Republicans won big in 2010 by defining Obama as an overweening ideologue. Yet that was the Tea Party’s doing, not the Republican establishment. In those days, Romney even jumped on the tea-party bandwagon with some surprisingly cutting observations about Obama’s leftism. Obama may not have pivoted after the 2010 election, but Republicans did. They toned down their attacks on the president’s ideology, and to some extent helped to build up the very wall of “likeability” they now fear to scale, even as the president rejected the Clintonian way and stayed to the left.
Remember that the Republicans won big in 1994 by defining Clinton as an overweening ideologue. And Clinton responded by bringing in Dick Morris, signing a horrible welfare reform bill, the Balanced Budget Act, the Iraq Liberation Act, and disastrously deregulating the banks. The Republicans attempted to bully Barack Obama in a similar manner, but so far they have got nothing. Had they been willing to make some concessions on revenue, they probably would have found some willingness on Obama’s part to emulate Clinton, at least to a point. But they weren’t, and he didn’t. So, as a result, conservatives like Mr. Kurtz see Obama as having “rejected the Clintonian way.” He didn’t pivot after suffering catastrophic losses in the midterm election.
I find this less interesting for its literal truth that for the way it shines a light on the Republicans’ strategic thinking. There is a bit of a meld. On the one hand, regardless of the Democratic president in the White House, the playbook says to refuse cooperation and to paint them as a far-left ideologue. On the other hand, the Republicans in charge of executing this play have a strong tendency to come around to believing it’s true and real. They didn’t stop thinking Bill Clinton was a far-left ideologue when he started signing their legislation. They only acknowledge a “Clintonian way” in retrospect.
I also enjoyed the following observation by Mr. Kurtz:
If the public is willing to cut Obama some slack for the economic problems he inherited, that is partly because we’ve allowed him to define the problem to begin with.
Why wouldn’t the public cut Obama some slack for problems he inherited?
As for the merits of the case that Mr. Kurtz would like to see made against Obama, I think it is pretty thin gruel. Check this out:
With the possible exception of the McGovern convention, this was the most left-leaning Democratic gathering in memory…If Obama squeaks by, he will have done so with the help of a Democratic party that has taken a large, open, and disturbingly leftist turn. I think we’re missing the significance of that. It is completely accurate to say that the Democrats are pushing a bogus reformulation of the American way of life — slapping a bunch of flags on their Julia ad and turning classic conceptions of civic and religious community into covers for a cradle-to-grave welfare state…the Obama Democrats are slowly redefining American exceptionalism into the European social democratic dream.
Again, as I said at the beginning, Mr. Kurtz doesn’t bother trying to create any predicates for these characterizations. We’re all supposed to just know what the “Julia ad” is and why it matters. We’re all supposed to agree that the Democratic Party has taken a dramatic turn to the left. I’m not interested in arguing against an unsubstantiated set of assertions. What I find interesting is this idea that we Democrats are overturning “classic conceptions of civic and religious life.” Nothing much has changed in the welfare state under Obama except that a year from now some people will begin getting subsidies to help them afford health insurance. Even this is not really new. We’ve had Medicaid for decades, and we have other programs like SCHIP to cover kids. What’s really different is the comprehensive scope. Thirty million people are going to get health care access that they didn’t previously have.
So, is this fear that conservatives seem to both cynically stir and actually half-believe based on the idea that government is replacing the traditional role of the church? Is that the totality of it? Or is it a little bit of that and a lot of rich people not wanting to pay taxes?
Either way, there seems to be very little justification for looking at the world this way. Certainly, the Democrats have no conscious plan to undermine religion or change classic conceptions of religious or civic community. During his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, President Obama tried to revive a classical sense of citizenship.
As Americans, we believe we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, rights that no man or government can take away. We insist on personal responsibility, and we celebrate individual initiative. We’re not entitled to success. We have to earn it. We honor the strivers, the dreamers, the risk- takers, the entrepreneurs who have always been the driving force behind our free enterprise system, the greatest engine of growth and prosperity that the world’s ever known.
But we also believe in something called citizenship — (cheers, applause) — citizenship, a word at the very heart of our founding, a word at the very essence of our democracy, the idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations.
Obama also said this:
We know that churches and charities can often make more of a difference than a poverty program alone. We don’t want handouts for people who refuse to help themselves, and we certainly don’t want bailouts for banks that break the rules. (Cheers, applause.)
We don’t think the government can solve all of our problems, but we don’t think the government is the source of all of our problems — (cheers, applause) — any more than our welfare recipients or corporations or unions or immigrants or gays or any other group we’re told to blame for our troubles — (cheers, applause) — because — because America, we understand that this democracy is ours.
We, the people — (cheers) — recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which asks only, what’s in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense. (Cheers, applause.)
As citizens, we understand that America is not about what can be done for us. It’s about what can be done by us, together — (cheers, applause) — through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government. That’s what we believe.
That doesn’t sound like a guy who has radical ideas about civic or religious life. It sounds a lot like Bill Clinton, frankly. It almost sounds like something that Mr. Kurtz might write. And it doesn’t sound like the most left-wing thing heard at a Democratic convention since 1972.
Yet, Mr. Kurtz is correct that Obama didn’t pivot. And that appears to be making him insane.
