Stuart Stevens served as Mitt Romney’s chief strategist during the campaign. He has taken a lot of blame for the shortcomings of Romney’s effort, but he took to the Washington Post to defend himself, Gov. Romney, and the campaign they ran. One thing he said stuck out for me.
There was a time not so long ago when the problems of the Democratic Party revolved around being too liberal and too dependent on minorities. Obama turned those problems into advantages and rode that strategy to victory. But he was a charismatic African American president with a billion dollars, no primary and a media that often felt morally conflicted about being critical. How easy is that to replicate?
There is a bunch wrong with that paragraph but I want to focus on the last sentence. How easy will it be to replicate the success of Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns without Obama as the candidate?
I think the likelihood of replicating those efforts depends on a few factors, but the only one that Mr. Stevens correctly identified as a problem is Obama’s unique charisma. His charisma, discipline, and skill as a candidate cannot be replicated. However, he didn’t win because he had a billion dollars or because the press went easy on him or because he’s black or because his policies were liberal. And, while I’ll concede that the lack of a primary helped him this time around (although not in the first debate), his rough and tumble competition against Hillary Clinton may have been a necessary component for preparing him to beat John McCain in 2008.
On the subject of Obama’s race, rather than determining whether he won or lost the last two elections, it had more of an effect on the shape of his victories. I do not believe that states like West Virginia, Arkansas, and Missouri that were friendly to Bill Clinton would have turned so sharply against the Democratic Party if Hillary had been the nominee and president for the last four years. On the other hand, Obama many have run stronger than Hillary would have in some states with heavy black and Latino populations. If we’re talking 2008, Clinton might have won Missouri and lost North Carolina, for example.
But we are talking about the future, and after eight years of having a black family in the White House, there has been some reshuffling of the two parties’ brands. The GOP is whiter than ever and the Democratic Party is more identified with the changing demographics of the country. Both changes are alienating people and growing the polarization between the parties. It may be that a 2016 campaign by Hillary Clinton will discover that Arkansas doesn’t love her family anymore, and that West Virginia and Missouri are not going to come back into the fold. On the other hand, it could be that Obama’s race is disguising the true weakness of the Republican Party. It could be that a 2016 Democratic candidate who is seen as a sound bet to continue Obama’s policies and solidify his legacy will have no trouble holding onto his coalition, but will also find a much bigger pool of white working class voters willing to give their candidacy a look. Honestly, I suspect that the GOP is only hanging on as well as it is by fueling itself on the fumes of racial fear and resentment.
If the GOP doesn’t adapt to appeal to a larger and more diverse segment of the electorate, I don’t think the Democrats will need a terrifically charismatic candidate to replicate Obama’s victories. They won’t need a billion dollars. They won’t need to worry about primaries. And they won’t be reliant on a sympathetic press. All of those things can be helpful, and it’s very important that the Democratic Party keep and build on the outstanding organizational effort of the Obama campaigns, but I don’t think Mr. Stevens has correctly diagnosed what went wrong for him and his candidate.
Despite a bad economy and a polarizing candidate, the Democrats won fairly easily. A better question is whether the Republicans can keep it as close in a better economy with a less polarizing candidate to run against. I don’t think they can.