Much to the legitimate consternation of the right, CBS News’ chief Washington correspondent John Dickerson recently wrote a column in Slate calling on the president to use his inaugural speech to go for the throat of the Republican Party. Here’s the key paragraph:
The challenge for President Obama’s speech is the challenge of his second term: how to be great when the environment stinks. Enhancing the president’s legacy requires something more than simply the clever application of predictable stratagems. Washington’s partisan rancor, the size of the problems facing government, and the limited amount of time before Obama is a lame duck all point to a single conclusion: The president who came into office speaking in lofty terms about bipartisanship and cooperation can only cement his legacy if he destroys the GOP. If he wants to transform American politics, he must go for the throat.
I’ll let CBS News figure out how they want to deal with that matzoh ball, but Dickerson’s point deserves consideration. I don’t really think the inaugural speech is the proper time to engage in strong partisanship. An inaugural speech ought to be aimed in large part at uniting the country and pushing for some broad consensus on the proper direction for the country. But, as an overall second term strategy, I can find no fault in Dickerson’s analysis.
We’ve read a lot about President Obama’s desire to be a great, transformative president. I don’t think you can do that unless you upend the political landscape in some way, leaving an electorate much different in its allegiances than you found it. You can say that about Lincoln and FDR and LBJ and Reagan. I’m not sure that you can say it about Wilson or Eisenhower.
Obama’s coalition for his second election was basically a smaller version of his first coalition. While demographics worked to modestly bolster his numbers, the right was successful in eroding his support among white working class voters, making the difference between Obama’s two victories little more than a matter of a slight enthusiasm gap.
The president’s challenge, now, is to splinter the Republican Party into two or more warring factions. If the Democrats are going to retain the power they have in Congress, they will have to make inroads in states that Romney won and they will have to pick up seats in the House that do not look winnable on paper. That means that it will take more than a good turnout operation or even a winning message. Millions of people will have to change their minds about their political allegiances.
That is why Obama’s strategy will change from fighting for the best deals he can get and making sure not to pick any fights he can’t win, to fighting for deals he probably cannot win and picking fights that divide the GOP caucus. If the Republicans shut down the government and refuse to pass any reasonable gun control laws and continue to block any comprehensive immigration reform, they will alienate many of their own voters.
If the House Republicans are forced to pass bills with mostly Democratic support, the base will turn against the Establishment and their unity of message will be destroyed while their oppositional energies will be sapped.
Everything works in tandem. A government shutdown angers the business community and energizes the Democratic base. Deals cut without majority-Republican support divide, distract, and demoralize the GOP’s base. Obstinance on immigration worsens the Republicans’ Latino problem and angers the business community. Extremism on guns, creates serious erosion to the Republicans’ support in the suburban districts we need to win back the House.
By staking out positions and pushing for broadly popular reforms that the Republicans’ oppose, the president wins either way. Either the Republicans split and support his policies or they split and make their electoral problems much worse.
One of the keys to success, though, is to get the Republicans to fight among themselves so that they can’t continue to successfully polarize the country around an us vs. them mentality. It is about marginalizing the Republican Party and eating into their base of support. Don’t discount the power of economic populism to help the party do this job. Yet, that populist message might be step two. Obama can provide the wedges that splinter the GOP, and then the next presidential candidate can exploit that with an populist message that goes right to the white working class’s interests.
With the right chess moves, the 2016 electorate could be completely transformed, and that would be a sure sign that Obama had succeeded in his goal of being a transformative president.
For a transformative President, the first step is to end the Civil War.
Good news, though. I give the C.S.A another 50 years, tops.
No, the first step is to win that Civil War…
Good stuff, Booman. (I just put a take from a slightly different angle up in the diaries.)
I think it’s significant to note that second, third and fourth generation hispanic and asian families are representing a larger share of this country. And that Barack Obama erased all of Bush’s inroads with those voters (mostly hispanic). As the republicans fervently cling to the vestiges of white supremacy, these changes will become permanent.
I would add Truman to your list. Transition from the war against fascism in WWII to ushering in the nuclear era, the Cold War, the Truman doctrine (Korean War, domino theory), the Marshall plan, creation of NATO, and the recognition of Israel, was transformative and all of these have had long lasting effects on the world.
His sad state of financial affairs after leaving office was also responsible the creation of a Presidential pension…and of course LBJ presented him with the first ever Medicare card in honor of his efforts to implement government supported health care.
He meant more transformational of the electorate itself after they were elected, not their presidencies being transformational, per se. Truman’s presidency didn’t shift the electorate in any major way.
And yet in the next election the progressives lost after 20 years in the White House. Truman defined the global role of post-war America and it was a move to the right. It was Vietnam not Civil Rights that took down LBJ. Just because it wasn’t manifest right away and in the expected direction like the other examples doesn’t mean it wasn’t transformative.
Don’t discount the power of economic populism to help the party do this job. Yet, that populist message might be step two. Obama can provide the wedges that splinter the GOP, and then the next presidential candidate can exploit that with an populist message that goes right to the white working class’s interests.
I’m very curious to see how full implementation of the Affordable Care Act in 2013 and 2014 will undergird this message.
Great post – now … what 5 specifics actions should Obama take in the next few months to put the idea into action?
A different take…mine:
Be Careful Who You Root For. One Party Rule?
AG
Well if the poem read at the inauguration is any indication Obama’s strategy is that he is going to aim at solidifying the American people, with common purpose and common sense and if the R’s don’g want to join the American people then they better get out of the way.
The stark positive stance levels up his last few months of positioning himself as the common sense voice of the people while the R’s are exploding with crazy. He simply asked Americans to do what they do best, to be great.
Failure to pass meaningful filibuster reform, especially with respect to appointments and beginning of debate, will prevent the transformation of the electorate.
What will bring back white working class voters is real prosperity and successful implementation of labor standards (even thoough more than half don’t realize it).
The other transformative action is giving meaning to the statement that we are not in a state of permanent war.
Here how it is:
White working class folks have to give up clinging to Whiteness.
They have to decide that their econonmic interests aren’t served by the people who chose to commit ECONOMIC TREASON against this country.
they better wake up.
“The Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than a black man.”
~MLK, Jr.
Nice.
so true….
but now the President is a BLACK MAN…
so, where does that leave them clinging to Whiteness…
We’re part way there. A lot of white working class folks did vote for Obama. They’re called union members.
And some who were not union members did as well.
I think that number will increase as prosperity improves. I also think that twenty-five years of wall-to-wall conservative propaganda on radio has now gotten old; before the end the decade there will be switching to new formats. As that happens the trend you are calling for accelerates.
I’ll let CBS News figure out how they want to deal with that matzoh ball
At first I was thinking of the substance of Dickerson’s column rather than the source, but it is pretty interesting to consider what this means for CBS. Of course the right is outraged, but they’re perpetually outraged by all TV news that isn’t Fox anyway.
Meanwhile, I just checked and CBS News is indeed in last place in the ratings. If they were suddenly to become much more opinionated, if not openly partisan, would they gain or lose viewers?
At any rate, Fox News needs to be destroyed at least as much as the Republican party does. The Fox/GOP alliance is damaging both to legitimate news organizations and the nation as a whole, so why shouldn’t CBS join the fight? (It’s fun to dream, anyway.)
Helps to note that old Bob Schieffer seems to be being moved (gradually) into retirement.
That strategy will come two years later than it should have come, but it will be welcome nonetheless.
Based on Obama’s first term and despite the rhetoric in his inaugural address, he appears to have made the decision to not be transformative in two areas: individual privacy and civil rights vs the interests of the state, and individual economic security versus the interests of corporations. Since these are pretty big issues, any way that he might become transformative will be confined to social services that the government provides, or the idea of an activist government.
I don’t expect him to be transformative in the area of climate change, since what’s required is too radical for either party. He can continue to give serious thought about the XL pipeline (before approving it) and give approving nods to the grade-school lessons that his daughters bring home.
Two areas in which I think he should exercise caution are gun control and immigration policy. Gun control because I think it’s better for him to take the position that he’s following the lead of the majority of the country than that he’s leading the country on this issue. Perhaps the influence of the NRA and similar groups has drastically fallen in recent years, but I’d like to be sure about that first before the midterm elections. With immigration, I wouldn’t presume that a citizen’s recent immigrant background necessarily translates to broad immigration reform. The rhetoric with which immigration is dealt with — especially regarding the distinction between legal and illegal immigration — will need to be constructed carefully.
Without filibuster reform, he can rely only on executive orders and public statements if he wants to be transformative. His administration hasn’t shown a lot of faith in the power of public pronouncements to date, so it’ll be interesting to see if that changes.
Factoring everything in (including these encouraging developments of the last few weeks), I’ll be very surprised if he’s a transformative president, but I’ll be the first to say that I was wrong.