The many candidates for nomination for President represent a breakdown in what had been an American consensus about what problems America faces and what the best solutions were for those problems. Each of the Parties and each candidate represent definitions of what the problems are, and each candidate is offering himself, with his or her view of what those problems are and his or her solutions, to the public in an effort to convince enough voters that they should be given the power of government to try to solve those problems.
This started out as an effort to answer dday’s question at Hullabaloo, and this analytic approach seemed like it would tell us a lot about the Republican candidates also. So what problems, with their solutions, are being presented? Let’s look at them, first withing each party and then between the parties. The approach is to take the Democratic candidates first, Then the Republicans, then compare across parties.
The Democrats
dday at Hullabaloo poses this description of what the top three Democrats appear to stand for.
Hillary Clinton is running to change the President; Barack Obama is running to change our politics; John Edwards is running to change the country.
This is the image each has acquired, and as image goes, seems to carry some truth. It encapsulates the rhetoric each candidate has been running on, together with the public response to that rhetoric. At the same time, it seems accurate for any one of the candidates in part because of the contrast with the other two. Does it really describe how each would act as President? Or is it establishing artificial distinctions between the individuals in order to try to impose some clarity on the race? I think it is more of the latter, but it’s the best we have.
dday’s description suggests that Hillary is a old line politician who knows how to both get elected and how to work the levers of power, while Obama represents a unique breakthrough for America in our long battle to overcome the American disease of racism. That would imply that both Hillary and Obama offer excellent candidates who are at the top of our political class, but are still trapped by the existing political system. Hillary can do what good politicians can do and can hold the nation together, while Obama offers a great deal less in policy terms but also offers a great breakthrough in dealing with the American problem of Racism. He is vague on policy but implies that his very candidacy for the Presidency is America’s solution.
Which leaves Edwards as the candidate who recognizes that America is in the middle of unparalleled changes. Edward’s rhetoric is that he is the only candidate who really recognizes those changes and that he is prepared to deal with them. All of this is implied in that three sentence description of the images of the campaigns.
If Edwards is correct about the fact of the need for structural changes and that there is a great deal of strong resistance to those changed in powerful corners, then the next question is whether Edwards’ proposed solutions will deal effectively with the problems America rather clearly has. Of those two issues, the first is the more important, because the government will be better able to deal with big changes if the public has been prepared in advance during the political campaign and shows they agree with and support the candidate they elect.
If America really is in a situation that requires significant changes and new initiatives, then the image that Edwards has developed will make it easier for him to actually accomplish anything. His specific solutions proposed now are less important than the fact that he is preparing the American public to accept the need for changes. That’s going to undercut the defensive moves from Wall Street and the economic conservatives when the time comes to make changes.
This is the description of problems and solutions as seen through the Democratic candidates. This “compare and contrast” for the Democratic candidates appears to have clarified what the issues really are, so let’s expand the analysis and compare the images of the Republicans to each other.
The Republicans
In contrast to the Democrats who are running on the need for changes, the Republicans are all running by offering proposals from the Republican past. The consensus they have is that America’s problems cannot be rooted in the America’s existing social or economic structures and that something general and unspecific called “conservatism” is the answer. It is when they try to get at the specifics of what conservatism demands that they have no consensus. The variety of solutions the various candidate offer show they to not agree on what the problems are. The varied positions of the candidates shows that.
McCain and Giuliani agree that all of America’s current problems can be described as being attacked by enemies, and they both offer to fight those enemies. Both are offering militaristic solutions. The distinctions between the two is that McCain focuses on enemies outside the U.S. and he appears competent to apply those militaristic solutions and maybe with less corruption. Rudy sees enemies everywhere, and will apply military and police solutions to immigrants and minorities as rapidly as to terrorists. I expect to see a Rudy slogan of “America uber Alles!” at any time. Rudy appears to be the least ethical Republican running for the nomination, and he is certainly the most likely to be influenced by organized crime.
Fred Thompson is running on a campaign of “Elect me. I’m the REAL conservative.” He doesn’t describe America’s problems, but suggests that whatever they are, conservative ideology is the solution and he will apply it. Other than that, he has no real policy. He simply offers himself, the new Reagan, as the solution. He is also, as Reagan did and Nixon before him, catering to the Republican Racists and Nativists. Fred is also more low key (lethargic even) than Rudy, or any other Republican candidate is.
Huckabee is offering the Bible as the solution to all our problems. He identifies America’s problems as resulting from the rejection of Biblical Truth, and he proposes solving those problems by enforcing the prescriptions that he reads from the Bible.
Ron Paul is running on the platform that the very existence of government, including most use of the armed forces, is the source of America’s problems, and he will solve America’s problems by eliminating most government services. The idea is that every individual is so limited by the controls placed on him that he cannot be fully productive, so the problem is the controls. Remove those controls to achieve greater social and economic productivity and freedom. His literal, nonhistorical , and extremely limited view of the U.S. Constitution attracts a lot of people but would certainly do away with the Common Law and stare decisis in the Supreme Court.
Which brings me to Mitt Romney. Mitt recognizes that the modern Republican Party has been a coalition of the Wall Street Free marketers and Libertarians, the evangelicals, and the militarists and Nativists. That coalition has broken up, and the problem Mitt is trying to solve is reconstructing the Republican coalition. The evangelical Republicans have gotten very little back from the Republican Party, making Huckabee very attractive. The other problems Mitt doesn’t face up to include growing economic disparity because the government has been redistributing American income from the middle class to the wealthy and failing to act on the export of middle class jobs or on the failure of the health care system to protect so many Americans, it is going to be hard to sell conservative free market solutions to the evangelicals. Then the failure of the militarist Republicans to resolve anything with the invasion of Iraq, leaving the American military stuck there while both Afghanistan and Pakistan fall apart, Mitt is going to find it difficult to sell a return to the failed Republican coalition. So Mitt’s problem, the one he is trying to solve with his candidacy, is nothing more than the collapse of the Republican coalition. He offers nothing beyond possibly getting him elected President as a solution.
So having looked at the individual candidates, what can we tell about the two parties and their view of the problems and solutions?
The Party differences
The Republicans now face the collapse of the Republican Party consensus on both problems and solutions. The Reagan Revolution was based on a shared consensus (at least in the Republican Party) that if government planning, controls and limitations were removed, then private enterprise consisting of individual corporations and people, all led by “The Right People” using the social and economic institutions of free enterprise and wealth accumulation, could solve all the problems America faced. They sold this to America, and they have tried it for thirty years with disastrous results.
Yet the Republicans never saw or acknowledged the real problems (terrorism, globalism and its rejection, Peak oil, the hollowing out of the American productive economy and its replacement by a largely financial economy in which the middle class is of much less importance, and now Global Warming just for a start) of the 21st century coming, and when those problems became too obvious to overlook, the Republicans had no tools with which to solve those problems other than military invasion, replacing the court powers of warrants and habeas corpus with police power unified in the Department of Homeland Security and directed by intrusive spying on everyone, all linked together with a corrupt form of unplanned and uncontrolled free enterprise to hopefully solve them.
The result of the Reagan Revolution is an economy that is rapidly eliminating much of the middle class by remaking America socially and economically along the Latin American model (Mexico and Brazil especially) while miring America in the same boom-and-bust process that existed from the end of the American Civil War until the Great Depression. That’s not the worst of it.
Since the Reagan/Libertarian/Free enterprise model allows government no power to act outside of the military and police, we have become enmeshed in a series of expanding wars in the middle east while at home we find expanded police powers, elimination of the protections provided by the courts and the Rule of Law, and the growth of secret government run by a society of spies and spy-lovers.
The only response the Republican Party offers to this set of conservative-caused or accentuated problems is to accuse the Bush administration of not being real conservatives, because if Bush had been a real conservative, America would not be having the problems that we all recognize we are having. The Republican mantra is that Conservatism never fails. Only people fail by being insufficiently conservative.
The Democrats, on the other hand, recognize that there are problems which are big and growing bigger. Barack Obama seems to have the least understanding of the general magnitude of those problems. He is a product of America’s greatest and longest running problem, Racism, and sees that if America elects him President that action will signal that American is overcoming the Race problem. He is right.
But Obama’s solution to the rest of the problems America faces today is to try to stop the bickering with the conservatives, listen to them and honor their input and work out a set of consensus solutions to those problems. It’s not clear that he even understands the problems America faces. He clearly does not understand the health care crisis. He offers himself as someone with the abilities to make a problem solving process that removes the “bickering” that has paralyzed Washington and thus lets both Republicans and Democrats come together and solve the real problems. The recent racial flap between Obama and Hillary showed he is fully capable bickering with the best of them, but he and Hillary have worked to quickly tamp down that bickering. But was the solution an example of Obama’s Kumbaya politics, or of Clintonian triangulation? And how does Obama’s promise to eliminate bickering in Washington differ from Bush’s promise in 2000 to being a kinder and gentler tone to Washington? Obama is repackaging the same old promises and selling then as “New and Improved” as far as I can see.
Edwards has expanded the message that America’s problems are structural and now Obama has expanded the message that bickering between adults can be resolved. I agree with Edwards, but I simply don’t believe that the Republicans can afford to give up their obstructionism in the Senate. They have nothing positive to offer as solutions, but they still have the old guerrilla tactics of preventing the government from functioning and thus challenging its legitimacy, then offering themselves to the public as the solution to getting a government that works. I don[t see how Obama can get around that Republican dynamic. They HAVE to obstruct government if they have any hope of retaining power at all.
So that’s Obama and Edwards. How about Hillary? Is Hillary too mired in the corporate-dominated past that she and Bill Clinton had to live in during the 90’s? That’s a part of her image I’m sure she would get rid of. It’ll be hard to do while she is collecting corporate money to run on, though. I don’t know if that really is the modern Hillary or just the image she is stuck with.
Conclusion
Personally I prefer Edwards among the three Democratic candidates. I suspect that the Press is ignoring him in large part because he does not have a machine that can compete with the machine Hillary has built over the last eight years and the one that Obama has been building. The difference that large sums of money have on the Press is obvious. Maybe he’ll break out in the next six or so weeks. UNfortunately, it’s probably between Obama and Hillary, and I am moving to choose Hillary. Obama is too insubstantial as a candidate. He clearly has no clue on health care, and he has tried to run on positions that are the the right of the DLC even. Still, I’d sure rather have any of the Democrats over the pack of blind and ignorant men who are offered by the Republican Party.
It’s hard to avoid the fact that the Republicans are so heavily mired in the past and in conservative ideologies that they can’t even recognize the seriousness of modern problems or accept that the solutions will require abandoning the failed Reagan Revolution. (Huckabee is really mired in the past – two thousand years ago.) America’s current problems have grown out of the past, and the answers that supposedly worked before will not solve them, even if they are mixed with unrestrained militarism. The conservative ideology is a major barrier to even recognizing what has caused current problems, as well as a barrier to determining what the solutions need to be. To rephrase St. Ronnie, Government is not the Problem. The conservative movement is the Problem.
The Democrats do recognize that there are real and modern problems, with, I think, Obama being the least publicly aware of them. But Obama may also be the least tied to his own past. I don’t know, because he has only come on the scene nationally in the last two or three years and I can’t say that I know enough about him to trust his reactions or abilities. Unfortunately, all three Democrats come out of legislatures, so there is less clarity in their images. Legislators simply cannot be held accountable for government actions the way executives can. But all three Democrats are looking towards the future, not the past.
This next six weeks is going to be especially interesting as all these contrasts play out against each other.
Caveats
The initial statement by dday appears to me to be framed in a pro-Edwards context. That doesn’t bother me much because I had already come to much the same conclusion about Edwards and I do prefer him as a candidate.
I am describing my reactions to the carefully crafted public images of each of the above candidates. Such crafted images are designed to conceal more than they reveal. Only Giuliani and Thompson seem to have lost control of their public images so that we have a better view of the flaws of the individual behind the image. McCain, interestingly enough, appears to have minimized the constructed image and redefines the flaws thus exposed as an advantage he calls “Straight-talk.” The rough edges exposed now have become a sort of image of no-publicly-crafted image for him. It is, of course, carefully crafted.
I am then comparing those carefully crafted images with the public descriptions of America and the world that have been presented by the Press and those descriptions that I can find on the Internet. Overall, most of the data is of doubtful reliability, but it is the best I can get. This is my attempt to pull those disparate sources of data together into some form of rational structure that I feel comfortable with. The structure should then show what data is good and what does not fit. To pull it all together, I have made a lot of judgments about what to accept and a lot more judgments about what to ignore. So be it.
This analysis applies to the current situation. I am not trying to predict the future.
Given those caveats, I do not offer this as “The Truth.” Any reader should look at it, see if it contains anything that resonates with them positively or negatively, and then accept or reject part or all of what I have written. I’m betting that this is worthwhile. It’s up to the reader to decide if they agree or disagree.
