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Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Gingrich Plan Wouldn’t Work
Last summer Newt Gingrich started saying that what the Republicans must do in 2008 is run away from Bush. They must be the party of change at a time when people want change. I wrote a column back then for the Dayton Daily News that patiently explained why the Gingrich plan wouldn’t work.
Now Jonah Goldberg has, nevertheless, written a column embracing the Gingrich idea. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-goldberg23oct23,0,3831108.column?coll=la-opinion-center
The basic Gingrich/Goldberg point is that Nicolas Sarkozy won in France despite being of the same party of Jacques Chirac, the unpopular incumbent. Gingrich and Goldberg say Sarkozy won by being seen as anti-Chirac.
So, presumptuously, here’s the column I wrote in June:
“GOP Hopefuls Join in Bush-bashing” ran a typical headline after last week’s debate among Republican presidential candidates.
Newt Gingrich, who was not among the candidates, but might be eventually, seems to believe the current candidates aren’t doing enough to separate them-selves from President George W. Bush.
He says, “I think unless a Republican who is nominated is committed to funda-mental change in Washington, they will certainly lose the election.”
“Look, I think that he (Bush) means very, very well. I think he’s very, very sincere,” Gingrich said in one interview, setting an all-time record for faint-ness of praise and for patronizing.
“But I don’t think that he drives implementation and looks at the reality in which he’s trying to implement things. And I think that’s why you ended up with, ‘Brownie, you’re doing a great job,’ when it was obvious to the entire country at Katrina that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had collapsed and was not capable of doing any job at that point.”
The political strategy Gingrich is proposing raises the fun question:
How can a political party expect voters to give it the presidency again when it admits that it has been mishandling the presidency? What’s the message sup-posed to be? “Never mind what we said about who should be president the last two times. This time we’ve got it right?”
Gingrich points to the recent French election. There, conservative (as op-posed to socialist) Nicolas Sarkozy succeeded two-term conservative President Jacques Chirac, though Sarkozy is no big fan of Chirac. Besides not liking each other, they don’t agree on immigration, social welfare polices and relations with Washington.
But a closer-to-home, more likely comparison comes to mind: Ohio, 2006.
Gov. Bob Taft was the George W. Bush of Ohio. His poll ratings were actually worse, and no Republican candidate for governor embraced him. But only Ken Blackwell, among the Republicans, ran aggressively against him. If he made the point once, he made it 1,000 times: He represented a bigger change from Taft not only than the other Republicans, but than the Democrats.
He meant that his brand of principled, anti-tax conservatism and risk-taking leadership separated him from the more conventional, ideology-light politicians of Columbus.
Didn’t exactly work out for him, did it? His 24-percentage-point loss was a margin simply unheard of in major statewide races where there’s no incumbent and both parties are really taking a shot. The last non-incumbent to win as big as Ted Strickland was John Glenn.
True, Jim Petro - the more conventional Columbus type whom Blackwell beat in the primary - would have lost to Strickland, too. But by so much? Margin has to matter to Republicans thinking about 2008, because they worry that a landslide would damage them in Congress and in dealing with the next president.
France - where Chirac’s polls were mediocre, not abysmal - has a different political system. Major parties are formed and disappear. Minor parties figure in, with people who voted for them in early rounds having to decide where to go in the finals.
The American system is binomial, or whatever the word is. A party gets a chance. If it screws up royally by the standards of nonpartisan voters, it’s out. And if, during the campaign, its candidate trashes his own party’s record, that settles the question of whether it screwed up.
Over the last century, when a party has won a third presidency in a row, it’s been in the context of majority satisfaction with the outgoing president (Ronald Reagan).
That suggests that life will be difficult for any Republican candidate in 2008 if circumstances then are what they are now. But suppose the circumstances are marginal. Then the Republicans need to think real hard about whether the way to go is violently, dismissively away from Bush.
The reason there’s been talk about Gingrich running is that there’s no bona fide, hard-core conservative of presidential stature in the field. A look at Blackwell’s primary victory in 2006 gives fodder to the claim that the voters want a conservative. But Gingrich has to ask Republicans who look at Ohio, 2006, to stop looking after the primary and switch their attention to France, 2007. It’s asking a lot.
If you’re a Republican who wants to be president, and the public is down on your party’s president, and your conservative message sounds a lot like you’re saying you would be more Republican, you’re Ken Blackwell.
Permalink | | Categories: 2008 presidential race
Whither the White Guys
Little behind in my reading. Turns out that Joe Klein had a piece in the previous Time Magazine, the one with Chief Justice Roberts on the cover (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1670520,00.html), that needs attention here.
Klein reports that Merle Haggard, the Okie from Muskogee, has made the philosophical sojourn from Reaganite to Hillaryist (best pronounced hill-air’-ee-ist, I suppose).
The reason Klein takes note of this (and goes to interview Haggard) is that he sees it as a sign of the times.
Klein embraces the conventional wisdom that the reason for the Democrats’ problems in the decades after Vietnam was that they lost touch with and lost the support of white guys, who fled the “feminized, antiwar, politically correct Democratic Party.” He suggests that this phenomenon is reversing itself now in some measure, that the “militarism” of the Republicans isn’t selling, and that the economic populism of people like Haggard is reasserting itself.
Klein’s point is somewhat diminished by his manly admission that, really, Haggard liked BILL Clinton, and is apparently still seeing Bill as a big player. The admission suggests that the militarism of Bush might not be such a big factor in the Haggard phenomenon, after all. But let’s ignore that.
It is certainly true that a lot of Democratic presidential candidates - especially those that have lost - have had trouble with white males, especially southerners. But the possibility ought to be pondered that this weakness doesn’t explain their defeats.
Suppose, for a second, that they lost in 1980, say, because the Carter presidency just wasn’t working at any level - the economy, foreign affairs, presidential efficacy, whatever. And they lost in ’84 and ’88 because things were going pretty well for the country under the Republicans, in both the foreign and domestic realms. Then the Democrats won in ’92 because the economy had been sluggish for several years under Bush, and won in ’96 because it had picked up under Clinton.
If, through all those ups and down, the white guys were the ones departing in the biggest numbers in the bad years, that doesn’t mean they were the heart of things. To ask which group departed in the bad times is to ask who are the party’s most marginal supporters in good times. That is worth knowing. But it doesn’t change the fact that what matters is whether the times are good or bad.
Nor does it suggest that the way to win next time is to address the specific concerns of the marginal group. Doing that is likely to be a trade off. Any majority coalition is going have strains. You get back the white guys by angering somebody else.
Better just to make sure that, next time, the times are good, if you’re the incumbents, or bad if you’re not.
Klein asks “Is it possible now, with the Republicans diving into foolish militarism and the indulgence of Thou-shalt-not killjoys, that the Reagan Democrats might be tempted to come home.” Sure, if things are bad enough.
Permalink | | Categories: 2008 presidential race
