Archive for February, 2012
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A few reactions to your feedback on recent columns:
-My criticism of affirmative action in college admissions drew predictable criticisms from the left—which generally views any retreat from racial classifications as a reverse of civil rights gains—and from the right—which would go further than I would and end all racial preferences. Several readers picked up on my concession that the ranks of black students would be thinned out if there were no preferences and wondered why I was so sanguine about the prospect. While I certainly don’t relish a reduction in black students, I would urge more examination on what diversity means in a complex society like ours. Which is the more likely problem on college campuses, a paucity of African American viewpoints, or an absence in the perspectives of, say, Arab Muslims, or East Asian Indians? That’s the trick with the diversity based arguments that drive affirmative action—they are usually a pre-text for one race (blacks), and are crafted for America circa 1975, before the ascension of globalization and before the multi-cultural surge in our demographics.
Having said that, a solid, pragmatic case can be made that we do need instruments like the Voting Rights Act (although not the partisan super-majority gerrymandering that contributes to the racial polarization of southern politics); and that secondary school districts need tools to keep our public schools from re-segregating. Unlike my friend Quin Hilyer, who makes a thoughtful case against ever taking race into account, I see the question as one of weighing the pluses and minuses.
-Some of you ask if I have revised my early assessment in the National Review of Rick Santorum’s electability based on his string of impolitic comments. In reality, my views of whether Santorum can win a general have always been nuanced. At his best, he delivers an economic fairness message that eludes many Republicans; at the same time, I have always included a caveat that he could push independents away with the forcefulness of his social views. I certainly miss the tactical wisdom in telling blue-collar Catholics over 60—an important swing voter bloc-that Jack Kennedy’s views on religion make you want to throw up. Color me skeptical of a candidate having an axe to grind with the merits of getting a college degree. And yes, the “Obama theology” meme gets tiresome when there is a genuine case about religious liberty and autonomy that needs to be made, but will get lost if it sounds extreme or coded.
My guess is that what’s going on with Santorum is partly an inexperienced candidate’s tendency to over-play to the room. Some of it is quite deliberate, and reflects a laser focus on winning the nomination and conveying his conviction to his base. The problem is that I‘ve seen that strategy up close: it usually fails in November and damages a party badly.
-Finally, several perceptive readers have wondered why in my essay on Obama and the rhetoric of community, I let conservatives off so easily. That’s a fair point that deserves more than an observation about the limits of space. The fact is that much of the Right is uncomfortable with the assertion of a national community: they fear it’s a cover for imposing an elite set of values over theirs, and for redistributionist tax and spend policies. It’s a subject worth addressing in a separate essay and I will do so soon.
Can Obama Sell the Idea of Community?
William Galston has been writing with authority about communitarian politics since I was an adolescent, and his recent essay in New Republic may be the best thing written yet on the strengths and defects of Barack Obama’s rhetorical embrace of “community”. It’s a window, for reasons intentional and unintentional, into why modern liberals have struggled so much with building a broad case for their most cherished reforms.
As Galston observes, communitarian language has deep roots in American civic tradition, from the pilgrim John Winthrop’s “shining city on a hill”, a biblical phrase that he reshaped into a clarion call for shared sacrifice and mutuality; to Teddy Roosevelt’s New Nationalism and its paen to heroic civic vigor; to Mario Cuomo’s 1984 Democratic keynote address, which elegantly describes “the family of America, recognizing that at the heart of the matter we are bound to one another.” The same strains have surfaced prominently in Obama’s best recent efforts—including the Osawatomie, Kansas “inequality” speech in December, and the State of the Union.
It’s a rich, moving way of describing the ties that bind Americans. But as Galston concedes, it’s fared imperfectly for modern liberals, especially Obama, whose modest rebound in recent polls seems tied more to improved unemployment ratings and the travails of the Republican field than to any rhetorical strategy. Indeed, the case can be made that the sharp rise in consumer confidence and the demolition derby the Republicans are waging should be yielding even greater gains for Obama, whom Gallup and Quinnipiac still peg at a lackluster 45 percent approval rating.
Galston deserves enormous credit for resisting the liberal line that America is too steeped in selfish materialism or anti-multicultural backlash for a community based argument to take hold. Instead of lapsing into judgment, Galston points out that “the instances of [community] solidarity [Obama] invokes lie well outside the experience of most Americans today.” Among the litany of reasons why, Galston cites the chasm between the career prospects of children of two professional parents and kids of single parent drop-outs; the fact that labor market stability is so unconnected to corporate profit; and the un-egalitarian composition of our armed forces.
He might have added to the list the ideological split between secular, advanced degree urban dwellers and evangelicals with two years of college or less in the exurbs and suburbs. He might have also noted the generational fault-line around retirement programs, and the distribution of Americans into seniors who are reaping more substantial benefits from programs like Medicare than they ever contributed, and millenials and thirty-somethings who are financing a retirement apparatus that is unlikely to be around for them.
Omissions aside, Galston is dead-on in his observation that few Americans experience the sense of attachment to their fellow citizens that Obama is idealizing. But having masterfully diagnosed the short-comings of communitarian rhetoric, Galston fades into cliché when describing the solution. The “steady appeal to common sense and common decency” he proposes sounds more like a conduct standard for freshman dorm life than a political argument. It’s a telling lapse, though, that suggests why the left struggles to broaden its coalition. For all of their ventures into the language of reciprocity, and mutual obligation, modern liberals (even creative ones like Galston) invariably associate our national ills solely with their antagonists on the right. Income inequality is a problem that is laid at the doorstep of rapacious Wall Street policies and corporate influence in shaping the tax code. There is scarce reference to the undermining of education reform by teacher’s unions or the degradation of both learning and cultural assimilation that still rages in inner city neighborhoods—two trends that deepen unequal achievement levels for the black and brown.
The left is quick to attribute lower middle/working class alienation to economic trends like stagnant compensation and globalization. That’s a partial truth that obscures two culture-driven forces—the competitive disadvantage working class kids face in entering the most elite colleges and the wage pressure illegal immigrant labor exacts on unskilled American labor. It’s a critique, in other words, that conveniently ignores the unintended consequences of liberal policies like race based affirmative action and soft border enforcement.
Rather than paint a more comprehensive picture of why Americans are losing faith in our systems, liberals have been content to source the blame out to a card-board, one-dimensional set of villains: the multi-national corporations and over-sized capital markets that have hoarded prosperity and all but bribed policy-makers into protecting their ill-gotten gains. A not altogether false description, but one that only partly resonates with the many Americans who know the crisis is deeper and more complex, and implicates sacred cows of the left as well as the right.
If liberals appreciate that some of their own policy priorities burden down-scale workers, you wouldn’t know it from their rhetoric about low-income whites voting against their own interests. It’s also been awhile since Obama has lamented the persistent culture of entitlement in the inner city, or since the Democratic Party has cast a critical glance at the way its own client groups impede accountability and reform in the social services or education sectors; to the contrary, the party has forfeited the critique to conservatives who all too often confuse reform with down-sizing.
The result is that the liberal communitarian appeal is essentially a rallying cry to the Democratic base. Instead of an urgent call to renew communal bonds, it sounds like a well-worn legal indictment of the faults of the one percent: heavy on a blow by blow recitation of the ways the powerful have gone awry, over-inclusive in the list of wrongs attached to their waywardness. It’s cold comfort to a serious thinker like Galston that the political right has all but abandoned community as a social organizing principle in favor of an exclusive focus on liberty and individualism: even on ground that the right is not contesting, the left is floundering to find its footing.
Artur Davis on Life in a Fiercely Partisan Congress, and Why it Might Not Get Better Any Time Soon
The following was originally published in The Daily Kos by Matt Bieber
Beginning in 2003, Democrat Artur Davis represented Alabama’s 7th District for four terms in Congress. Following a defeat in Alabama’s 2010 gubernatorial primary, he retired from politics. Late last year, Davis left the Democratic Party and became an independent.
Davis is currently a Fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics. This conversation took place in his IOP office on February 15th.
MATT BIEBER: It’s been clear for a while now that the Republicans and Democrats in Congress are less able to get along and work together than they did in decades past. It also seems like they like each other less. Is that right? What did your day-to-day encounters with Republican colleagues look like?
ARTUR DAVIS: Well, there was a big difference in the level of bipartisan engagement…over the eight years that I served in Congress.
When I got in Congress in 2003, it was a very different political environment from the one that exists today or the one that existed during my last years in Congress. As hard as it is to reconstruct today, President Bush was extremely popular at that time, had a 60+% approval rating. Congress had done a number of bipartisan initiatives from No Child Left Behind to the Sarbanes-Oxley financial reform bill. A significant number of Democrats had voted for the Bush tax cuts, and there was almost unanimous support in early 2003 for President Bush’s policies on terror [and] the PATRIOT Act. There was even a significant amount of Democratic support for the war in Iraq, but that was a much more controversial proposition.
So, when I arrived in Congress, it was during a time when Democrats and Republicans regularly shared the same political views on important issues, when they regularly worked together even on issues that were deeply controversial, like healthcare. There was a bipartisan coalition of Ted Kennedy, John Edwards and John McCain who were pushing for something that [is now] long-forgotten, called the Patient’s Bill of Rights. That was thought to be a very important area of improving the quality of healthcare ten years ago. And you had John McCain and John Edwards leading the floor fight from both sides of the aisle. Campaign finance reform, for that matter – McCain-Feingold united Republicans and Democrats.
By the time I left Congress, there was no significant bipartisan legislative activity – none. We went from a time that produced a number of bipartisan [bills] to a time in which there were virtually none.
When I first came to the House, most members of Congress went back to their districts and routinely touted the relationships that they’d built across the aisle. It was considered to be good politics for Democrats to go back home and say, “I work with Republicans to get things done,” and vice versa. By the time I left, the best politics was members going back to their districts and saying, “I’m standing there fighting the Republicans” or “I’m standing there fighting the Democrats.”
This campaign cycle, the Democratic members of Congress facing primaries are not going around talking about the Republicans they work with. They’re talking about how they’re standing and fighting with Barack Obama to save Medicare and Social Security. The Republicans who are facing primaries are not going back to their districts and talking about the relationships they have with Democrats. They’re talking about their efforts to repeal Obamacare and stop Democratic spending.
So, there’s been a change in how members describe their work. There’s been a change in how members perceive what voters want them to do and be, and it’s created a much more hyper-partisan environment. An important thing to point out, there were 63 new Republicans in 2010, and there were about 80 races that were competitive.
It sounds like a lot until you realize that there are 435 districts. Now I will certainly trust you do the math better than me, but subtract 80 from 435 and you’re left with in the upper threes – that’s the number of districts that were not competitive in one of the most fractious, volatile cycles we’ve ever seen, and a cycle where Republicans gained more seats than their party had gained since the 1930s.
Most people don’t know that, or they know it but never thought about the significance of it. When 350-some seats are not contested, that means that first of all, for the given member of Congress, they’re not terribly worried about the Democrat or Republican. They’re worried about the person who may be building to challenge them in the primary. If you’re a Democrat, you’re worried about the guy who is active in Organizing for America, who’s out there moving around the grassroots and who’s arguing that you’re not doing enough to fight Republicans. If you’re a Republican, you’re [worried about] the young Republican Tea Party activist who’s going around saying, “We need a fighter, someone who will hold the line on spending and not someone who’s working with those people.” So, it causes both sides to structure their politics in a way that’s very oriented toward their political base.
MB: How did that shift affect the way that you worked together on a day-to-day basis? I’ve read that, say, 40 or 50 years ago, members knew that their friends in Congress would have to go out and say rough stuff about them during campaign season, but that members didn’t take it too personally. Now that things have gotten so much more fiercely partisan, has that willingness to forgive ebbed at all?
AD: You know, when members perceive there’s a political advantage in working across the aisle, it’s very easy for members to build social relationships with people across the aisle. That’s just human nature and it’s good politics. If you believe that you’re going to need to work with this person on your committee to get a bill done, you think it’s in your political interest to do that, and you think that the political process is conducive to a bipartisan bill movement, it makes it a lot easier to spend time chatting with someone across the aisle or to say to a member, “Let’s go and grab lunch,” in the member’s dining room or to run into a member as they’re leaving the floor at eight o’clock at night and say, “Look, I’m starving. Let me go get something to eat.” Typically in the political world, politics drives social relationships and not the other way around. People often form social relationships with people they work with.
So, as the place became more polarizing and there was less space and less interest in things happening on a bipartisan basis, it cut away some of that interest that members have in developing relationships.
In my experience, there’s always a surface cordiality that exists. That was the case in 2010 as much as in 2003. Members regularly run into each other in the airport, on planes, and often sit next to each other, so it’s not uncommon for there to be a level of cordiality. But I did notice that there seemed to be fewer constructive, meaningful relationships across party lines.
And frankly, over the period of time that I was there, I would say that members seemed to develop more of a mindset that their friends were people who are also are in their political caucus, and even often people who thought like they did. You would kind of notice that the Blue Dogs hang out together, that people in the Progressive Caucus hang out together, that the black and Latino members have their relationships. And I suspect the same kind of thing, to some degree, happens on the Republican side. Relationships would form more within your political identity.
I don’t know if that’s a new phenomenon or not, but it was something that was very pronounced about the Democratic caucus that I observed. Sure, you have people who’ve been there for years and built alliances, but as you move toward the newer generation of members, their friendships and alliances tended to be with people who were their year or people who were kind of a similar ideology or people who had a similar political profile, and it became more of a narrow-casting than I think some people would expect.
MB: This insight – that the work drives the social relationships, rather than the other way around – suggests to me that the fractiousness we see in Congress won’t get better until the general political climate becomes more favorable to bipartisanship.
AD: Until the political climate realigns itself in a way that Congress is expected to produce, you’re not going to get a significant difference. Until the political climate realigns itself in a way that voters are demanding action on particular fronts, you’re not going to see much of a change. I often say to people, whatever political outcome happens in 2012, it is very hard to make a case that any of it will produce a significant amount of legislative activity.
Let’s say best case for Democrats, Barack Obama wins by 8-10 points, Democrats retake the House, Democrats strengthen their hold on the Senate. It’s questionable whether anything other than repealing the Bush tax cuts on millionaires would happen. People ask the question: Well, if you have an easy Obama win, Democrats take the House and consolidate their strength in the Senate, what agenda items would move? Well, let’s look at the two years when Democrats controlled the Congress and had a Democratic president. Cap and trade still didn’t move. It’s not likely that that would change.
Let’s say the Republican nominee wins [and] Republicans keep the House and take the Senate. It’s not clear what would happen. There is no single legislative item that you can say with certainty would happen in the first 90 or 120 days or the first year of the kind of Republican alignment I described, because there’s no consensus in either party on the next direction for the country.
There’s consensus in the Democratic ranks about raising taxes on millionaires. There’s consensus in Republican ranks about repealing Obamacare, but no consensus on what to replace it with, no consensus on whether the politics of the moment would permit a straightforward repeal without a replace strategy, no consensus on what the replace vehicle would look like, no consensus on whether elements of the healthcare bill – like the exchanges or pre-existing illness conditions –ought to be included within the Republican reform; there’s vast disagreement over that. So, again, even if Republicans were to get exactly what they want, it is hard to make the case that you would get substantive legislative action.
So, whenever people say that the reason we’re not getting things done in Washington is because there’s political gridlock and if either side breaks the gridlock – well, the reality is that today, there’s so little consensus in either party on what the next steps ought to be that I think you would see very little legislative proactivity regardless of what happens this year.
MB: You mentioned Democrats’ unanimity around the goal of repealing the tax cuts on millionaires. Obviously, that would leave intact the tax cuts in place for everyone else, and that’s what the president has said he favors.
AD: Yeah, there’s unanimity on that. Obviously, that is about the only major policy item today on which I think there is unanimity from the Democrat caucuses.
MB: Let me ask about that in particular. You recently wrote in the National Review that “an Obama sweep would, for the first time in 76 years, institute government-centered, redistributionist economics as the country’s central governing philosophy.” That seems like an awfully big claim. If the Democrats’ ambitions don’t run beyond restoring the tax rates on millionaires to Clinton-era levels, say, and maybe – if they’re lucky – fiddling with capital gains or carried interest, that doesn’t seem like such a wild change.
AD: That’s a fair point, but here’s the difference: most presidents who’ve won election – in fact, I would submit that every President who’s won election in the modern era on the Democratic side – has pretty much won as a centrist, or they’ve won in such a way that their political agenda was muted. When Jack Kennedy won in 1960, he didn’t win as a liberal hero; he won as the guy who was going to deal with the missile gap. Lyndon Johnson in ’64 honestly won as the guy who wasn’t that crazy Barry Goldwater. Jimmy Carter won as the guy who was going to fix Washington and bring honesty in the process and never lie to the American people; that’s not an ideological agenda. Bill Clinton won in ’92 as a nontraditional Democrat who was not going to follow Democrat politics as usual.
Barack Obama won as the guy who was going to turn the page, as the guy who was going to alter the political environment. Barack Obama did not run on the healthcare bill, you know. That was not a major thing that Obama talked about, except for the debates where Hillary pressed him on it. Obama was the last candidate to actually introduce a healthcare proposal—which if you go back and look at what he proposed in ’07, it’s much different from the law as actually enacted.
If Obama were to win this year and if Democrats were to win the House this year, the belief in the Democratic Party would be that that kind of ratified a certified notion of activist government, a certain notion of an agenda that was focused on redistribution, and that would be the governing philosophy within the party. Now, would that philosophy translate into legislative action? For the reasons I mentioned, it’s arguable that it would not – in fact, it’s probable that it would not. But all politics is not about Congress. What the agencies do, what the regulators do, is enormously important. The political mood that’s set is important, and what the courts do is very important.
This is what’s at stake in this election: If Democrats have the kind of sweep that it appears possible that they could have, that would introduce as the dominant political philosophy, a notion of a powerful government-centric approach, a notion of redistribution as an important economic strategy in a way that no previous election really since the 1930’s has done. That is a big deal for Democrats who value that view of the world and it’s a threat for Republicans who don’t value that view of the world. That’s not an ideological point; it’s a description of what we’re facing.
That’s why there’s a lot at stake in this election. This election, more than most, is about ratifying a particular notion of government. That even if the legislative process can’t rise to that notion, there are many other levels of government that can rise to it. It also sets a political mood that will shape state governors’ races. It creates a political mood that will drive politics all across the county and up and down the spectrum.
That’s what makes this election significant for both sides. If Republicans lose this election the way I described, the notion will be that the Republican notion of deregulation, the Republican anti-government notion – the Republican defense, if you will, of the status quo in our economy – the perception will be that that vision and that philosophy was crushed.
Bob McDonnell’s Wisdom
This piece originally appeared in Politico
The skeptics will say that Gov. Bob McDonnell, the Virginia Republican who is openly interested in being vice president, had no choice but to switch positions on a bill requiring vaginal ultrasounds for women seeking abortions. Letting such a controversial mandate become law would have undoubtedly compromised his national appeal and undercut his party in the commonwealth this November.
But politics aside, McDonnell’s change of heart is instructive for conservative politicians navigating the culture wars. First, McDonnell deserves credit for avoiding the usual rhetorical dodge. Rather than deflect the substance by basing his opposition on defects in the law-making process (think Haley Barbour criticizing Mississippi’s personhood amendment on the ground that it didn’t clear the regular pathway for complex legislation), McDonnell straightforwardly calls the ultrasound bill what it is: an “invasive procedure by the state without [the patient’s] consent.” When a conservative criticizes an act of unmitigated big government intervention, he shouldn’t have to mince words.
Second, McDonnell, an unabashedly pro-life politician, didn’t cave in to the idea that abortion politics requires politicians to cling to the extreme of their respective views. If that sounds intuitive enough, it is actually a departure from the way the right and left typically engages the issue. Liberals and the pro-choice lobby recoil from even the sanest limits on abortion access on the theory that they are a slippery slope, and weaken the principle of reproductive rights. Conservative politicians generally believe a pro-life culture requires every potential hurdle to be placed in the way of an abortion. It’s a zeal that easily leaps from waiting periods and strict licensing rules for abortion clinics to outright psychological compulsion, which is what the ultrasound requirement really is.
It’s no surprise that individuals who believe abortion is murder endorse any tool, no matter how harsh, to inconvenience it or discourage it. That’s the necessary lot of pro-life activists who are fighting around the edges of a Supreme Court precedent that in their view sanctions killing. It’s also a tempting time for social conservatives to forego compromise. They are galvanized because they despise the trend of government declaring selected portions of church doctrine a dead letter (the contraception fight, Illinois’ hard line on Catholic adoption agencies who oppose gay relationships) and they catch the whiff of condescension in the mainstream media toward faith.
But Bob McDonnell just showed a grasp for this truth: building a pro-life majority in a closely divided state requires uniting the true believers who see nothing but moral clarity with an ambivalent center that believes abortion is more irresponsible than homicidal. That McDonnell made that nod to reality isn’t “mushy moderation”, or selling out the fruits of a legislative majority: it’s a recognition that leadership and activism have different imperatives.
The fact is that in a country turning left on most social issues, pro-life politics is stronger than it’s been in decades—Gallup says about half the country opposes the legality of abortions, and the number who favor making the practice rare and hard to get approaches a super majority. One undeniable reason is that technology is simultaneously exposing the violent details of abortion and the vitality of an unborn fetus. The science is making abortion on demand look more hard-hearted than ever to young, college educated women, whose opinions on the issue have shifted dramatically in the last decade. What a huge error it would be to squander those gains by pushing the same women to the other side of the argument.
Artur Davis on Life in a Fiercely Partisan Congress, and Why it Might Not Get Better Any Time Soon
Beginning in 2003, Democrat Artur Davis represented Alabama’s 7th District for four terms in Congress. Following a defeat in Alabama’s 2010 gubernatorial primary, he retired from politics. Late last year, Davis left the Democratic Party and became an independent.
Davis is currently a Fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics. This conversation took place in his IOP office on February 15th.
MATT BIEBER: It’s been clear for a while now that the Republicans and Democrats in Congress are less able to get along and work together than they did in decades past. It also seems like they like each other less. Is that right? What did your day-to-day encounters with Republican colleagues look like?
ARTUR DAVIS: Well, there was a big difference in the level of bipartisan engagement…over the eight years that I served in Congress.
When I got in Congress in 2003, it was a very different political environment from the one that exists today or the one that existed during my last years in Congress. As hard as it is to reconstruct today, President Bush was extremely popular at that time, had a 60+% approval rating. Congress had done a number of bipartisan initiatives from No Child Left Behind to the Sarbanes-Oxley financial reform bill. A significant number of Democrats had voted for the Bush tax cuts, and there was almost unanimous support in early 2003 for President Bush’s policies on terror [and] the PATRIOT Act. There was even a significant amount of Democratic support for the war in Iraq, but that was a much more controversial proposition.
So, when I arrived in Congress, it was during a time when Democrats and Republicans regularly shared the same political views on important issues, when they regularly worked together even on issues that were deeply controversial, like healthcare. There was a bipartisan coalition of Ted Kennedy, John Edwards and John McCain who were pushing for something that [is now] long-forgotten, called the Patient’s Bill of Rights. That was thought to be a very important area of improving the quality of healthcare ten years ago. And you had John McCain and John Edwards leading the floor fight from both sides of the aisle. Campaign finance reform, for that matter – McCain-Feingold united Republicans and Democrats.
By the time I left Congress, there was no significant bipartisan legislative activity – none. We went from a time that produced a number of bipartisan [bills] to a time in which there were virtually none.
When I first came to the House, most members of Congress went back to their districts and routinely touted the relationships that they’d built across the aisle. It was considered to be good politics for Democrats to go back home and say, “I work with Republicans to get things done,” and vice versa. By the time I left, the best politics was members going back to their districts and saying, “I’m standing there fighting the Republicans” or “I’m standing there fighting the Democrats.”
This campaign cycle, the Democratic members of Congress facing primaries are not going around talking about the Republicans they work with. They’re talking about how they’re standing and fighting with Barack Obama to save Medicare and Social Security. The Republicans who are facing primaries are not going back to their districts and talking about the relationships they have with Democrats. They’re talking about their efforts to repeal Obamacare and stop Democratic spending.
So, there’s been a change in how members describe their work. There’s been a change in how members perceive what voters want them to do and be, and it’s created a much more hyper-partisan environment. An important thing to point out, there were 63 new Republicans in 2010, and there were about 80 races that were competitive.
It sounds like a lot until you realize that there are 435 districts. Now I will certainly trust you do the math better than me, but subtract 80 from 435 and you’re left with in the upper threes – that’s the number of districts that were not competitive in one of the most fractious, volatile cycles we’ve ever seen, and a cycle where Republicans gained more seats than their party had gained since the 1930s.
Most people don’t know that, or they know it but never thought about the significance of it. When 350-some seats are not contested, that means that first of all, for the given member of Congress, they’re not terribly worried about the Democrat or Republican. They’re worried about the person who may be building to challenge them in the primary. If you’re a Democrat, you’re worried about the guy who is active in Organizing for America, who’s out there moving around the grassroots and who’s arguing that you’re not doing enough to fight Republicans. If you’re a Republican, you’re [worried about] the young Republican Tea Party activist who’s going around saying, “We need a fighter, someone who will hold the line on spending and not someone who’s working with those people.” So, it causes both sides to structure their politics in a way that’s very oriented toward their political base.
MB: How did that shift affect the way that you worked together on a day-to-day basis? I’ve read that, say, 40 or 50 years ago, members knew that their friends in Congress would have to go out and say rough stuff about them during campaign season, but that members didn’t take it too personally. Now that things have gotten so much more fiercely partisan, has that willingness to forgive ebbed at all?
AD: You know, when members perceive there’s a political advantage in working across the aisle, it’s very easy for members to build social relationships with people across the aisle. That’s just human nature and it’s good politics. If you believe that you’re going to need to work with this person on your committee to get a bill done, you think it’s in your political interest to do that, and you think that the political process is conducive to a bipartisan bill movement, it makes it a lot easier to spend time chatting with someone across the aisle or to say to a member, “Let’s go and grab lunch,” in the member’s dining room or to run into a member as they’re leaving the floor at eight o’clock at night and say, “Look, I’m starving. Let me go get something to eat.” Typically in the political world, politics drives social relationships and not the other way around. People often form social relationships with people they work with.
So, as the place became more polarizing and there was less space and less interest in things happening on a bipartisan basis, it cut away some of that interest that members have in developing relationships.
In my experience, there’s always a surface cordiality that exists. That was the case in 2010 as much as in 2003. Members regularly run into each other in the airport, on planes, and often sit next to each other, so it’s not uncommon for there to be a level of cordiality. But I did notice that there seemed to be fewer constructive, meaningful relationships across party lines.
And frankly, over the period of time that I was there, I would say that members seemed to develop more of a mindset that their friends were people who are also are in their political caucus, and even often people who thought like they did. You would kind of notice that the Blue Dogs hang out together, that people in the Progressive Caucus hang out together, that the black and Latino members have their relationships. And I suspect the same kind of thing, to some degree, happens on the Republican side. Relationships would form more within your political identity.
I don’t know if that’s a new phenomenon or not, but it was something that was very pronounced about the Democratic caucus that I observed. Sure, you have people who’ve been there for years and built alliances, but as you move toward the newer generation of members, their friendships and alliances tended to be with people who were their year or people who were kind of a similar ideology or people who had a similar political profile, and it became more of a narrow-casting than I think some people would expect.
MB: This insight – that the work drives the social relationships, rather than the other way around – suggests to me that the fractiousness we see in Congress won’t get better until the general political climate becomes more favorable to bipartisanship.
AD: Until the political climate realigns itself in a way that Congress is expected to produce, you’re not going to get a significant difference. Until the political climate realigns itself in a way that voters are demanding action on particular fronts, you’re not going to see much of a change. I often say to people, whatever political outcome happens in 2012, it is very hard to make a case that any of it will produce a significant amount of legislative activity.
Let’s say best case for Democrats, Barack Obama wins by 8-10 points, Democrats retake the House, Democrats strengthen their hold on the Senate. It’s questionable whether anything other than repealing the Bush tax cuts on millionaires would happen. People ask the question: Well, if you have an easy Obama win, Democrats take the House and consolidate their strength in the Senate, what agenda items would move? Well, let’s look at the two years when Democrats controlled the Congress and had a Democratic president. Cap and trade still didn’t move. It’s not likely that that would change.
Let’s say the Republican nominee wins [and] Republicans keep the House and take the Senate. It’s not clear what would happen. There is no single legislative item that you can say with certainty would happen in the first 90 or 120 days or the first year of the kind of Republican alignment I described, because there’s no consensus in either party on the next direction for the country.
There’s consensus in the Democratic ranks about raising taxes on millionaires. There’s consensus in Republican ranks about repealing Obamacare, but no consensus on what to replace it with, no consensus on whether the politics of the moment would permit a straightforward repeal without a replace strategy, no consensus on what the replace vehicle would look like, no consensus on whether elements of the healthcare bill – like the exchanges or pre-existing illness conditions –ought to be included within the Republican reform; there’s vast disagreement over that. So, again, even if Republicans were to get exactly what they want, it is hard to make the case that you would get substantive legislative action.
So, whenever people say that the reason we’re not getting things done in Washington is because there’s political gridlock and if either side breaks the gridlock – well, the reality is that today, there’s so little consensus in either party on what the next steps ought to be that I think you would see very little legislative proactivity regardless of what happens this year.
MB: You mentioned Democrats’ unanimity around the goal of repealing the tax cuts on millionaires. Obviously, that would leave intact the tax cuts in place for everyone else, and that’s what the president has said he favors.
AD: Yeah, there’s unanimity on that. Obviously, that is about the only major policy item today on which I think there is unanimity from the Democrat caucuses.
MB: Let me ask about that in particular. You recently wrote in the National Review that “an Obama sweep would, for the first time in 76 years, institute government-centered, redistributionist economics as the country’s central governing philosophy.” That seems like an awfully big claim. If the Democrats’ ambitions don’t run beyond restoring the tax rates on millionaires to Clinton-era levels, say, and maybe – if they’re lucky – fiddling with capital gains or carried interest, that doesn’t seem like such a wild change.
AD: That’s a fair point, but here’s the difference: most presidents who’ve won election – in fact, I would submit that every President who’s won election in the modern era on the Democratic side – has pretty much won as a centrist, or they’ve won in such a way that their political agenda was muted. When Jack Kennedy won in 1960, he didn’t win as a liberal hero; he won as the guy who was going to deal with the missile gap. Lyndon Johnson in ’64 honestly won as the guy who wasn’t that crazy Barry Goldwater. Jimmy Carter won as the guy who was going to fix Washington and bring honesty in the process and never lie to the American people; that’s not an ideological agenda. Bill Clinton won in ’92 as a nontraditional Democrat who was not going to follow Democrat politics as usual.
Barack Obama won as the guy who was going to turn the page, as the guy who was going to alter the political environment. Barack Obama did not run on the healthcare bill, you know. That was not a major thing that Obama talked about, except for the debates where Hillary pressed him on it. Obama was the last candidate to actually introduce a healthcare proposal—which if you go back and look at what he proposed in ’07, it’s much different from the law as actually enacted.
If Obama were to win this year and if Democrats were to win the House this year, the belief in the Democratic Party would be that that kind of ratified a certified notion of activist government, a certain notion of an agenda that was focused on redistribution, and that would be the governing philosophy within the party. Now, would that philosophy translate into legislative action? For the reasons I mentioned, it’s arguable that it would not – in fact, it’s probable that it would not. But all politics is not about Congress. What the agencies do, what the regulators do, is enormously important. The political mood that’s set is important, and what the courts do is very important.
This is what’s at stake in this election: If Democrats have the kind of sweep that it appears possible that they could have, that would introduce as the dominant political philosophy, a notion of a powerful government-centric approach, a notion of redistribution as an important economic strategy in a way that no previous election really since the 1930’s has done. That is a big deal for Democrats who value that view of the world and it’s a threat for Republicans who don’t value that view of the world. That’s not an ideological point; it’s a description of what we’re facing.
That’s why there’s a lot at stake in this election. This election, more than most, is about ratifying a particular notion of government. That even if the legislative process can’t rise to that notion, there are many other levels of government that can rise to it. It also sets a political mood that will shape state governors’ races. It creates a political mood that will drive politics all across the county and up and down the spectrum.
That’s what makes this election significant for both sides. If Republicans lose this election the way I described, the notion will be that the Republican notion of deregulation, the Republican anti-government notion – the Republican defense, if you will, of the status quo in our economy – the perception will be that that vision and that philosophy was crushed.
IOP Fellows Charted Twisting Career Paths out of Harvard
The following was originally published in The Harvard Crimson by David Song
When Artur G. Davis ’90 graduated from Harvard as a government concentrator, he says he never imagined that 13 years later he would be an Alabama congressman.
“I never really expected to be a politician,” Davis says. “When I was [at Harvard], I wanted to be a journalist.”
Yet in his junior year, he realized that, without having worked on any of the campus papers, it was unlikely that he could pursue a career in journalism.
“I finally did what all the other people who are undecided in Harvard elected to do,” Davis says, “and that’s go to law school.”
Of the seven fellows at the Institute of Politics this semester, three graduated from one of the schools at Harvard University: Davis, Farai N. Chideya ’90, and Steven P. Schrage, who graduated from Harvard Business School in 2004.
The at-times unpredictable career trajectories of these individuals—from Harvard students to Harvard IOP fellows—reveal a common theme: being flexible and embracing unexpected opportunities can open many doors.
UNDERGRADUATE UNCERTAINTIES
Davis first became interested in politics in elementary school, when he moved on from comic book super heroes to historical figures.
“When I was first interested in history, I saw historical figures as these kinds of heroic individuals who had done in real life the things people did in Greek mythology and comic books,” he says with a smile. “I was always fascinated by the fact that the people who matter…faced a lot of setbacks and were people who had to evolve and become the personalities and personas that we attach to them now.”
Yet while Davis studied government and history at the College, he was uncertain about his future career path.
“The Harvard tradition is if you don’t quite know what you want to do senior year, you go to law school to keep your options open,” he said.
Davis saw a law degree as very applicable to a range of disciplines. He notes that many of his friends ultimately practiced law even after pursuing medical or business degrees.
Chideya, a professional journalist and author, says that she agrees it is not unusual or problematic to go through several careers in a lifetime.
“It’s not a bad idea to do something then jump into something else,” she said. “I have many friends who have law degrees who don’t practice—some are in tech, some in journalism, some in marketing.”
Chideya says she knew she wanted to be a fiction writer, but she was less certain about journalism.
“I was not entirely sure that I wanted to be a journalist—so it was a really great process of being organically introduced to the business, learning from great people who have often been in the business for 20 to 40 years.”
Chideya concentrated in English at the College, studying Shakespeare and the modern novel, an education that she says shaped the way she looked at politics.
She also wrote for The Harvard Independent but says she was not “a hardcore journalism person.” Her turning point was a summer internship with Newsweek, which evolved into a job during the semester.
At Newsweek, her boss let her take interesting assignments, including reporting at a women’s prison and covering a same-sex custody battle.
“I got to do some really interesting work, and that’s what got me into doing [journalism],” Chideya says.
Citing shifts in interest like Chideya’s, Davis notes that students’ most challenging choice is not deciding what to do decades down the road but rather organizing the first five years of their post-undergraduate life.
“It’s the first time for a lot of Harvard students to not have an obvious next step, because for many students the next step after high school was Harvard,” Davis explains.
FIRST STEPS, FIRST JOBS
When Schrage graduated from Duke University, he knew he wanted to travel the world before moving on with his career goals.
After attending bartending school and managing a restaurant to save money, Schrage embarked on a series of global adventures. He talked with students in the wake of the Tiananmen Square incident, rode camels alongside smugglers on the India-Pakistan border, motorcycled in the Golden Triangle area in Southeast Asia, slept on rooftops in Old Jerusalem, and traveled on third-class trains across Indonesia.
“It really gave me a way to experience the world…and see how people lived, how they dealt with issues, so that really sparked my curiosity in terms of the international dimension,” he says.
After graduating from the University of Michigan Law School, Schrage began work at the State Department Legal Adviser’s Office, which inspired his political career.
“This was at the time when the control of Congress switched for the first time in 40 years,” he says. “I saw it as an opportunity to get involved, make a difference in changing some of the institutions, taking policies into a new direction—young people could make a difference in that.”
CAREERS IN TRANSITION
For Davis, the move towards a career in political office began with a lost election.
“The core question you need to ask is: Do you really want to do the job, and would you do a good job?” he says. “I felt quite frankly that I could be a good congressman.”
Dissatisfied with the incumbent’s abilities, Davis set up a campaign for a position in the House of Representatives as an unknown with no history in politics, no connections, and no donors or campaign workers.
“I put together about as much of a shoe-string campaign as one could conceive,” Davis says. “And I learned that $1.4 million goes way further than $70,000.”
Despite losing the election, Davis decided that politics was a route through which he could make a tangible difference, and he ran for the same position again two years later in 2002.
“I felt that I had done well enough and made enough connections to do it again,” Davis says. “And there was nothing else I wanted to do more, no other path that struck me as a more fulfilling one.”
He won and went on to be a four-term congressman.
Chideya’s career also reached a memorable turning point. After publishing “Don’t Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation About African Americans” in 1995, she received an offer from CNN to be a political analyst. She soon shifted to radio and pioneering in online websites.
She says that having control over her own work was an appealing aspect of writing, which helps explain why she did not choose a more “traditional,” structured job.
“If you write a book, you ultimately are responsible for what’s on the page, and I like that,” she says.
Schrage says he feels the risks and sacrifices involved in transitioning out of previous jobs have ultimately been rewarding.
When he was Scholl Chair in International Business at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan think tank, he received an offer from Senator Scott Brown to be his chief of staff. “It was a tough decision, because I had a job I loved very much,” Schrage said. “But I felt that Scott Brown had a very unique opportunity in policy during his first year to bridge the gaps in Washington.”
MANY WAYS TO GET INVOLVED
Davis feels that learning about the history behind political decision is crucial for anyone interested in pursuing a career in politics.
“A lot of people who walk into politics have no real sense of history—they don’t have a real sense of the continuity of problems and arguments we are currently having,” he says.
Davis also believes many students underestimate the influence they can have through politics.
“Handing out signs in New Hampshire is not for everyone…working at phone banks is not for everyone,” he says. “If you’re not going to do it well or with enthusiasm, you’re better off not doing it.”
However, he emphasizes that there are many ways to get involved in politics beyond these traditional activities.
“I feel that Harvard students are reluctant to get involved in politics unless it’s electing the next president of the United States, but there’s a lot of [local] opportunities out there,” he said. “If you get involved in campaigns at a local level, it’s a wonderful opportunity to learn more of politics and see how it plays out on a day in and day out basis. Don’t be afraid to help out.”
For the many students who are uncertain about their future paths, Chideya emphasizes the importance of simply making decisions and taking risks.
“If you don’t know what you want to do, experiment,” she says. “Get a job you think you’ll like…make decisions, and realize they won’t always be perfect. It’s a hard thing for Harvard students to hear, but it’s okay to be not perfect.”
—Staff writer David Song can be reached at davidsong@college.harvard.edu.
Race and College Admissions
The Supreme Court announced yesterday that it will revisit the perennial hot button of affirmative action in the college admissions process. The case, which involves the University of Texas’ admission practices, is a constitutional cliff-hanger: the 5-4 majority in 2003 for the proposition that colleges can treat race as a vague, non-specific factor rested on the now retired reed of Sandra Day O’Connor. Her successor, Samuel Alito, has a history of skepticism toward racial preferences. Adding to the peril for defenders of affirmative action, the court’s emerging liberal superstar, Elena Kagan, has recused herself.
The Texas plan provides automatic admission for the top ten percent of students in every Texas high school. To fill out its freshman class, the university deploys a formula that does not assign a specific point value to race, but unmistakably makes it a factor. It is precisely the kind of half-measure the court endorsed nine years ago, and which seems to be the prevailing practice in all manner of elite public and private colleges 9 (full disclosure: it’s also the kind of plan that admitted me to Harvard 25 years ago).
Count me as a conflicted spectator who chafes at both poles of the debate. Conservatives are way too quick to idealize college admissions as meritocratic instruments: the reality is that they have never worked that way and that’s not a bad thing. Public universities are taxpayer subsidized institutions that exist to maximize upward mobility, and few of them would serve that value (or fill their classrooms) by graduating classes that consisted exclusively of high school academic superstars.
The idea that racial classifications are unnecessary to achieve racial diversity is also a notion that doesn’t hold up well. Every major study on the subject suggests that other instruments of “diversity”, like working class status, or first generation college status, tilt toward the admission of more non-affluent whites and don’t do much to advance ethnic minorities. Even if a wholesale shift toward class as a “plus factor” delved into looser criteria like debt to asset ratio, or home ownership, the best evidence is that nothing assures racial diversity better than race preferences.
But the liberal side of the scale has its own outsized flaws. The principle that public institutions ought to “look like” their population or taxpayer base can be turned on its head: shouldn’t every member of that same constituent base feel he has an equal shot at clearing the admissions gatekeepers? If accountability is at stake, surely one measure of accountability is whether a public university favors one section of the community or treats all comers equally.
The other liberal case for affirmative action is invariably that a “diverse” campus environment is one that is more dynamic and that exposes young adults to an array of attitudes and views they would otherwise never encounter. It’s a theme that resonated thirty or forty year ago, much less so today. There are precious few white students in 2012 that experience a sudden cultural frisson from a talented black or brown student occupying the seat next to them. The notion that it takes a suspiciously consistent percentage of minorities (say, 10 percent v. 5 percent) to jar white students into a tolerant sensibility, or to ease blacks “out of their shell”, seems outmoded, if not outright ridiculous, for a millennial generation that takes race far less seriously than their parents still do.
The middle to upper income 18 to 22 year old adults who frequent college campuses, and live in the throes of a thoroughly integrated television and music culture, won’t become more intolerant if their campus experiences somehow become less racially diverse. It should also be noted that a retreat from race conscious admissions would almost certainly not deprive a single African American or Hispanic student of a college education; at most, it would redistribute the same kids to schools perhaps one competitive notch below their target, i.e., the University of Maryland rather than the University of Michigan. (It’s worth pointing out that one likely outcome of a turn from racial preferences at elite public colleges would be more diversity at second-tier institutions as well as private liberal arts schools).
In addition, the case for diversity in a multi-cultural democracy can turn into what conservatives like to deride as a “spoils system” based on political chits. Do the most stalwart advocates of affirmative action really spend much time worrying if the descendants of East Asian Indians and Arab Muslims are well represented at Ann Arbor or Austin? If not, does it show the hand of a political agenda that defers to the most potent minority voting blocs while giving lip service to the ideal of inclusiveness?
The best case for ending racial preferences isn’t a pollyannish claim that they don’t matter and that freshman classes will look about the same with or without them. To the contrary, the strongest argument is that they do matter, but less today than yesterday, and that the cost–closing doors to kids who don’t get an unearned edge–has outpaced the gain. It’s a notion, by the way, that doesn’t concede that public education should completely get out of the business of taking race into account. The Court’s decision in 2007 limiting race as an element in K-12 district assignments was much too oblivious to the documented linkage between integration and high achievement in secondary schools, and the reality that re-segregated schools are typically sub-standard and that parents have limited options to test other markets.
But the reflexive instinct that ending race conscious college admissions is a disaster in the making? It’s no longer a serious claim. Even a full-scale retreat would hardly disenfranchise African American students or consign them to sub-par schools that lack adequate resources. The market of higher education is much too robust for that. Lacking a more compelling rationale, the case for college affirmative action segues into one more claim that political ground gained shouldn’t be abandoned, even if the ground is just the power of one interest group throwing its weight against another.
Read More: “Affirmative Action, a Middle Class View” by Quin Hilyer
Grading Presidents
The following was originally published in the Recovering Politician:
Let’s assume that there are two presidents whose greatness is not in dispute: Lincoln and FDR, both won defining wars that might have gone the other way absent superior leadership; both dominated their political time by, in Lincoln’s case, creating a new party, and in FDR’s case, re-conceiving a stagnant, fading party into a modern progressive one. I would venture there are three others who weren’t tested quite as severely but who dramatically strengthened the country and the office of president: Washington (who demonstrated that the country was governable as a republic) Thomas Jefferson (who affirmed that the country’s future was westward, and expansionist) and Teddy Roosevelt (who affirmed the ideal of restraining corporate power and size, and who did so in an era when both parties were dominated by economic conservatives).
Then for good measure, throw in Andrew Jackson and Harry Truman at the bottom of the top tier. For all their petty prejudices and their small-mindedness toward their enemies, both had their transcendent moments: Jackson democratizing a country that was veering toward becoming an oligarchy, and Truman shoring up vulnerable democracies from Greece to Israel, and as a result, denying the Soviet Union ownership of the second half of the 20th Century.
Is there a modern president who makes a claim for membership on that list? I’m spending a lot of my time now at an institution that venerates John Kennedy. The argument for Kennedy is that he revitalized the ideal of civic commitment at a time when McCarthyism and fifties materialism had gutted it; that his decision-making skills in the Cuban Missile Crisis averted a nuclear war; and that he gave the cause of civil rights a moral boost at a time when it desperately needed it. The case against Kennedy is that his thousand or so days was too brief, too devoid of serious legislative accomplishments; that he laid the foundation for a disaster in Vietnam, and that he was too late to the cause of civil rights to deserve much credit for it.
My old friends in the DLC, center-left of the Democratic Party have some strong points to offer about Bill Clinton. The case for Clinton greatness goes something like this: eight years of a rare kind of prosperity, one that substantially expanded wealth and reduced poverty at the same time; an electric rate of job growth that coexisted with the most effective deficit reduction campaign in the modern era, and a recasting of the Democratic Party as a middle-class friendly, communitarian enterprise. The anti-Clinton case is that the nineties were just too inconsequential, that Clintonism was too many narrow initiatives–S-Chip, charter schools–too little in the way of defining policy shifts. It is also an undeniable fact that a vital year and a half was spent fighting off impeachment, and that the fight and what it was about contributed to the trivialization of our politics.
And then there is Ronald Reagan, whose grade usually depends on the political cards you bring to the equation. The conservative cause lionizes Reagan for facing down communism and reversing decades of confiscatory taxation, while the left describes the eighties as the enshrinement of an ethic that undermined the social contract, marginalized the poor, and legitimized deficits. The right credits Reagan with re-energizing conservatism at a time when it looked marginal. The left has not forgiven him for demonizing government.
I will risk a cautious verdict based on one premise: the top tier of presidents, all seven in my opinion, can claim credit for settling a broad historical question about the scope of the country and its ambitions, and doing so in a way that outlasted their presidencies and shaped politics for at least the next generation.
By that standard, Reagan wins, Kennedy and Clinton fall short. Neither Kennedy’s ethic of national interest over special interests, nor Clinton’s modernization of the Democratic Party, survived their terms. By the time the sixties ended, the country had reverted to hostile camps whose broad outlines of polarization still exist in the red-blue map, and the sharp regional divide on culture, faith, and race and gender, that define America circa 2012. The Democratic Party today is not Clinton’s party—it is narrower, more ideologically insular, more inclined to confuse reform with more regulation, and innovation with more bureaucracy, than the one that elected Clinton twice.
Whatever you make of Reagan’s domestic agenda, it is essentially the conservatism that prevails today—one convinced that lower tax rates are a condition of growth, that government is inefficient and prone to make things worse, and that redistribution is counter-productive—and it’s a mindset that has constrained public policies for three decades. By the way, anyone who doubts the durability of that blue-print should note the number of times Clinton and Obama have yielded to it, in the programs they have scaled back and the initiatives they haven’t pursued.
Was Reagan a “great president”? That depends on what you want America to be. Was he a consequential president who altered the country’s vision and its politics in a way that lasted? Undoubtedly, without question.
No Tears For Buchanan Or MSNBC
I didn’t shed many tears for Pat Buchanan in the wake of his firing from MSNBC. The sales for his book—a pedestrian work that merely recycles 20 years worth of his diatribes—are about to surge, and he is mildly more familiar and relevant to Americans today than he was 72 hours ago. If he desires it, it’s a certainty that he is headed to Fox News Channel, and probably with a prominent platform.
The lack of sympathy shouldn’t be confused with an affinity for censorship. It should have been no wonder to MSNBC’s hierarchy that Buchanan’s demographic theories are overheated, and that he sounds alarm bells that are alarms primarily if you have a certain crabbed view of the country or a trace of zenophobia. To penalize those views now, when they have been the Buchanan brand for over two decades, has an arbitrary, unfair quality.
The problem with each side of this saga is that I always suspected that MSNBC was using Buchanan in a distasteful kind of way, and that he played along to the detriment of the conservatives whom he supposedly embraces. Buchanan’s on-air role had the feel of a caricature; it was the elevation of a conservatism that is exactly what many liberals imagine conservatives to be—smugly intolerant of the left, cantankerous, narrow-minded. Every time Buchanan chided modern conservatives for waywardness, it was exactly the kind of claim that the left expects the hard right to make—one that seemed unacquainted with the new hues in our culture, and one that yearned to reconstitute America along pre-sixties lines.
Every time Buchanan weighed in to describe post 2000 Republicans as woolly headed “compassionate conservatives”, it meant that MSNBC’s audience never had to hear the much more substantial conservative case, that a Mitch Daniels makes, that Republicans need another dose of engagement with poverty and the working class. Whenever Buchanan urged Republicans to hold fast against the “far left” on a cultural hot button like gay marriage, it meant that a federalist argument that communities have a right to choose their own cultures through popular vote—the kind of argument Chris Christie is effectively making in New Jersey—was swept aside in favor of a retrograde, intolerant sounding defense of tradition.
Whenever Buchanan invoked the specter of illegal immigration from the point of view of a wealthy white man feeling marginalized, it crowded out a skepticism based on the threat from low-wage undocumented labor, and the fact that the threat falls hardest on poor unskilled blacks and downscale whites. By blurring the line between legal and illegal immigration, he aided and abetted liberals who suspect Republicans are troubled more by the browning of America than by lost jobs.
Buchanan was equal time for the variant of conservatism that is precisely the one that liberals want to run against. Somewhere along the way, the game got stale for enough of MSNBC’s audience that the old Nixon warrior overstayed his welcome. Ironically, they were the last ones in on the inside play: all they heard was the hard-edge of a right-winger who seemed to be choking at the “lean forward” mantra that is MSNBC’s way of conveying its progressive tendencies. The viewers missed the strategy, and simply wanted him gone.
I’ve heard Pat Buchanan lament that political discourse now is the opposite of the clubhouse of the early sixties, where disagreements during the day were soothed over bourbon and cigarettes at night; where equally powerful men, all of them white, were too tied to each other to take the rancor seriously. That sanguine world of non-serious disagreements, where everyone knew what the game was, is what Buchanan tried to replicate on, say, Morning Joe. Last week, the shtick ran out. It’s no real loss.
Responses and Feedback
Every now and then, I will offer a few brief responses to feedback I receive on this site or elsewhere in the interests of letting you know your reactions don’t go unnoticed:
-Several readers took issue with the wisdom of Rick Santorum offering a major speech confronting claims that he is too sectarian and out of touch on gender issues. A regular theme of the disagreement was that the strategy would never work for a conservative in the way it worked for Barack Obama when he addressed the Jeremiah Wright firestorm in 08. It’s a fair point that a left-leaning media that was enraptured with Obama’s rhetorical powers and his personal narrative would not be as generous with a pro-life, anti gay marriage conservative like Santorum. But it’s worth noting that a conservative presidency would have to engage the same media environment and still find a way to move public opinion. Ronald Reagan never shrank from making a conservative case in the teeth of resistance, and Santorum shouldn’t either.
-A few readers made the excellent point that the New York Times’ safety net story suffers from a simpler defect than the one I mentioned: the story links income support items like food stamps and free school lunches, to entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, and to elements of the tax code like the mortgage interest deduction and the earned income tax credit. It’s a reach to suggest that a taxpayer who expects his contributions to Social Security to be rewarded, and who claims a deduction the tax code makes available, is a hypocrite for being skeptical about poverty programs. It’s another reach to lump all of these incredibly disparate provisions together under the label “safety net.” It’s a weak thread that does make one question the underlying statistical foundations in the Times article and I should have at least mentioned it.
-Some took issue with my piece on Jack Kennedy and Mimi Alford on the ground that it minimized the atrocious behavior that Alford attributes to Kennedy. No question that if Alford is truthful (a thing we can’t know any more than we know whether Paula Jones’ just as lurid description of Bill Clinton’s behavior was honest), Kennedy used her in a manner that is appalling. But Alford only adds degrees to what we have long known about JFK’s adulteries and the casualness of his marriage vows. The fact that we have the benefit of more details doesn’t change my point: not all morality involves personal conduct or fidelity. There is another moral dimension that involves how nobly public figures affect our obligations to each other and the world. That morality has proved a far higher bar for politicians to either copy or fake, and Kennedy deserves credit for clearing it on civil rights and foreign policy.