| Jed's Story
From the map, Obama did fail to win one battleground state--Missouri--by a few thousand votes. But he picked up one "safe McCain" state to make up for it--Indiana--and he added the Omaha-area CD from "safe McCain" Nebraska, to go one over running the table, so far as the over-all score was concerned, winning 197 of 196 bettleground EVs.
Jed L draws one conclusion from the map, and he's got a good point. But I'd like to draw another. Here's Jed's first:
Perhaps they could have avoided publishing such an embarrassing map if they had taken into account that even though the horserace numbers were close at this point, Democrats had a huge advantage in mobilization and intensity and were unlikely to lose any state that they had won in the four previous elections.
Six states on this battleground list had voted Democratic in the previous four elections -- MI, MN, NJ, OR, PA, and WI. Obama won those states by a combined 56%-43% margin, all by double-digits. If the WaPo had excluded these six states, here's what their electoral vote estimates would have looked like: - GOP Leaning: 174
- Dem Leaning: 248
- Battlegrounds: 116
This list of battlegrounds would have been far more reasonable, even without Indiana. But unlike the chart that was actually published, this table would have made it clear that Obama was in charge of the campaign
Showing Obama's big advantage might not have been Fair & Balanced™>, but so what? The point of reporting isn't to be Fair & Balanced™. The point of reporting is to accurately present the truth. And that makes Nate Silver one of the best political reporters out there.
Jed's 100% correct, especially in light of Post anti-ombudsman Deborah Howell's post-election hissy fit about how biased her paper had been. But there's another story here as well. The Post actually didn't ignore the fact that there were a handful of traditionally safe Dem seats in their "battleground" column. Indeed, that was pretty much their point:
Recent races for the White House have turned on a small group of swing states, and the 2008 general election is likely to be no different. But campaign aides to both Barack Obama and John McCain say their candidate can "change the map" in November and pick off states that traditionally have fallen into the other party's column.
This was the underlying supposition on which their map--and much of the following campaign coverage--was built. Of course it was a wildly mistaken supposition, but it was not entirely arbitrary. McCain had spent the better part of decade positioning himself as "maverick" who could appeal to independents, and the press loved him for it. This positioning went back to a very conscious strategy to pick up Perot voters, the same strategy the GOP had used to capture Congress in 1994.
It was not an illusion that the GOP had captured Congress, which is why I say that the map-changing supposition was not arbitrary. It was not simply based on competing campaign spin. The spin had a rationale. But the reporting never explained that rationale. Well, now is the time to do so. And explaining the roots of that rationale leads to a slightly longer story than the one that Jed had to tell.
Roots Of A Problematic Realignment
According to Walter Dean Burnham's account of realignment theory, realignments happen because party systems reach their limits in terms of their problem-solving abilities. An early warning of this is generally the emergence of prominent third-party movements--such as that of Ross Perot. However, Burnham was also the first to cite the period just concluded as an anomalous one--characterized by divided government, rather than one dominant and one subdominant party. He therefore referred to 1968 as a "de-aligning" election. And this produced a deeply anomalous situation, a party system that never functioned well enough to deal with the problems it faced.
Now, to be honest, the American political system is never all that effective in problem-solving. For example, even with the election of our first black President, the legacy of slavery is still with us. Just look at a map of counties where Obama did worse than Kerry. But we do, generally, at least begin to make progress on managing the most intense, intrusive consequences of those underlying problems.
But 1968 was different. That de-aligning election did not come about because the previous party system had failed to solve the problems before it. Quite the contrary, that de-alignment happened because the party system was too ambitious at problem-solving. It wanted to solve problems that some people really didn't want solved. This was the downfall of LBJ's Great Society--not that it might fail, but that it might succeed. For the Great Society was 100% American--it was John Winthrop's shining City on A Hill, only not just for a select few, but for the most sprawling diversity of humanity ever gathered together in one nation.
Oh, sure, there was a war--Vietnam--that was hugely unpopular. But that war was not one the LBJ wanted to fight. It was a war he thought that he had to fight in order to remain in office and pass his Great Society agenda. And even with Vietnam, the Great Society could have continued under Humphrey, were it not for the southern-centered defections over race, capitalized on by Wallace, as well as Nixon's sabotage of the Paris Peace Talks.
Nixon resented the grandeur of LBJ's vision. Johnson was born about as much of an outsider as Nixon was, but he was much more of a classic American optimist. Although Nixon's whole career would revolve around portraying others as un-American, it was his own lack of characteristic American optimism that made think he could only win by tearing others down. And that was the very basis of his politics.
Rather than continue LBJ's trajectory of confronting our contradictions and overcoming them, Nixonian politics meant a new trajectory--a trajectory of denial, deceit and projection. One of the most central features of this, early on, was the recasting of the Vietnam War. Nixon knew two things: it could not be won, military, and it could not be lost, politically. There had to be an illusion of victory, even in defeat, and part of gaining that victory required the recasting of the core mission of the war itself.
Enter Ross Perot. Perot's activism on the POW issue played a major role in Nixon's effort to recast Vietnam as a war fought to rescue American prisoners of war held by Hanoi. I know it sounds ludicrous, but this actually happened. It wasn't the only thing that happened. But it was a major theme, made all the more politically necessary as anti-war Vietnam Vets emerged as Nixon's most fierce critics. Perot's mythologizing of the POWs--especially the historically unprecedented conflating of MIAs and POWS--allowed us to forget the monstrous atrocities that we were even then still committing in Vietnam.
If we were fighting to rescue our captured soldiers, then we were returned to the theme of white America's first best-selling genre--the captivity narratives born of the early conflict with New England Native Americans, known as King Phillip's War. And the theme of the captivity narratives was never that we had wronged those who in return had captured some of us. No. The theme of the captivity narratives was that we needed to get right with God, and then we could go back to pleasantly plundering everything in sight, always careful not to enjoy it too much.
Fast Forward From Nixon/Perot To Reagan/Perot
This is the vision that Ronald Reagan fully embodied. He represented a full-blown re-mythologizing of absolutely everything. And those who dared point out that everything he said was a lie, they were just a bunch of kill-joys.
Except, they were right. One of the key promises Reagan made was that we could painlessly just do away with all that caring about the poor stuff. We could care about ourselves, and the poor would just take care of themselves. We could cut taxes, and the budget would just magically balance itself.
It didn't happen.
But it was such a powerful myth, such a happy-faced version of Hitler's Big Lie concept, that Democrats didn't know how to fight it. And thus the deficits boomed--producing, ironically, a classic Keyensian-style expansion, albeit a weak one, which was credited, deceptively, to the free market ideology of Milton Friedman. At the same time, Reagan's boundless, unfounded optimism also meant we paid no attention to the devastation of our domestic industrial base. Instead, we welcomed a new economic dogma that told us that trade was always good--even if we were always the ones on the wrong side of a multi-billion dollar trade imbalance.
The American people remained highly ambivalent throughout all this. They liked Reagan's optimism. His policies, not so much. Throughout the 1980s, public support for increased social spending grew continuously, whether anyone was listening or not. Liberal Democrats--not your yuppified latter-day latte drinkers, but Tip O'Neill type children of the New Deal were listening to the people, but were at a loss to craft a new presidential election-winning narrative. Meanwhile, conservative Democrats argued that the problem was not how to puncture Reagan's happy-talk illusion--but how to join it.
Out of this impasse--after George H.W. Bush proved much less a showman than Reagan--H. Ross Perot again stepped forth, leading the charge to cut the deficit, and fight the outsourcing of American jobs. It was, in fact, a profoundly anti-Reagan conservative agenda. But it was also, in a way, a conservative anti-conservative agenda. It styled itself an All-American, no-nonsense, no-ideology, just hands-on, pragmatic, fix-what's broken, no pointy-headed-types allowed type of no-nothing populism.
While Tip O'Neill-style liberal Democrats could have won Perot voters back by showing how their policies could fix the problems facing us, the conservative Democrats strategy of emulating Reagan could not. Bill Clinton split the difference. First, he ran a Tip O'Neill-style campaign, "Putting People First," and then he governed within the box that Reagan built, albeit with a different end in mind. As Mike Lux has previously explained, shrinking projected investment spending, turning increasingly to deficit reduction, and, of course, passing NAFTA without any of the previously promised offsetting labor or environmental safeguards.
Newt Gingrich jumped at the opening this created, and began aggressively courting Perot and his legions. After all, now that a Democrat was President, why not make balancing the budget job one? Of course the Perotistas got snookered by Newt. The "Contract With America" was written just for them. No Christian conservative elements appeared in it at all. But once Newt & Co were in power, things changed. And so did Newt's majority, as the GOP House majority became increasingly more Southern. It was a strategy that could only succeed by plunging deeper and deeper into fantasy--such as the six-year obsession to impeach Bill Clinton for something, anything that could prove he was evil, evil, evil.
In the 2000 election, John McCain wanted to position himself in line with Perot, capturing the broad middle, and while taking advantage of the Newt-lead over-reach to pick up conservative support as well. But Bush out-maneuvered him. By being a governor well outside the Beltway, taking un-earned credit for education reforms that Perot had actually had a big hand in, and adopting the language of "compassionate conservatism" Bush pulled off a far more skillful finessing of the Gingrich/anti-Clinton disaster.
But, of course, all that was pure show. Beneath the surface, Bush was merely more of the same than anyone could imagine--more extreme, more irresponsible, more delusional in his own grandeur than even Newt Gingrich ever was. Then, eight years after he missed his shot in 2000, John McCain wanted to try again. But it was eight years too late for that. Things had moved on. Positions had hardened. The chance to meld Perotistas with social conservatives--if it had ever really existed in the first place--was long gone by 2008. Against the right opponent, those two constituencies still might be united in voting "no", but there was no way left to unite them in voting "yes." George W. Bush had seen to that. He had acted out in spades what had previously only been implicit, or acted out symbolically. He had recapitulated Reagan with all the vicious charm of Richard Nixon.
And so, the Washington Post battleground map reflected the last gasp of GOP strategizing along the path first charted by Richard M. Nixon in 1968. The fact that Obama swept virtually all the states in question--plus one state and one CD that was not--clearly shows the end of that era. This is what realignment looks like. The map has changed. More importantly, what is behind the map has changed in ways that still remain obscure, even to those whose campaign helped change it.
But that's only the beginning. As with the realignment of 1896, most of the winning party's establishment has formed all of its assumptions under the old order, and has not the slightest clue of what a new order should look like. Barack Obama may not be William McKinley, but he's not Teddy Roosevelt, either. At least not yet. And this is even more true of those he has surrounded himself by.
The 1896 realignment was one of the more uncertain, ambiguous ones in American history. It was halfway between the sharp clarity of 1932, and the utter confusion--no, make that delusion of 1968. Right now, 2008 seems very much like 1896. What has been rejected, what is now the past, is far more certain than what has been affirmed, than what the future is. For that, the real struggle has only just begun. |
