I take the conservative despair at Obama’s reelection as being mostly a good thing. Last week’s butt kicking was a long time coming and a major policy and rhetorical rethink is in order. The good news is that it happening.
I’m not sure that I agree with everything last thing said by any particular person at this AEI forum, but they are thinking and everybody should see it. It is the most heartening thing I’ve seen in years and it looks like a critical mass of the right-leaning political elites get it. Maybe the most powerful moment in the whole talk was when a questioner in the audience said that she saw both party conventions and that Bill Clinton was the only person to speak to the electorate as “reasoning adults.” From looking at the movement of the RCP Obama job approval rating, it would seem that a measurable and possibly crucial fraction of the electorate agreed with that lady.
Ramesh Ponnuru argues that the Republican Party is institutionally weak and that this weakness is hurting both “conservative” and “moderate” Republicans. That sounds right to me. A lot of people talk about how that vain fool in Missouri threw away a Senate seat (first by a weird statement, then -even more inexcusably – by refusing to step aside.) But Akin has been getting a little too much attention. Look at Scott Brown. He was a lot more “moderate” and worlds more likeable than Akin. Brown’s ads focused on how “bipartisan” he was and how he was able to get people in Washington to work together. What Brown was missing was any sense of what Washington bipartisans should actually be doing. I think this is only partly Brown’s fault. He didn’t have an attractive middle-class and working-class-oriented agenda and neither did Akin and neither did Romney. The good news is that there are several agendas worth of policy proposals out there. We might even have a Republican Party that is more ready to hear about family-friendly tax reform instead of its relentless focus on cutting taxes for high earners in ways that vary from the unlikely-but-just-barely-possible (Romney) to the completely insane (Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, Tim Pawlenty.)
And as the Republicans get their policy act together, Kevin Feasel has some ideas about how to get their message out:
Get the money that otherwise would be wasted on political consultants and spend it on actual education: 5-minute tutorials, 2-minute TV advertisements, 60-minute lectures, 3-day seminars for students. Lay out the conservative message as it is: complex, multi-faceted, and incomplete. Explain it in terms that somebody who has never heard a conservative idea in his life could understand. The hundreds of millions of dollars conservatives and Republicans spent in advertisement during this campaign were, in large part, a major waste. You can’t explain Washington’s structural problems in a 30-second ad, and you can’t expect somebody who gets all of his news from Jon Stewart to understand the ongoing problems with our welfare programs, or why 99 months of unemployment insurance means that more people will be unemployed for 99 months.
November 18th, 2012 | 12:20 am
Exactly. We need to lay the groundwork for a wider, more general understanding of conservative ideas, and we need to start now. Not wait two years to address the public, then another year to answer policy questions. We need to volunteer our answers before anyone asks — that way, we use the correct terms, instead of fielding loaded questions, or questions from people who have no idea what is going on. Get our ideas, our terms, our language, out there, and then work from there in a year, and build on it.
November 18th, 2012 | 2:09 am
Thanks Pete,
Listened to the AEI forum discussion. Listened to it twice actually. (listening to AEI forum podcasts are a strange pastime of mine). And I’m glad that you’re giving this such prominence on this blog.
I was wondering what you thought about how often the term ‘narrative’ kept getting used, as in ‘the Republicans need to have a more compelling narrative’. At times the discussion seemed too pre-occupied with the production values of messaging.
I found this particularly problematic when the point was made that the GOP has to get better at listening to diverse constituencies. This is true enough as far as it goes. However, I have the sneaking suspicion that what Republicans will find out is that ‘listening’ is really about making members of these constituencies ‘feel’ like they are being listened to in the democratic party sense, which is to say compensate said constituencies with some kind of policy or entitlement to gain their vote.
The relevant take away seemed to be that the party has to better translate its values into coherent policies that actually help to articulate a vision that can plausibly support the inspirational narrative that some of the panelists are saying is lacking. And the counter example of Romney’s mistake on the dream act I thought was apt.
However, I found myself cringing at the use of Clinton as an ideal example of a communicator. The man epitomizes political snake oil selling. And his speech at the democratic party convention was just a string of disengenuous misrepresentations not the least of which is that somehow deregulation was strictly a Republican vice. Excuse me Mr. Clinton you were the one who advocated for the elimination of Glass Steagall, and your policies epitomized serial deregulation throughout both your two terms.
I would much rather an example of compelling political advocacy be found that actually shows how one can build a compelling narrative based in political reality. Mr. Clinton’s talent is that of a fantasist who simply had a talent for sweeping up other people into his own selective delusions. I think the woman in the Q&A who said her friends thought Clinton’s speech was the only thing they heard that they thought spoke to them, says something about just what the Republican party is up against.
November 18th, 2012 | 9:07 am
“I was wondering what you thought about how often the term ‘narrative’ kept getting used, as in ‘the Republicans need to have a more compelling narrative’. At times the discussion seemed too pre-occupied with the production values of messaging.”
I think you are right, about the risks of believing that narrative itself is the only thing that matter (though I don’t believe that is what anyone on the panel believes.) It is possible that (for instance) the GOP congressional leadership will hear that.
“I found this particularly problematic when the point was made that the GOP has to get better at listening to diverse constituencies. This is true enough as far as it goes. However, I have the sneaking suspicion that what Republicans will find out is that ‘listening’ is really about making members of these constituencies ‘feel’ like they are being listened to in the democratic party sense, which is to say compensate said constituencies with some kind of policy or entitlement to gain their vote.”
I don’t think that is what Henry Olsen or Reihan Salam are about, but I can very easily see the Republican congressional leadership turning “listening” into what you describe (especially if they are using left-leaning political elites as their interlocutors) doing what you fear. But there is also no real alternative to some kind of “listening if they want to avoid irrelevance. So we need for them to get it right (finding a way to talk about a moderately social conservative Ryanism.)
“Clinton’s talent is that of a fantasist who simply had a talent for sweeping up other people into his own selective delusions.”
Clinton is a complicated guy and I think you are selling his convention speech short. He made a real argument at length about why the recovery was so slow and apparently people found it plausible. The Republicans made no such argument. I think the lesson isn’t that Clinton is a magician but that:
a. People are not very deeply informed.
b. They aren’t as stupid as Republican operatives assume.
I think rhetoric has to work in that grey area.
November 18th, 2012 | 9:22 am
[...] MORNING GOD & CAESAR EDITION Published November 18, 2012 Anno Domini Green Shoots - Pete Spiliakos, [...]
November 18th, 2012 | 10:50 am
I would not term the election result a “butt kicking”. A 2+/- % margin, roughly 3 million more voters is hardly a butt-kicking…certainly it was a great disappointment. This was definitely a presidential election the Republicans should have won without difficulty. They had a weak candidate and a weak message. I don’t think I ever heard a clear exposition of why the Republican ideals of smaller government, and non-government community action, the role of small business in the larger economy, and how, say, tax increases on the 2% would harm the economy, are better than the tax and spend policies that are driving this country’s future into the ground. Oh, and don’t forget the social issues: someone should be talking about what supporting/promoting the traditional family has to do with healthy citizens, healthy society, and that it’s the best defense to the numerous social ills that plague our country. The Mitch Daniels response to the last SotU address was the best explanation of Republican ideals heard all year. Why that kind of talk was absent during the campaign is beyond me. In part, I think the fractured, partisan (heavily favoring liberalism) media structure is a huge hurdle to get over no matter what comes out of the soul searching. Also, it sounds like there was a failure of Republicans and Republican leaning voters to actually get out and vote, ORCA or no ORCA.
November 18th, 2012 | 11:32 am
Fr. Guido, given the pretty favorable (for Republicans) circumstances, I think that Obama winning by 2.5% or so is actually very disturbing. The losses in the Senate (and I don’t just mean Missouri and Indiana) are even more disturbing. As Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out, the “weak candidate” actually outperformed the Senate Republicans in most places. There are some real problems hear.
I agree with most of the rest though I would place less emphasis on the defense of the 2% (not that there is anything wrong with that, it is just that there are other issues too), and especially agree on the Daniels State of the Union response.
I think Republicans can and should do better on GOTV, but that is low on my list of worries. If the GOP can’t get the GOTV mechanics right, then they are going to get everything else wrong too. And as Henry Olsen said at the AEI panel, message is more important than GOTV mechanics because you can’t get people to get out and vote for you if they don’t actually want to vote for you.
November 19th, 2012 | 6:14 am
Pete,
I still view the result as more of a great failure of the Republicans to capitalize on favorable circumstances than some master stroke of political gamesmanship by Obama (only a butt-kicking in the negative, perhaps). The Republicans came with a C- candidate playing a D+ game. As was pointed out numerous times on this site, there were at least a few more competitive candidates to be had in the party. While the electoral college technically gives us the winner, the popular vote I think is still where it’s at for interpreting “mandates” etc. 50.7% just isn’t convincing for a lot of love for Obama. It’s more sticking with a known quantity than going with a new guy who never sounded like he would be that much better. One could say that ideologically it doesn’t matter, because now the Dems have the position in which to steer the country ideologically for the next four years.
I only mention the tax/wealthy issue because it got a lot of play in the campaign. No substantive argument was made as to why this is a “bad” thing to do, just that it’s “bad” and thus Romney and Republicans in general could be painted as a bunch of fat cats in it only for the purpose of helping their fat cat friends. In the long run I don’t think it’s an issue to sway many “persuadables” over to the Republican side. The 47% comment, I believe was taken out of context, but again never got a great explanation as to what he really meant. (I took it as a statement that considering the demographics of the country Obama already had a lock on a substantial portion of the population so there was only a small target audience to try to swing Romney’s way). While there may be some truth to that view, it essentially is a setup for failure if you don’t even try to persuade everyone that you are the best candidate. (Yes, still apportion your resources to their most effective end).
Obama (with MSM help) was able to paint Romney as evil incarnate. O had no real positive record to run on so did the mud-slinging, as any reasonable candidate would do (given our country’s campaign culture) and Romney never seemed to make an effort to counter the accusations. Also, in the MidWest battleground states, Romney’s criticism of the auto-industry bailout probably hurt and his statements about Jeep moving factories to China, which were contradicted by Chrysler, brought that back around as an issue. Again, no explanation of what the alternative to a government-funded bailout would look like, or how it would have been better. Altogether, though, hard to argue about that type of hypothetical after the fact.
On a somewhat related note, liberal assertions are easier to make in our sound-bite culture. At first glance it may sound reasonable to have the government do more for people in these difficult times, give everyone contraceptives, allow gays to marry… It takes some thought to see why some (all) of these things should not happen and you have to follow the logic behind the assertions to its inevitable conclusions to figure out how destructive that thinking is to the ideals upon which this country was founded.
I agree with your last point, people have to like what you stand for in order to support you.
Despite the disappointment, I still see plenty of room for hope. The knuckleheads in charge just have to spend more time reading Postmodern Conservative.
November 19th, 2012 | 9:55 am
Well, Pete, just how does 99 months of unemployment insurance lead to more people being unemployed for 99 months?
I’ve always heard that the availability of jobs depended on the willingness of businesses to offer them, because they think they can make more money with the new jobs they offer. In other words, it depends upon the supply of openings offered, not on the supply of workers needed to fill them.
Over the last 50 years, I, at least, have only seen help wanted signs stay around for a long time when the public is already largely employed. Have you seen the contrary?
And I have never seen a single objective piece of evidence that unemployment compensation actually reduces the available labor supply and lengthens the time businesses must wait between advertising the job and filling it. Not one.
So, somehow, the Invisible Hand of the Market becomes even more invisible than usual in this matter. Maybe its taking a three martini lunch.
Certainly nobody on unemployment is taking a three martini lunch. After all, what they are actually being paid (in Ohio at least) is about 50% of their former wages, while obligated for the same size bills generally, faced with the huge expense of picking up the former employer’s share of their health coverage, and at the mercy of uncertain movement in gasoline prices. Mostly, you have to run up what credit you have to keep your head above water, at the risk of eventual default and the termination of your utilities anyway.
So you really don’t have much time to lollygag around acting as if your problems are all solved by your unemployment check.
The fact that we are burdened by so much private debt is due as much to having several rises and falls in employment as it is to any spendthriftness excusing the wagging of conservative fingers.
What I have heard justifying this rare and unprecedented suspension of “market forces” when people are on unemployment, is a lot of seat of the pants psychologising about “human nature” based on a priori philosophical principles whose truth is unsupported by any objective evidence, either. Thus I would have to call the whole argument, like so much of conservatism, “faith based”.
What is supported by evidence is that people in large groups behave predictably and reliably. We just saw a demonstration of that 2 weeks ago. It is the “nature” of all mammals to give milk to their young, but that tells us nothing about what milk cows will do in a cattle stampede. While any individual might slack off, people out of work as a whole look for jobs and remain unemployed because there aren’t enough of them.
I strongly suspect that so many conservative intellectuals, such as Kevin Feasel, think otherwise because they’ve never had to stand in an unemployment line.
November 19th, 2012 | 10:09 am
Oh, and by the way, if there is any doubt that Mr. Feasel is a little disconnected from the facts on the ground:
“In the olden days, restaurants and grocery stores would donate leftover food to homeless shelters; now, they can’t do that.”
I can assure him from personal experience that food pantries still do receive and gratefully accept food donations from local merchants.
November 19th, 2012 | 1:21 pm
Scott Brown’s election to replace Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy was due to a fluke in state politics instead of a resurgent Republican party. The Massachusetts Democratic Party machine was in disarray after Senator Edward Kennedy’s death because there was no one he had groomed to be his successor and thus no strong candidate waiting in the wings. Once the party found someone to unite behind, Scott stood little chance of being re-elected.
November 19th, 2012 | 4:34 pm
I would note that many of these “policy proposals” operate in a world where census data is completely detached from facts on the ground:
“In the Obama years, spending on America’s welfare programs — such as food stamps, Medicaid, and income support — has exploded. Surprisingly, that growth has not been driven by an increase in the number of poor Americans: Today, most beneficiaries of our “anti-poverty” programs are in fact living above the federal definition of poverty, and in some cases well above it. The data on how these programs spend their money suggest that enormous budget savings can be realized without reducing the help we provide to the poor — by bringing our anti-poverty programs back in line with their original purpose.”
There are plenty of nice charts to support this assertion but there are several facts on the ground simply left out of the story. And these facts are vital:
1. The aid is given based on “need” and not just on absolute “poverty level”. Need is based on three criteria: household income, inelastic expenditures (rent and utilities costs), and assets.
The “poverty level” for a single individual is $11,000 (in round figures). This amounts to $917 a month. This is the important figure, because everybody’s bills are paid monthly.
In my town the cheapest 1 bedroom apartment rents for about $400, leaving $517 dollars a month to cover food and utilities. “Need”, however leaves out significant costs such as transportation to work. In my town the absolute minimum for this is $61 a month for a local bus pass–and bus travel alone allows you realistic access to no more than 10-15% of the available employment and takes between 2-4 hours for a daily two-way commute.
This leaves $455 dollars a month for food, a week’s worth of presentable work clothing, grooming aids for cleanliness and presentability at work, and laundry costs.
November 19th, 2012 | 5:25 pm
2. The amount actually given in aid is only a % of need. Our poverty level individual would receive about 50% of food supplement. An individual can sustain a nutritionally adequate diet on about $400 a month, so they would have $200 of their food costs covered, leaving them with $255 a month for all other expenses. This invites comparison with your budget for clothing, transportation, grooming, and laundry.
The larger the income, the less aid you receive because your “need” is less. At $8.00 an hour for eight hours a day, you would make about $1400 a month before taxes, federal, state, and local.
This individual’s “need” and therefore their aid, would be reduced proportionally, from $200 to about $150. And so forth.
3. To receive aid at all, you must have total assets of no more than $1500. And that $1500 is subtracted from your yearly aid totals. So if our $8 an hour worker had been thrifty enough to actually save about 8% of their gross wages, they would receive $25.00 a month in aid.
Anyone who owns a house simply cannot be on aid–their assets would be too great. So when the authors complain about people over 200% of poverty receiving aid, they are NOT in any way talking about “the middle class” as they claim. They are talking about people making $1835 a month, renting their shelter and receiving but token subsidy.
So why are there now more of them? Because a large number of people have been foreclosed out of their houses and stripped of other assets by unemployment or gasoline costs for work related driving. Guess where the profit off them went.
November 19th, 2012 | 7:47 pm
“And I have never seen a single objective piece of evidence that unemployment compensation actually reduces the available labor supply”
And yet such evidence exists anyway
http://www.econ.uconn.edu/seminars/20102011/papers/schmieder10.pdf
http://www.econ.uconn.edu/seminars/20102011/papers/schmieder10.pdf
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:qcfNdx7IDQoJ:emlab.berkeley.edu/users/webfac/quigley/e231_f05/chetty.pdf+unemployment+insurance+duration+substitution+effects&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShUAGZ6BTPONi3UatUG43c245jia7_AhLb19a6yqsFBluhhIDkcaXfNfIo2MLiDXo1HJ3jkkV2nYAXsNz1ao8thJCJrdAoqSgFKeCxtEOm1BSn_HOJJZpsAsSy3WL2AEjY3n2Ra&sig=AHIEtbT3NptsE31Qb5BBDYA-5E_41mrIAQ
You would have had a point if you had confined yourself to the more defensible position that some studies show the effects of increasing unemployment insurance eligibility are small enough that they are worth it when you take account of the competing interests in increasing the eligibility period during a very bad labor market.
The rest is an example of the “seat of the pants psychologising about “human nature” based on a priori philosophical principles whose truth is unsupported by any objective evidence” that you claim to deplore along with the public scratching of a itch related to martinis that has nothing to do with the matter under discussion.
November 19th, 2012 | 8:10 pm
“I still view the result as more of a great failure of the Republicans to capitalize on favorable circumstances than some master stroke of political gamesmanship by Obama (only a butt-kicking in the negative, perhaps).”
I think the masterstroke stuff (not singling you out, just the general praise of the Obama campaign) is overdone. He ran a fine mechanical campaign. It wouldn’t have saved him if he had been running in the demographic American of 1988. That is the most disturbing thing as it is a culmination of trends that have been building for a generation of more.
“The Republicans came with a C- candidate playing a D+ game. As was pointed out numerous times on this site, there were at least a few more competitive candidates to be had in the party.”
I think we need to make some distinctions here. I do think there were Republican candidates who could have run better in this year. Whether they run 2.7% of the electorate better I don’t know. But Romney ran ahead of the Republican Senate candidates in Ohio, Virginia, Florida, and Wisconsin. I doubt those candidates were ALL D+ candidates who ran F campaigns. There are real agenda and messaging problems that are distinct from Romney’s personal weaknesses and more important too.
“The 47% comment, I believe was taken out of context, but again never got a great explanation as to what he really meant. (I took it as a statement that considering the demographics of the country Obama already had a lock on a substantial portion of the population so there was only a small target audience to try to swing Romney’s way).”
The problem with all these defenses of Romney’s statement is that they involve rewriting what Romney said to make a different point. If Romney had said that Obama is likely to get at least 47% of the vote regardless of the course of the campaign, it would not have been controversial in the least. Here is what Romney said:
“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49, 48—he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. And he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean that’s what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people—I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives”
So he says the 47% who have no net income tax liability are “dependent”, think of themselves as “victims” and cannot be convinced to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” this is not infelicitous commentary. This stuff is just plain wrong.
“Obama already had a lock on a substantial portion of the population so there was only a small target audience to try to swing Romney’s way).”
I think that is true, but what does it say of the condition of the Republican coalition that they have to draw to a demographic inside straight to win even under moderately favorable conditions?
November 19th, 2012 | 8:16 pm
Cbalducc, I think you are partly right, but only partly. It wasn’t like the state Democratic leadership was crazy for Elizabeth Warren either. The different turnout dynamics of a special election and a presidential election year mattered a lot too. But so did:
A. Obama was just more popular in November 2012 than he was in 2010.
B. Scott Brown had hot issues in 2010 on Obamacare and civilian trials for terrorists. They just weren’t as hot in Massachusetts in 2012 and he (like a lot of Republicans) had no other set of popular issues to run on.
November 19th, 2012 | 9:18 pm
Pete, other than Mitch Daniels, who do you have in mind when you say that “there were Republican candidates who could have run better [than Romney did] in this year”? Did any of the guys you have in mind run for the nomination? As third-rate as Romney’s campaign was, I can’t see that any of his opponents in the primaries would have done better. Which, as others have said, is more a commentary on the weakness of the field than on Romney’s quality as a candidate.
November 20th, 2012 | 12:16 am
Peter, it would really help if you actually read the stuff you cite. This is the major conclusion straight from the abstract of the study by Schmieder, von Wachter, and Bender which you have linked to twice:
“We do not find strong effects of increased UI duration on average job quality or on longer-term employment outcomes. Our findings imply that large expansions in UI during recessions are unlikely to lead to sizable increases in unemploy- ment duration or the unemployment rate, to contribute to unemployment persistence, or to lead to worsening job outcomes for the long-term unemployed.”
And here are some of the highlights in your third link of Chetty’s conclusions on the impact of Unemployment Insurance on the labor supply:
“This paper has argued that unemployment benefits raise durations primarily through non- distortionary income effects rather than the substitution effects emphasized in the existing literature. Roughly stated, the standard view has been that people take longer to find a job when receiving high UI benefits because it pays less to go back to work…..
The strong link between unemployment benefits and unemployment durations has been interpreted in previous studies as evidence that UI generates a substantial deadweight cost by reducing labor supply. The results of this paper challenge this view…..
Although a formal analysis of optimal UI policy is outside the scope of this paper, there are some qualitative insights worth mentioning. If the deadweight cost of UI is lower than previously thought, it follows naturally that the optimal benefit level should be higher as well.”
This sort of thing is one of the reasons I link very little and quote quite a lot. Extracting a pertinent quotation mandates that you spend some time reading the source.
November 20th, 2012 | 6:29 pm
Joseph, “it would really help if you actually read the stuff you cite.”
I took the time to read not only the studies, but also your own words. You wrote:
“And I have never seen a single objective piece of evidence that unemployment compensation actually reduces the available labor supply”
Schmieder et al write:
“Our results show that substantial increases in benefit durations lead to moderate increases in nonemployment durations in the short run, but there are little long-term effects on labor force attachmentor observable job quality. The point estimates indicate that the effects on employment are approximately constant over the business cycle or slightly smaller during economic downturns”
Your quotation of Chetty is deeply misleading in how it it cuts off as Chetty writes:
“The evidence described here suggests instead that unemployment durations rise mainly because households have cash on hand [from UI] while unemployed and are therefore less pressured to find work.”
So we have both studies directly contradicting your assertion. But that doesn’t tell us what the policy should be as Schmieder finds the effect to be small (though they cite studies that find larger effects.)
Here is the third study I meant to link to
http://www.nber.org/papers/w9014.pdf?new_window=1
November 20th, 2012 | 6:32 pm
djf, the timing wasn’t going to work out, but I would have liked Jindal better. When it comes to getting the tone right I think I think Bob McDonnell has it right, but he wasn’t going to run in 2012. Of the ones who did run, Romney had the best chance to win. Alas.
November 21st, 2012 | 9:51 am
Pete, I see where you’re coming from regarding Jindal and McDonnell, but I think I respectfully disagree. IMHO, Jindal and McDonnell would have brought disadvantages of their own (i.e., perceived over-identification with the religious right and “Southern-ness,” which, post-W, is not helpful). I especially doubt that Jindal (who is, if anything, too youthful-looking) would have had cross-over appeal to the sort of Northern non-ideological middle class white voters who failed to turn out for Romney. This is all just my subjective impression, and may well be wrong, but I guess we’ll never know.
Too bad Mitch Daniels didn’t run. Just around the time he removed himself from consideration, I came around to him. Oh, well.
November 21st, 2012 | 1:39 pm
djf, we have something of a natural experiment in the case of McDonnell as he ran well in the Virginia suburbs against an opponent who ran a culture war campaign against him. I think that regional identity is a lot less important than tone when it comes to avoiding being caricatured by the opposition. Being a Northern moderate didn’t help Romney because he never made the case for his social conservative positions (Which let’s face it he probably never believed anyway), let Obama always choose the ground and never learned to hit back effectively. So I think that a Southern social conservative can come across more reasonable than Romney if he (or she) is the right Southern conservative who runs the right kind of campaign.
November 21st, 2012 | 6:10 pm
Bill Clinton Compared With Barack Obama:
what IS IS & what ISlam IS !
November 23rd, 2012 | 1:06 pm
Pete,
I am aware that McDonnell was able to overcome the GOP’s problems with suburban voters when he was elected governor. However, those problems came back to haunt him once he was in office, with the controversy over the somnogram legislation. Whatever one’s views of the merits of that issue, it is undeniable that the Dems were able to use it to drive down his numbers in VA.
I also recall that McDonnell made some ill-considered comment about the Confederacy that was also used against him. If he’s not smart or quick enough to avoid pitfalls like that, he’s not presidential material. It’s no excuse that the comment may have had some reasonable, non-racist explanation (as I’m sure it did), that it was distorted by the Dems and their lackeys (as I’m sure it was), or that it was the sort of comment that would have been well-received by highly conservative, all-Republican audiences in out-the-way rural or exurban areas.
I agree that tone matters, but I don’t share your confidence that a candidate’s “ma[king] the case for . . . social conservative positions” with which people viscerally disagree (and one does not have to have given an issue any independent thought to feel strongly and “viscerally” about it) can bring around significant numbers of voters. I’d be pleased to be proven wrong on this, however, and I agree that the approach has not really been tried.
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