A while back on Twitter, Ross Douthat wrote “Social cons gave GOP Todd Akin. Elite donors gave GOP “47 percent.” Both hurt, but latter hurt a lot more.” I’m not going to disagree with Douthat. Romney was more important than Akin and “47%” sentiment was more prevalent on the right than musings about “legitimate rape.” It wasn’t a coincidence that Romney was caught making his 47% cracks to a wealthy donor audience in a format closed to the press. But I would want to complicate this view of the donors. News reports from a while back indicated that lots of Republican donors were hoping for Mitch Daniels to enter the race. This was the same Mitch Daniels who, in response to Obama’s 2012 State Of The Union speech, said:
Those punished most by the wrong turns of the last three years are those unemployed or underemployed tonight and those so discouraged they’ve abandoned the search for work altogether. And no one’s been more tragically harmed than the young people of this country, the first generation in memory to face a future less promising than their parents did.
As Republicans, our first concern is for those waiting tonight to begin or resume the climb up life’s ladder. We do not accept that ours will ever be a nation of haves and have-nots. We must always be a nation of haves and soon-to-haves.
Are the donors represented by Daniels, or the guy who showed such contempt for the 47% of Americans who had no net federal income tax liability and who made it clear there was nothing in his tax plan to appeal to them? I think the answer is yes but… There are probably donors who share Romney’s expressed contempt for, and lack of interest in the 47% as other than a mindless force of economic predation. There are probably lots of donors who believe that a combination of education and health care policy reforms combined with a growing economy and an effective, affordable, and limited government are the best thing that could happen to the middle-class and those that aspire to the middle-class.
The dynamics of the 2012 presidential race worked out that even most donors in the second group ended up supporting Romney. Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, and Bobby Jindal didn’t run. It turned out that Rick Perry didn’t do the work on national issues and opinion dynamics to be a viable candidate. Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain were utterly irresponsible figures who were running thinly disguised commercial ventures rather than presidential campaign. Santorum lacked the organizational skills and rhetorical discipline to win a presidential campaign. That left Romney. That is not to excuse the (probably significant) fraction of Republican donors who did buy into some version of the 47% argument. I’m just saying it isn’t clear that they are a plurality of the donors. There was money there for something better.
I feel like I’ve been way to easy on Republican donors this week so I’ll close with a criticism. Conservative Republican donors have recently done a lousy job of using their money to influence election outcomes. They’ve spent way too much money on redundant 30 second election year ads that are completely unpersuasive and may actually be incomprehensible to much of the electorate. They would have been better off if they had invested researching and testing methods for reaching younger and nonwhite voters who hardly ever hear a right-leaning idea sympathetically expressed. They would have been better off focusing more on ideas for policy family-friendly tax reform and replacements for Obamacare. Their messaging should be aligning more with Yuval Levin than Karl Rove. And they should be spending more of their money between elections so that when a Republican starts talking a middle-class agenda, the public already has some idea of what he (or she) is talking about.
December 7th, 2012 | 12:15 am
“They would have been better off if they had invested researching and testing methods for reaching younger and nonwhite voters who hardly ever hear a right-leaning idea sympathetically expressed. They would have been better off focusing more on ideas for policy family-friendly tax reform and replacements for Obamacare. Their messaging should be aligning more with Yuval Levin than Karl Rove.”
How I wish that conservative donors were taking your advice. Instead, today we saw the largest and most powerful conservative ideas-organization pick a bombastic, divisive senator to be its new president. Far too much of the base is still taking its cues from Limbaugh and Hannity rather than people like Douthat and Levin.
December 7th, 2012 | 1:11 am
Pete, no amount of homework would have made Rick Perry presidential material. The guy was clearly missing something that could not be supplied by briefing books.
I think what you’re saying in this post and previous related ones is that the people making up the whole Republican/conservative apparatus – politicians, campaign managers and consultants, party operatives, contributors, pundits, talk show hosts, and think-tankers – should be something other than what 95% of them are. Which is to say, that 95% of them see themselves primarily either as facilitators of corporate America (even though much of corporate America is happy to accommodate itself to the Left) or as advocates for an ideological agenda of some kind (there are various ones within the party, most of which I agree with to one degree or another) that, whatever its merit, is of little interest to the voters you call “persuadables.” Thus, GOP candidates’ attempts to address the concerns of these voters are after-thoughts, and usually very poorly thought-through after-thoughts. It seems to me that getting these guys to make a serious effort to reach persuadables on their own terms (rather than just using cliches that worked back in 1980-1994) is like trying to teach quantum mechanics to Paris Hilton.
I realize the Democrats are also stalking horses for ideologues and interest groups (bad ones, in their case), and are not truly interested in the concerns of the voters in the middle, but they have a real passion for politics that motivates them to do whatever it takes to reach these voters and win. And they also seem to have a real long-term strategic view of politics.
The Republicans and their supporters, by contrast, seem terminally myopic and, at bottom, not really poltical to their core. Their real passions are business, investing, golf, football, in some cases religion (none of which I deprecate, although I don’t understand the attraction of golf) – and they can’t wait to finish with the political stuff and get back to the things they’re really interested in. Which is perhaps one reason why they assume that some strategy that worked in the past will always continue to work. And why the Romney campaign apparently based its strategy on unrealistically optimistic assumptions and best-case scenarios.
Okay, rant over.
December 7th, 2012 | 11:49 am
“The Republicans and their supporters, by contrast, seem terminally myopic and, at bottom, not really poltical to their core. Their real passions are business, investing, golf, football, in some cases religion (none of which I deprecate, although I don’t understand the attraction of golf) – and they can’t wait to finish with the political stuff and get back to the things they’re really interested in.”
I agree with this, except for the label. It’s the left that’s better described as myopic in that they see everything as political.
The problem isn’t that there are those who want to engage in those things (collectively known as having normal life) as opposed to being everywhere and always political, it’s that there are those who are obsessed with politics-24/7/365.
December 7th, 2012 | 3:04 pm
Adam,
I was talking about political myopia. The Democrats and the Left seem to be succeeding in taking over the country, so I don’t see how they are the politically myopic ones. Republican politicians may lead happier personal lives – I wouldn’t know and wouldn’t care – but the movement they lackadaisically “lead” is collapsing into national irrelevance.
Further to my point, see today’s post on the Commentary website (Contentions) by Bethany Mandel on a recent meeting of Romney’s consultants and other GOP operatives, at which those in attendance congratulated themselves on what a wonderful a job they did (to the considerable enrichment of Romney’s consultants, of course). It’s hard to resist the conclusion that these consultants and operatives and “strategists” are mostly concerned with perpetuating the party and the movement for the purpose of keeping the gravy train running to themselves.
December 7th, 2012 | 3:05 pm
It is true that half our population believes the gov’t exists to support them. Since this is politically incorrect the only solution is the old
bourgeois one. Property qualifications for voting.
A literacy test wouldn’t be bad either. This is not racism; there are plenty of white people who should be barred from the franchise.
December 7th, 2012 | 3:35 pm
The problem continues to be that Republicans are not communicating who they are, and getting that message to carry with average voters. We need to get back to our roots, get back to the 1980′s with Reagan and Alex P. Keaton, and the yuppy movement. Start showing people that being a conservative means that you are young, full of promise, and on track for massive success. I think I summed it up pretty well over at Conservative Island recently with this post, http://conservativeisland.com/who-are-conservatives-in-america/
December 7th, 2012 | 5:42 pm
The reason it is hard to communicate conservative values to the youth is that the youth has been educated by semi-Bolshevik teachers. It may be too late for sanity. We may need a rightist revolution and that could be unpleasant at the least.
December 7th, 2012 | 5:44 pm
Christians, and I don’t mean happy-go-lucky followers of Osteen et Co., may have to realise that they will find the future grim. Are they prepared to fight?
December 7th, 2012 | 5:52 pm
The basic idea behind “47%” had been a conservative talk-radio staple for couple years. So much so that I didn’t see right away what a mistake it was when Romney said it. Had gotten used to hearing such.
So, is it really a “donor class” thing?
December 7th, 2012 | 5:54 pm
djf,
As far as rants go, it’s a good one in my opinion. But I will note that I think Adam has an important point which, depending on how true it is, may point to an inherent disadvantage for those whose philosophy supports a more Jeffersonian notion of small government compared to the democratic notion of a large interventionist government inasmuch as the latter, seeing government involvement as intrinsically important to the general welfare will therefore see government activism as inherently more meaningful and important than their Jeffersonian counterparts, who by contrast see government as a necessary evil and so are more likely to assign greater importance to other more local involvements in their lives, like family, community, church, and vocation.
One thing that I find disconcerting about how the Obama campaign has succeeded in re-engineering social networking and IT is that it effectively leverages one of their own inherent advantages, reaching out to those whose view of life is quite conducive to dedicated political activism. Conservatism, on the otherhand has to draw from a community of people who do not view their lives and meaning in terms that are nearly so one dimensionally political.
The sad irony is that, in my opinon, the country benefits from people more like the latter, but politics is usually more influenced by people like the former.
And perhaps this explains what Pete is observing in these more recent installments of his. If most of the typical constituencies of the conservative persuasion are middle class Americans with, as Mr. Baum puts it, a life to live, then the only conservatives that will likely be volunteering their voice and resources in conservative policy discussions will be those who’s interests are the most political, which pretty much limits it to the corporatists.
My critique isn’t to imply that business input shouldn’t be as involved as it is, but that the other components of the conservative coalition are not nearly as motivated to contribute their voices and resources by comparison.
December 7th, 2012 | 8:26 pm
Carl, no, you’re totally right and it isn’t just a donor thing. My sense is that the resentment of the “47 percent” runs very hot among some fraction of right-leaning people near the median. I’d written the same before, but decided against repeating here since it was only a discussion of donors. In retrospect it was a mistake. http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/postmodernconservative/2012/09/27/thoughts-on-resentment-against-the-47/
DJF, thanks for your comment as it helped crystallize an idea I had for a post (But I’m too tired and lazy to write it tonight.) So a word on your own comments:
“Pete, no amount of homework would have made Rick Perry presidential material. The guy was clearly missing something that could not be supplied by briefing books.”
Probably. My read is that Perry was fine at working through the electoral and policymaking processes in Texas and doing so from a fairly weak office. Granted Texas was a one-and-a-half party state at the state-level during his time as governor, but he did turn back at least one major intraparty challenge.
Success at one level doesn’t necessarily translate to another level. Obama did better at state and federal-level politics than at Chicago municipal politics (getting played by small time Chicago polls was one of the themes of his first book.)
I do think Perry had shown significant political skills in the past. Were those skills enough to win the nomination? Maybe not. Were they enough to construct a cogent critique of Romneycare and have an answer on his state’s uninsured rate? I think he could probably have done those things if he had put in the work. I get the feeling he thought running for president was going to be a lot easier than it turned out to be. Maybe that is all a longwinded way of agreeing with you.
“The Republicans and their supporters, by contrast, seem terminally myopic and, at bottom, not really political to their core. Their real passions are business, investing, golf, football, in some cases religion (none of which I deprecate, although I don’t understand the attraction of golf) – and they can’t wait to finish with the political stuff and get back to the things they’re really interested in.”
For about two generations, Republican candidates, campaign mechanics and media mavens were at least the equal of their Democratic counterparts at the presidential level. The Democrats were at least as stunned in 1984. There was more to this Republican success than their campaigning skills of course, just like Obama has had more going for him than his own and David Axelrod’s skills. The current group as represented by Steve Schmidt, Karl Rove, and Stuart Stevens really are some combination of out-of-date and decadent (though Roger Stone was around in the good old days.) That doesn’t mean the wheel doesn’t turn. I just don’t think it turns itself.
December 7th, 2012 | 10:26 pm
Pete,
Thanks for your thoughtful (as always) response. W/re Rick Perry, I was not saying that the man has no political talent – obviously, he does. What I meant was, he does not have the makings of a president, and, if he ever got himself nominated, would have been roadkill in the same way Santorum (for whom I have more respect, by the way) or Gingrich would have been. Granted, that’s not based on close observation and study, as you have done, but that’s my intuition, based on my limited exposure to the man.
As to the wheel turning – I agree, it doesn’t entirely turn itself. In fact, I think the wheel got a lot of help turning to its current position, with the Democrats on top. But to be fair, the changes in our society that have ultimately worked to the Left’s advantage take place at a deep level – like, maybe, plate tectonics- and were probably beyond being stopped by any sort of political agenda. But, as I’ve said before, the Republicans never even tried, and only now are a few of them starting to understand what has happened.
December 8th, 2012 | 2:36 am
@djf
“Republican politicians may lead happier personal lives – I wouldn’t know and wouldn’t care – but the movement they lackadaisically “lead” is collapsing into national irrelevance.”
I don’t know if they lead happier personal lives, but I suspect that they have areas of life that escape politics.
For the left, everything is politics and that is myopia to me, but perhaps better categorized as obsession.
Republican politicians don’t lead anything. Look at the timidity and paucity of John Boehner. Instead of telling Obama, (doing the math first), I have x many members that were voted in by their constituents by bigger majorities than what you received and we know a large part of why they were sent here was to stop you, he accepted a 51% victory as a drubbing). I seriously hope his incompetence costs him the Speakership.
Part of the reason Boehner and before him Hastert aren’t leaders is because the Republican view of elected officials is that they are employees who do the people’s bidding, not coronated individuals whose bidding is done by the people.
In my experience, it’s the left that wants to be led, so they have plenty of leaders.
You’re looking for a great herder when the flock is cats, not sheep.
December 8th, 2012 | 4:32 am
What’s all this talk from the commentariat here about “the Republicans” as if that’s some group of people separate from themselves. Anyone here who has for a couple of election cycles voted mostly for Republican candidates is among “the Republicans”.
Secondly, I have bad news. There are no “replacements for Obamacare”. That is, no scheme of government intervention that provides most medical services for most Americans can escape the moral, practical, personal and social problems that accompany the Obamacare intervention.
I’ve been seeing socialized medicine coming to America as inevitable since the 1980s, not because it is a good thing but because more and more Americans are weak. They fear long-term incapacity, serious disease, major injury death, and the medical bills that accompany them. They want tragedy to be erased from life just as it was in 1970s-era TV shows. And for somebody else to cover the bills.
Finally, about the 47% remark: an older relative who was alive when FDR was president and was probably a Democrat before being baptized Catholic as an infant responded to that remark with “of course”. She wasn’t keen on the 1960s invention of Welfare Rights back in the day, either. It wasn’t the honesty of the remark that set Romney back, it is the dishonesty of so many Americans who took up the chorus of scorn against it.
December 8th, 2012 | 4:54 am
To get a bit off topic, I think Todd Akin might have hurt Romney directly a bit more than you think, albeit I think if you are pro-life you need to be a bit easier on Akin.
Akin co-sponsored a bill with Paul Ryan with language in it that essentially brought to the fore the idea of “legitimate rape”. It was a hard right, pull no punches pro-life bill, so obviously pro-choice factions were going to go after Akin and Ryan for it. He was then asked to justify his stance which is how his gaffe got out. I saw a bit of stuff at the time that tied Akin+Ryan together…and that is how you get to Romney.
To be somewhat controversial about it, I think you can take the position of John McCain or the position of Akin, but that you have to take the position of Akin if you are serious about advancing pro-choice legistlation.
Now Akin and Ryan wanted to limit federally funded abortions in the case of rape, but wanted some way of “authenticating” the rape…not just check the box and say you were raped. It was actually due in part to his thinking along these lines that he made the gaffe in the first place. But I think apology for the gaffe was probably even the wrong policy. (not because it isn’t a bad or dangerous brand…but because if you are serious about the policy sometimes you have to take a punch on having an offensive brand, and it isn’t like you aren’t being controversial by making legistlation dealing with abortion in the first place.) If you have to apologize for the “gaffe” then you might as well pack it up on the abortion issue in the first place, and argue that being pro-life is for theoretical Kantians! Akin and Ryan had already proposed a bill where if the statement of facts is written by a pro-choice voice, they end up saying that Akin is going to question women who have been raped and make them relive the trauma! In this sense the Akin gaffe was just a party admission.
But I don’t see how the long run pro-life vision could ever get away from this progressive/pro-choice critique. While a lot of pro-lifers might think that it is somewhat plausible that abortion will be banned outright, this I think can never happen. I do think Roe v. Wade has been watered down from a fundamental right, to getting what is essentially intermediate scrutiny in Gonzales v. Carhart. For what it is worth I do not know of a single nation in the world were abortion is banned outright (illegal with no exceptions). In Gonzales you are talking about partial birth and health of the mother exceptions.
If you are pro-life obviously you are going to be argueing for recognition of a rather narrow set of “health of the mother” exceptions… And pro-choice folks are going to call you names and say you hate women because you don’t recognize or leave room open for condition X, Y, or Z. What kind of meanies are republicans picking on women with Fibromyalgia? (for example).
So there are literally 100′s of potential political gaffes that could come up from talking technically and honestly as a congressman about just what is and is not an acceptable medical condition. The same would be true if as a congressman one is argueing or thinking ahead along the lines of what a prosecutor/State might argue to deny an abortion. (In the particular case of Ryan and Akin, what should count as legal exception in a pro-life position.)
But if you are ever going to make the pro-life position credible this is what you are going to have to take on! (No wonder McCain and most republicans don’t want to touch it).
No one is going to take the pro-life position seriously or use it as anything but a sort of tired get out the vote, unless it has a clear idea about what sort of exceptions it is going to allow.
Basically the end game on a pro-life position looks something like Abortion is illegal…but… You can get waivers for rape, maternal life, health, and/or mental health. (In moving from fundamental right to intermediate scrutiny…to rational basis it seems highly likely that even if the Supreme Court leaves part of it up to the states, they would retain and require a sort of due process to recognize these exceptions.)
Which probably means that it ends up like a hearing in a state familly law court before a Judge or an ALJ (maybe some other administrative body, that can act quickly)… But even then…in hearings for waivers of parental consent, for minors…someone has to be the “meanie” and argue the case against…
So in the end game for abortion, some fairly liberal states might just have a check the box system(or retain something like current law)…but in all likelyhood in a state like Louisiana, under say a fairly conservative governor like Jindal… You would end up with some prosecutor argueing that the petitioner was not actually raped, or that the rape was in some fashion not a legitimate rape (in a case where it is unreported?).
The problem for the pro-life side thus from a familly law standpoint would seem to be that in the best case pro-life scenario you are looking at some sort of ugly process, where someone has to look an actual human being in the eye and make that “gaffe”!
The petitioner was not legitimately raped (they never filed a police report?), therefore I ask the state to deny the petition for a waiver permitting an abortion!
Or perhaps you just have abortion be illegal, but you hand out the waivers for rape, maternal life, health, and/or mental health, on a sort of check the box basis.
All of this depends in part on the Supreme Court and seems unlikely…but abortion being banned outright seems impossible. A good chunk of strategic democrats(not necessarily progressives), sort of want to see Roe overturned, just to put tremendous political pressure on Republicans from such a scenario…
But if these strategic democrats think being selectively “pro-life” is so good for them…perhaps it is because Republicans recognize Akin’s comments as an immediate gaffe and haven’t done any real policy thinking about what being Pro-Life would really mean in practice!
My guess is that if strategic democrats want Roe overturned, then stategic Republicans do not want it overturned! That is it is quite possible that they both see the same realism and acknowledge the Akin comment as a universal gaffe.
One problem is that you have strategic republicans and strategic democrats at every level of every issue.
“It’s hard to resist the conclusion that these consultants and operatives and “strategists” are mostly concerned with perpetuating the party and the movement for the purpose of keeping the gravy train running to themselves.”
A good chunk of them are, and they think it makes them authentic conservatives. After all it seems selfish, and it maintains the status quo! If they were less selfish and wanted change, wouldn’t that make them progressives?
December 8th, 2012 | 9:45 am
DJF,
“W/re Rick Perry, I was not saying that the man has no political talent – obviously, he does. What I meant was, he does not have the makings of a president, and, if he ever got himself nominated, would have been roadkill in the same way Santorum (for whom I have more respect, by the way) or Gingrich would have been. Granted, that’s not based on close observation and study, as you have done, but that’s my intuition, based on my limited exposure to the man.”
Yeah, you’re right about Perry (and Santorum – Gingrich wasn’t even a serious candidate) in a general election. Romney really was the strongest general election candidate. Stillm if he had respected the challenge, he could have given Romney a tougher run for the nomination. That’s what sticks out to me about Perry – that he seemed to think it was easy.
Michael,
“They fear long-term incapacity, serious disease, major injury death, and the medical bills that accompany them.” What sensible people (who are not also incredibly brave) don’t fear those things? As for policy replacements to Obamacare that deal with some of those concerns, see above.
“It wasn’t the honesty of the remark that set Romney back, it is the dishonesty of so many Americans who took up the chorus of scorn against it.” I’m not aware that it is dishonest to point out that not all of the 47 percent of tax units who have no income tax liability “believe that they are victims” and you can “never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
December 8th, 2012 | 12:00 pm
John Lewis,
So you are capable of a lucid contribution afterall! And here I thought you were a troll off your med’s all this time. My sincere apologies.
Your critique of the problem of abortion for Republican’s is well posed and true within the limits in which you treat it. There are, however, at least two rejoinders that I think should come to mind.
1. The tactical disadvantage of the Republican position applies until you consider the official position of the Democratic party which supports, among other things, late term abortion, albeit under qualifications (which, lets admit it now, are about as meaningful as the requirement of a doctor’s prescription for ‘medical mariquana’).
On the late-term abortion front public sentiment has been moving to the right as the science of ultra-sound et al., has continued to improve. So the Democrats have an equal but opposite problem to the Republicans for they want abortion without meaningful qualifications.
So, to be precise, the debate around abortion will generally be won by whomever succeeds in framing the debate. If Democrats succeed it will be because voters will be thinking about all those pregnant women who are victims of rape, or are at risk to their health. If the Republican’s win it will be because voters will be thinking about those ultrasounds of their children at 6 months where all the features of a healthy human child are visible but in miniature.
Having said that, the fact that the press is asking the Akin’s of the world about raped women and not the Obama’s of the world about the biologically irrelevant distinction between a child at 8 months versus at birth points to the extrinsic disadvantages a biased press has introduced that conservatives continually have to overcome.
2. Your accurate characterization of the “no abortions, but …. ” predicament of the conservative position assumes, admittedly for good reason, the existing political-centric view of abortion. By which I mean that the matter of abortion is dealt with as strictly a subject of jurisprudential and legislative concern.
The problem is that abortion is really first and foremost a personal, societal and moral concern which, in a hypothetical world in which the life of a pre-born child were acknowledged as having equal value to a born child, society at its most local levels would do all it could to provide the kind of support necessary to the woman, and the woman as well as society would be conscious of the value of the life of that child such that they would do what they could to ensure the child would live.
In such a world a Roe vs Wade type Law would either be viewed as repulsive and shot down, or at least rendered practically irrelevant by virtue of the attitudes and actions of citizens of that society.
The fact is this hypothetical world does not exist, but it represents what I think is the proper pro-life alternative to the present state of affairs. The challenge of Conservatives is that as long as our political assumptions take into acount only the relationship between the individual and the state, any political topic where the role of supportive local communities is the proper solution will never be considered among the alternatives and so topics such as abortion will appear untenable unless the individual is given complete discretion on all matters personal and moral even at the expense of another human life.
In this respect the matter of Abortion is illustrative of the myopia of our present political discourse that operates as though the world consists only of the individual and the state and thereby ensures the continuing atrophy of those local resources that could offer a better, more effective way of solving what, from from an individual-state perspective appears so irresolvable.
December 9th, 2012 | 10:56 am
There is nothing wrong with the message of Romney or the Republican Party. That message elected a majority of Representatives, so it achieved majorities in the majority of congressional districts. The problem is that most states allocate ALL their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote in their state, so only the states where the population is closely split can actually believe that they affect the outcome of the presidential election. Since Electoral College (EC) votes are based on the number of congressional seats in each state, supplemented by the number of Senators to counterbalance sheer population, if all states followed Nebraska in giving each.congressional district a vote, then political minorities in every state could realistically feel they can affect the outcome of the election. Additionally, it would make it much more difficult to embroil the EC in litigation since there would be no point to a recount in districts where you clearly won or clearly lost, and in a district that was evenly split you could win only one EC vote plus maybe one more Senate EC vote based on the majority of EC.votes in the state, so the prize would not be worth the effort.
A national popular vote would change the emphasis from swing states in the EC to the large population states, most of which are dominated by large urban left wing politics. The mitigating effect of the Senate and the corresponding EC votes, which require broader geographical consensus, would be lost. A national popular vote would make smaller, more conservative states even more powerless nationally, and make them feel like a suppressed minority, thus.inviting them to look outside the established form of the Constitution for real political equality.
Professional political consultants like the current swing state system because it replaces 51 units with 15. It is a simpler problem. But it takes power away from the people and alienates from the presidential election. If the EC were allocated by congressional district, Romney would have won the election because Republicans won the House. Voter turnout would increase as voters in many states, even California and New York, felt they could affect the outcome. And when a midterm House election changed control as in 2010, the president would know he needed to make a course correction, instead of depending on the suppression of dissenting voters.in large states. The current winner take all system by state divorces the presidential election from democracy and makes it more of a national popularity poll like for American Idol rather than serious political decisionmaking.
December 9th, 2012 | 2:54 pm
Pseudoplotinus,
Thanks for your thoughtful response, which I have just now read. I think you’re making a good point in identifying what seems to be an inherent advantage the Left has in politics these days – politics takes up more real estate in the mind of the typical leftist than that of a typical conservative or classical liberal. This disparity in enthusiasm even existed back when the Left was clearly a minority faction. For example, my understanding is that, back during the days of the campus protest movement in the 60s – most students (even at Columbia) were against the radicals and occupiers. But the energy was on the side of the radicals. (I hasten to add that I was not actually on any campus in those days. I’m old, but not that old.) Even when conservatives had their greatest political triumphs – in 1972 (yes, Nixon was not really a conservative, but still), in 1980, 84, 88, in 1994 – it was really the reaction of a mostly inert “silent majority” to what then still seemed an alien threat to their interests and way of life.
That said, if you take a very long historical view, it does seem that the political enthusiasm, energy and commitment of those whom we now call “conservatives” or “classical liberals” was once greater. Take, for example, the American Revolution. Something has changed since then.
December 9th, 2012 | 7:19 pm
Raymond,
“There is nothing wrong with the message of Romney or the Republican Party. That message elected a majority of Representatives, so it achieved majorities in the majority of congressional districts.”
The House Republicans lost the popular vote by over 1 million votes – though they still did three and a half million votes better than Romney. Gerrymandering is a heck of a drug, but not a basis for either winning presidential elections or hoping to turn clear presidential defeats into victories. The Senate Republicans lost twenty-five out of thirty-three Senate races. The message is not fine. There is lot that isn’t fine.
“A national popular vote would make smaller, more conservative states even more powerless nationally, and make them feel like a suppressed minority, thus.inviting them to look outside the established form of the Constitution for real political equality.”
You want to see what a real crisis of legitimacy looks like? Try one in which the Electoral College allocation is changed such that the Democrats win the plurality of the popular vote by almost five million (or around 3.6 percent), a majority of the states, and most of the largest states and still lose the presidency because of the gerrymandering of House districts. Now there is zero chance of such an outcome since the bad faith at work is so obvious. The Republicans need more voters. There is no way around that.
December 9th, 2012 | 10:40 pm
Pete, it’s really, really hard to beat people who give you stuff.
The commie-Dems and their low-info, unwashed masses, yearning for free stuff, will destroy the last vestiges of the republic. What do you do at that point?
December 11th, 2012 | 9:41 am
djf,
Glad to know that post didn’t go unnoticed. I think your statement that something changed in the country since the Revolution would be considered an understatement.
It seems to me that the part of the country that could be described, to use Walter Russel Mead’s term, Jacksonian, is ebbing, and what is on the rise is a population infatuated with what I would call a sort of technocratic parochialism, by which I mean a belief in rule by an aristocracy of “experts”. I believe Paul Johnson used a similar description in his account of modernism in his “Modern Times”.
The country made up of self-sufficient and territorial famers who wanted the crown to stay out of its business is slowly becoming a country made up of individuals in isolation that views it as the states responsibility to manage the rough edges of lifes inconveniences. This trend is not unstoppable in my opinion, but it certainly seems to be moving in the wrong direction.
March 6th, 2013 | 9:41 pm
[...] had my differences of emphasis with Ross Douthat on the subject of Republican donors, but he nailed it today when he [...]
March 6th, 2013 | 9:46 pm
[...] had my differences of emphasis with Ross Douthat on the subject of Republican donors, but he nailed it today when he [...]
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact