Serious Political People

by digby

It’s amazing how so many of the architects of the Bush debacle are now on television spouting off about what a terrible failure he is and nobody ever mentions their role in making him one. I guess being a villager means never having to say you’re sorry.

Former Bush advisor Matthew Dowd is a particularly egregious example of this slimy shape shifting. He’s everywhere these days, extolling the virtues of bipartisanship and centrism, saying that people are just darned sick and tired of all the polarization and partisanship. He never mentions this, though:

A former Democratic consultant, Matthew Dowd was the chief campaign strategist for Bush-Cheney 2004 and director of polling and media planning for Bush-Cheney 2000. Here, he describes how, even as the Florida recount was progressing, he and Karl Rove were already thinking about a re-election campaign in the event that Bush won. Dowd tells FRONTLINE that while most of the resources in the 2000 campaign were devoted to trying to win over independents, his post-election analysis showed that only 6 to 7 percent of the electorate was truly “persuadable.”

Here was Dowd shortly after Bush’s triumphant reelection:

Let me go back to 2000 for just a minute. … Where did this idea of a base strategy come from? And was it as revolutionary then as it was reported as being when we all look back? When did you first hear about it? Is it your idea?

Well, it’s interesting. Obviously, as you looked at 2000, approached 2000, motivating Republicans was important, but most of our resources [were] put into persuading independents in 2000. One of the first things I looked at after 2000 was what was the real Republican vote and what was the real Democratic vote, not just who said they were Republicans and Democrats, but independents, how they really voted, whether or not they voted straight ticket or not. And I took a look at that in 2000, and then I took a look at it, what it was over the last five elections or six elections.

And what came from that analysis was a graph that I obviously gave Karl, which showed that independents or persuadable voters in the last 20 years had gone from 22 percent of the electorate to 7 percent of the electorate in 2000. And so 93 percent of the electorate in 2000, and what we anticipated, 93 or 94 in 2004, just looking forward and forecasting, was going to be already decided either for us or against us. You obviously had to do fairly well among the 6 or 7 [percent], but you could lose the 6 or 7 percent and win the election, which was fairly revolutionary, because everybody up until that time had said, “Swing voters, swing voters, swing voters, swing voters, swing voters.”

And so when that graph and that first strategic imperative began to drive how we would think about 2004, nobody had ever approached an election that I’ve looked at over the last 50 years, where base motivation was important as swing, which is how we approached it. We didn’t say, “Base motivation is what we’re going to do, and that’s all we’re doing.” We said, “Both are important, but we shouldn’t be putting 80 percent of our resources into persuasion and 20 percent into base motivation,” which is basically what had been happening up until that point, because of — look at this graph. Look at the history. Look what’s happened in this country. And obviously that decision influenced everything that we did. It influenced how we targeted mail, how we targeted phones, how we targeted media, how we traveled, the travel that the president and the vice president did to certain areas, how we did organization, where we had staff. All of that was based off of that, and ultimately, thank goodness, it was the right decision.

Three years later, the man is saying this on Bill Maher:

I think everybody, including Bill Clinton himself, said that the mistake he made when he first took office was that he governed way too far to the left when he started and that after the Republicans took the house in 1994 he moved more to a centrist policy. that’s when his numbers went way up, that’s when he preserved his reelection. And if Barack Obama starts the same way Bill Clinton does that is a huge problem, I think.

It’s good for the Republican party if he does that. But I think Barack Obama is going to have to govern to the center which is where the majority of the country is.

This is more of the “serious people” disease we have seen and discussed ad nauseum in foreign policy, now asserting itself in politics. These are all essentially conservative villagers who are wrong nearly all the time about nearly everything, but who maintain some bizarre hold on the conventional wisdom in spite of the fact that they are consistently full of shit.

This isn’t entirely partisan. There are as many “serious” wankers of this type on the Democratic side, as we saw in the Iraq debate. But this is a moment of clear and present danger for progressives because these “serious” political types are busily setting the terms of this potentially big Democratic win as a victory for centrism. And they’re doing it exactly as Dowd does above, by going back 16 years to prove it, while ignoring the epic conservative failure of the past eight. (Ask yourself why Dowd didn’t use Bush’s overreach on Iraq or Schiavo as an example — and why nobody on that panel thought to bring it up.) The “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” example is always used to show that a president must govern from the center, but here we have a hugely unpopular president who ran and governed explicitly as a conservative for eight years and nobody makes the same connection. That’s not an accident: they actually believe that he’s unpopular because he was too liberal!

Maher comes right back in Dowd’s face, as only the comedians and bloggers are allowed to do, and says that he’s wrong, that the country need radical change. That’s true, but I would be shocked if it gets it. The best we can hope for is a discernible shift to the left, and even that will precipitate a backlash and hissy fit among the villagers that will twist the Democratic establishment into pretzels trying to prove, again and forever, that they aren’t crazed hippie freaks who have a bizarre and out of the mainstream agenda.

If Obama wants to deliver change, the first thing he has to do is figure out a way to either co-opt of vanquish the village elders. And congress is a wild card. If they play nice, Obama may be able to roll over the village. If they decide to play “who’s the boss” then we’ll have a different scenario. Hopefully, they will have learned the real lesson of the Clinton years, which is to not enable Republicans by stabbing your president in the back every time he tries to do something even slightly liberal. I’m not holding my breath on that one.

Update: Chris Cilizza on MSNBC just issued the same warning about Clinton and reassured everyone in the country that the Democrats have likely learned the important lesson that they need to ignore the crazy morons on the left who don’t understand the “process of governing.” He brought up 2006 as an example of the hippie freaks expecting waay too much — but Grover Norquist strutting around saying that the Democrats were neutered farm animals after the 2004 election has been forgotten.

Bush has been successfully disappeared.

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