Is This So Hard To Say?
by dday
“Politics is not left, right or center … It’s about improving people’s lives.”
-Paul Wellstone, Election Night 1990 acceptance speech
We are 18 years on from that piercingly simple statement, and yet nobody in the Democratic Party has managed to use it as the antidote to this endless effort to analyze and re-analyze the election through a conservative frame, by claiming this is a center-right country and Obama had better be cautious in enacting an agenda too far to the left, which would anger the public. This is of course true if you believe the public is directly analogous to the Washington commentariat. I’ve had a hard time chronicling everyone who has told me that, in the wake of the largest victory for Democrats since 1964, in the wake of winning a majority of the votes cast in 4 out of the last 5 Presidential elections, in the wake of reducing the Republican Party to a regional outpost in the South and part of the Great Plains, this is a profoundly conservative nation. Here’s a partial list:
Ron Brownstein, Jon Meacham, Peggy Noonan, Howard Fineman, David Broder, John Heilemann, John King, Mark Penn, Doug Schoen, Charles Krauthammer, Ruth Marcus, Marc Halperin, Dan Balz, Peter Wehner, William Galston, Bob Kerrey, Fred Barnes, Pat Buchanan and Joe Scarborough.
I think they call that a meme. Just for fun, here’s a textbook example of the genre:
“My own hunch is that Obama is smart enough not to want to govern as a liberal,” said Peter Wehner, a former Bush administration official.
(On our side we have Nina Easton. Whoop-de-damn-do.)
Most of these are movement conservatives masquerading as journalists, but of course they have a disproportionate impact on their Village buddies, who are just as fearful of any altering of the status quo and just as protective of it. So they fundamentally misread the Clinton years and concern troll Barack Obama against making the “same mistakes.”
This is one of the classic myths that conservatives and establishment pundits, helped in no small part by conservative Democrats, like to flog. The reality is that we lost the 1994 elections mostly because of the disappointment from working-class Democrats and independents, especially women, who had voted for us in big numbers in 1992 but didn’t show up to vote in 1994. We lost because we didn’t deliver for our voters, not because we over-reached.
The first major fight was over our first federal budget. As folks may remember, Bob Rubin and other deficit hawks convinced Clinton to dramatically scale back on his campaign promises for investments in domestic programs, and to delay health care reform until we got that budget passed. While Clinton complained that we were going with an approach more like Eisenhower than like a Democrat, he went along with the green eyeshade guys. The budget got progressively more modest over the course of the legislative battle, most importantly taking out Gore’s carbon tax idea. The bill that ended up passing was reasonably progressive, but way scaled back from 1992 campaign promises or what progressive members of Congress/groups had been pushing.
The next big fight was over NAFTA, a real example of lefty over-reaching. Yeah, right. And once again, those of us in the White House pushing hard for health care reform to be prioritized early were left disappointed as once more the drive to get health reform passed got delayed. Meanwhile, our allies in the labor movement who were excited about helping us pass a health care bill had to spend millions in fighting the NAFTA battle […]
For all of our over-reaching, we didn’t deliver much to those working class voters who gave us our victory in 1992. Family and Medical Leave was a great thing, and very popular, but very modest compared to bigger picture economic issues. An increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit was also terrific, but helped only a relatively small number of people.
Not delivering much is what cost us the 1994 election. I did a thorough analysis of the 1994 exit polls after the election and did a memo to my fellow White House staffers. What I found was that the key to the election were the voters that stayed home who were non-college educated, lower and middle income, younger, more women than men, and heavily Democratic. Disproportionately large among those non-voters were working class and unmarried women. Overall, there was a 22-point difference in terms of Democratic support (in the wrong direction, of course) between those who voted and those who had in 1992 but didn’t in 1994, thereby sealing our fate.
It’s a funny thing, the public wants you to improve their lives a bit and keep your campaign promises to do so, and they don’t really seem that concerned about whether you’re moving too far to “the left” or “the right.”
In fact, the entire notion of “what kind of a country is America” becomes quickly tautological. This is a centrist country in the sense that the center would be the median ideology of everyone in it. The question becomes where is that center. And it’s completely clear that the public agrees with Obama’s agenda, which includes investments in public health, education, energy and infrastructure, an end to the war in Iraq, increased diplomacy, reproductive choice, and a more progressive tax code.
If you want to call that a progressive majority, it would be hard to argue with you. But more than anything, it’s a recognition on the part of the vast majority of the public that they would rather have a government that improves people’s lives instead of one that actively harms it. So while looking at self-described ideology shows that the electorate is in pretty much the same place as it has been, that’s a false indicator. People want to stop being screwed, and they intuitively understand that a conservative agenda was doing that repeatedly. They don’t want to be ruled by monsters anymore. The best way to show them that you’re not a monster is to marginally improve their lives, fulfilling your role as a public servant to the greater good.
Obama has a difficult task. He has a Village media culture that wants him to go slow instead of looking at what’s necessary for the historical moment. He hears every day to push aside those DFHs and mean ol’ liberals who would run his Presidency into the ground. He hears the same thing from conservative Blue Dog members of his own party who’ve suddenly found their fiscally conservative backbone, and even the party leadership, fearful of a backlash and continually stuck in early 1995 mode, weighing risk and reward and gaming out the politics of it all instead of, and let me say this one more time, IMPROVING PEOPLE’S LIVES.
I actually think Nancy Pelosi tried to say this yesterday in a soundbite that Digby flagged yesterday. If you listen to the whole quote, you’ll see that she says that raising the minimum wage, increasing CAFE standards, cutting student loans in half and creating the 21st-century GI Bill, all ideas that came out of the progressive wing, were embraced by both parties.
She ended up saying it in a very stunted way, when it doesn’t have to be that difficult. The role of government is to improve people’s lives. Through initiating projects through collective action that the individual cannot do themselves, like building roads and bridges and police and fire departments. Through equalizing opportunity for success through education programs. Through making sure the least of us doesn’t slip into grinding poverty with a social safety net, rather than just socialism for the rich and connected. Through making sure that we have a health care system that provides access and treatment as a basic human right. Through defending the nation with diplomacy and international engagement instead of sending in the military at the slightest provocation. Through adhering to a Constitution that has been ignored and mocked the last eight years.
I think Obama’s instincts in this regard may be decent.
The debates unnerved both candidates. When he was preparing for them during the Democratic primaries, Obama was recorded saying, “I don’t consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, ‘You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.’ So when Brian Williams is asking me about what’s a personal thing that you’ve done [that’s green], and I say, you know, ‘Well, I planted a bunch of trees.’ And he says, ‘I’m talking about personal.’ What I’m thinking in my head is, ‘Well, the truth is, Brian, we can’t solve global warming because I f—ing changed light bulbs in my house. It’s because of something collective’.”
But he’s going to need a great deal of help, and this is where Digby was going previously. The liberal blogosphere is uniquely positioned to act as the counterweight to this large gelatinous mass tut-tutting that we mustn’t rock the boat and have the candidate who ran on change actually change anything. Progressive organizations like Media Matters can attack this meme and treat it with the withering contempt it deserves. Obama is going to hear this in his ear (probably from his new Chief of Staff) every ten seconds from the moment he takes the oath of office. It’s important for us to make sure he hears something else.
Improve people’s lives, President-Elect.
“Any jackass can kick down a barn but it takes a good carpenter to build one.”
-Lyndon Johnson
