Winning Isn’t Everything, It’s The Only Thing
by digby
Greg Sargent has been making the argument for a while that GOP obstructionism is helping them at the polls because people actually blame the majority Democrats for failing rather than blame the Republicans for succeeding.
I think he’s right about that and there are two reasons. I’ve argued before that Americans worship winners and they don’t really care about unfair process. This is the nation that reveres the quote “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” I think the best example is the stolen election in 2000, in which most people seemed to believe that the partisan manipulation of the system in Florida and the biased Supreme Court decision were actually a fairly decent way to figure out who should be president in what was essentially a sudden death playoff — the one who did whatever was necessary to make it happen was the one who was most qualified, simply by dint of his ability to come out on top at the end of the “game.” (We see that same ethos on Wall Street and among those who think it’s perfectly fine to torture and hold innocent people in jail indefinitely.) In America, the operating principle is that the ends justify the means.
Similarly, the party in power is expected to do what’s necessary to pass its agenda. If it can’t, it is held responsible for the failure, not those who stopped them from doing it. This is particularly true in the present circumstance. The president blaming the “do nothing congress” only works when the congressional majority is of the opposition party. When it’s your own party, you just look like a weak leader and people think the underdog Republicans are simply “playing the game” better and so deserve to “win.”
And there is another dimension to this which especially applies to the Obama administration. Since he ran explicitly on the promise to end the bickering, change Washington and create a post-partisan consensus, people see the failure of those things to materialize as a measure of his failure to deliver on his promise. This president is more hampered than most in making the (legitimate) argument that the Party of No is to blame for the nation’s troubles. I didn’t subscribe to the “personal magic” theory of the presidency, so I had no illusions about Obama’s ability to keep this promise. But I think a fair number of people believed it and the rest think it’s the job description to beat the opposition with hardball politics. Failing at either makes him the loser, not the other side.
Obviously, Obama has to say something to explain why a common sense policy like unemployment benefits can’t pass in a country with nearly 10% of workers out of a job. But I don’t think blaming Republicans after the fact is anything close to a real winning argument, even though it’s not fair. And you can’t exactly tout your other accomplishments when people aren’t seeing any results in their own lives — it just doesn’t track. So he’s in a tough position. But they need to come up with something other than “the Republicans won’t let us do our jobs.” Americans don’t want to hear excuses, even when they are justified. For better or worse, it’s just who we are.
Update: Chris Bowers has an interesting post today that runs along a related track. It turns out that the non-ideological among us — the vaunted independents — vote their personal pocket books. So blaming it on Republican obstructionism — or appealing to “moderation” for that matter, isn’t going to do the Democrats any good with those folks:
Democrats want to help the center-right members of their party win by allowing them to appear “moderate” to swing voters, and thus water down every piece of legislation the party proposes. However, all Democrats, including the center-right Democrats, are all going to lose big because they failed to enact progressive public policies that would have resulted in putting more money in the hands of voters. Whatever benefit the blue Dogs get at the ballot box for appearing “moderate” will be canceled out, several times over, because voters are pissed that they have less money in their wallets.
The dominant ideology of swing voters is disposable income. As such, enact public policies that increase real disposable income, or else face defeat at the ballot box. It really is that simple.
And that, needless to say, explains why the Republicans are obstructing everything in sight. The worse off the people are, the better they will do. It’s not like their leaders didn’t telegraph that from the very beginning.
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