It’s Their Party And Their Problem

 

Please Democrats, whatever we do, don’t let the Bush campaign convince even one of us that this election is “unique” in that the key is to excite the base and forget about the moderates and undecideds. It’s Rovian bullshit and Noam Scheiber explains why:

This explanation strikes me as a little convenient for the Bushies. While you obviously never want to ignore your base, the reason the Bushies are focusing so hard on their’s isn’t that they’ve carefully appraised the political landscape and concluded that this is their best strategy. They’re focusing on their base because they have to: Despite Karl Rove’s best efforts, the Republican base still isn’t shored up.

Rove’s grand plan was to spend the first three years of Bush’s term stroking conservatives’ erogenous zones–lots of tax cuts, conservative judges, regulatory rollbacks, and religiously hued social policy (the administration’s marriage initiative, its efforts to restrict access to abortion, its retrograde stem cell research policies, etc.). The idea behind this stuff was that it would give Bush the political capital to tack leftward during his re-election campaign.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the center: Rove discovered that conservatives don’t just want to win on some issues, they want to win on every issue. Conservatives went ballistic over last year’s Medicare prescription drug bill, over additional money for the reconstruction of Iraq, over the deficit and the failure to control spending generally, and over the administration’s perceived indifference to gay marriage. Equally maddening to conservatives were proposals like a manned mission to Mars and immigration reform. So rather than spend this year reaching out to moderates, as planned, Rove found himself in full retreat, junking Mars and illegal immigrants, embracing a constitutional ban on gay marriage.

Both sides of the partisan divide have their little problem with purism. The Nader factor is illustrative of ours. But, let nobody ever say that we are anywhere close to being as rigid and uncompromising as the right wing of the Republican party.

I wrote a piece on American Street sometime back called “Welcome To Our Nightmare Mr Rove”  in which I discussed this very problem with the wingnuts. Interestingly, it played off of another article by Scheiber in which he discussed the intractability of the right wing. I wrote:

His thesis, basically, is that Republicans are temperamentally unable to compromise because they see things in black and white,  manichean terms — otherwise known as Yer-With-Us-Or-Agin-Us, My-Way-Or-The-Highway or the I’ll-Hold-My-Breath-Until-I-Turn-Blue philosophy of politics. He further explains that Democrats’ collection of interest groups means that activists who agitate for certain issues like gay rights or choice are more willing to compromise because they are usually personally affected by government and are therefore, more apt to feel the immediate consequences of incremental change. (Regardless of the motivation, it seems to me that Democrats are just more “into nuance” e.g. smarter.)

What he does not point out, however, is that if this description of the Republicans political viewpoint is correct it illustrates why they are fundamentally unqualified to govern in a democratic system. If one is unwilling to compromise then any kind of bipartisan consensus is impossible and rule by force becomes inevitable.

This is undoubtedly why we have seen a steady encroachment of the constitution in the last few years. First came the impeachment, the nuclear option of partisan warfare. Then we saw the Supreme Court intervene in a presidential election despite a clear constitutional roadmap for dealing with just such a situation. Now they are pre-emptively endorsing the radical idea of a constitutional amendment to remedy a supposed problem that has not even been decided by more than two state supreme courts and one act of civil disobedience in California. (And, if California is any guide, amending the constitution will shortly become the default strategy for all of the right wing’s pet causes.)

Karl Rove, however, has to win this election in a system that requires that his boy at least feint to the middle. His strategy, as Schreiber delineates above, didn’t work. There is no pleasing the right wing and there is no room for compromise. And, he is learning, just as the centrist Dems learned in the 90’s when they tried to maintain a bipartisan consensus, that if you give these wing-nuts an inch, they’ll take a mile. The more you move to the right, the more they move to the right. There is no meeting half way.

Welcome to our nightmare, Mr Rove.

This problem is their problem in the election. (It will be our problem when we win and try, once again, to govern.) We Democrats have many issues, not the least of which is our unceasing ability to seize defeat from the jaws of victory. But, this uncompromising, black and white worldview isn’t one of them. We must not let them draw us blindly into a “battle of the partisans.” Bush and Rove are still having to cater to their base and that is their electoral nightmare. Let ’em have at it. We’ll go to the middle and win the election.

(Incidentally, to toot my own horn just a tiny bit, that piece from American Street was chosen by Barbara O’Brien of Mahablog fame as an excerpt in her new book called Blogging America. Buy the book. It features many great bloggers and is probably the first book published on the subject)

 

Update: Donkey Rising  crunches the numbers and comes to a similar conclusion. The independent and swing voters are looking to be ours for the taking if they keep this up.