PLANK JUNE 18, 2012
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Back in April, my esteemed mentor and colleague William Galston and I had an exchange at TNR about whether the presidential election would necessarily serve as a “referendum” on the president’s record (particularly with respect to the economy, of course) and what that meant for Obama’s re-election strategy. I won’t rehash the entire discussion, but Bill leaned heavily on the political science consensus that referenda are unavoidable for incumbents, while I demurred in part, citing the contrary example of 2004, the impact of polarization on the number of persuadable voters, and the need to make a sharp characterization of Mitt Romney’s sometimes hazy character and record, as factors dictating a strongly comparative Obama message.
Now after an Obama speech widely hailed as setting the tone for his campaign’s treatment of economic and fiscal issues from here on out, Galston has unsurprisingly registered concern in another TNR column:
"Today in Cleveland, President Obama jettisoned the theme of economic inequality that had suffused his economic speeches for more than six months, focusing instead on “how we grow faster, how we create more jobs, and how we pay down our debt.” The real issue, he said, is how we reverse the “erosion of middle-class jobs and middle-class incomes.”
In making that claim, Obama doubled down on the guiding assumption of his campaign—that he can turn the 2012 election into a choice between two models for the future, rather than a referendum on his first term. He made only a brief effort to defend his economic record, focusing instead on what he intends to do in a second term and on what he believes are the fatal flaws of the Republican/Romney agenda."
After unfavorably comparing Obama’s message to its ostensible model, Reagan’s “Morning in America” plea in 1984 against turning back the clock to the bad old days of the Carter Administration, Galston concludes:
"The president and his top political advisors clearly reject the view that his record is central and believe they can make this election into a choice between two futures. As a Democrat, I hope they’re right. But as a student of American politics, I fear they’re not."
I’m not as sure as Bill is that Obama won’t spend time defending his economic record: The “boring” and “unoriginal” parts of his Cleveland speech that the pundits kept complaining about involved a lot of talk about what his administration has accomplished in areas ranging from the auto industry to education and energy. But there’s a solid reason Team Obama has been forced into a “comparative” message, and it’s not just because job growth seems to be lagging at a crucial moment in the campaign.
Even big fans of the “referendum” theory agree that challengers have to cross an invisible threshold of “acceptability” before they can defeat even the most vulnerable incumbent. Mitt Romney is running an extraordinarily evasive campaign in terms of his record in the one public office he’s occupied, and the agenda he’s been made to accept in order to win the GOP nomination. That’s no accident: There are sound reasons to believe his record and especially his agenda will be highly problematic for him, in no small part because it reflects what Bill Clinton shrewdly called (a term Obama quoted in Cleveland) “Bush on steroids”—a rightward twist on the economic policies that gave the country years of sluggish growth, rising inequality, middle-class insecurity, large budget deficits, and then the Great Recession.
One of the great ironies of contemporary politics is that Republicans have succeeded in separating themselves from the Bush legacy by moving to the right of that one-time hero of movement conservatives. They do have “new ideas,” but they are ideas that until very recently were considered out of the mainstream (e.g., total abandonment of Keynsianism, a deflationary, hard-money prejudice in monetary policy, an effort to shrink the public sector to a fixed percentage of GDP, climate-change denialism, frank opposition to public education, etc.). Making the voting public understand that development—and its implications for anyone with bad memories of the Bush administration—is essential to Obama’s ability to contextualize his own record and defend his own future agenda. To put it bluntly, if Mitt Romney succeeds in presenting himself to swing voters as this mild-mannered “moderate” technocrat who will use his business skills to “fix” the economy and otherwise leave cherished programs and public policy commitments alone, he will be well across the threshold that makes him broadly acceptable to voters seeking “change” not only from Obama’s record but from Bush’s.
Romney is not going to talk about his agenda and its organic relationship to the failed and unpopular hobbyhorses of conservatism unless he is forced to do so. The media show no great inclination to take on that task. Obama must assume it, or all the efforts in the world to defend his own record are likely to fail with low-information swing voters who have no real idea of the opposition party’s lurch in exactly the wrong direction from Bush to Romney.
27 comments
Brilliant. Thank you Ed, for a cogent accurate article. I get so tired of Republicans (like Scott Walker, for instance) running campaigns full of feel-good euphemisms, full of fuzzy Orwellian phrases about their fix, and then when they get elected those fuzzy euphemisms result in draconian policies that just make things worse. The Main-Stream-Media often simply parrots the feel-good messages, instead of calling those politicians to task and asking what they really mean. And even if they do ask what that really means, Romney is quite capable of putting out even more Orwellian fuzziness in answer to a direct question. So yes, it's up to Obama to say what he will do, and point out what Romney is proposing is just "Bush on steroids". This might give the electorate a chance to vote between two real choices, instead of one choice and a fantasy.
- AllanL5
June 18, 2012 at 12:59pm
Ok. I take the bait. What will BHO do in his second term?? Not pass Bush on steroids-- simply pass Bush if he can? Through what House of Congress whose membership he is not campaigning to influence?? BHO point out GOP extremism strongly and consistently??? When pigs fly. Which is why a BHO loss in November is not a complete disaster--- not THAT much is really lost, as I note many Progressives are also starting to recognize.
- drofnats1
June 18, 2012 at 2:00pm
Maybe I'm just over-sensitive. But I suspect that "BHO" is not the value-neutral shorthand that JFK or LBJ or even RMN were. There's that pesky "H" in there...
- billhub
June 18, 2012 at 2:18pm
Bush doubled the national debt and Reagan almost tripled it. Is there any reason to expect a different Republican administration from Romney? Romney and the Republicans in the legislature preach austerity as the solution, but the loss from such stupidity is their gain in power. If Romney is elected, the risk of failure from austerity is too likely and too great. Romney's charade is to pretend we can have success and low taxes, which will only occur if there is concomittant spending, which is also fine with Republicans, because a huge national debt sets the stage for cuts in social security, medicaid and medicare.
- Nusholtz
June 18, 2012 at 2:19pm
Nusholtz. You are correct. But I fear we are faced with a Hobson's choice. A rapid lurch yet further right and economic failure +crisis all attributable to Repubs under Romney --- or a continued drift to the right and economic failure +crisis occuring with BHO as Prez with Repub House and/or Senate under Repubs. Dems get the blame for that for a generation. Fairly or unfairly, Dems in 2012 have little to show for the last four years --- statements by some comparing BHO to Washington, Lincoln, FDR or LBJ notwithstanding. That's comparable to Repubs putting Reagon on Rushmore- yeh, right. Political idiocy is not confined to one party.
- drofnats1
June 18, 2012 at 2:49pm
Excellent post Mr Kilgore. My sentiments exactly regarding Galston's piece. drofnats says, "When pigs fly. Which is why a BHO loss in November is not a complete disaster--- not THAT much is really lost, as I note many Progressives are also starting to recognize." This is the very weakest part of your critique of Obama. A Romney presidency would be consequentially much different from a second Obama admin, and all your protestations to the contrary is just magical thinking. Two reasons: 1) A Romney victory would likely be accompanied by GOP gains in both houses of Congress which would mean the only thing in the way of a radically conservative legislative onslaught would be a Democratic filibuster, a defense upon which I wouldn't like to rely, especially since I wouldn't be at all surprised if an emergent GOP Senate majority would take your advice for Democrats and blow up the filibuster. 2) The Supreme Court. If Romney wins, Kennedy retires and gets replace by another Alito in his mid fifties and the conservative majority on the court gets locked in for another twenty years. Two years ago I too was fantasizing about a progressive third party--I'm on the New Progressive Alliance mailing list. I'm sympathetic to your frustrations with Obama and the Democrats. However, denialism about the real differences between Obama and Romney and between the two major parties is counterproductive to your goals. You want to believe that if things get bad enough that the public will see the light and start voting in their own interests, yet it is perhaps more plausible that as things get worse, as government becomes smaller and more dysfunctional under Republican mismanagement, as the corrupting power of corporate money gains ground, people will stop voting at all. Marx taught that the increasing pressure on the proletariat would inevitably explode into revolution, but this simply hasn't been born out. As often as not, oppressed peoples turn inward and look only to their own individual survival. Just look at present day Zimbabwe if you need an example of this.
- AaronW
June 18, 2012 at 2:58pm
What will Obama do? At the very least, stay the course. That means not declaring war on Iran, not increasing our already huge budget deficit with further tax-cuts, letting the Bush Tax-Cuts expire, cutting the military budget a little. He'll hold the line on Social Security, preserve the ACA, prevent the Republicans from gutting unemployment insurance, Medicare/Medicaid, Student Loans. If the American electorate has any balls, they'll vote in more Democrats, and hopefully the Senate will finally revise their rules to remove "individual holds". But if not, gridlock can continue, and we'll have Clinton-era tax-rates with Clinton-era gridlock -- which didn't turn out so badly for the economy last time. If Romney gets in, we'll have Great Recession II. Quite a choice there.
- AllanL5
June 18, 2012 at 2:59pm
If progressives want to do the most good, they should abandon their attempts at third-party action and get active in their local Democratic Party organizations. If I lived in America, I'd be doing exactly that.
- AaronW
June 18, 2012 at 3:00pm
Hell, if I lived in America, I might run for Congress.
- AaronW
June 18, 2012 at 3:07pm
Excellent column - thank you. Somebody has to speak about Republican extremism and the President should clearly take the point but he can't be the only one. Republican control of various statehouses is resulting in more and more outrageous attacks on civil liberties be they the rights of workers or of women or of minorities or people who *look* like immigrants especially if they have dark hair and eyes - one suspects that Teutonic immigrants wouldn't be stopped in Arizona. Right? Meanwhile the gun lobby, the far right religious and the business community seems to have formed an unholy alliance - in fact I'm not sure how they hold this all together considering that these appear to be competing interests. How is business served by people attacking women's rights or folks being mowed down in the streets by all these loose guns, by attacks on people who are willing to pick crops for lousy wages, by threats to craft unions and education? It isn't. So, the sheer illogic of the GOP position(s) and also the interference in local government by powerful right wing "think tanks," huge money "speaking" like a "person," all this needs to be spelled out. As for the idea that we are better served by Romney winning - that is totally nuts. It's asking for sheer misery to be unleashed on people - the repeal of ACA, to be replaced with what; attacks on Social Security, Medicare and other desperately needed (and earned!) safety nets, the privatization of schools and prisons and ever-increasing power in the hands of "Christians," not to be mention a "defense department" on steroids - Drof what are you thinking? That all this misery will result eventually in armed insurrection? As if that would be a good thing? Seriously can you imagine? With respect I think you are meshugah. Think about the human toll if not the anti-logic of your position. So yes - Obama SHOULD stand up more to the far right but I don't think he saw them coming. Who did? Who could have foreseen the showdowns over the debt ceiling - instead of creating jobs the US has been brought to the brink of disaster by a minority of a minority and they intend to do it again. So it's hard to be prepared for something you can't foresee unless you are wearing a tinfoil hat - which in retrospect, maybe we should have been; we should probably have taken Hillary Clinton's comments about a "vast right wing conspiracy" seriously and at face value. But who wants to think like that? Even in the face of Bush v Gore and Citizens United, we Americans don't want to be paranoid, which is a good thing - we want to see our fellow citizen and see a nice, moderate person - a potential friend - a person with whom we have a civil relationship - the basis of any functioning society. We don't want to think about conspiracies period let alone white supremacists and people who charge the indigent for their jail cells, or who want to replace science with creationism or send women back to the Dark Ages or demand people's papers on sight, especially if they don't look "white;" who'd throw the old, disabled or ill out onto the streets and continue the process of essentially stealing the wealth of a nation including its priceless and irreplaceable natural environment.
- Sophia
June 18, 2012 at 3:14pm
drof - Given the choice between being raped and killed, and merely having the shit beat out of me, I'm still sufficiently devoted to the future strongly prefer the latter. It's not a Hobson's choice, in other other words, at worst, it's a choice between embracing and enhancing an unfolding disaster and living with further inadequate response to said unfolding disaster.
- IowaBeauty
June 18, 2012 at 3:20pm
Some people sought perfection and found it in Ralph Nader in 2000. Let that be a cautionary tale. The stakes are too high. The President elected in 2012 may replace Supreme Court justices Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer.
- amidut
June 18, 2012 at 3:24pm
@Aaran. Of course a Romney victory is associated with Repub control of congress because the coming economic crisis occurred BEFORE 10/12-- rather than after. That is, it occurred on BHO's watch and he got the blame. And BHO and the Dems really failed 2008-2012, whether or not you or anyone else posting on tnr yet has sufficient realization to admit it. A BHO win in 2012 gains what?? Saves SCOTUS?? Ya'll gotta stop smokin' whatever it is your smokin'. BHO will appoint no SCOTUS judges-- and damn few, if any other Federal judges. Dems will not control the Senate with a filbuster proof majority-- and under Reed and BHO will not break the filibuster. You fantacize about 3rd parties-- I never do. I also don't pretend that a Romney Presidency will be pretty--you need stop pretending that a BHO Presidency will produce Progressive polices of ane consequence. I'm suggesting a hard-nosed Progressive takeover of the Dems in 2013 rather than in god-knows-when after 2016 following a BHO disasterous second term. I note that none of you are predicting Morning in America with a BHO win in 10/12 -- I'm pleased your non-acceptance of the current reality has at least some bounds. @Allan.. BHO stay the course?? Like he did for an adequate stimulus, single payer real health care reform, real financial reform, raise the debt limit, end the Bush tax cuts in 2010.. A few more such victories and the Dems will be undone for a generation, rather than 4 years of Romney.
- drofnats1
June 18, 2012 at 3:46pm
Sophia. With all due respect, your (and my) only hope is a resurgent Democratic Party that openly and consistently advocates strong Progressive values to counteract right-wing ideologies inculcated by 30+ years of rightward drift. Anything else is just a continued rightward drift. Slow, rather than rapid, death. The Dems are NOT going to re-organize if BHO wins in 2012, to think otherwise is to continue the present ineffectual lunacies. To use your analogy (and I like dramatic analogies-- college students or CEOs remember them), if you get the political shit kicked out of you under BHO for four years you'll then be poliically raped by Repubs in 2016, if not in 2014. You'll be politically raped by Mittens and the Repubs by 2014, but its your best chance to live and Kill Bill (aka Mittens) in 2014 and 2016. It's not pretty--but I suspect it really is your (and my) best chance. I am also assuming that you and I are not left-wing tree-hugging nuts fantasizing about Naderesque policies. Rather, we are after universal health care like has been achieved by over 20 other countries and was acceptable to Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford. We are after financial reform like Glass-Seagall that was in place for 50 years prior to Clinton. We are in support of wars in our own interest with clear outcomes as enunciated by Eisenhower and BHO. We are after tax rates associated with a period of American economic growth and income distribution from Truman though Ford, maybe including the Clinton Presidency.
- drofnats1
June 18, 2012 at 4:12pm
Another way of describing political reality in the US in 6/12 is that the extreme right is not going to lose power unless they are decisively beaten and replaced by strong political figures advocating successful policies. There is no way that right-wing defeat will be produced by BHO and the current Dem leadership in 2012 -- or in the forseeable future if BHO wins. My scenario is admittedly a risky gamble. However, it beats a non-existent alternate scenario. Desperate times sometimes require desperate gambles.
- drofnats1
June 18, 2012 at 4:25pm
"BHO will appoint no SCOTUS judges-- and damn few, if any other Federal judges. Dems will not control the Senate with a filbuster proof majority-- and under Reed and BHO will not break the filibuster." What are YOU smokin'? You think the Repubs will filibuster SCOTUS appointments? They haven't so far, and they can't afford to. To do so would make filibuster dysfunction all too plain. The only way a 2nd term Obama makes no SCOTUS appointments is if there are no SCOTUS vacancies. This is possible since Kennedy might hold out, but even so that still amounts to some advantage since if Romney is elected, Kennedy will almost surely retire, and his replacement will sit for a long time. You have a case against Obama and the current Democratic Party, but when you insist against all evidence on the equivalence of Democrats and Republicans, you make yourself look silly and doctrinaire.
- AaronW
June 18, 2012 at 4:29pm
So, drofnats, you assume that if the democrats lose to the republicans in 2012, the lesson they will take from losing to the repubs is to be more left-wing? You don't think losing will empower the "centrist" dems at least as much as the progressives. For every one of you who says taht we will have lost because Obama wasn't progressive enough, there will be ten New Democrats who will say that we should become more like the people who defeated us. The GOP of course will drift further right because they'll feel embolden by their win. And that will leave more room to their left but our right for the new, chastened democrats to occupy. I just don't see how my scenario is any less likely than yours if Obama loses.
- miceelf
June 18, 2012 at 4:30pm
"You need stop pretending that a BHO Presidency will produce Progressive polices of any consequence." I never suggested any such thing. Obama is not a progressive. I never thought he was. I was pretty disappointed about how far from progressive he turned out to be, but that's water under the bridge. He's the only candidate we've got, and you need to stop pretending that a Romney Presidency will FAIL to produce Reactionary policies of great consequence. And if you're not thinking about third parties, what are you thinking about? A reborn, reinvigoratedly progressive Democratic Party? A Romney victory promotes that goal exactly how? By waking the public up to Republican chicanery? Grow up. All your scenarios whereby Republican victory in 2012 boomerangs into their ultimate downfall are pure baloney. The long term demographics all favor the Democrats and a shift towards more liberal policies. The Republicans are busily using every scrap of leverage they can lay hand to in order to rig the system in their favor and thereby project their power and influence into the future. And while Obama is not and will not be "progressive"--I've really come to hate that term--he will act as a check and an antidote to the game-rigging that would go on unabated under Romney.
- AaronW
June 18, 2012 at 4:48pm
It's about governance, drof, about defending the institutions of democratic governance against those who would subvert them to their own ends. Obama has been distressingly slow to recognize just how high the stakes are, but so, in your way, have you. You talk a lot about how the economy will be no worse under Romney than Obama and how no "progressive" legislation will be enacted under a re-elected Obama, and you know what, you may well be right. But under Romney, the progress of corporate capture of government will continue unchecked. There will come a time when even if a liberal majority were to wake up to how ill-served they've been by the Democratic party, it will make no difference, government will already be in the corporations' pocket. And whether you think so or not, a Romney victory will hasten that day.
- AaronW
June 18, 2012 at 7:54pm
Aaron. Since when are Repubs using or not using the filibuster except for their own ends. I suspect you and others are naive to to the max if you think otherwise. As for your points re Romney, they are correct and my points as well.. What you don't accept is that BHO ain't gonna change-- isn't gonna be Trumanesque in a second term. You get Romney if BHO obviously fails before November. You get worse if BHO fails after November. That's the Hobson's choice.
- drofnats1
June 18, 2012 at 8:18pm
drofnats, I asked you before and you refused to answer then, and I suspect you'll just ignore me this time around too: where is the evidence, not just your speculation, the freaking evidence of a left-of-center electoral constituency in the U.S. waiting to be tapped if only the real Democratic candidate comes along? At the time I provided the counter-example of Russ Feingold, a long-serving and progressive senator who is linked with, among others, a key piece of legislation trying to control the effects of money on elections. He was the only senator to vote against the USA PATRIOT Act and, despite that, won his seat again in 2004. He lost in Wisconsin in 2010. This was what for you -- a nuanced symbol of how progressives can win if only they don't compromise? I've said it before and I'll say it again -- you seem to live in a country I don't recognize, one in which you can casually invite a re-run of the Bush years on steroids without even batting an eyelid, on the slim chance that it might turn 2016 into 1932. I'm not and haven't been predicting Morning in America, but I don't have a death wish. There are important things to be defended here, from the ACA (which will survive in some form and can be improved) to the student loan reforms to potential immigration reform, potential SCOTUS appointments, and, most of all, an administration that believes in the interests of more than just the top 10% of the population.
- ironyroad
June 18, 2012 at 10:35pm
drof, Stephen Colbert say something directed at people like you: "Yes, Obama duped young people by not doing every single thing they want. So now, they'll all vote Republican. It's like when I want some bread, I won't settle for half a loaf. Instead, I will have a muffin made of broken glass."
- zardoz67
June 18, 2012 at 11:04pm
drof, they did not filibuster Sotomayor's nomination. I see no reason to predict that they would filibuster future Obama SCOTUS nominations. If they tried to use the filibuster to block any and all Democratic SCOTUS nominations, thereby leaving an 8-judge Court, this would be such an obvious abuse of the power that they couldn't get away with it.
- AaronW
June 18, 2012 at 11:47pm
drof, I hate to tell you this - but - I am a far left tree hugging nut:) However I am also realistic enough to understand that compromise is vital. Without compromise nothing works, period. Also, much as I pray for universal health care and strict environmental laws - maybe high taxes on anybody who guzzles gas over x amount per week unless it's strictly necessary, like, you are an airplane - I agree with people above who don't think there's a huge left wing constituency in the US. If anything Americans have been poisoned when it comes to socialism, thanks to McCarthy and decades of propaganda and our own origin myths and various distortions of Christianity and seem to be pretty right wing. So, I will take an Eisenhower Republican (Obama) with at least some progressive ideals over a far right wing fascist any day and hope that people evolve toward a more progressive point of view regarding money, class, environment and support for the arts and education. I think Obama has already tried to help with health care; if SCOTUS shoots down the ACA then making a strong argument for universal health care must follow immediately. Sadly though, and clouding the issues, is the fact is even John Kerry disavowed his own liberalism, a shameful moment I thought - rather than embracing his status as a liberal and being proud of it he claimed he wasn't one. This lack of confidence about who we are and what we think has caused otherwise rational people to don awful garments and shoot animals in order to fit in with people who are from another planet and that kind of pandering is ridiculous and counterproductive. Therefore instead of trying to fake it and or pander, Democrats, progressives and others on the left, even if tending toward the center, need to think very clearly about what we want and how to persuade others that this is simple common sense that will help everybody. What's made this impossible, so far, is the fact that the right has been very successful in playing the culture wars like a violin and this has obfuscated the need for economic progress. So we should start by agreeing to disagree on social issues, simply stop pandering to the religious right, the gun lobby, the hunters, etc, standing up proudly for who and what we are -while respecting their rights to be different from us - and meanwhile making clear arguments for what can and should be accomplished economically. This includes a dispassionate argument about class, income and wealth disparity, unemployment, health care, inadequate safety nets and poor planning that has harmed our country - this includes selling out to certain industries that have harmed us terribly environmentally and politically. That way something might actually get done.
- Sophia
June 19, 2012 at 2:47am
One thing that should be pointed out, and Obama can do this - is the fact that supposedly independent (and constantly moralizing) Red States are frequently and often supported by Blue States which are theoretically the home of Far Left Tree Hugging Nuts, Gay People and Minorities and Women Who Believe In Abortion, ie, Sodom & Gomorrah to hear some folks tell it. Krugman's piece about Greece is a good starting point here. Clear, simple economic ideas and facts should trump all this ridiculous cultural warfare. We really are all Americans. And nobody has said that more poetically that Obama. But if the Republicans have their way - people should be told very clearly what will happen to the poor - not just poor people but poor states.
- Sophia
June 19, 2012 at 2:53am
Meant, than, sorry. There is no better messenger than Obama, nor a more dignified and classy person either. We need him, need to support him; and need to stop carping about the fact that he isn't perfect ideologically. Ideological perfection is not obtainable in any democracy.
- Sophia
June 19, 2012 at 2:55am
Drof, you keep telling me that I won't accept that Obama will not change. Wrong. I fully recognize that he probably won't change much (tho everyone changes a little). What I believe and what you can't seem to accept is that an unchanged Obama is still miles better than Romney.
- AaronW
June 19, 2012 at 8:30am