Results Matter Most
Roundabout 2005, a lot of people were working on the idea that Karl Rove and George W. Bush had cemented some kind of permanent Republican lock on the government. Many of the people doing this were rightwingers crowing about their own genius. But many seemed to be envious critics, simultaneously horrified by and admiring of Rove’s brilliance. Ron Brownstein and Democracy had the neat idea of running a “re-review” of several books from this era and looking back at where they went wrong. It’s a very interesting essay and I recommend it, but I think it has two flaws.
One is that I don’t think Tom Schaller’s Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South is appropriately lumped in with some of these other books. The electoral coalition that brought the Democratic Party back to power looks, broadly speaking, exactly how Schaller said it would look. I think Dixe belongs with Judis and Teixeira’s The Emerging Democratic Majority as books that mostly look right in retrospect, but that are worth probing for errors in order to enhance our understanding. Either way, Dixie is very different from the “new Republican hegemony” genre.
The other shortcoming of Brownstein’s analysis is what Ed Kilgore points to here, namely the fact that you can’t really leave the governing out of the story. Political reporters like to be “objective” and don’t like to immerse themselves in public policy debates. Thus, it’s convenient to try to understand American politics as roughly akin to baseball, in which winning and losing is determined by a mixture of skill at the game and raw luck. The evidence, however, suggests that objective events in the world—as opposed to political tactics—have a huge impact on policy outcomes. Which means, in turn, that the actual quality of the policymaking coming from incumbent politicians winds up making a difference. Under the circumstances, one of the main things the Republican triumphalists missed was simply the possibility that Bush’s policies would work out really poorly and help drive a backlash. But that’s exactly what happened, first in Iraq and then with the arrival of a global economic crisis. As I wrote reviewing some other books in March 2007:
A glance at Jacobson’s poll charts reminds us what a fleeting thing political success is. Polarization has been a semi-constant theme of the Bush years, but the president who once enjoyed record-high approval levels is, today, flirting with Nixon territory. The political X-factor, as Harold MacMillan famously remarked, is “events, my dear boy, events.” Had Bush responded effectively to the challenges of 9-11, one could imagine the GOP regaining Reaganesque levels of dominance. Instead, his policies have failed and created a moment of opportunity for Democrats — one whose outcome, boring as it is to observe, will depend in part on the quality of their own efforts and in part on events outside their control. Popular (or unpopular) response to contingencies, if sustained, can create not just the appearance of political dominance but the reality as well.
25 Responses to “Results Matter Most”
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June 17th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
John Dean:
June 17th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
I don’t really think you can put What’s the matter with Kansas in with the other books either. I’m not a particularly big fan of it, but it looks at politics in a single state and doesn’t say much about national trends, certainly nothing about a continuing majority.
Which leaves you with books by the old-school journalists, Atrios’ Villagers, who were the only ones ever pushing the “Permanent Majority” storyline. And now, Brownstein, another in the same crowd, is lying about who supported the storyline in order to make it look like “everyone believed it back then”.
June 17th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
I think your emphasis on events is absolutely correct. This is why I think a lot of the revisionism about Rove (ie, that Rove was actually a bad political strategist) is wrong. I still think Rove was brilliant in his own odious way, as both a political strategist and polemicist. What did him in was the failure of the actual policies, combined with the fact that Bush is a pinhead.
June 17th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
The moment Bush invaded Iraq, it was nearly guaranteed that he would leave as a very unpopular President, just like Harry Truman did, for even if one believed that removing the Baathists was a better option than maintaining the ststus quo, it was very unlikely to appear to be the better option within 5 years. The craziest thing about Bush, Rove, Cheney, and Co. may be that they thought they could have a neat, clean, and relatively painless outcome from their chosen policy. I remember watching Adelman saying he thought that ivading Iraq would be a “cakewalk”, and thinking that he really couldn’t believe that, but it appears that he might have.
As to other issues which affected Bush’s popularity, I can nearly guarantee that if the price of gasoline is above $4.00 per gallon in the spring of 2012, Brack Obama will have low popularity ratings which will make his re-election problematic, if the Republicans manage to nominate anybody with campaigning skill.
June 17th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
Rove was really, really, really good at one thing: tapping into the white trash zeitgeist. His guys were the straight-shooters who never wavered and were proud of being slightly thick. The opposition was naive, flip-floppy, and probably gay, not to mention mired in darkies. Rove’s luck lay in that he tapped into it at a time when the opposition was scared to stand up for themselves or be unabashed about their own demographic. All Rove had to do was give his demo something to sneer about, and he could be confident that the right’s old media machine would pump it out, and that the Democrats wouldn’t do squat. Dems spent much of this decade trying to appeal to Rove’s base. Stupid.
Another way of stating this is that all that it required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
But here’s a less self-serving way to look at it. Governing and policy outcomes, not to mention events, happen somewhere: in a population. What happened to the people who vote for you? What do they need? What to they want/fear? Situate yourself in your most advantageous cultural geography and never blink.
This is why Obama is an idiot to stiff the gays.
June 17th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
“I still think Rove was brilliant in his own odious way, as both a political strategist and polemicist. What did him in was the failure of the actual policies, combined with the fact that Bush is a pinhead.”
1) Rove picked Bush. So if Bush is a pinhead, Rove is
responsible for pushing him.
2) Rove lost in 2000 – the Senate went 50-50, Gore won the
popular vote and won Florida (except for the misfortune
of the butterfly ballot and a stacked SCOTUS).
3) Rove then screwed up by allowing Bush and his gang to
screw around with Sen Jeffords, causing the Senate to
go Dem.
4) He won 2002, exploiting 9/11 to the max.
5) 2004 was a mess. Bush’s debate performances were abysmal.
Kerry damn near won: given better weather and/or a fair
distribution of voting machines in Ohio, he probably
would have done. With all the power of incumbency and the
a bigger warchest, it still came down to the wire and at
6pm on polling day it looked like a Kerry win.
6) Republicans got crushed in the 2006 midterms.
7) Republicans got crushed in 2008.
So what have we got ? One unequivocal win, in 2002, a
a couple of nailbiters pulled out by working the refs, and
then falling off the cliff.
Maybe that’s the best the Republican party can do, now that
the Southern strategy has run into the hard facts of
demographics, with 22% of the electorate now black or
Hispanic. I guess Rove’s plan for that was to win the
Hispanic vote with immigration reform: but how the heck he
was ever going to get the Republican base on board with
that after stoking xenophobia in 2002 and 2004 was a mystery.
Conclusion: ruthless tactician, lousy strategist.
June 17th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
… and also damn lucky not to face jail time for perjury
and obstruction of justice in the Plame case.
June 17th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
The obvious choice is missing from Brownstein’s article: Hacker and Pierson’s Off Center. I remember being really depressed after I read that.
June 17th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
Wow, I was just thinking last night about how Bush squandered so much of the nation’s and congressional Democrats’ good will in the wake of 9/11. He then squared his squandering by pursuing bad policies (one needs only have to been a live in the early ’90s, and with a bit of a pulse to know what happens to a country when a strong man exits center stage [i.e., Tito + Yugoslavia]) which have brought our country to this most difficult of times. And Bush’s disastrous presidency was aided and abetted by the see-nothing, do-nothing Congressional Republicans. Governance, let alone good governance, is not overrated.
June 17th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Aaaaaaaaaaand here’s the wimp -vs- manly man narrative still in action.
(emphasis mine, tiny penis Wehner’s)
The waiting game is the smart thing to do, but it’s not the manly thing to do, and manly man doesn’t worry about failure, he’s all about looking manly. The other guy? He’s “nervous.” That’s how you know he’s a queer loser.
It’s a narrative divorced from outcomes, which is how we know it’s intended for the most isolated and ignorant audience. The manly language also tells us it’s aimed at an impotent and insecure audience, people who need a vicarious outlet for being bulls in a china shop, if only to make the wimpy Dhimmicrats squeal like the girls they are.
Ahmadinejah tells us the west is run by “filthy homosexuals” (as he did today). The American right has a similar narrative. The narratives are aimed at equivalent demos in Iran and the US.
June 17th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
If political reporters were covering a game of baseball, their stories would be full of exclusive interviews with the front office and long pieces analyzing the moves of the managers and trying to predict the weather. But you’d be out of luck if you wanted to know how the players performed during the actual sporting event.
June 17th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
I’d challenge one particulatr of what Matthew says: that successful management post-9/11 could have brought the GOP to Reagan levels of popularity. I don’t see it…anymore than, say, I’d imagine a heroic resolution to the hostage crisis and solid energy policy could have led Carter to a new FDR coalition. In both cases, the tide was already turning against a once-dominant political order (read Kevin Phillips and Judis/Teixeira for details). Events, in such circumstance, could and did have short-term consequence — Watergate briefly helped Dems achieve huge Congressional margins (though tempered by the Southern crowd) and Carter’s election; Lewinsky + 9/11 got Bush 1) close enough for an election to be swiped and 2) re-elected, barely. But the thin margins by which Carter in ‘76 and Bush in ‘04 prevailed made it clear they were on shaky ground, and all it took was a bit of bad news to send them totally over the edge.
I don’t think you can say “the ‘04 forecasts were true but upended by events. Things were simply never as rosy for the GOP as reported. Honestly, it was silly that a 2.4% Bush margin of victory — and worse than that in the Electoral College — had people talking about a permanent GOP majority. It made no sense, and mostly came from people predisposed to believe in the idea.
June 17th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
To be fair, the actual invasion bit was a cakewalk. Managing the aftermath was the tricky bit, but it was pretty obvious that nobody in the administration (that had any power to do anything) had put even the slightest thought into what to do in Iraq once the government had been beaten.
Matt also forgot to mention Katrina. Iraq was on the other side of the world, and was populated by furrners, Katrina was here and full of Americans.
June 17th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
I think Bush’s lousy governance was less important than you
think. Sure, the country was heartily sick of Bush ever
since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. But Bush wasn’t on the
ballot in 2008. Mostly what happened was that the Southern
strategy of dog-whistle racism continued to do what it always
does, getting the Republicans about 55% of the white vote.
But demographic change – growth of minorities as a proportion
of the electorate – put Dems on top. And isn’t this just
what Teixeira’s “Emerging Democratic Majority” predicted ?
Now I don’t know quite what a good strategist could have done
to avoid this: I guess Rove’s plan was to get more of the
retiree vote with the Medicare prescription drug benefit,
and then get more of the Hispanic vote with immigration
reform. But that plan failed. And now they’re screwed,
probably for the next 15-20 years.
I also don’t think poor results from Democratic governance
are going to give Republicans much of a chance. Unless and
until the Republican leadership makes a decisive break with
all forms of racism, they’re not going to win any of the black
vote and they’re not going to win much of the Hispanic vote.
And we’ve got a big wave of 15-25 year olds who are heavily
anti-Republican. Defining yourself as the party of old
white men is no longer a winning strategy, and it’s going to
take a long time for the R’s to dig themselves out of that
hole (just look at any picture of the Republican leadership).
June 17th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
For all that, DaveNYC, I’d wager that if the price of gasoline had stayed around $2/gallon, Bush’s popularity would have stayed significantly higher.
June 17th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
Adelman was Rumsfeld’s guy, before everything went to hell, anyway. Rumsfeld’s vision of the war was to take Baghdad, kill or capture Saddam, and leave. I think Rumsfeld knew that was not the official administration policy, but he always assumed (not just on Iraq, but on everything) that people would come around to seeing that he was right, and do as he suggested. He acted accordingly, and assumed there would be no post war occupation.
June 17th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
“But Bush wasn’t on the ballot in 2008.”
Sure he was—Obama made sure of that, despite McCain’s efforts to the contrary.
June 17th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
That policy outcomes matter is certainly true up to a point. But we also know that coalitions are stable over fairly lengthy stretches of time, and that for the most part different groups display different party loyalties. The public hardly rushes from one party to another en masse if one is an apparent “failure” [McCain still got nearly 46% of the vote last November]. In fact, crafting policy and building stable coalitions aren’t conflicting strategies, but interactive ones, because policies affect different people in different ways. Most of the time policy outcomes aren’t as stark as taking the country into a disastrous war or having a major financial crisis erupt on your watch. More common are the policy decisions that reward some groups more than others, or reward some groups at the expense of others. These decisions may be resource-allocational, or [quite often, and not always different] expressive of differing cultural values.
Viewed this way, the problem with the Rove strategy [and Kilgore's right to point out that Bush/Rove were about far more than feeding the base] is only partly one of policy failure. Rather, it was that, far from building a new Republican majority, they essentially wound up conserving the one they had inherited from the Reagan years up to 1994, which in retrospect I’d argue was its high-water mark. If one looks at the House of Representatives [a broader measure, I'd argue, than presidential politics], the Republican majority established in that year eroded gradually into the 21st century, got one last minor boost post-9/11, than collapsed in 2006 and 2008. Between 1994 and 2006, the net party shift in the House never exceeded eight in either direction. That’s pretty damn stable, and reflected a pretty strong underlying Republican coalition. But stability masked the fact that it was aging and built around issues that became central to American politics back in the 1970s. Bush/Rove’s efforts to expand the coalition [notably with Hispanics] ran afoul of base resistance, while the very success of the base at incorporating white southerners in 1994 produced a policy dilemma whereby feeding white southerners’ cultural priorities began to alienate traditional constituencies among affluent and highly educated nonsoutherners. The Republicans didn’t lose across the board last fall, after all; they made notable gains in the upland, non-Atlantic-coastal South [including, alas, Tennessee]. But that very success has damaged their ability to broaden their appeal to the expanding nonwhite electorate and has wiped out their traditional advantage among the highly educated. Brownstein’s thus right to note that a fundamental problem with many of these analysts was their failure to understand that the Democratic Party is no longer anchored in the white working class. For the new Democratic Party, “policy success” will involve handling the basics of national security, peace, and macroeconomic stability; but it will also involve crafting policies that will appeal to a majority coalition and be hated by a minority. I don’t think that’s exactly what you mean by “success,” but it does mean that “successful policy outcomes” are in the eyes of the beholders.
June 17th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Will, where’s your cheering for the Iraqi dead? Come on, you spent years castigating everyone who didn’t want to unleash mass murder on the Iraqi people as apologists for Saddam Hussein, now you just want to avoid the whole ugly issue of your apparent hatred for those nasty people who were sitting on your oil (oh, and whose oppression might one day lead to nuclear war – how, you never explained, but never mind). As one of the biggest cheerleaders for mass murder you should take full credit at every opportunity.
The fact is that what Bush did was to launch a brutal war of aggression – this is significantly different from Truman (whose actions were also cause for opprobrium, but cannot be accused of Bush’s crimes against humanity over Korea).
Bush’s popularity wasn’t tied to the price of oil. It was tied to his disastrous policies – including the response to Katrina and his thuggish behavior on the world stage.
June 17th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Hadn’t the price of gas fallen back to levels people were more comfortable with by the November 2008 election? I seem to remember reading at least one piece in which a commentator basically linked the incumbents’ chances to a direct relationship with the price of gas and that, by inference, once gas prices fell, so would Democrats’ chances.
The problem with that outlook was twofold. One, the price of gas was just one of many issues. Second, even though gas prices fell back to a “normal” level (they’ve increased again since), people became aware that they could go back up again due to a number of different reasons, and that while $2.00/gallon gas was a nice thing to have, only a fool would rely on the price staying that low for the foreseeable future. Gas in my neighborhood is already back up above $3.00.
Furthermore, while high gas prices aren’t good for any incumbent, I think they’re worse for Republicans. High gas prices at least fit the Democratic narrative — oil is a limited resource, environmental issues are real, and we should curb our consumption or seek alternate modes of transportation. What is a Republican going to say when asked about high gas prices? Put bluntly, if a war in the Persian Gulf can’t get us cheap oil, then what good is it?
June 17th, 2009 at 7:39 pm
What no one is doing is taking the changing demographics of the U.S. combined with the collapse of the Republican Party to its natural conclusion. The U.S. will soon be a one party state where politics will more resemble the current state of affairs in Chicago or Boston instead of any previous national politics.
As demographics change, it will be impossible for the Democrats to screw up enough to lose a national election and also for the Republicans to recover. Look at how Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, or the District of Columbia automatically vote for Democrats and the local Republican Parties are irrelevant. Also, the anti-white dog whistle racism of the Democratic Party will pay off in the future. As long as high taxes are paid mainly by whites, all non-whites will overwhelmingly support the Democratic Party.
If the Obama Administration passes an immigration amnesty bill along with a thought crime bill, the Republicans should just go out of business.
June 17th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
Rove was really, really, really good at one thing: tapping into the white trash zeitgeist.
In both 2000 and 2004 Bush won with families earning more than 50K and those who had at least attended college. White middle/upper middle class people between 30-59 were his base.
(I bet your parents voted for Bush both times)
So not only are you a hateful little twerp (white trash? really? how progressive of you) but you are also wrong.
June 17th, 2009 at 8:35 pm
I bet your parents voted for Bush both times
This was my experience with Republicans I knew, including relatives. However, regardless of income, they were quite up front about how much they didn’t want to seem as homosexual as the Democratic opponent supposedly was and were all very resentful of the idea that Bush’s intellect was counted as a point against him and liked to see those hoity-toity Dems like Gore and Kerry put in their place.
June 17th, 2009 at 8:47 pm
As demographics change, it will be impossible for the Democrats to screw up enough to lose a national election and also for the Republicans to recover.
Ehh, I don’t really worry about that too much. Hegemony can only last so long; even if the current Republican party disintegrates, a new opposition will form, new issues will arise, and different segments of the population will drift to one side or another.
June 18th, 2009 at 6:33 am
Adam,
The Democratic party has had a lock on politics in places like Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, DC for decades. Even with high taxes and poor government, politics the political landscape has not change. Actually the failures of Democratic politicians in places like Baltimore has made the surrounding counties more Democratic since the former Democratic voters have moved to the suburbs while keeping the same voting habits.
As Hispanics become the new blacks and Asians become the new Jews, the problem for the Repubicans is there are no new Mormons or Baptist.