National
Journal Group
Learn more about our publications and sign up for a free trial.
E-Mail Alerts
Get notified the moment your favorite features are updated.
Need A Reprint?
Click here for details on reprints, permissions and back issues.
Advertise With Us
Details on advertising with National Journal Group -- both online and in print -- can be found in our online media kit.
Go Wireless
Get daily political updates on your handheld computer.
|
Introduction: Life, Liberty And Property
By Michael Barone
But as the results of the 2002 elections came in, it was clear that something -- some things -- had changed. It is highly unusual in American politics for a president's party to gain House seats in its first off-year election; the last time it happened was in 1934, when Franklin Roosevelt was assembling what would become the New Deal Democratic majority. But George W. Bush's Republicans -- and they are George W. Bush's Republicans -- gained seats in the House. Likewise, it is highly unusual in American politics for a president's party facing an opposition majority in the Senate to gain a Senate majority in an off-year election; in fact, it had never happened since passage of the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, which provides for popular election of senators. But George W. Bush's Republicans, facing a 51-49 Democratic Senate (counting the former Republican and self-proclaimed Independent Jim Jeffords as a Democrat), emerged from election night with 51 Republican senators. The popular vote for the House of Representatives turned out to be 51% Republican and 46% Democratic. The popular vote for senator and governor were almost exactly the same; these numbers have less significance, since there was no election for senator in 17 states and no election for governor in 13 states. Contrary to expectations, Republicans ended up with 26 governorships -- just one less than before -- and they gained 105 seats in state Houses and 36 seats in state Senates. For the first time since 1952, there were more Republican than Democratic state legislators. These down-the-line gains for Republicans are politically significant. The difference between poll results of 51%-46% and 49%-48% is not statistically significant. But that difference in election results is politically significant. The Republicans' 51%-46% margin in the House vote in 2002 is significantly different from the 49%-48% margins of 2000 and 1998. It is closer to the 52%-45% popular vote margin by which the Republicans won control of the House in 1994 and to the 53%-46% margin by which the first President George Bush was elected in 1988. What changed? What changed to make the 49% nation into a Bush Republican nation, if only by a small margin? What were the effects of September 11, or of other developments between November 2000 and November 2002 that produced this different result? The changes can be summed up according to the words -- they belonged to John Locke -- that inspired Jefferson while he was writing the Declaration of Independence; namely that by nature all free people have a right to Life, Liberty and Property. Life, liberty and property have all been changed by September 11 and by other recent developments in ways that reshaped our political alignment and produced the results of the election of 2002. But before we examine how life, liberty and property have been changed, let us look more closely at the results of the 2002 election and how they compare with the results of the elections of 1996, 1998 and 2000, the elections of the 49% nation. To do so, let us divide the country into three parts with roughly equal population. One is the Coast, which includes the Northeastern states except for Pennsylvania, the three West Coast states and Hawaii. The second is the Heartland, including Pennsylvania, the Midwest, the Rocky Mountain states and Alaska -- the great interior of the United States. The third is the South, the 11 Confederate states plus West Virginia, Kentucky and Oklahoma. Each contains about one-third of the nation's population, but turnout in the Heartland is higher and it casts between 37% and 41% of the nation's votes. The Coast, dominated by its large metropolitan areas, is economically the richest part of the country and culturally the most liberal. The Heartland, a mixture of industrial metropolises and small town and rural America, is economically a little less well-off and culturally less liberal. The South, increasingly metropolitan but with strong rural traditions, is growing more prosperous and is culturally very conservative. Not surprisingly, in the last five elections, the Coast has been consistently the most Democratic of the three regions and the South consistently the most Republican in both presidential and congressional elections. This was not always so. As recently as 1992, the South voted 52%-46% Democratic for the House, a higher percentage than in the rest of the nation, even while it was giving a slight plurality to the beleaguered incumbent George Bush. By 2002, the South voted 56%-41% Republican for the House, a higher percentage than in the rest of the nation -- and very much like George W. Bush's 55%-43% lead in the South in 2000. This similarity is just one instance of a trend that has generally gone unnoticed by political journalists and political scientists: the move toward straight-ticket voting in the 1990s. This was a sharp reversal of a trend from the 1940s to the 1980s toward more split-ticket voting. Presidential and congressional candidates often appealed to voters across party lines. But in the 1990s voters, while still giving lip service to the idea of ticket-splitting, actually split their tickets much less often. The result was a convergence between party preference in presidential elections and party preference in House elections. That convergence is apparent in the following table:
In 1988 and earlier, Democrats held the House for three reasons. First, they started off with most of the incumbents, and incumbents almost always have an advantage in House elections. Second, they had many candidates, usually conservatives, who won large majorities in House seats that regularly voted Republican for president. Third, Democrats had many more politically talented incumbents and challengers than the Republicans -- candidates who were able to win in seats that leaned to the other party in presidential voting. By the 1990s, these strengths started to wear thin. Democrats did not have as many incumbents as they once had, and incumbents did not enjoy their normal advantage in 1990, because of the House bank scandal, and in 1992, the year of the Perot uprising and the peak of the term limits movement. Politically talented Democrats who held Republican-leaning seats started to retire or to lose to Republicans, and were not replaced by others. And as conservative Democrats retired, their seats were often won by Republicans. The convergence began in 1992, when Perot voters were about equally split between Bill Clinton and George Bush as their second choice, Democrats won the presidency by 6% and the House popular vote by 5%. In 1994, when Bill Clinton's job rating was low, Republicans won a majority of the House vote. In 1995, we entered the period of parity between the parties, and in 1996, Clinton was reelected with 49% of the vote while Democrats won 48% of the House vote. In 1996, most Perot voters were anti-Clinton; if their votes are allocated to their second choices, Clinton would have beaten Dole by about 51%-45%. In 2000, the parties' percentages for president and the House were virtually identical. Southern conservative seats were electing Republican congressmen, and both parties had about the same number of talented politicians able to win and hold seats leaning to the other party. Preference for president and Congress has converged, not just at the national level, but also in each of our three regions, as the following table shows:
In 1996, the Democratic percentage for the House in each region and nationally was within 1% of the Clinton percentage. In 2000, the Republican and Democratic percentages for the House in each region and nationally were within 1% of the Bush and Gore percentages. This is not to say that there is straight-ticket voting in every district. Some House incumbents of both parties run ahead of party, but within large regions and nationally they tend to balance each other out. The vote for the House can now be taken as a good working proxy for the presidential strength of both parties -- something that was not true in 1992 or for many years before. That enables us to write a brief psephological history of the last decade from the presidential and House voting figures. The 1994 election shows us that Bill Clinton was widely unpopular -- unpopular enough to squander his party's historic advantage in House elections in his native South. The 1996 election showed that Clinton and Democrats rallied, but unevenly. Republicans retained their strong standing in the South, where Clinton got 46% and House Democrats 45%. Clinton and Democrats did better in the Heartland, but were still stuck under 50%, with Clinton at 47% and House Democrats at 48%. They did better in the Coast, where voters in large metropolitan areas reacted against Newt Gingrich and Christian conservatives. There, Clinton won 54% and House Democrats 53%. In the impeachment year of 1998, Clinton's job rating was higher than in 1996 and his personal ratings lower, but there seems to have been no difference in his overall standing. In 2000, Al Gore maintained much of Clinton's strength, but in a race without Ross Perot 48% was not enough to guarantee victory. Gore got 43% in his native South, (3% less than Clinton), and lost the region 55%-43%; House Republicans won there 54%-42%, substantially the same as their 1994 showing. In the Heartland, Gore won the same 47% as Clinton, but lost the region 50%-47%; House Republicans carried it 51%-46%. Most of the closely contested states were in this region; the Heartland includes nine of the 18 states decided by margins of 6% or less, with 110 of their 183 electoral votes (Bush won 62 of those electoral votes and Gore 121). In the Coast, Gore ran even better than Clinton, with 55% of the vote, carrying the region 55%-40% (it had a larger Nader vote than the other two regions). House Democrats won there by the nearly identical margin of 56%-41%. House Republicans improved their standing in all three regions in 2002. They carried the South 56%-41% -- even better than in 1994. They carried the Heartland 54%-44%, running 1% behind their 1994 score. And in the Coast, they reduced the Democrats' lead from 56%-41% to 54%-42%, still a decisive margin and a better result for Democrats than in 1994. It seems clear that some part of the Republican improvement in 2002 reflects changes of mind: We are no longer the 49% nation we were between 1995 and 2001. Over the past decade and a half, Republicans have won more than 50% of the vote in both presidential and House elections -- in the presidential race in 1988 and in House races in 1994 and 2002. During the same period, Democrats failed to win more than 50% of the vote in any presidential race, and they have not won 50% in House races since 1992, when they had advantages which they are not likely to have again soon. Democrats no longer have most of the incumbents. They have not had, for whatever reasons, an edge in the number of politically adept candidates that they had in the 1970s and 1980s, and such candidates are less likely to arise and persevere when their party is in the minority. And conservative politicians in the South and conservative parts of the Heartland are much more likely to make their way forward in the Republican party than in a party whose national stands will always be a political liability locally. Bill Clinton in 1996 and Al Gore in 2000, as the nominees of the president's party in a time of apparent peace and prosperity -- the most favorable posture to run -- won no more than 49% and 48% of the vote. George W. Bush's Republicans, as the nominees of the president's party in a time of national peril and sluggish economic growth, won 51% in 2002. Political scientists' formulas which try to explain election results by economic trends suggested that Republicans would lose votes and seats in 2002. The Republicans in unfavorable circumstances did better than the Democrats did in the most favorable of circumstances. Instead they gained. That is not a guarantee that there will be a permanent Republican majority; it is not necessarily a harbinger of a Bush victory in 2004. It is not proof positive of conservative activist Grover Norquist's prediction that Republicans will hold the House for the next decade. With an uncertain outlook for the war on terrorism and for the economy, many things are possible. But it does suggest that all those things are lively possibilities. And it does make it clear that we are no longer in the 49% nation and that we are on our way to somewhere else. Now let us turn to the changes in life, liberty and property that helped produce the outcome of 2002.
Life
But when choosing their presidents, voters were careful to reward those who waged war on the results of their decisions. Harry Truman was reelected in 1948, to almost everyone's surprise, after he rallied the nation to wage the Cold War and ordered the airlift to isolated West Berlin. Democrats lost in 1952 and 1968 after their presidents embarked on wars but failed to put us on the road to victory. Richard Nixon was reelected in 1972 because he seemed to have brought about American withdrawal from Vietnam without defeat. Jimmy Carter was defeated for reelection in 1980 because he seemed unable to prevent advances by the Soviets and attacks by the Iranian mullahs. From 1968 to 1988, Democrats won only one presidential election -- and that by only a narrow margin -- when large parts of their party seemed uninterested in protecting and advancing America in time of peril. Democrats won in 1992 and 1996 and nearly won in 2000, when the nation seemed to be safe. Now, when it is clear once again that the nation is in peril, voters have responded positively to the leadership of George W. Bush. His job ratings in the 14 months after September 11 remained very high, and for a longer sustained period than for any other president since polling began in 1935. He was viewed in 2002 as a strong leader, dedicated to prosecuting the war on terrorism. Many Democrats seemed to take the war on terrorism seriously: House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt and Senator Joe Lieberman were two prominent examples. But in 2002 some seemed more interested in scoring political points and seeking political advantage. After Bush's speech to the United Nations September 12, 2002, it was clear that Congress would have to debate a resolution supporting military action in Iraq. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle at first said that such a debate would have to be extensive, so extensive that it might not be possible to vote on a resolution until after the election. When it became clear that Daschle could not use his scheduling and obstructive powers to produce such a delay, he switched to saying that debate and a vote could take place quickly. It appeared he was seeking political advantage both times -- at first to prevent Democratic senators from having to cast a vote before Election Day, then to try to switch the spotlight from Iraq to issues like the economy and prescription drugs. Similarly, on the homeland security bill Daschle persisted in backing provisions protecting public employee unions opposed by Bush and so prevented passage of the bill before the election; this gave Bush and the Republicans an opening to make the argument that Democrats were less interested in homeland security than in protecting a constituency that provides lots of money for Democratic campaigns. Republicans ran tough ads on homeland security that helped defeat Democratic Senators Max Cleland and Jean Carnahan and deprive Democrats of their Senate majority. On the question of military action against Iraq, the Republicans were almost completely united behind the president, while the Democrats were deeply divided. In the Senate, 29 Democrats voted for the resolution and 21 Democrats and Jeffords voted against; 48 of 49 Republicans voted for it. In the House, 81 Democrats voted for the resolution and 126 against; Republicans voted for it by a 215 to 6 margin. Gephardt voted for it but his Whip and successor as Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi voted against it and lobbied actively to get other Democrats to do so. The Iraq issue also splits Democratic voters and Democratic fundraisers -- a serious problem for the party as it chooses its 2004 presidential nominee. Many vocal Democratic caucusgoers and primary voters in early 2003 opposed military action in Iraq even as it was favored by large majorities of Democratic voters. That means that the eventual Democratic nominee may be either unacceptable to much of his party's base or unacceptable to most voters on what could still be an important issue. A party divided when the nation is in peril has grave difficulty getting its citizens' votes. It was often said during the campaign that voters were more concerned about domestic or economic issues than they were about the war on terrorism. Polls asking voters which issues they were more concerned about -- a foolish question in a poll -- or which issues they would prefer to hear candidates talk about, often showed more voters choosing domestic or economic issues. But polls often elicited such answers during the Cold War and might even have done so at some stages of World War II. People naturally don't like to contemplate another September 11 or a chemical or biological warfare attack. They prefer to dwell on familiar, quotidian, relatively unthreatening domestic issues. But that doesn't mean that they ever entirely forget that the nation is in peril. And it doesn't mean that some critical number of voters decided to switch to the party of a president who seemed to take that peril seriously from a party many of whose leaders and members did not. "This was an election about security -- or, more accurately, about insecurity," Democratic pollster Allan Rivlin wrote two days after the election. "When you think about it, these [domestic] issues seem minor when people want to harm us." It is true that only one House Democrat who voted against the Iraq military action resolution October 10 was defeated November 5, Jim Maloney of Connecticut, whom redistricting placed in a contest with Republican incumbent Nancy Johnson. And only one Democratic seat in the Senate was put in immediate jeopardy, that of Minnesota's Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash October 25. No one can know whether he would have won, but his Democratic replacement, Walter Mondale, who said he would have voted against the resolution, was defeated by Republican Norm Coleman. Most Democrats who voted against the resolution represent safe Democratic seats or seats that are not up until 2004 or 2006. But as a party, Democrats were hurt by this vote, as they were hurt by the votes of most Democrats against the Gulf War resolution in January 1991. It is generally thought that no Democrats lost their seats because of that vote, which was 22 months before the next election. Yet it may have contributed to the defeats of Senators Terry Sanford of North Carolina and Wyche Fowler of Georgia and the near-defeat of Senator Ernest Hollings in South Carolina in 1992, and it almost surely played a role in the decision of some of the party's leading political figures -- notably Dick Gephardt, Joseph Biden, Sam Nunn, John Kerry, Mario Cuomo, Lloyd Bentsen, Jay Rockefeller -- not to run for president in 1992.
Liberty
In the America of 2000 such cultural issues -- issues that amount to conflicts between principles of liberty and morality -- were central to the division between the parties. In the achingly close election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, or between Republicans and Democrats for the House of Representatives, it was not income that divided the voters: if the only thing you knew about a person was his income and from that guessed how he would vote, you would have been wrong almost half the time. Party preference was much more closely related to cultural factors -- level of education, racial or ethnic identification and, most of all, religion. Strongly religious voters were very likely to vote Republican. Unreligious or not very religious voters were very likely to vote Democratic. If the only thing you knew about a person was his religious beliefs and from that guessed how he would have voted, you would have been right a very high percentage of the time. And if you knew the person's views on abortion and gun control, you would have been right almost always. Practically everyone is familiar now with the 2000 election map showing the states Bush carried and the states Gore carried, the red states and the blue states. "The red states and the blue states" became shorthand for the idea that Americans were roughly equally divided between two blocs of people with very different beliefs, with both sides openly hostile to the beliefs of the other. This is reminiscent of Benjamin Disraeli's description of the "two nations" of Britain in the 1840s. The hostility between the red states and the blue states, these two nations, grew more and more bitter during the 36-day controversy over the Florida vote count in November and December 2000. But on September 11, the red states and the blue states became red, white and blue America. When the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and United Flight 93 were attacked, we realized instantly that we were all attacked. We realized that the differences that had so bitterly divided us were less important than what we shared in common. We realized that the conflicts between claims of liberty and claims of morality were just arguments at the margin, and that they were less important than our common commitment to liberty and morality. In his State of the Union speech January 29, 2002, Bush put into words what binds us together, our belief in what he called the "seven non-negotiable demands of human freedom." They are the rule of law, limits on the power of the state, respect for women, private property, free speech, equal justice and religious tolerance. Bush was self-consciously echoing Franklin Roosevelt's proclamation of the four freedoms in 1941, "freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, freedom from fear." Roosevelt's formulation was the work of a New Deal Democrat, but there was nothing in it that his Republican opponents did not also believe, though they would not have put it that way. Bush's formulation was the work of a conservative Republican, but there is nothing in it in which liberal Democrats do not believe, though they would not have put it that way either. In this changed atmosphere, it seems likely that for many voters the hard edges of the cultural issues have turned softer. When the nation is in peril, people are less eager to fight culture wars. An October 2002 Ipsos-Reid poll reported that 56% of Americans said they had become more likely over the past year -- that is, since September 11 -- to respect cultures that do not share their values. Our cultural divisions still persist and still account more than anything else for our political divisions. But voters may be willing to cross cultural lines and support the party that does not reflect their own cultural views. Some significant number of voters who rejected George W. Bush in 2000 for his association with religious conservatives and his opposition to abortion and gun control may have voted for his party in the changed atmosphere of 2002. And there are some signs that opinion has been moving Bush's way on key cultural issues. Most national polls ask whether voters want "stricter [presumably federal] gun control laws," and usually most respondents say they do. But that percentage has been falling in some polls, from 67% in May 2000 to 57% in May 2002 in the ABCNews.com poll, for example. And when presented with the choice of new restrictions on gun ownership or stricter enforcement of current laws, respondents in polls have favored stricter enforcement, by 35% to 11% in an April 2000 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll (45% chose both) and 53%-45% margin in a September 2000 Gallup poll. Congress resisted cries for new gun control laws after the April 1999 Columbine killings and it is generally conceded that his support of gun control laws cost Al Gore critical votes from traditional Democrats in states like West Virginia and his native Tennessee. Moreover, there are two tracks to the gun issue. At the federal level, there is discussion, widely aired in the overwhelmingly pro-gun control national press, for more restrictions on gun ownership. In the 1990s, it produced some modest increases in regulation that have not significantly reduced the numbers of guns. But at the state level, since 1987, 33 states -- with more than half the nation's population -- have passed laws requiring that law-abiding citizens who can demonstrate they know how to use guns can get permits to carry concealed weapons. On abortion, opinion continues to be divided. But there is a large middle ground of voters who believe some abortions should be allowed, but that some abortions now allowed should be prohibited. A September 2002 Gallup poll showed that 26% of adults say abortions should be "always legal," 18% say "always illegal" and 54% say "sometimes legal" -- numbers similar to those obtained since 1996. That picture is very different from the one usually found in the overwhelmingly pro-abortion rights national press. There is strong majority support for outlawing partial-birth abortion, which is the issue on the floor in Congress and state legislatures, and strong majority opposition to banning all abortions, which is not. It is an article of faith among many political analysts that opposition to abortion is a huge liability in national elections. But it is a fact that in five of the seven presidential elections since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1972, the more anti-abortion candidate has won. It is true that many women are strongly in favor of "choice," the brilliant euphemism for abortion used by abortion rights supporters. But the number of women choosing to have abortions has been steadily declining since 1990. And, interestingly, an in-depth Kaiser Family Foundation-Washington Post poll in spring 2002 found that the gender gap -- the tendency of women to vote more Democratic than men, apparent in every election since 1980 -- scarcely exists among voters under 30. They are the most likely of any age group to favor Republicans, though most have not yet committed to either party. For women in this age group, "choice" may not be so strong an issue as it is for so many Baby Boomer women. These are women who were told that they had a moral duty to stay home with their children, and the "choice" for them is not only about abortion but also about all those other choices they have made which they were trained to think were wrong and which they themselves often have doubts about. Most women under 30 did not receive such training; they were raised to think it was normal and O.K. for mothers to work outside the home and for wives to get divorced; they lived with the consequences, and feel capable of making their own choices without risking disapproval. In fact, more young women today than a decade ago are choosing to stay home with young children. The assumption that American women would always embrace 1970s feminism may turn out to be wrong. One other non-economic issue that splits voters along red state/blue state lines is the environment. In national polls, and in the states which contain the nation's largest metropolitan areas, there is widespread support for the goals of environment groups, and this issue favors Democrats -- particularly if the national press succeeds in characterizing George W. Bush as a despoiler of the environment acting at the behest of big corporate contributors. But in states where environmental restrictions actually have an economic impact, the positions of environmental groups are widely unpopular and the issue is a political liability for Democrats. Al Gore came within 1% of losing Oregon and 6% of losing Washington because of his refusal to oppose breaching the Snake River dams, which is almost unanimously opposed in the eastern parts of those states. He did lose West Virginia, in large part because he backed a ban on mountaintop mining. Clinton administration support of lowering the level of the Missouri River cost Gore support in traditionally Democratic counties in central Missouri, which he lost narrowly. Threats that a Gore EPA would regulate non-point-source pollution -- in laymen's terms, agricultural runoff -- helped insure that Gore got record low percentages in the Great Plains states. His opposition to oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge did the same in Alaska. So there are costs as well as benefits for Democrats who take liberal positions on cultural issues like gun control, abortion and the environment, just as there is a cost as well as a benefit for Republicans who take conservative positions on these issues, which pit claims of liberty against claims of morality (and for many environmentalists their issues are issues of morality). The liberal stands which helped Democrats make gains in the largest metropolitan areas in the 1990s also helped Republicans make at least partially offsetting gains in rural areas and the exurban fringe. What impact issues will have in the 2004 election is unclear -- but it seems likely to be less of an impact than in 2000. If George W. Bush in fall 2004 is seen as a strong leader who has made gains in the war on terrorism and has prevented an economic collapse, he is likely to win the votes of some of those who oppose his positions on these issues, and make inroads in the blue states. If he is seen as a leader who has faltered on the war and the economy, he is likely to lose some voters who share his views on these issues, and will be hard-pressed to prevent the Democratic nominee from making inroads in the red states. One final thing should be said about liberty -- the liberty, honored through most of American history, of foreigners to come to our land and become citizens. Many of the 22 million immigrants who entered the United States in the last 30-some years have become citizens and are entering the voting stream. They will affect American politics, just as the millions of immigrants who came here from 1840 to 1924 affected American politics from the 1840s to the 1930s. Some believe that because immigrants are relatively poor, they will vote for the Democrats because they will seek government assistance. But it was never as simple as that with the 1840-1924 immigrants (the Democratic party in the 19th century was a party of laissez faire and small government), and it is not so simple now. The great mass of today's new Americans fall within two Census-defined categories, Latinos and Asians. Asians are a greatly heterogeneous group and there are few rigorous studies of their political behavior. Many are highly skilled and far from poor; the median household income of people born in India and living in the United States in 2000 was $85,000, double the national average. The VNS exit poll in 2000 reported that Asians voted 55%-41% for Al Gore. But this was skewed by Hawaii, where most people are classified as Asian, though almost all are not recent immigrants but the descendants of immigrants who arrived before 1930. VNS reported that Asians in California voted for Gore by only 49%-48%, about the same as the nation as a whole and more Republican than average in California. The Los Angeles Times exit poll shows quite different results, with Gore carrying Asians nationally by 62%-37% and in California by 63%-33%. In 2002 the Los Angeles Times California exit poll showed Democrat Gray Davis leading Republican Bill Simon among Asians 54%-37%. With such divergent data about such an ill-defined group, it is hard to draw any firm conclusions, much less predict the future. But it can be said that there is not a self-conscious Asian voting bloc that can be organized and turned out to produce reliable large majorities for either party. In the short and medium term it is unlikely that Asians will shift the partisan balance in American politics appreciably. Latinos -- or Hispanics, as the Census Bureau calls them -- are another matter. One out of six people under 18 living in the United States in 2000 was Hispanic, and the large majority of them were U.S. citizens or youngsters on the way to becoming citizens. Those who argue that we should close the gates now lest Latino immigrants make this a permanently Democratic country miss the point: these young people are a very large part of the future of America and of American politics. In 2000, VNS reported that Hispanics voted for Gore over Bush by a 62%-35% margin, a result that is in line with Latino voting behavior in the various states in the 1990s. But unlike blacks -- a group that our civil rights laws and most of our journalists tend to analogize them to -- Latinos are not a single bloc, voting just about the same way in every state and locality. Their voting behavior seems to be related to the politics of where they came from and the politics of where they moved to, and varies widely from state to state, and from nation of origin to nation of origin. Thus Cubans are strongly Republican, Mexicans from the states of Michoacan and Guerrero (the two states carried by the leftist Cuahtemoc Cardenas in the July 2000 Mexican election) are heavily Democratic: thus Latinos in Miami are heavily Republican, Latinos in Los Angeles heavily Democratic. The 2002 election showed that the Latino vote is moveable, even volatile -- in other words, an appropriate target group for both political parties. In California, where Republican Governor Pete Wilson's ads in 1994 suggested that Latino immigrants were only interested in welfare, Latinos voted 65%-24% for Democratic Governor Gray Davis according to the Los Angeles Times exit poll, providing almost all his margin of victory. Latinos in Illinois voted overwhelmingly Democratic. But in other states, it was another story. In Florida, Republican Governor Jeb Bush (whose Spanish is probably the best of any major American politician, so good that he can modulate his accent) won 56% of the Latino vote, according to the Fox News Channel Election Day poll; not surprisingly, he won a huge majority among Cuban-Americans, but he also won 51% among non-Cuban Hispanics. In New York, Republican Governor George Pataki came close to carrying Hispanics; New York City's Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg apparently also ran well among Hispanics in 2001 -- even though Puerto Ricans, historically the largest Latino group in New York, and Dominicans, who are coming to outnumber them, were the most Democratic Hispanic voters in the 2000 presidential election. Pataki and Bloomberg took more liberal positions on many issues than most Republicans nationally, but their performance suggests that Latinos are fluid in the political preferences. Colorado's Republican Governor Bill Owens, on his way to a landslide victory, carried the Hispanic vote. Texas's Republican Governor Rick Perry, running against Rio Grande Valley businessman Tony Sanchez who spent $60 million on his campaign, carried 35% of the Hispanic votes -- not a bad showing in those circumstances. The prediction that Latino voters would be overwhelmingly Democratic is based on two theories, both false. The first is that as people of color they would meet unyielding discrimination by racist white Americans: this is theory undergirding the decision to include Hispanics among the groups entitled to racial quotas and preferences, even though "Hispanic" is not a racial category under either the U.S. definition of race or the various Latin American definitions of race. But Latinos in recent decades have encountered nothing like the discrimination blacks faced in the segregated South or that Latinos faced in Texas until the 1960s, and most Latinos in America today do not have parents or grandparents who encountered that kind of discrimination; it is not part of their family lore, as it is for most American blacks. Nor do Latino immigrants see themselves as rebels against an unjust society, or soldiers in a fight for the reconquista of the U.S. Southwest. The large majority come here because they want to be part of the United States and partake of its bounty. The second theory is that politics is all about economics, and Latinos will vote to redistribute income from the government to themselves. But contrary to what Wilson's ad implied, Latino immigrants are interested not in welfare but in work. Their experience in Latin America is that unless you are well connected it is foolish to rely on the usually corrupt and unreliable state for a living, and if they were well connected they would have stayed at home. On cultural issues, Latinos are a bit more conservative than the average American voter; many are strong Catholics and a growing number are Protestant evangelicals (which is the case in Latin America as well). Nor are Latinos moored to either American political party. This is not a group that has voted Democratic for generation after generation; most Latino voters in the United States in 2000 and 2002 didn't vote in the United States in 1988 or 1990.
Property
The thesis here is that economic issues affect American politics differently from how they affected it in the decades after the depression and the New Deal. The important economic focus for most voters now is not on short-term income but on long-term wealth, not on whether a slowdown in the economy threatens voters with unemployment or reduced income but on whether there is a framework in which voters can make progress in their lifelong project of accumulating wealth. For the fact is that the large majority of Americans do accumulate significant wealth over the course of their lifetimes. Media accounts of statistical data on wealth provided by the Federal Reserve Board always stress that most Americans do not have significant wealth. They overlook the fact that something like 70% of Americans age 55 to 64 have wealth, mostly in the form of housing equity and financial investments, totaling $300,000 or more. That may not sound like much next to Bill Gates's billions, but it is enough, when coupled with Social Security entitlements and private pensions, to provide for a comfortable retirement. Of course very few young people have significant wealth yet; with debts from student loans and little mortgage equity, many have negative net worth; and so at any given time most American adults do not have significant wealth. But a sensible society does not want its young people to have significant wealth; it wants them to have a chance to accumulate significant wealth over the working life. In our society, they do. American voters who remember the 1930s were, for many years after, exquisitely sensitive to increases in the unemployment rate and signs of an impending recession. They could remember how a one-year economic decline led to economic collapse and personal disaster. In times of recession they were quick to vote for the party out of power, especially if that was the Democrats: look at the election figures for 1958 or 1970, years when most voters remembered the 1930s. But in 2002, only 8% of voters were old enough to remember the 1930s. The memory of voters under 30 in 2002 does not go back before the years 1983-2001 -- 18 years in which the nation experienced low-inflation economic growth 97% of the time. And today unemployment is not the personal disaster it was in the 1930s, 1940s or 1950s. Then, people who lost their jobs had little wealth and small unemployment checks to rely on; without that weekly paycheck or packet of cash and with little wealth to draw on, they had a hard time buying groceries and paying rent or making mortgage payments. Over the last 20 years America has generated more than 41.5 million new jobs, and Americans who lose their jobs today can meet immediate expenses with credit cards until they find a new job; they can get ready cash by taking out a home equity loan. They don't respond to recession or economic sluggishness the way voters who remembered the 1930s did. So how do voters respond to economic issues when the focus is not on short-term income but long-term wealth? The 2002 elections provide some useful clues to the answers to that question. They can be subsumed under three headings: the investor majority, the Social Security issue and taxes. The investor majority. The last decade has seen a spectacular increase in the number of Americans who are investors, who own stocks, bonds or mutual funds. According to surveys conducted by Democratic pollster Peter Hart, it increased from 21% in 1992 to 43% in 1997. In 2002 it was significantly higher. Pollster John Zogby reported that 66% of 2002 voters had a 401(k) or IRA plan and that 52% identified themselves as members of the investor class. Pollster Scott Rasmussen reported that 59% of 2002 voters were investors. Of course some of these people had only small investments. But most were Americans hoping to make progress in their lifelong project of accumulating wealth. In just 10 years time the electorate has changed from one in which a huge majority of voters were non-investors to one in which a substantial majority were investors. The Founding Fathers believed that representative government could work in America because an overwhelming majority of (white male) Americans were property-holders: in most cases, farmers who owned land. In industrial era America it seemed that we had been transformed into a country where most Americans were not property owners. Before World War II, most non-farmers did not own their homes, and many farmers (one-quarter of the total population) were tenants rather than owners. The large majority of Americans did not have significant savings or own stock, bonds or mutual funds, which in the 1930s weren't worth much anyway. The Founders would have been concerned that a non-property-owning majority would use their votes to effect a redistribution of income and wealth, and that is indeed what happened, to some extent, though much less so than in Europe. The redistributionist impulse was disciplined also by the fact that, thanks to the New Deal's FHA and VA programs, we became in the post-World War II years a nation in which most people owned their own homes. Now, in post-industrial, information age America, we are once again a nation of property-owners, with a financial stake in the country; the large majority of voters own land and financial instruments. From 1992 to 2000, as most Americans became stockowners, prices on the financial markets rose giddily; from 2000 to 2002, they fell. So 2002 was the first year in which we would see how a majority-investor electorate would respond politically to sharply falling stock prices. Some predicted that when voters got their October 2002 401(k) reports, they would react against the party in power, since stock prices had dropped 18% in the third quarter of 2002 -- the biggest drop in 15 years. Others predicted that investor-voters would tend to vote for Republicans as the party more likely to provide a framework in which stock prices could increase. One such was Republican National Committee pollster Matthew Dowd, who said that RNC polling actually showed Republicans increasing their support from investors, despite falling stock prices and reports of corporate misdeeds, from 40%-32% in January 2002 to 45%-32% in June 2002. This occurred even while support for Republicans from the non-investor minority decreased. It appears from the election results that the majority of investor-voters did in fact vote more Republican than the minority of non-investor voters. Rasmussen reported that investors voted 56%-42% Republican, while non-investors voted 52%-45% Democratic. Because about six in 10 voters were investors, this meant that Republicans won 52%-46%; if the proportion of investors had been the same as in 1992, and the percentages in each group the same, the total vote would have been 50%-46% Democratic. Rasmussen also noted that within every measured subgroup of the electorate investors were more Republican than non-investors. Male investors were 18% more Republican than non-investors, female investors 16% more Republican, black investors 6% more Republican, elderly investors 29% more Republican. Zogby found a similar pattern among union members, voters with incomes under $35,000. Union members and low-income voters were the Democrats' core economic groups in the New Deal years and long after; now it appears that stock ownership is moving some of these voters to the Republicans. And the sharp difference among investors and non-investors among the elderly suggests that many elderly voters identify as their chief economic interest not their Social Security entitlements but their investments. In future years, an increasing percentage of elderly voters will be investors, given the spread of 401(k) and IRA plans over the last 20 years. That suggests that the saliency of the Social Security issue among the elderly will continue to decline. It is seldom that an election provides a clear-cut test of an entirely new question. But the 2002 election provided the first test of how an investor majority would respond to a sharp drop in stock market prices. The results show that they did not react against the party in power. Investor-voters evidently took the long view when they considered their economic interest, voting not on their short-term losses but on their expectations of long-term gain. Investors, Dowd explains, are optimistic simply by virtue of being investors: they have money in the market. Surveys of investors in 2002 showed that they expected stock prices to be higher in two and five years; they seemed to understand that over time the stock market has always proved to be a good long-term investment. In addition, Dowd argues, "The investing voters see the government playing a reduced role in the very large historic economic cycles." That leads investor-voters toward support of tax cuts, free trade, measures to insure corporate accountability -- policies which produce economic growth and increase the transparency and fairness of financial markets. Over the long run, there is likely to be a much larger constituency with a vested interest in checking the growth of government and limiting economic redistribution. It should be noted that even while stock prices were falling, prices of the other major component of investor-voters' wealth, housing, sharply increased in most parts of the country. In 1992, at a time when many fewer voters owned stock and voters' wealth was concentrated in housing, George H.W. Bush's percentage of the vote as compared to 1988 dropped most sharply in New Hampshire and southern California, the two areas where housing prices had dropped most abruptly in 1990-92. The first President Bush was punished by voters in 1992 for seeming disengaged and uninterested in economic and domestic issues; the second President Bush in 2002 could argue that he had produced policies -- the 2001 tax cut -- to spur economic growth and proposed some other ideas -- increasing the deductions for stock losses, cutting the capital gains and dividend taxes, speeding up increases in contribution limits for IRAs -- which would arguably help investors. In contrast, Democrats in 2002 had little to say about how they would improve the economy. It was as if they thought that sluggish economic growth and the brief recession would trigger a reflex in voters to vote for the opposition, as so many voters did in the decades after the 1930s. But that reflex evidently no longer exists. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and former Vice President Al Gore delivered widely-covered speeches describing vitriolically the condition of the economy but providing little or nothing in the way of substantive alternate policies. Many Democrats privately wanted to repeal the Bush tax cuts. But they hesitated to say so publicly, because several Democrats in close Senate and House races had voted for them. Democrats also thought that news stories about corporate misconduct at Enron, Arthur Andersen and WorldCom would win them votes. Republicans are associated with big corporations, they argued, and so revelations of corporate misconduct would swing voters toward Democrats. But the identification of corporation leaders with Republicans is much weaker than it was in the 1950s, when nearly all top executives were Republicans, nearly 40% of private sector employees outside the South belonged to labor unions and when union members tended to see their interests as adversary to management's. Much of American politics then revolved around labor-management conflicts. But today, only 9% of private sector employees are members of unions, and relatively few employees see their interests as adversary to management's; instead, they want to see management perform profitably and honestly. Voters responded to the stories of corporate misdeeds not as union-member-employees but as investors, and as investors they wanted to see corporate wrongdoers prosecuted and new laws passed to require better accounting standards. After the election, Gephardt stepped down as minority leader and mused that Democrats should try to come up with proposals to protect investors and enable Americans to invest more. The Bush administration was considering tax changes to benefit investors and in January 2003 proposed to end the double taxation of dividends. These are the kinds of responses a majority-investor electorate will tend to elicit from shrewd politicians. Some Democrats' impulse is to attack such proposals as giveaways to the rich. But that is riskier than it used to be in a nation where a large majority of voters are investors. The Social Security issue. Much of the dialogue in the 2002 campaign was about Social Security. In many states and districts, Democrats attacked Republicans for supporting "privatization" of Social Security, by which they meant George W. Bush's proposals for voluntary individual investment accounts for young workers. In some states and districts Republicans attacked Democrats for supporting "privatization" of Social Security, by which they meant Bill Clinton's proposal in January 1999, never seriously considered in Congress, to have government invest part of the Social Security taxes of young workers. A few Republicans -- notably Elizabeth Dole and John Sununu, running for the Senate in North Carolina and New Hampshire, and Congressmen Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Clay Shaw of Florida articulately defended individual investment accounts and won. Other Republicans, like John Thune and Bill Janklow in South Dakota, promised to vote against "privatization"; Thune lost narrowly and Janklow won. The campaign dialogue seemed to many to signal that proposals for individual investment accounts were doomed. The time when the political stars were in alignment for their passage was in 1999, when prominent Democrats -- Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Bob Kerrey, Charles Stenholm -- joined most Republicans in supporting them, and when Bill Clinton was making statements intellectually consistent with supporting them. But in early 1999, Clinton came out against the idea. Clinton instead proposed government investment, a nonstarter politically. Moynihan, for one, dismissed it with contempt. In the 2000 campaign, Gore opposed individual investment accounts vehemently, and in 2001 and 2002, just about every Democrat in Congress and running for Congress attacked them scornfully. With some Republicans playing defense on the issue and making commitments to vote against "privatization," and with virtually all Democrats opposed, it was hard to see how individual investment accounts could ever pass Congress. Until the election results came in. Not only did Republicans gain seats in both houses of Congress against historic precedent, the polls all indicated that elderly voters -- long the primary constituent for Social Security as-is -- mostly voted for Republicans. This is evidently a result of the fact that an increasing percentage of the elderly get more income from their investments than from Social Security. Not many had noticed during the campaign, but support for voluntary individual investment accounts -- the formulation Bush uses -- remained well over 50% during all the Democrats' attacks; it was when they were asked about "privatization" that voters disapproved. In June, a CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll reported that 57% favored a proposal that would "allow people to put a portion of their Social Security payroll taxes into personal retirement accounts that would be invested in private stocks and bonds." That figure dipped to 52% as the campaign season heated up in September, but returned to 57% when the question was asked again after the election. That result mirrors a post-election poll taken by Republican pollster David Winston for the United Seniors Association that found 59% supported a system where you own and control how part of your Social Security retirement money is invested while 35% favored a system where the federal government has complete control over Social Security retirement money. It begins to look as if there are fewer seniors voting to keep Social Security as-is than there are younger people voting to give themselves the option of Social Security accounts. Some will argue that this gets public opinion wrong because the issue is framed Bush's way. But Bush has the presidential megaphone. If Democrats cannot win a plurality of votes cast on the issue in a year when they are on the attack and Republicans' responses were in many cases confused and muddled, how do they expect to win a plurality of votes cast on the issue if it is framed clearly by a popular president? Of course, Bush may not be popular in 2004, or as popular as he was in November 2002. But he seems determined to raise the issue again in 2004 as he did in 2000 and on the campaign trail in 2002, if, as seems likely, Congress doesn't act on it over the next two years. The fact is that the G.I. generation -- the prime supporters of Social Security as-is for many years -- will never again cast as high a proportion of the total vote as they did in 2002. Casting higher proportions will be the young voters who believe they have more to gain by investing some of their Social Security taxes than by relying on the promised government return. The argument made by some Democrats in 2002 that there is no problem because the system will be in good shape until 2037 is not appealing to a voter born in 1972 who will turn 65 that year -- and there will be an increasing number of voters born in the 1970s in the years ahead. It used to be said that Social Security was the third rail of American politics: propose changes in the system and you die. Now it seems that the third rail is moving to the other side of the track: oppose changes in the system and you die. Most Democratic politicians do not believe this and believe that opposition to any change in Social Security is a winning issue for them. The results of the 2002 election ought to give them some pause. Taxes. There was little argument about taxes in the 2002 elections. Prominent Democrats like Edward Kennedy and Hillary Rodham Clinton called for repeal of the 2001 Bush tax cut, but they weren't out on the campaign trail much, for the critical Senate races took place in states Bush carried or ran well in 2000. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle declined to call for repeal of the tax cut, apparently in deference to senators in tough races who voted for it. In speeches decrying the state of the economy, Democrats often blamed it on the Bush tax cut. But they did not explain how a tax cut taking effect mostly in 2004 and after had hurt the economy in 2001 and 2002 (some took a stab at it, arguing that the prospect of higher deficits would produce higher interest rates, but interest rates in fall 2002 were at a record low). At least one part of the tax cut, the rebate, which was the Democrats' idea originally and which they were entitled to take credit for, probably did stimulate the economy a bit. The fact is that most Democrats oppose the tax cut not because of its fiscal effect -- who really knows what the fiscal situation will be in 2010? -- but because, as one Democrat put it, "I want the government to have the money." They understand that Bush pushed the tax cut because he wanted to reduce the size of government; they want it to be larger, because they believe a larger government can pay for programs that will help people and be good for the country. That is a principled position, and one in which many reasonable and decent people can and do believe. The problem is that it is hard to sell. The best way to make the case for bigger government is not to argue the abstract case for big government but to make the case for specific, concrete programs which are attractive to most voters or to voters strategically positioned within the electorate. But it is hard to win elections today by promising you are going to be able to enact attractive programs in 2006 or 2010. And the Democrats may have missed the best opportunity to attack the Bush tax cut, which is before it takes effect. For the tax issue will be in a different posture if and when the significant tax cuts take effect in 2004. In 2000, the posture of the issue was this: Bush was promising a tax cut, which voters were skeptical about; Democrats promised to leave taxes where they were, which voters tended to believe, since they knew that the Democrats remembered how they had been clobbered in 1994 after raising taxes the year before. But in 2004 and even more so in 2006 and 2008, the posture will be what it was in 1988, when the senior George Bush said, "Read my lips, no new taxes": Bush will be promising to keep taxes low, Democrats will be suspected of wanting to raise them. We know what happened to Walter Mondale when he promised to raise taxes in 1984 and to Michael Dukakis when he declined to promise he would not raise them in 1988. The Republican nominees in 1984 carried and in 1988 ran even in the nation's biggest metropolitan areas -- Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles. In 2000, when the tax issue was in a different posture, George W. Bush ran weakly in the suburbs and Al Gore carried all of those metropolitan areas by wide margins; suburban women's liberal positions on cultural issues outweighed Bush's promise to cut their taxes. It is possible, though by no means certain, that when the choice is between asserting liberal positions on cultural issues and paying higher taxes, the decision may go, as it did in 1984 and 1988, the other way. Life, liberty, property: our lives are different since September 11, our politics different from what it was in 2000. How are the parties responding? It is easier to answer that question about the Republicans. George W. Bush is in clear control of his party, and Karl Rove, his chief political strategist in Texas and now in the White House, occupies a position that no one has ever held in American history. Few if any political strategists and operatives have ever had the confidence of a president that Rove has; no political strategist has ever played as big a part in helping the president set public policy. Harry Hopkins, who lived in Franklin Roosevelt's White House for long periods, played a major role in policy, but only occasionally dipped into electoral politics, as when he went to the Chicago convention to engineer FDR's draft for a third term in 1940. Robert Kennedy was enormously powerful in making policy when his brother was president, but as attorney general he properly stayed out of electoral politics. Hamilton Jordan in the West Wing played a major role in making policy and in Jimmy Carter's reelection campaign, but took little part in intramural Democratic politics or the off-year campaigns. Lee Atwater in his tragically brief career had the senior George Bush's confidence in political matters but, headquartered at the Republican National Committee, took little or no part in making policy. Karl Rove does politics and does policy; he helps George W. Bush plan ahead and schedule policy decisions and political moves not just weeks but months ahead. He helps to set the strategic themes of the administration and he steps in and settles local political disputes. To all this Rove brings a knowledge and understanding of history and political demography of a high level which if not unique has only rarely been found in White House aides and political operatives. Even before he became politically involved with Bush, he had a vision of how Texas could become a solid Republican-majority state. Now it is. For some years now he has had a vision of how to build a Republican majority in America, and the 2002 election results suggest he has made at least a little progress toward that goal. His model is a politician underrated in his own time and remembered later only as a personification of out-of-date thinking, 20th century America's first president, William McKinley. McKinley ran for president in 1896 as governor of Ohio, opposed by the eloquent populist William Jennings Bryan. His Republican party had been defeated four years before, after years of equal division between the parties. Its most loyal voters, Civil War veterans, were dying out. Part of the country, the South, was unremittingly hostile. The plains were filled with angry farmers and the cities with teeming immigrants, seemingly the ingredients of a new Democratic majority. Yet McKinley built a Republican majority instead -- indeed, the only lasting Republican majority at all levels of office the nation has seen. His party gained seats in the Senate but lost some in the House in 1898. In 1900, McKinley won reelection and Republicans gained seats in both houses. Over the 36 years from 1896 to 1932, Republicans held the presidency for 28 and held majorities in the Congress for 26. Their national majority came apart only because of the depression of the 1930s. What was the McKinley formula for success? Public policies like hard money, limited government, toleration of labor unions and immigration, the vigorous assertion of American military power and moral principles in the world. There is some resemblance between McKinley's formula and George W. Bush's. Both are less about tactical positioning on short-term issues and more about strategic responses on long-term public policy. In 2000, Bush ran a disciplined campaign on five major issues -- tax cuts, education, Medicare reform, individual investment accounts in Social Security and strengthening our defense. Education has usually been a Democratic issue; Bush has changed that by relentlessly shifting the focus from the amount of spending to the quality of results. The tax cut, a favorite of Republican primary voters, wasn't a great asset in the general election; Bush went ahead and made it his priority anyway, because a long-term tax cut sets limits to the size of government over the long term. In his time McKinley and even the learned Teddy Roosevelt were scorned by elite intellectuals like Henry Adams, just as Bush is scorned by their equivalent today; McKinley and his Republicans were always opposed by the South, as Bush seems likely to be always opposed by New England and much of the Northeast and California. But the McKinley Republicans created a majority for a party that believed in market economics, a limited but compassionate government, a vigorous foreign policy, and George W. Bush has made some progress toward creating a majority for his party today. The Democrats in the wake of the 2002 election began to look much like the Democrats of 1896-1912. The Democratic party, throughout its long history, has been a fissiparous party, a collection of out-groups who at their best unite to become the in-party and at their worst become a brawling mob. They were deeply split on some issues in 2001-02 -- the Bush tax cut and the Iraq military action resolution were the two most prominent. On many others, they have moved far to the left of the Clinton-Gore formula that won them 49% of the votes in 1996 and 48% in 2000. Clinton backed NAFTA and, less successfully, other free trade measures; House Democrats voted by wide margins against trade promotion authority in 2001-02. This will likely hurt them among young and college-educated voters; one thing you learn in Economics 101, no matter how far left or how far right the professor, is that free trade is good. Clinton at least considered giving young workers some chance to get market returns on a portion of their Social Security taxes; today, Democrats are obdurately opposed. Most Democrats backed Clinton rhetorically when he said we must take action against Saddam Hussein in 1998; some of them cavilled and orated against taking military action against Saddam Hussein in 2002. Their complaints about the economy in 2001 and 2002 were loud, but the critique was incoherent. Bill Clinton's "little things" strategy of proposing lots of little programs -- family leave, children's health insurance, school uniforms -- to help working families worked for him because he was able to use the presidential megaphone to make each program known and also to create the impression he was working hard and creatively to use government to help people in their daily lives. But "little things" programs, however worthy and attractive, can't do the same for today's Democrats who don't have the presidential megaphone -- no one will ever hear about them. There are no obviously good strategies for a party in opposition to a popular president. They can wait for disaster, but Democrats in their hearts do not want to see failure in the war on terrorism or the collapse of the economy, and they certainly do not want to be seen appearing to want such things. They can try to energize their base by espousing left-wing policies, but this risks antagonizing voters in the center. Or they can appeal with moderate policies to the voters in the center and risk low turnout by their base and breakaways to the Green party. They can wait until demographic trends make them a majority again, though this seems unlikely to happen soon, if ever, as young men and women trend Republican and George W. Bush romances Latinos and Asians as Theodore Roosevelt once romanced Italians and Jews. History gives a party in such a position two pieces of advice. The first is that you should step back and analyze where the nation is today and what government can do to put it in a better place, and then encourage your local and state officeholders to act on those analyses. The New York Democratic party in the 1920s under Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt acted on the advice of social workers, ethnic leaders, policy theorists and shrewd political bosses and developed policies which provided much of the substance of the New Deal. Republicans in the 1970s listened to the musings of neoconservative intellectuals and Christian conservatives and under Republican National Chairman Bill Brock developed ideas that became policies in the administration of Ronald Reagan. The Democratic Leadership Council and Democratic governors and mayors in the 1980s and early 1990s developed policy positions and political formulas that became the basis for the successful campaigns and successful governance of Bill Clinton. Democrats today risk appearing to be clinging to policies -- the Social Security program of 1935 cannot be improved on, protectionism is better than free trade, no limits should be put on the extent to which a few hundred trial lawyers can transfer the assets of millions of stockholders to themselves. They must take a fresh look at the country, and think, and then act on their ideas. The second lesson is that you should not show -- or feel -- contempt for the popular president you oppose, because in doing so you show contempt for the people who elected and support him, the people whose votes you need to win. Democrats in the 1950s and 1980s and 2000s made jokes about the mindlessness of Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, jokes that oozed contempt and condescension. They were idiots, they didn't read books, and they were Manchurian candidates manipulated by behind-the-scenes advisers: the litany is familiar. John Kennedy did not win in 1960 by making Mort Sahl jokes about Ike, and Bill Clinton did not win in 1992 by requiring voters to admit they were wrong in voting for Reagan before they could apply for grace by voting for him. Republicans seethed with hatred for Franklin Roosevelt during all his three full terms as president; that did not prevent him from winning a fourth, or prevent Harry Truman from winning in 1948. Republicans seethed with hatred for Bill Clinton. But voters who had decided that they wanted Clinton to remain in office regardless, because of his professional ability and policies, punished Republicans at the polls in 1998. George W. Bush did not win in 2000 by requiring voters to admit they were wrong in supporting Clinton during the impeachment controversy. One aspect of the Clinton-Gore era that Democrats do seem to have clung to is the war room mentality -- non-stop political spin, constant smash-mouth criticism of the opposition, a willingness to change the rules in order to win at all costs. That approach was apparent in Minnesota, when Democrats turned the memorial service for Paul Wellstone into a campaign rally. The reaction was furious, in Minnesota where most voters were watching the event live and, to a surprising extent across the nation. The highly able and personally decent Walter Mondale lost his home state for the first time in his career. Contrast the 1994 race for governor of Texas. The incumbent Democrat, Ann Richards, who had a positive job rating, felt free to make contemptuous remarks about her opponent and to refer to him as "Shrub." The opponent, George W. Bush, always referred to her as Governor Richards and when in a debate she paid tribute to relief workers in an emergency, he began his response by saying, "Well spoken, Governor." Karl Rove hasn't forgotten. Neither should Democrats. It may be that history will record the years 1995-2001, when there was parity between the two parties and when Clinton was reelected and Al Gore came so close to being elected, as a Clinton detour within a long period of Republican majority, something like the Eisenhower detour in majority-Democratic America. That's certainly what it will look like if the Republican presidential majorities of 1980, 1984 and 1988 and the Republican congressional majorities of 1994 and 2002 are followed by Republican presidential and House majorities in 2004. We are a long way from there yet, and those who remember the 1992 cycle -- when it was widely believed that Republicans had a lock on the presidency and that George H.W. Bush with his 91% job rating in March 1991 could not be defeated -- understand that many things can happen in American politics. But there is some reason to believe that this is the way history will record our as yet unfinished era. In the first two-thirds of the 20th century, this country was industrial America, a country that was moving toward standardization and centralization. This was an America of ever bigger corporations, a bigger and more bureaucratized government, standardized professions and scientific communities, assimilation of immigrants and conformity, common social experiences like the comprehensive high school and the draft military. It was a society temperamentally inclined toward centralization, normalization, standardization. That America had a natural tendency to vote for Democrats, at least starting in the 1930s, when the depression enabled FDR's Democrats to outflank McKinley's and his cousin's TR Republicans and emerge as the party favoring vigorous and active government. In the last third of the 20th century and now in the first third of the 21st, we are living in post-industrial, information age America. The economy is increasingly decentralized, and market-driven rather than regulated by government or manipulated by oligopolies; the culture is increasingly variegated, as people feel free to choose different lifestyles and as new peoples come from other lands; affluence and surging economic growth enables the emergence of many economic and cultural niches in which Americans can choose to live comfortably. It is a society temperamentally inclined toward decentralization, away from bureaucracies and toward markets, for individual choice rather than standardization. This America has a natural tendency to vote for Republicans, although it is willing to vote for Democrats like Clinton who fashion their public policies and political tactics to suit its predispositions. George W. Bush seems to understand the character of this society: a common theme in his 2000 platform -- tax cuts, education, Medicare, Social Security -- was allowing more individual choice rather than requiring everyone to fit into the same bureaucratically defined template.
There is a similar contrast in how Americans fight their wars. Industrial America fought its wars by using its centralized industrial strength. Large draft militaries, mass-produced unsophisticated weapons and materiel -- these are what we brought to World War I and what enabled us to win World War II and prevented our losing in Korea. But as industrial America became post-industrial America, industrial war-fighting worked less well in Vietnam. Now post-industrial, information age America is winning its wars with a volunteer military and special forces, tactics that put a premium on high skills and personal initiative, with highly sophisticated equipment far beyond the capacity of any other country's military forces. We saw this in the Gulf War, we saw it even more in Afghanistan, we saw it in Iraq. This military is an institution that reflects the basic character of the nation led by George W. Bush, a leader who understands his nation's basic character far better than those who seethe with contempt for him. On the performance of this military, and of this president, much depends -- including the course of American politics for the next several years, perhaps the next two decades. But it is clear that this nation at peril, alike though it is in its basic character, is importantly different in its politics, from the 49% nation that we thought we knew so well until the 2002 election returns started coming in.
National Journal Group offers both print and electronic reprint services, as well as permissions for academic use, photocopying and republication. Click here to order, or call us at 877-394-7350. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
NEW FEATURE
[ Site Index | Staff | Privacy Policy | E-Mail Alerts ]
[ Reprints And Back Issues | Content Licensing ]
[ Make NationalJournal.com Your Homepage ]
[ About National Journal Group Inc. ]
[ Employment Opportunities ]
Copyright 2013 by National Journal Group Inc.
The Watergate · 600 New Hampshire Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20037
202-739-8400 · fax 202-833-8069
NationalJournal.com is an Atlantic Media publication.
