An editorial from former Washington Post editor and informal McCain campaign advisor Tod Lindberg this morning calls out the recent spate of "America is still a center-right nation" talk from Republican strategists and officials for what it is: nonsense.On election night, former Bush guru Karl Rove opined on Fox News, "Barack Obama understands this is a center-right country, and he smartly and wisely ran a campaign that emphasized it." And it's not just conservative pundits and operatives singing this song. Take Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, who wrote an Oct. 27 cover essay entitled "America the Conservative," which argued that Obama will have to "govern a center-right nation" that "is more instinctively conservative than it is liberal."
The only problem: It isn't true. Or at least, not anymore. If you'd asked me a year ago whether the United States is really a center-right nation, I would have said yes -- after pausing for a second to contemplate the GOP's big congressional losses in 2006. At the time, Republicans cheered each other up by assuring ourselves that the worst was over: If you were running for Congress and survived 2006, you could hold your seat forever.
Tell that to Christopher Shays. After 2006, he was the sole surviving GOP House member from all of New England, but he went down this year, 51 to 48 percent. We are now two elections into something big. This month's drubbing is just the latest sign that the country's political center of gravity is shifting from center-right to center-left. Republicans who fail to grasp this could be lost in the wilderness for years. Lindberg is no liberal, or even a moderate -- quite the contrary, he's a pretty conservative guy on trade and fiscal policy. But he still paints a pretty grim picture for a Republican Party that has repeatedly shot itself in the foot on immigration and other issues important to growing minorities in electorally important areas of the country.Some analysts like to explain this shift by pointing to Democratic gains and Republican losses among particular regions and demographic groups, arguing that the GOP has growing problems winning over such areas as the Southwest and such groups as Latinos, educated professionals, Catholics and single women. There's something to this, but the Republican problem is actually larger and more categorical. In 2004, Republicans and Democrats each constituted 37 percent of the electorate. In the 2006 congressional election, Democrats outnumbered Republicans 38 percent to 36 and won big. This year, the Democrats made up a stunning 39 percent of the electorate, compared with just 32 percent for the Republicans. Add the painful fact that Obama outpolled McCain among independents, 52 percent to 48, and you have a picture of a Republican Party that has lost its connection to the center of the electorate.
Shortly after the GOP convention, McCain looked as if he could still come back. But it was the "maverick" McCain, running against party type, who was winning over independents at that point, not a conservative campaigning as a conservative (compassionate or otherwise).
Perhaps, as Rove says, Obama was running to the center. But can anybody make a serious case that people were mistaking him for a center-right politician? Or even a "New Democrat" such as former president Bill Clinton? The McCain campaign was not shy about letting voters know about the elements of Obama's record that marked him as a man of the left. Perhaps voters simply didn't believe a word of it, but a better explanation is that a majority of them heard McCain's warnings and just didn't mind. Center-left nation, anyone? Latino voters in particular make up a large and growing segment of the voting populace in states like Florida, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and -- dare I say it? -- Texas. That group shifted heavily in the Democratic direction in the 2008 election. It's increasingly difficult to see any scenario, let alone a likely one, in which a Republican candidate gets to 270 electoral votes without most of those states.
And yet that's the gauntlet that Republican candidates must run today: play to the base, which on a nationwide basis seems to hate brown people and teh gayz and atheists and Muslims too, and thus lose the moderate swing voters...or be a true "maverick" and let the base scream and moan and stay home on Election Day because the candidate just isn't "conservative" enough.
It's going to be a deep, gut-wrenching, and in all probability a violent fight in the Republican Party in the next several election cycles to figure out if they stick to the base and remain in the political wilderness, or move in a more moderate direction, abandoning their base and remaining in the political wilderness.
Pass the popcorn. |
