Party
Like It’s 2008
By
Frank Rich
Another weekly do-or-die primary
battle, another round of wildly
predicted “game changers” that
collapsed in the locker room.
Hillary Clinton’s attempt to
impersonate a Nascar-lovin’, gun-totin’,
economist-bashin’ populist went
bust: Asked which candidate most
“shares your values,” voters in both
North Carolina and Indiana exit
polls opted instead for the elite
and condescending arugula-eater.
Bill Clinton’s small-town
barnstorming tour, hailed as a
revival of old-time Bubba bonhomie,
proved to be yet another sabotage of
his wife, whipping up false
expectations for her disastrous
showing in North Carolina. Barack
Obama’s final, undercaffeinated
debate performance, not to mention
the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s attempted
character assassination, failed to
slow his inexorable path to the
Democratic nomination.
“It’s
still early,” Mrs. Clinton said on
Wednesday. Though it’s way too late
for her, she’s half-right. We’re
only at the end of the beginning of
this extraordinary election year.
While we wait out her
self-immolating exit, it’s a good
time to pause the 24/7 roller
coaster for a second and get our
bearings. The reason that
politicians and the press have
gotten so much so wrong is that we
keep forgetting what year it is.
Only if we reboot to 2008 will the
long march to November start making
sense.
This
is not 1968, when the country was so
divided over race and war that
cities and campuses exploded in
violence. If you have any doubts,
just look (to take a recent example)
at the restrained response by New
Yorkers, protestors included, to the
acquittal of three police officers
in the 50-bullet shooting death of
an unarmed black man, Sean Bell.
This
is not 1988, when a Democratic
liberal from Massachusetts of modest
political skills could be easily
clobbered by racist ads and an
incumbent vice president running for
the Gipper’s third term. This is not
the 1998 midterms, when the Teflon
Clintons triumphed over impeachment.
This is not 2004, when another
Democrat from Massachusetts did for
windsurfing what the previous model
did for tanks.
Almost
every wrong prediction about this
election cycle has come from those
trying to force the round peg of
this year’s campaign into the square
holes of past political wars. That’s
why race keeps being portrayed as
dooming Mr. Obama — surely Jeremiah
Wright = Willie Horton! — no matter
what the voters say to the contrary.
It’s why the Beltway took on faith
the Clinton machine’s strategic,
organization and fund-raising
invincibility. It’s why some
prognosticators still imagine that
John McCain can spin the Iraq fiasco
to his political advantage as
Richard Nixon miraculously did
Vietnam.
The
year 2008 is far more complex — and
exhilarating — than the old
templates would have us believe. Of
course we’re in pain. More voters
think the country is on the wrong
track (81 percent) than at any time
in the history of New York Times/CBS
News polling on that question.
George W. Bush is the most unpopular
president that any living American
has known.
And
yet, paradoxically, there is a
heartening undertow: we know the
page will turn. For all the anger
and angst over the war and the
economy, for all the campaign’s
acrimony, the anticipation of ending
the Bush era is palpable, countering
the defeatist mood. The repressed
sliver of joy beneath the national
gloom can be seen in the record
registration numbers of new voters
and the over-the-top turnout in
Democratic primaries.
Mr.
Obama hardly created this moment,
with its potent brew of Bush
loathing and sweeping generational
change. He simply had the vision to
tap into it. Running in 2008 rather
than waiting four more years was the
single smartest political decision
he’s made (and, yes, he’s made dumb
ones too). The second smartest was
to understand and emphasize that
subterranean, nearly universal
anticipation of change rather than
settle for the narrower band of
partisan, dyspeptic Bush-bashing. We
don’t know yet if he’s the man who
can make the moment — and won’t know
unless he gets to the White House —
but there’s no question that the
moment has helped make the man.
For
five years boomers have been asking,
“Why are the kids not in the streets
screaming about the war the way we
were?” The simple answer: no draft.
But as Morley Winograd and Michael
D. Hais show in “Millennial
Makeover,” their book about the
post-1982 American generation, that
energy has been plowed into quieter
social activism and grand-scale
social networking, often linked on
the same Web page. The millennials’
bottom-up digital superstructure was
there to be mined, for an amalgam of
political organizing, fund-raising
and fun, and Mr. Obama’s camp knew
how to work it. The part of the
press that can’t tell the difference
between Facebook and, say, AOL, was
too busy salivating over the
Clintons’ vintage 1990s roster of
fat-cat donors to hear the major
earthquake rumbling underground.
The
demographic reshaping of the
electoral map, though more widely
noted, still isn’t fully understood.
From Rust Belt Ohio through
Tuesday’s primaries, cable
bloviators have been fixated on the
older, white, working-class vote.
Their unspoken (and truly
condescending) assumption, lately
embraced by Mrs. Clinton, is that
these voters are Reagan Democrats,
cryogenically frozen since 1980, who
come in two flavors: rubes who will
be duped by a politician backing a
gas-tax pander or racists who are
out of Mr. Obama’s reach.
Guess
what: there are racists in America
and, yes, the occasional rubes (even
among Obama voters). Some of them
may reside in Indiana, which hasn’t
voted for a national Democratic
ticket since 1964. But there are
many more white working-class
voters, both Clinton and Obama
supporters, who prefer Democratic
policies after seven years of G.O.P.
failure. And there is little
evidence to suggest that there are
enough racists of any class in
America, let alone in swing states,
to determine the results come fall.
As the
Times columnist Charles Blow charted
last weekend, Mr. Obama’s favorable
and unfavorable ratings from white
Democrats are both up 5 points since
last summer in the Times/CBS poll —
a wash despite all the
hyperventilating about Mr. Wright
and Bittergate. (By contrast, Mrs.
Clinton’s favorable rating among
black voters fell 36 points while
her unfavorable rating rose 17.)
Gallup last week found that after
the Wright circus Mr. Obama’s white
support in a matchup against Mr.
McCain is still no worse than John
Kerry’s against President Bush in
2004.
But
this isn’t 2004, and the fixation on
that one demographic in the
Clinton-Obama contest has obscured
the big picture. The rise in black
voters and young voters of all races
in Democratic primaries is
re-weighting the electorate. Look,
for instance, at Ohio, the crucial
swing state that Mr. Kerry lost by
119,000 votes four years ago. This
year black voters accounted for 18
percent of the state’s Democratic
primary voters, up from 14 percent
in 2004, an increase of some 230,000
voters out of an overall turnout
leap of roughly a million. Voters
under 30 (up by some 245,000 voters)
accounted for 16 percent, up from 9
in 2004. Those younger Ohio voters
even showed up in larger numbers
than the perennially reliable
over-65 crowd.
Good
as this demographic shift is for a
Democratic ticket led by Mr. Obama,
it’s even better news that so many
pundits and Republicans bitterly
cling to the delusion that the Karl
Rove playbook of Swift-boating and
race-baiting can work as it did four
and eight years ago. You can’t surf
to a right-wing blog or Fox News
without someone beating up on Mr.
Wright or the other predictable
conservative piñata, Michelle Obama.
This
may help rally the anti-Obama vote.
But that contingent will be more
than offset in November by mobilized
young voters, blacks and women,
among them many Clinton-supporting
Democrats (and independents and
Republicans) unlikely to entertain a
G.O.P. candidate with a perfect
record of voting against abortion
rights. Even a safe Republican
Congressional seat in Louisiana fell
to a Democrat last weekend, despite
a campaign by his opponent that
invoked Mr. Obama as a bogeyman.
A few
conservatives do realize the game
has changed. George Will wrote last
week that Mr. Obama was Reaganesque
in the stylistic sense that “his
manner lulls his adversaries into
underestimating his sheer toughness
— the tempered steel beneath the
sleek suits.” John and Cindy McCain
get it too, which is why both last
week made a point (he on “The Daily
Show,” she on “Today”) of condemning
negative campaigning. But even if
Mr. McCain keeps his word and stops
trying to portray Mr. Obama as the
man from Hamas, he can’t disown the
Limbaugh axis of right-wing
race-mongering. That’s what’s left
of his party’s base.
Now
that the Obama-Clinton race is over,
the new Beltway narrative has it
that Mr. McCain, a likable
“maverick” (who supported Mr. Bush
in 95 percent of his votes last
year, according to Congressional
Quarterly), might override the war,
the economy, Bush-loathing and the
bankrupt Republican brand to be
competitive with Mr. Obama. Anything
can happen in politics, including
real potential game changers, from
Mr. McCain’s still-unreleased health
records to new excavations of Mr.
Obama’s history in Chicago. But as
long as the likely Democratic
nominee keeps partying like it’s
2008 while everyone else refights
the battles of yesteryear, he will
continue to be underestimated every
step of the way.
