To reread the major political books from the years around Bush’s reelection is to be plunged, as if into a cold pool, back into a world of Democratic gloom and anxiety. Those books were linked by the common belief that Republicans had established a thin but durable electoral advantage that threatened to exile Democrats from power for years, if not decades. Many books from that time assumed Democrats could avoid that eclipse only by adopting the tactics used by Republicans in general and Rove in particular.
Liberal activists and thinkers all exhorted Democrats to attack Republicans in vitriolic terms, to find liberal "wedge issues" that could divide the electorate as sharply as the conservative stand-bys of abortion, gun control, and gay marriage, and most important to emulate Rove’s approach of seeking to win elections more by mobilizing the party’s base with an uncompromising message than by persuading swing voters with a more centrist appeal. "Liberals who regard Bush’s political strategist as Satan scan the Democratic Party and ask plaintively,
‘Where is our Karl Rove?’" write journalists Mark Halperin and John Harris in their 2006 book,
The Way to Win.... The story of the Democratic revival, the story that these books missed in their fascination with Rove and the conservative movement, is a tale of what might be called the accidental coalition....
... Many of these authors assumed that Democrats could regain the initiative only by recapturing the allegiance of the white working-class voters–the "silent majority" or "Reagan Democrats"–who had moved toward the GOP since the late 1960s.
That belief was hardly unique to these books. Since the 1980s, the principal political debate among Democrats has revolved around how to win back working-class whites. Liberals from Jesse Jackson to Thomas Frank argued that economic populism provided the key; the moderates, clustered around the Democratic Leadership Council, insisted on more centrist cultural positions and more muscular foreign policy proposals. In truth, neither approach worked very well. Neither Bill Clinton’s talk of "personal responsibility," nor Al Gore’s identification as the champion of "the people" against "the powerful," nor John Kerry’s attacks on "Benedict Arnold corporations" dented the Republican hold on the white working class.
(yet) Democrats, while no one was looking, have built a coalition that no longer requires them to attract most working-class whites to win. That coalition includes voters under 30 (largely from the vast Millennial Generation), who voted 2-1 for Obama; non-white voters (African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and other minorities), who voted 4-1 for Obama; and college-educated whites, who have steadily moved toward the Democrats since Clinton’s first election, largely because they generally hold liberal positions on the same social and foreign-policy issues that have driven blue-collar whites toward the GOP. In the history of modern polling, no Democratic presidential nominee has ever won a majority of those college-educated whites, but Obama came close–he carried 47 percent of them overall and won a clear majority of those voters outside of the South. Obama won 78 of the 100 large counties with the highest proportion of college graduates; in 1984, Ronald Reagan won 82 of the same counties.
more...
http://www.democracyjournal.org/article2.php?ID=6688&limit=2000&limit2=3000&page=3(password required)
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
