I’m ambivalent about the upcoming Presidential race, torn between whether February 2007 is way too early for campaigns to start up or if it’ll provide a needed dialog of ideas.
I remember just a couple months ago thinking that I couldn’t wait for the 2008 campaign to start up. I wanted anything that could distract me from the depressing hopelessness of the current Bush administration. Yes, we’re stuck with him, and even as unpopular as he is, there’s little that can be done to stop him.
(It’s interesting in a way: if a “lame-duck” president has no military engagements, he or she is restricted to domestic policies which can be completely choked-off by a hostile Congress; almost everything depends on proposing bills and getting them passed, even if they’re just spending bills. But as we see with the Senate unable to do much more than pass “Non-binding resolutions condemning the President, there’s little more they can do to stop his management of a war short of impeachment. Hence, Bush has nothing to fear from the Democratic majority.)
There’s something profound about this upcoming election, and I’m certainly not alone in pointing it out: this is the first time in 80 years that there will be no incumbent candidate. Neither the President or the Vice President will be running, so political dialogue will take place in both political parties.
There’s more to this than simply having twice as many candidates—twice as many “talking heads” in the fray. This time you’ll see commonality between moderates of both sides. I will argue that this creates a significant shift of power between moderates and fundamentalists.
Think back to any other primary season. The sitting president (or the VP if the president is term-limited) is the de facto candidate for his party. The focus of the opposing party becomes who is the farthest from this president—who is most likely to win against him. In my mind everything becomes a sports match. It’s about media campaigns and personal mud slinging and “us versus them” and money and popularity. It isn’t about issues.
Case in point: President George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign. In the beginning he was really running as that “compassionate conservative”. He came from a governorship where he had indeed cooperated with a bipartisan state legislature. I won’t say that I liked him back then; when I first heard of Bush I went to a news site that tracked the various candidates on all the issues and I had pretty much a 100% disagreement with him. But it was Karl Rove and some brilliant pollsters who realized that the only way to win the Republican primaries was to “energize the base” and change from being a moderate candidate to being an extremist. It was an unfortunate reality, because getting in bed with those extremist groups really led us down the path into a partisan Hell.
I’ll bet I haven’t convinced you yet that things will be different. After all, weren’t the more left-wing 2004 Democratic candidates like Howard Dean discarded for a more moderate John Kerry? I would say no, Kerry’s nomination came from the Democrats abject fear of another four years of Bush. They were willing to trade their desires for an ideologically compatible candidate for one who was “electable”. They wanted some plain, vanilla, non-contraversial figure who “looked and sounded Presidential” with no requirement of substance.
No, what I think we’re going to see is foreshadowed by last year’s Senatorial election in Connecticut, the successful campaign of Senator Joe Lieberman. I was amazed by what had happened there: the Democrats hated Lieberman’s moderate position so much that he lost his own party’s primary, but registered as an Independent and won the ultimate race. The liberal fundamentalists were powerful enough to win a primary and lose the election to a member of their own party.
That’s pretty profound in my book because it speaks to the new reality out there: there’s a huge and growing block of people in the “undecided/independent” category. One would think, based on that fact, that Bush’s 2000 “pander to the base” strategy would have been completely wrong. Why did it work? Because they were able to assume that most registered Republicans would ultimately vote for the Republican (anti-sitting-president) candidate, so they could dedicate their energy in the primary season ignoring the moderates and energizing the fanatics.
So what happens when moderate Democrats like Hillary Clinton start talking about issues that grab the attention (and approval) of moderate Republicans? What happens when Rudolph Giuliani or Mike Huckabee impresses some moderate Democrats? (I’m knocking McCain off that list. He hasn’t done anything to impress me in the last two years.)
I think this next primary season will go to the moderates, and the polling figures already support my opinion. The most liberal Democratic front-runner (according to voting record) is Obama, and his central message is bipartisanship. Hillary has spent her six years in the Senate building a solid reputation of stepping across the isle and working for things that make it hard for Republicans to demonize.
If somehow we can avoid the politics of extreme partisanship, this election cycle may be about two issues we haven’t considered since 1996: ideas and competence.