Leading progressive pundit Jon Chait:
The perception has formed, perhaps indelibly, that the reason Democrats will get hammered in the 2010 elections is that the party moved too far left in general and tried to reform health care in particular.
This perception owes itself, above all, to the habit that political analysts in the media and other outposts of mainstream thought have of ignoring structural factors. Any political scientist can tell you that external factors hold enormous sway over public opinion. Economic conditions tend to matter the most, but scandals, wars, personality, and other factors come into play. While the Democrats may have committed sundry mistakes, the reason for their diminished popularity that towers above all others is 10 percent unemployment.
But political analysts are more like drama critics. They follow the ins and outs of the tactical maneuverings of the players, and when the results come in, their job is to explain how the one led to the other. If you suggested to them that they should instead explain the public mood as a predictable consequence of economic conditions, rather than the outcome of one party’s strategic choices, they would look at you like you were crazy. They spend their time following every utterance and gesture of powerful politicians. Naturally, it must be those things that have the decisive effect.
Pundits frequently cite economic performance as the reason for voters' decisions, perhaps because of the utterances and gestures of James Carville, who coined the phrase, "It's the economy, stupid." Conventional wisdom surrounding the 1992 elections holds that the economy turned the country against George Herbert. The economy cannot be all-powerful (pure econonomic determinism cannot explain the magnitude of what happened in 1994, GWB's 2000 victory, the 2002 midterms, or the red-blue divide, and it doesn't really square with the Democrats' underwhelming performance in 1982) but it is pretty important. Everyone seemed to recognize that Obama's 2008 victory owes a lot to the economic collapse that year.
However, Democrats took the 2008 election as a general repudiation of free market capitalism, or "free market fundamentalism," as they sometimes called it. By this I do not mean that they sought to centrally plan the economy or nationalize all industry. Rather, I mean that Democratic rhetoric dealt in abstractions (an allegedly laissez-faire ideology has failed; therefore, the Democratic agenda should be implemented across the board) rather than claims of concrete competence (Bush administration regulators made specific mistake x, and we will not make such a mistake.) President Obama has sometimes stated that he came to Washington to do more than just clean up the mess of his predecessor, but precisely because his mandate was one of narrow economic competence, he has been unable to maintain support for such an ideological transformation. It should further be noted that economic determinism fails to explain either the suddenness of Brown's rise (which happened as the risk of comprehensive reform became apparent) or the fact that the President continues to at least tread water in terms of personal approval (so it isn't his reverse coattails that are dragging down comprehensive reform.)
Chait continues:
If you believe that Democratic ideological overreach is the problem--“they thought the country was at a very different place ideologically,” explains perpetually quoted Republican wise man Vin Weber--then you have to undertake the following thought experiment. Imagine that John McCain won the 2008 election. (How? I don’t know--maybe Obama is caught on tape singing “Kill Whitey” to himself in a private moment.) Would McCain have more popular support right now than Obama does, because the public really wants an agenda of smaller government and lower taxes?
I don't know- McCain would face a different set of difficulties in governing. Let us assume that he passes a smaller, short-term stimulus that receives Republican support, and Democrats denounce it for being too small (does the economy do worse than it is now under this scenario? Again, I don't know.) McCain can then be accused of a refusal to alleviate suffering. This is a different problem from the one Obama faces, which is the perception that we indebted ourselves for nothing ("I spent $800 billion, and all I got was this lousy 10% unemployment rate.") McCain would attempt to mitigate his difficulties through moralization (adjustments to a more sustainable economy are necessarily painful,) just as Obama has attempted to mitigate his difficulties by blaming Bush. But in the world in which we live, the Democrats' set of problems are the real ones.
What’s actually surprising about public opinion is not how much has changed since 2008, but how little. His approval rating in the latest Washington Post/ABC poll, 53-44, nearly matches his 2008 vote total. Obama still enjoys a massive edge in trust over congressional Republicans. That Democrats are suffering from a voter backlash anyway just shows how mechanistically public opinion can behave.
Actually, this tends to support my argument. The economy should most directly hurt Obama's approval and trust numbers (to some extent it has- approval numbers tend to be considerably higher than vote totals) and only indirectly hurt the candidates of his Party. The more straightforward explanation is that people reluctantly trust Obama as President, but do not like the legislation that he is proposing. They expressed by voting in as their legislature, whose job is to legislate, a man opposed to said legislation.
The difference between the parties is that Republicans ignore the establishment’s advice. After Obama’s election, conventional wisdom insisted that the GOP would have to move to the center. Instead the party moved further right. And whatever the policy merits, it has worked politically. If Republicans had cooperated more with Obama, it would have given him bipartisan accomplishments and made him even more popular.
The GOP’s ability to ignore establishment nostrums in the face of defeat is its great electoral strength. Democrats, by contrast, have a congenital tendency to panic. Abandoning health care reform after they’ve already paid whatever political cost that comes from voting for it in both houses would be suicide. Even if Coakley loses, the House could pass the Senate bill as is, avoiding the need to break a filibuster, and tinker with it in a reconciliation bill that can’t be filibustered. The only thing preventing the Democrats from following through would be sheer panic.
The GOP was able to ignore establishment nostrums because establishment nostrums were wrong about how far the public had moved to the Left. The public had moved left economically from about 1996 to 2008, and Republicans followed that trend (this is the only way the built their governing majority.) The public moved in an anti-Republican direction from 2005 to 2008, but I don't know of any evidence that the move to the left accelerated (liberal Democrats beat liberal Republicans in liberal districts, and conservative Democrats beat conservative Republicans in conservative districts, and anti-trade Democrats beat anti-trade Republicans in anti-trade districts. If voters behaved "mechanistically," Democrats should have been able to run liberal candidates all over.)
Why would Democrats have benefited from bipartisan cover for their actions, even though the GOP is distrusted and unpopular? Because those actions, in themselves, are unpopular or at least make voters uneasy, and if they don't work, it would be nice not to have to take all the blame. Republicans thought that they might not work, based on their view of politics and economics. Democrats sought to increase the short-term costs for Republicans of their obstruction (employing "party of no" rhetoric.) Everybody was playing the political game rationally or as-if rationally, given his own plausible set of assumptions.
Chait concludes his piece with an inspirational movie reference:
Remember the classic scene in It’s a Wonderful Life? Facing a run on his building and loan, George Bailey tries to explain to his frantic customers how to look after their self-interest. “Don't you see what's happening?” he pleads, “Potter isn't selling. Potter's buying! And why? Because we're panicking and he's not.” President Obama’s great challenge right now is to be his party’s George Bailey.
To me, that has always been the idea behind the Yes We Can movement- an appeal to sheer willpower, which will almost create the objective conditions necessary to bring about one's desires. This led to a rather substantial bubble, but it was only that, a bubble. There are strong indications that that bubble simply popped on Tuesday.
P.S.
Vindicating my view of the matter:
"Nearly two-thirds of Brown's supporters say their vote was intended at least in part to express opposition to the Democratic agenda in Washington, but few say the senator-elect should simply work to stop it...Obama also remains popular in Massachusetts. More than six in 10 of those who voted approve of his job performance, with 92 percent of Coakley's voters expressing satisfaction, along with 33 percent of Brown's. More than half of Brown's backers say Obama was not a factor in their vote."
Many people still trust Obama and consider him "one of them," especially in Massachusetts. Obama, the man, did not repel voters into backing Brown; the problem is not transitive (economy hurts Obama which hurts health care which hurts Coakley) but direct (health care hurts Coakley.) Insofar as any broad trend was in play, it was a general shift in political philosophy back to 1994 attitudes:
"When Obama was elected, 63 percent of Massachusetts voters said government should do more to solve problems, according to exit polling. In the new poll, that number slipped to 50 percent, with 47 percent saying government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals."
I agree with your assessment that health care hurt Coakley more than Obama. One of the problems with Obama-centric analysis is the Obama has thus far managed to distance himself from much of the actual substance and process by (1) not sending a detailed proposal to Congress and (2) continuing to focus on vague, campaign-esque promises like "coverage for everyone" and "efficiency" without really advocating any of the trully horrible things that people know are in the bill. In allowing or forcing Congressional Democrats to take the lead on this issue (or, one might say, in failing to really lead on this issue), President Obama disconnects himself from much of the Congressional content and process surrounding the health care debate which has people so outraged. Therefore, the Congressional politics surrounding the health care bill and Coakley's representation as a vote for Congressional Democratic leadership directly impacted the MA Senate race much more than Obama did.
Also, although I think it is fair to attribute some of the public's disapproval of current government leadership to the "current state of the economy", attempts to attribute all of it is frankly insulting to the people of this great country and implies a fatalistic view of American politics.
First, it reflects a disturbingly elitist attitude which assumes that the general public is too stupid to notice important details, such as economic mismanagement and governing philosophies, and pretty much just votes for the current administration in good times and votes against it in bad times. Interestingly, this claim undermines the Democrates own claims that Obama beat McCain because of his ideas by implying that what really happened was McCain was simply associated with the current administration during an economic downturn. One can't claim on one hand that one's ideas win elections, but on the other hand the public mood is mechanistically related to the economy.
Second, the implication that any president would have President Obama's relatively low approval rating because "it's the economy stupid" implies that no President could have done anything to make the economy better, which implies, ultimately, that government is useless. As you point out, one would have expected significantly different policies from McCain, which could have drastically influenced the current economic landscape. That does not mean government is in complete control and good policies will solve all our problems instantly (or even forever), but government can influence the economy in positive and negative ways. One example of a negative influence is the current downturn caused largely by government distortion of lending incentives.
Posted by: Arthenor | January 23, 2010 at 11:44 AM