2008: A Watershed Election?

By JOHN STEELE GORDON

Exciting as presidential elections can be, they don't often change things fundamentally. Now and then, however, they can remake the American political landscape for years to come, and the country enters into a new era. Will 2008 be one of those watershed elections? Perhaps, but not in the way that many people think.

Randy Jones

Let's look at a little history.

By 1932, the Republicans had been the dominant party in American politics for more than a generation. Only in 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt split the Republicans, did Democrat Woodrow Wilson capture the White House (with only 41.8% of the popular vote). Four years later, despite a successful first term, the advantages of incumbency, and a world war raging in Europe, Wilson barely won re-election. In 1920, the Republicans won a huge victory and were back in the saddle.

Twelve years later, however, the country was sliding ever deeper into the Great Depression and the Republican president, Herbert Hoover, was perceived as having failed. Dour and beaten down by unprecedented events, he was no match for the ebullient Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt had run on a fairly conservative platform (he hammered Hoover for failing to balance the budget, for instance). But once in office, he embarked on what was at the time a radically new program, the New Deal. It didn't end the Depression, but it transformed the country's politics, thanks to Roosevelt's personality and formidable political talents.

For the first time, the federal government came to be regarded as having stewardship of the economy and being responsible for maintaining a social safety net. The Republicans, deeply resentful of finding themselves out of power, were also out of alternative ideas. They offered little but a return to the political past – of a less-regulated economy and the ethic of personal self-responsibility – that the American people wanted no part of. The Democrats became the majority party, a position they would hold for nearly 50 years.

Only when Dwight Eisenhower, a war hero who was not perceived as a threat to the liberal agenda, ran on the Republican ticket in 1952 – and when the Democrats self-destructed in 1968 – was it possible for the Republicans to recapture the White House.

But by the late 1970s, it was the liberals who were out of ideas. The American economy was in a shambles, with high inflation, high unemployment and gas lines. The Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, like Hoover before him, was perceived as being unable to handle the situation. Ronald Reagan, running on an explicit platform of tax cuts and smaller government, beat him handily in the 1980 election.

Like Roosevelt, the optimistic, politically and media-adept Reagan remade the political landscape. The Democrats, now just as resentful as the Republicans in the New Deal era, offered only warmed-over liberalism as an alternative. Walter Mondale, Reagan's opponent in 1984, famously said, "Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did." Mondale lost 49 states. Reagan went on to cut marginal tax rates yet again.

Only when Ross Perot split the Republican vote in 1992 could a Democrat win the White House (with just 43% of the popular vote). Reaganesque lower taxes and deregulation sparked an enormous economic boom that has now lasted, with two brief and shallow recessions, for more than 25 years.

Is the 2008 election likely to be a repeat of 1932 and 1980, remaking the political landscape in the process? That's unlikely. For one thing, while the incumbent is unpopular, he is not running. And the economy, while certainly dicey right now, is a long way from the desperate problems of 1932 or the very serious ones of 1980.

Instead, the election this year is between two very different political personalities. John McCain is a moderate conservative and war hero with a solid political record but limited media skills (he still has trouble using a teleprompter) and no excess of charisma. Barack Obama is a young, very charismatic newcomer with virtually no political record but great oratorical talent who promises profound change.

This is very reminiscent of the election of 1896, when William McKinley ran against William Jennings Bryan. McKinley too was a genuine war hero (distinguished service in the Civil War) who then entered politics. He served several terms in the House and became chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. In 1891 he was elected governor of Ohio.

His opponent's political résumé was a lot thinner, with only two back-bencher terms in the House. But at the Democratic convention of 1896, Bryan electrified the crowd with his "Cross of Gold" speech. It instantly became an American classic and propelled him to the nomination at just 36 years old, by far the youngest man ever nominated by a major party. Like Mr. Obama, Bryan promised a new politics aimed to benefit the common man, not the capitalists.

He launched the country's first whistle-stop campaign, giving more than 500 speeches around the country. And at first it worked. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which had made its debut on May 26 of that year at 40.94, had lost 30% by August, when it stood at 28.48. But the Republicans fought back, utilizing new advertising techniques, and painted Bryan as someone whose populist ideas would wreck the American economy. The Dow began to recover as McKinley picked up support in northern industrial cities, and among ethnic workers who had been previously Democratic. In the end he won with 51% of the popular vote against 47%.

So 1896 turned out to be a watershed election, alright. By rejecting the candidate who advocated change for the candidate who promised moderate conservatism, it made the Republicans the dominant party until 1932.

Barack's Brilliant Ground Game

By KARL ROVE

For a campaign that says it wants to end the politics of the Bush-Cheney years, the Obama for President effort has cribbed an awful lot from the Bush-Cheney playbooks of 2000 and 2004.

For starters, Barack Obama's manager admitted to the New York Times that he wanted an "army of persuasion" modeled explicitly on the massive Bush neighbor-to-neighbor "Victory Committee" of '00 and '04. Those efforts deployed millions of volunteers to register, persuade and get-out-the-vote.

AP

Barack Obama

Sen. Obama's organizational emphasis wisely avoids the Democratic mistake of 2000, when Donna Brazille's plea for a stronger grassroots focus was ignored by the Gore high command. It also avoids the mistake of 2004, when Democrats outsourced their ground game to George Soros's 527 organizations. The latter effort paid at least $76 million to more than 45,000 canvassers – many hired from temp agencies – to register and turn out voters. It was the wrong model: Undecideds are more likely to be influenced by those in their social network than an anonymous, low-wage campaign worker.

Like Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama has harnessed the Internet for persuasion, communication and self-directed organization. A Bush campaign secret weapon in 2004 was nearly 7.5 million email addresses of supporters, 1.5 million of them volunteers. Some volunteers ran "virtual precincts," using the Web to register, persuade and organize family and friends around the country. Technology has opened even more possibilities for Mr. Obama today.

The Obama campaign is trying to catch up with the GOP's "microtargeting" program, which uses powerful analytical tools and extensive household consumer information to focus on prospects for conversion and extra turnout help. Another Obama adaptation of a 2004 Bush campaign technique is a stepped-up, rapid response effort. Charges do not go unanswered, the campaign stays relentlessly on the offense, using every channel of communication.

The Obama campaign has also copied the Bush strategy of broadening the general election map. In 2000, the Bush effort targeted not just the traditional battlegrounds, but also West Virginia (last won by the GOP in an open race for the presidency in 1928), Tennessee (Al Gore's home), Arkansas (Bill Clinton's home), Washington and Oregon.

Hoping for a breakthrough somewhere, Mr. Obama also wants to force John McCain to play defense. So in addition to traditional battleground states, he's running TV ads and organizing in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, Indiana, Nebraska, Montana, Alaska and North Dakota. And where Mr. Bush targeted Latinos, African-Americans, Jews, Catholics and education voters to narrow Democratic margins, Mr. Obama is going after evangelicals, veterans and values voters with ads and outreach to trim the GOP's margin.

There are problems, however. Mr. Obama's people admit they want to sucker Mr. McCain into spending money. To be successful, a bluff must be credible. In places like Nebraska and North Dakota, Mr. Obama can't rely on local issues – like Mr. Bush did with coal in West Virginia in 2000 – to unexpectedly win a critical state. Organization alone won't suffice. And putting Obama dollars into Texas, for example, to help win five state House seats may simply cause Texan Republicans – not Mr. McCain – to raise money and work harder to counter.

Democrats don't have the same large volunteer pool the GOP does with its Federated GOP Women, College and Young Republicans, and local party committees. In the primaries, Mr. Obama instead moved hordes of volunteers from state to state. It was a brilliant tactic, but Nov. 4 is different. The volunteers adequate for primaries held over five months will simply not be enough to compete in 51 separate elections (all 50 states plus the District of Columbia) all on one day.

Mr. Obama's biggest problem is that when it comes to substance, he's following the playbook of a Republican other than George W. Bush. In 2000, Mr. Bush won the general election on the same themes and positions as in the primaries, including compassionate conservatism, the faith-based initiative, tax cuts and Social Security reform. There was no repudiation of past positions, no chameleon-like shifts in positions.

Instead of consistency, Mr. Obama has followed Richard Nixon's advice, to cater to his party's extreme in the primaries and then move aggressively to the middle for the fall.

In the primary, Mr. Obama supported pulling out of Iraq within 16 months, called the D.C. gun ban constitutional, backed the subjection of telecom companies to expensive lawsuits for cooperating in the terror surveillance program, opposed welfare reform, pledged to renegotiate Nafta, disavowed free trade and was strongly against the death penalty in all cases. But in the past few weeks, Mr. Obama has reversed course on all of these, discarding fringe liberal views for relentlessly centrist positions. He also flip-flopped on accepting public financing and condemning negative ads from third party groups, like unions.

By taking Nixon's advice, Mr. Obama is assuming such dramatic reversals will somehow avoid voter scrutiny. But people are watching closely, and by setting a world indoor record for jettisoning past positions, Mr. Obama may be risking his reputation for truthfulness. A candidate's credibility, once lost, is very hard to restore, regardless of how fine an organization he has built.

Will Obama Let the Sunshine In?

How perfect it was that while running for president in 2008, the 40th anniversary of "1968," Barack Obama should denounce the 1960s. His candidacy and his times are bland compared to what was happening then, or so everyone thought.

The year 1968 had a torrent of cataclysmic political events, each of which might have destabilized any other year.

Four decades after the radical 60s, Barack Obama remains vulnerable to its legacy. Daniel Henninger, Wonder Land columnist, speaks with Paul Lin. (July 10)

We just passed Robert Kennedy's assassination, and before that the Paris student riots in May 1968. Up next month, the Democratic convention in Chicago – with its pitched battles in Grant Park between the cops and antiwar demonstrators, the anti-Vietnam protests inside the hall, Mayor Richard Daley on home TVs screaming hysterically at Sen. Abraham Ribicoff.

Thus spake Sen. Barack Obama, b. 1961:

"There is no doubt that we represent the kind of change that Sen. Clinton cannot deliver on. And part of it is generational. Sen. Clinton and others, they have been fighting some of the same fights since the '60s. And it makes it very difficult for them to bring the country together to get things done."

Sen. Clinton "and others" would include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, various Senate and House Committee chairmen, DNC Chairman Howard Dean, and much of the Congressional Black Caucus whose political formation started and stopped in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Insofar as many of the people running Sen. Obama's own party have spent the past four decades playing the Hatfields to the conservative McCoys, can one truly say he has freed himself from those times?

AP

Delegates at the 1968 Democratic Convention protest the war in Vietnam.

As someone might have said back then, sort of.

A phrase born in the '70s out of the feminist movement held that "the personal is political." As an epigram for the age, she got that right. Back then, it seemed to make sense.

Neither Barack Obama nor others of his generation can fathom the fantastic emotional intensity of 1968. It was a year submerged in physical and emotional violence. After the Martin Luther King assassination in April, many American cities erupted in violence and arson, most notably Washington, D.C. The smash-face antiwar movement screamed alongside.

For the then-young men and women of the liberal left, politics became, and remained, unapologetically personal. The falling away of restraint on personal behavior required that the new ethos had to be codified by politics and the courts. Fighting for the right to hang erotic art in a Cincinnati museum became their idea of crucial struggle. Their counterparts on the right were appalled. The point is that for both sides, 1968 was a political furnace; it forged belief systems that drive many in politics today, especially Democrats.

Hillary Clinton came out of this intensely fought milieu. Barack Obama did not. When Obama criticized the fights born back in the '60s, he was severing the personal from the political. He is personally very different from these people. (I wouldn't say this about Michelle Obama.)

What has struck me most about Obama's personality is that it conveys nearly no sense of irony. Hillary in stump speeches would respond to applause for her tales of woe by bobbing her head and forming her mouth into a knowing smirk. Obama doesn't do "knowingness." He's earnest and emotionally quiet. Making un-ironic earnestness seem charismatic is hard, but he's doing it.

His recent flip-flops on guns, the death penalty and Iraq suggest he is less inclined to belief-based '60s style activism than to pragmatic opportunism. The old school wanted to triumph. He wants to succeed.

The Democratic bloggers, truly a tribe descended from 1968, hate Obama's easeful flexibility. But it explains in part how he is slipping by with a standard liberal policy-set no one seems to notice. A lot of moderate Democrats and younger voters, who consider themselves mainly achievers rather than activists, are OK with this. They would rather vote for a flexible opportunist than a committed man of the left. So that's what they're getting.

If he wins, though, the country would have a president who lacks personal and political clarity. This would give the politics of hope new meaning. What precisely do voters think they're getting? You don't have to wait for an answer. It will be supplied in January by Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, the House caucus and many others who turned professional after the '60s and know what to do with a big governing majority in Congress.

For Democrats who think 1968 was yesterday, the next four look good: Obama's personality produces a win (proving the personal remains political), and the win produces traditional party goals on universal health insurance, tax levels and, not least, the more modest American footprint in the world they have sought since the charismatic Jack Kennedy got the country into Vietnam. Looks like the sunshine may be coming back.

Economic policy

What next?

Congress ponders how to throw more money at the slumping economy

FOR months Washington has waited for the economic stimulus plan George Bush signed in February to take effect. And now it has, earlier than some expected. The government reported on June 27th that the tax rebates included in the package helped increase real after-tax incomes by 5.3% in May, and consumers increased their spending at twice the rate they did in April.

Still, as even George Bush admitted at the time of announcing it, the stimulus will be no more than a temporary “booster shot”. Stimulus or no, the government announced on July 3rd that employers cut another 62,000 jobs in June. That is the sixth straight month of job losses. And despite the stimulus’s help raising incomes in May, wages still lagged behind inflation, reflecting the weak labour market and rocketing prices for commodities, especially oil. Consumer confidence is now lower than in the last three recessions. House prices continue to fall, and Wall Street worries about more huge losses at big banks. All ominous enough to get policymakers talking seriously.

Congress is therefore pondering what to do next. This month it is likely to pass a long-debated housing bill, which would allow some at-risk borrowers to refinance into government-backed mortgages. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that some 400,000 borrowers will be able to take advantage of the scheme; the bill’s backers insist the number could be as high as 1.5m. Still, with perhaps 3m foreclosures expected this year, nobody thinks the measure will solve the housing market’s problems. Barney Frank, one of the bill’s authors and the chairman of the House financial services committee, has said a second housing bill may be in order.

But Nancy Pelosi, the House’s speaker, wants a second stimulus package before any new housing legislation. Indeed, some prominent economists are now arguing that, in the words of Robert Shiller of Yale, policymakers should be designing a new stimulus plan and should “stand ready for another after that, and another”.

Details are still emerging. But Democrats are keen on helping state governments—which in the first quarter saw their lowest annual growth in tax revenue since 2002—by increasing money for Medicaid, the health programme for the poor that the states fund jointly with the federal government. That could prevent states from having to cut benefits in order to balance their budgets. Barack Obama has spoken of more rebate cheques. Others suggest a holiday from the payroll tax. The Democrats say they want to spend another $50 billion on the whole package. But it could be triple that if the outlook worsens.

Getting a second stimulus plan or more debt reduction for homeowners past the White House could be difficult. George Bush is wary of the housing bill, worrying that it rewards irresponsible borrowers. Congressional Republicans might support rebate cheques, but would probably oppose plans for more social spending.

Much depends on how the economy fares in the coming weeks. Nothing focuses politicians’ minds like an economic slowdown in an election year. If the president vetoes any of these bills, a nervous Congress might override him.