Forked Tongues

I have been struggling since the election to write the big piece about "what it all means" but others here and elsewhere have said it all so eloquently that I've been stymied. It goes without saying that Barack Obama's win is a great victory for racial progress, and there is no doubt that the country has finally awakened from its post 9-11 trance. But what does it all mean for progressivism? I honestly don't know yet. The contours of this victory are still amorphous to me. I'm watching it unfold with excited interest and hope.

It's much more obvious to me what has changed for the right considering their epic fall from grace [1]--- absolutely nothing. This is because in their minds they didn't actually lose --- liberalism did. Back in 2005 I wrote [2]:

Movement conservatives are getting ready to write the history of this era as liberalism once again failing the people. Typically, the conservatives were screwed, as they always are. They must regroup and fight for conservatism, real conservatism, once again. Viva la revolucion!

There is no such thing as a bad conservative. "Conservative" is a magic word that applies to those who are in other conservatives' good graces. Until they aren't. At which point they are liberals.

Get used to the hearing about how the Republicans failed because they weren't true conservatives. Conservatism can never fail. It can only be failed by weak-minded souls who refuse to properly follow its tenets.

They have certainly lived up to my expectations. Here's Rush [3]:

The way to the light is plainly visible. But everybody wants to be considered the smartest people in the room, so they come up with all these new things like "the era of Reagan is over...[T]here's a blueprint for winning it, 1980, there's a blueprint. McCain is not the blueprint for how Republicans win landslides. Going after moderates, independents, and all these yokels is not the blueprint. The blueprint's there, 1994, taking back the House, the blueprint's there. Why are these people ignoring it?

And if anyone wonders how they plan to go forward, here's [4] Michael Reagan:

It's official: America has its first truly Socialist president... and it's the Republican Party's fault...the so-called "leaders" of our party, who promised us that if we'd just vote for who they put up for election, we'd finally get what we wanted: smaller government, lower taxes, dramatically lower spending, pro-life laws, pro-marriage constitutional amendments, pro-American economics... well, YOU AND I put them in power, and they gave us nothing but BIG GOVERNMENT, BIG DEFICITS, and LIBERAL COMPROMISES.

[We must] EXPOSE LIBERAL CORRUPTION-- With the Democrats back in power in both Congress and the White House, you KNOW that they'll be falling right back into their habits of taking lobbyists' money under the table, trading votes for campaign contributions, spying on and sabotaging Republican legislative plans, covering up their leaders' sexual "flings," and spending taxpayer money on personal expenses like never before. But this time, YOU AND I will be there every step of the way, making sure that no stone is left unturned, every dark corner is filled with light, and every illegal act is paid for with censure, impeachment, recalls, investigations, and jail time for every criminal we expose in Washington, D.C.

Lest anyone believes this thinking is confined to the fever swamps, here's a member of the Senate talking about how he plans to approach this new era [5]:

Jon Kyl, the second-ranking Republican in the U.S. Senate, warned president-elect Barack Obama that he would filibuster U.S. Supreme Court appointments if those nominees were too liberal.

Kyl, Arizona's junior senator, expects Obama to appoint judges in the mold of U.S Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and Stephen Breyer. Those justices take a liberal view on cases related to social, law and order and business issues, Kyl said.

"He believes in justices that have empathy," said Kyl, speaking at a Federalist Society meeting in Phoenix. The attorneys group promotes conservative legal principles.

Kyl said if Obama goes with empathetic judges who do not base their decisions on the rule of law and legal precedents but instead the factors in each case, he would try to block those picks via filibuster.

Naturally, Kyl was one of those threatening to invoke the so-called nuclear option to end the filibuster when such things were suggested by the Democrats.

I hear a lot of people saying they think the backlash politics of Nixonland may finally be in retreat with the election of an African American president. Let's hope that's true. But it pays to remember that ruthless attack politics have been practiced by somebody in America since the very beginning [6]. And we have an entire generation of conservatives trained in its dark arts. I suspect they'll find a way to use them.

But in the early going, it's clear to many of us that the bigger threat to the progressive agenda lies with the political establishment's frenzied attempt to narrow the mandate to a cramped, incremental centrism. They insist that the country is center-right even in the face of a broad progressive victory and demand that the the new administration must bend over backwards to accomodate conservatives or risk being seen as liberal, which is assumed to be the political kiss of death. They say this in spite of the fact that the Republican Party is less popular [7] than e coli.

Like David Sirota here and others elsewhere, I have been tracking this "center-right" meme that has been building since the election. (In fact, I've been [8] tracking [9] this [10] theme [11] as it's built [12] since the 2006 election.) Here's a fairly mundane, but thoroughly common, case in point. Steve McMahon, Democratic strategist, said on Chris Matthews yesterday that "the middle decided this election and the swing voters are waiting for Obama to address their economic concerns."

That's simply not true [13]. The turnout was only slightly higher overall than last time because Republicans stayed home. But there was hugely increased turnout among Democrats and first time voters who registered as Democrats. Unless McMahon is saying that African Americans [14], young people and liberals [15]are swing voters, he's just full of it. This was not a swing election. This was an enthusiastic endorsement of the Democratic Party by a majority of voters.

I can see why politicians say they represent the middle; it's a perfectly understandable bit of political rhetoric. But it's kind of a shame that every time I see an allegedly progressive spokesperson on television these days he or she is spinning like a whirling dervish derisively insisting that the left had nothing to do with this election. It's just sad. I guess we've got a way to go before Democrats will proudly own their victories or even give rhetorical lip service to the idea that Americans are progressives and believe in liberal ideas.

Matthews, of all people, actually batted this stuff back pretty vociferously, (which is also sad. If Chris Matthews is now the voice of the liberalism on television, we've got some big public relations problems.) The Republican strategist on Matthews' show, Todd Harris, agreed with him that Obama needed to deliver on his big promises, but offered this warning:

But big doesn't need to be conflated with liberal. He can be big and govern from the center. I think it's important that people not lose sight of what this election was and what it wasn't. What it was, was a historic victory for Barack Obama, what it wasn't was a wholesale realignment of American politics to the left.

Matthews interrupted:

You speak with a forked tongue, Todd. Let me tell you something, when Ronald Reagan won with 51%, when your guy George Bush won with less votes than Al Gore --- you talk about mandates --- he came in there and did exactly what he wanted to do. He came in there and gave tax cuts to the rich across the board. He took us to war in Iraq, the way he wanted to do it. The idea that you should pussyfoot if you're a Democrat, but if you're a Republican you go in there whole hog --- you have a totally ---two standards here. Republicans should take advantage of every victory and call it a mandate, Democrats should go in there and be very cautious --- "gee whiz, I'm sorry for being here, I hope we don't offend the conservatives" ----

Steve McMahon, would you jump in here please?

McMahon: First and foremost, Barack Obama believes there is a 700 billion dollar bailout that Obama believes was too tilted to Wall Street and the financial interests. The first thing he needs to do is get control of that so that some of that money can be redirected to some of the things you talked about. But he also promised health care reform and he promised to insure every American. He made big promises and these are very difficult to do. But there's not going to be enough money to do everything that he wants to do right away. So he's going to have to pick some priorities and I think what's important for Barack Obama is that the priorities he picks are mainstream values and mainstream priorities for the swing voters who got him ten or twelve states that John Kerry wasn't able to win.

Those are the people who delivered this presidency to him, not the left, and he needs to address their economic concerns with big ideas and bold programs but with programs that the country can afford.

Todd Harris: I think Steve is right about that and he ought to be looking for ways to work in a bipartisan way and the first thing that he can do is the enactment of his middle class tax cut. I don't think there will be a single Republican who will be opposed to that. I also think working toward energy independence is something the parties can agree on and on the foreign policy front, working to win the war in Afghanistan, something he talked about and Republicans ought to be able to get behind.

Matthews: Let's go through that. That sounds like a Republican platform...

Funny that.

When Obama says he's going to govern as a post partisan, I'm not sure even he knows exactly what that means just yet. But Democrats and pundits reflexively reassuring everyone who'll listen that the crazy progressives are completely irrelevant is not only a public slap in the face of millions of Democratic voters (many of whom are new and must be wondering who these hated Democrats are) is destructive. All I hear is small bore, boiler plate junk about middle class tax cuts and "stimulus" --- which doesn't mean anything to people. If they succeed in defining it as a crabbed, circumscribed agenda that must appeal to some mythological swing voter while simultaneously placating the walking ids that call themselves conservatives, they are going to shrink this mandate before the new administration has unpacked its laptops in the West Wing. I realize that they want to "manage expectations" but this excessive pearl clutching about bipartisanship is about as inspiring as dirt and could very well lead to a premature loss of confidence among the faithful and a loss of flexibility in the congress.

I obviously don't know what the new administration is going to do out of the gate. They're just figuring that out themselves. But I do know that the villagers are working overtime to make sure that whatever it is will be comfortably restricted to what they think is "center-right." And we know that the conservatives are going to continue their obstructionist tactics and character assassination because they still think that's a winning strategy. If real change is going to come, Obama (and we) are going to have to educate some of them, outwit all of them and ignore most of them, all at the same time.