The Coming Clinton Post-Convention Bump and the Election of Fear

The DNC was a far better infomercial than the RNC and the reward should be a Clinton bump that erases the RNC Trump bump.    But hold on–much in the same way that the polls this week after the RNC gave a distorted picture of the race the same will be true next week.    The real election begins about August 8, and it will be an election about fear.

From beginning to end the DNC was a better made-for-TV event than the RNC.  And ratings prove it.  While all the results are not in, the DNC for its first two nights attracted about 4-5 million more viewers than the RNC.  I suspect the same will be for night three that featured Obama, Bill Clinton, and Biden, and also for the last night where millions (especially women) watched a historic night  on television.  Simply having more people watch the DNC than the RNC should translate into a larger potential bump.

But there are other reasons to think the bump might be stronger for Clinton than it was for Trump.  The DNC had better speakers and despite stories of some disgruntled Sanders people, all the Democrats came to the convention whereas many Republicans stayed away from the RNC.  Both the Republicans and Democrats are divided parties, yet by comparison the Republicans were and remain more divided.  Democrats did a better job constructing a positive narrative for America and generally  optimism plays better than pessimism, although they too did use fear–fear of Trump–as a major theme.  They did a great job criticizing Trump, making the case to why he should not be elected (Clinton herself was especially good on this).  Simply put, the Democrats messaged better and that should reap  benefits in terms of a post convention bump.

Purely guessing at this point, Clinton should be able to negate almost all of Trump’s bump, placing the election and polls about where they where prior to the two conventions–a race where Clinton is probably slightly ahead and still favored to win, although it will be close.  She still has the fund raising and organizational advantages she had before, and now perhaps with a slightly more unified party she perhaps is even a little stronger than she was before the conventions.  I will give her a 55-60% chance of winning.

But having said that, there are still reasons to think she can lose and there are opportunities that were missed at the convention.  First, for most Democrats the Wasserman-Schultz DNC email has passed.  But not for many critical Sanders voters and supporters.  Yes I have seen claims that 90% of the Sanders people are with Clinton now but many are young voters and I am still not sure they will actually turnout for her.

Second, indicative of Clinton’s worries about the liberal base turning out was her speech.  It was a speech to unify the party and not one that spoke to the general public and more particularly the swing or undecided voters who switched dramatically to Trump after the RNC.   The battle for the presidency is among the swing voters in the swing states and it is here that Clinton still has core problems.  Third, the speech was powerful in criticizing Trump but thin in offering her narrative about her vision for her presidency.  She offered a few brief micro-narratives about what she wants to do, but like Trump’s speech it too was thin on policy specifics.  It had some policy ideas but not details.  This is course has been the problem with her campaign all along–no grand narrative but a promise of incrementalism that is hard to excite anyone.  Fourth, it is also not clear that selling incrementalism and tinkering with the status quo sells in a year when so many people want change and anti-establishment is the theme of 2016.

Fifth, it is not clear her speech addressed the core trinity of problems with her personally–like-ability,  trustworthiness, and the passion gap.  Her speech seemed more to say I am better trusted to steer the country than Trump, but that of course assumes one likes the status quo and two that criticizing him is enough to move voters behind her.  In effect, Clinton too used fear as a basis of why people should voter for her.  For Trump it is fear of crime and terrorism, for Clinton it is fear of Trump and his finger on the nuclear code.   I am waiting for Clinton to update and rerun the famous 1964 LBJ Daisy  ad that was used so effectively against Goldwater.

My simple points are first that yes the DNC and Clinton had a good week and they will get a bump, but there are still underlying structural issues that Clinton faces that the convention and her speech did not resolve.   Second, whatever the polls say come Monday ignore them for a week and let’s look at what they say around August 8, to give us a real picture of what the race is like.  My sense is that this is an election about fear, with it being used to motivate both Trump and Clinton as reasons to  vote, but in slightly different ways.

The Crisis of Mainstream Republicanism (and why the Democrats are not far behind)

There may be a simple reason why Bush, Christie, and Kasich are doing so poorly and Carson and Trump so well, at least by comparison–mainstream Reagan Republicanism is exhausted and bankrupt.
There is a terrific piece recently in Politico by Michael Lind that makes that point.  The mainstream Republicanism that Bush and Christie are part of is indebted to Reagan.  He makes a good point but I argued the same point five years ago. The battle to build the Reagan brand of Republicanism had  its roots in Goldwater’s victory over Rockefeller.  As I stated then:

The contemporary battle for the Republican orthodoxy begins in 1964 when Barry Goldwater challenged the Rockefeller wing of the GOP for dominance. Goldwater’s “Extremism in defense of liberty” speech was a repudiation of the accommodation with the New Deal that Eisenhower, Javits, and the Rockefeller wing had reached. Goldwater may have lost the election but he propelled the GOP in a direction that first triumphed with Reagan’s victory in 1980 and his inaugural speech declaration that government is the problem, not the solution.

The Reagan coalition blended together often contradictory movements of economic liberty and social conservatism. The former requires a minimalist state protecting individual choice, the later requires an activist one second-guessing freedom. While ideological, it was still willing to compromise within its party and with Democrats, producing notable and important legislation such as the 1986 tax reform and the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. From 1980 to 2008 the Reagan brand is what defined the party. But beginning with the presidency of George Bush in 2001, and clearly by its end the Reagan brand had worn thin and when McCain ran and lost in 2008 it was clear that Reaganism was dead. Obama’s victory, along with Democratic gains in 06-08, signaled that change. For whatever it meant, it was preferred to Reaganism.
Reaganism was a brand–anti government, anti-taxes, and in so many ways, really anti working class, even though ostensibly its rhetoric was populist.  It won over the white working class, the Reagan Democrats, the then Archie Bunkers of the world, mostly because of either the perception or reality that the Democrats were no longer on their side.  Reaganism was successful because of its powerful narrative and because of the weak one Democrats had.

I also argued back in 2010 that the Reagan brand was exhausted, dead by 2008 with the Palin-Bachman remaking of the party.  That remaking is essentially complete, leaving Bush and Christie out.
But the remaking failed to win in 2008 and 2012.  It is still failing yet the mainstream Republicans have yet to figure this out.  Neither the Reagan version nor the one that emerged should be able to hold  white working class America, the group that has seen its economic position gradually erode more and more.  Trump’s success speaks to the failure of both the Reagan and Palin-Bachmann brands of Republicanism.   Trump may not have a plan to help white working class America, but he taps into a sentiment and angst that so far neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have addressed.
There is no good reason why either verison of  Republicanism (Reagan or Palin-Bachmann) should be able to hold on to white middle America  except for the fact that the Democrats have yet to articulate a plan and narrative that speaks to them.  Enter Sanders. The Sanders-Clinton split in the party in part is about the failure of the Democrats to speak to white working class America, suggesting that the Bill Clinton-Obama party brand too may be exhausted. That is the story for another blog another day.

Orthodox Republicanism after Eric Cantor

David Brat’s defeat of Eric Cantor should comfort neither establishment Republicans nor Democrats.  His victory portends threats to both parties.  For Republicans, it suggests a continued ideological divide, for Democrats, a vital threat in 2014 to the electoral prospects.

Until Brat’s victory, many declared dead the Tea Party insurgency within the Republican Party.  But the Tea Party is more than simply a group of people or a fringe organization.  It is an attitude and ideology. The Tea Party movement, with language describing some GOP members as RINOS (Republican in Name Only), questions the ideology and political views of party, raising the question:  What is orthodox Republicanism today?

The contemporary battle for the Republican orthodoxy begins in 1964 when Barry Goldwater challenged the Rockefeller wing for dominance.  Goldwater’s “Extremism in defense of liberty” speech was a repudiation of New Deal accommodation that Eisenhower, Jacob Javits, and the Nelson Rockefeller wing had reached.  Goldwater may have lost the election but he propelled the GOP in a direction that first triumphed with Reagan’s victory in 1980 and his inaugural speech  declaration that government is the problem, not the solution.

The Reagan coalition blended together often contradictory movements of economic liberty and social conservativism.  The former requires a minimalist state protecting individual choice, the later an activist one second-guessing freedom. While ideological, it was still willing to compromise within its party and with Democrats, producing notable and important legislation such as the 1986 tax reform and the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act.  From 1980 to 2008 the Reagan brand defined the party.  But beginning with the presidency of George Bush in 2001, and clearly by its end the Reagan  brand had worn thin and when McCain ran and lost in 2008 it was clear that Reaganism was dead.  Obama’s victory, along with Democratic gains in 06-08, signaled that change, whatever it meant, was preferred to Reaganism.

But the seeds of Reagan’s demise in McCain’s 2008 loss produced the heir of a new Republicanism in Sarah Palin.  Palinism seeks to balance the social conservatism and economic liberty of Reaganism, but it takes seriously the Goldwater extremism speech in its hyperactive purism and refusal to compromise..  Palinism takes aim at the New Deal, combining it with nativism and constitutionalism that came to a head in the formation of the Tea Party and its mantra “I want my country back.”

Palin is toast, but her spirit lives on. The Palin makeover of the GOP combines Goldwaterism and Reaganism with a cult of personality  a multi-media advertising campaign, and a dose of Ayn Rand libertarianism.  But Palinism is also built on what historian Richard Hofstadter labeled the paranoid style in American politics.  It is a anti-intellectual world view nurtured in fear–a fear that outside forces are threatening a way of life that includes faith in Christianity, capitalism, and the Constitutionalism.  This paranoid style, incubated in the Puritan theology of the seventeenth century as described by Perry Miller in his classic 1956 Errand into the Wilderness, was premised upon a theory of uncertainty of salvation, fear of evil, and the omnipresent threat of outsiders who were not part of the church and community.  For Hofstadter and Miller, the paranoid style of fear and prejudice produced notable events such as the Salem Witch Hunts and McCarthyism.

Puritanism and the paranoid ethos both contain an orthodoxy and powerful internal contradictions. Both believe in the righteous and absolute certainty of their truths and in a demonification of challengers.  Both eschew reason for fear, and both necessitate a strong state to suppress evil and  preserve God and American values, even at the expense of freedom for some.  Facts are not important–they stand in the way of truth.   Liberals and MSNBC commentators fail to understand the Tea Party world view.  It is a new orthodoxy that goes right to the heart of politics, asking and questioning the most basic question, “Why government?”

This new orthodoxy draws its roots from this Puritanism and paranoid style .  But it is driven less so from the pulpit than by Fox news, conservative talk radio, and blogs in search of profits and ratings.  Tea Partyism is less a coherent ideology or world view than it has yielded a paranoid attitude mixed in with a branding effort to make money.  It is a brand built on populist anger, anti-government feelings, opposition to immigration, gays, abortion, Democrats, and anything else that inspires fear, so long as it sells.

The new orthodoxy has two wings–The libertarianism of Rand Paul committed to some type of libertarianism, and the Ted Cruz populist politics.  While both revolve around less government and less taxes, they differ on civil liberties and the role of the US in the world.  Whatever their anti-governmentism is, their views and that of many Tea Party members are hypocritical.  Yes less government and taxes, but still I deserve my Social Security check and Medicare because I deserve it, others do not.  There is also a hypocrisy in that the areas of the country that most strongly espouse  anti-government views are the ones with the greatest poverty, uninsured, lower per capita incomes, and the greatest percentage of money coming to their states from the federal government.  Less government for thee, not me.
   
So what orthodox Republicanism now?   Tea Party GOP rebranding is a multi-media cult of personality that draws upon the anger and fear of many that their way of life is threatened and that someone else is to blame for it.  If only government, gays, immigrants, abortionists, Democrats, and RINOS did not exist, we could take back our country and prosper again.  This is what orthodox Republicanism is, the marketing of a politics of fear.

For all of the contradictions within the new Republican orthodoxy, Democrats should not take comfort.  Yes such a new orthodoxy threats to split the Republican Party, sending them further to the right, putting them out of sync with the median voter, and thereby making it more difficult for them to win elections.   But this might only matter with national presidential elections.  As Democrats saw in 2010, turnout is lower in non-presidential elections years, benefitting Republicans.  What the Tea Party brings to the Republicans is passion–passion is essential to electoral success. Passionate candidates and voter win.  Democrats have little passion going for them in local races in non-presidential election years.  Moreover, today as it was back in 2010, Democrats lack a narrative to counteract the Tea Party.  Four years the Democrats ether lacked a narrative, or simply said the Tea Party was nuts, or they simply expected them to self-implode.  They are taking the same road again this year, perhaps with equally disastrous results.

The new Republican orthodoxy is the child of Obama–has taken up the banner of “change” and it  is using their narrative, also with fear, to advance an agenda that challenges the mainstream of both the Republican and Democratic parties