I might be proved wrong, but as suggested in my last post, I think we have every reason to be think that Obama will be our president by this time next year. The current polling is irrelevant. Obama is so far superior to McCain by every metric and with the Republican Party in such shambles it's hard for me to believe that McCain has even the remotest chance by the time the Obama has had time to make his case to the country. It's a perfect storm for the Dems--disgust with a corrupt party that has disgraced this country and its ideals with a once-in-a-century candidate who can point a nation eager for new leadership in a different direction.
This is the real story and historical
significance of this election, not whether a black man or a woman is
elected for the first time. The GOP might be imploding, and that certainly gives Dems a short-term advantage, but their future in the long term will depend on whether it can integrate the two halves to the traditional populist vote which comprises a traditional Main Street moral sensibility with an openness to progressive economic initiatives. The populist vote is currently split: The Republicans
have taken the traditional
values half and the Dems the progressive economic half. Or another way to put it is that the GOP has the populist soul in its grip, while the Dems have been trying to get hold of its head. For this reason Republicans have had an advantage insofar as they work effectively within the irrational dimension of politics, even if only in its darker precincts. The GOP has controlled and shaped the nation's mood.
The head is always in service to the various irrational impulses that arise from within the soul. The question is whether those impulses are vicious or virtuous. The GOP's meal ticket has been to disguise its greed and power agenda behind a facade of traditional virtue, and the Main Street types who haven't the time or interest to pay attention are taken in by it. And the Democrats haven't had a counter for it. Their wonkish programs have no narrative appeal that stirs the soul. And Dem tone-deafness in this respect made them incapable of understanding the nature and seriousness of the backlash that set the mood that has dominated our politics since 1980.
This conservative mood in the political sphere hasn't always been dominant, even if a cultural conservatism has dominated in the cultural sphere. William Jennings Bryan, FDR, MLK, JFK and RFK used to understand how to appeal to the progressive political aspirations within the American soul while working within its culturally conservative sensibility. The Dems have been clueless since the sixties about how to do this. That's what makes Obama so interesting and refreshing and Hillary so pathetic. She doesn't know how to appeal to what's best in the American soul, so she imitates the Republican technique that appeals to what's worst. That's what her experience has taught her.
So I disagree with the conventional wisdom that the country's soul is dominated by a political conservatism. And it's wrong to think that people who have culturally conservative values are also always politically conservative. From the thirties through the sixties this was not the case because the Dems had political leaders that understood what was best in America's political heart and knew how to appeal to it. Since then no Dem has emerged who knew how. Prominent Dems have been one hack after the other with no real leaders.
I don't think Carter was a hack, but he had other issues that made him ineffective as a leader. During his administration, the GOP saw its opportunity and seized it. The party found an effective way to hide its aggressively anti-republican politics behind a veneer of traditionalism and fear mongering. The Dems have been too flatfooted, arrogant, or clueless to respond. So the GOP has won the battle in shaping the mood of the country, and whoever controls the mood controls the politics. The backlash mood since 1980 has been driven by resentment and fear, but the mood can change if the right leader emerges who can call us to someting better. My optimism is based on my faith that most people make bad choices only when a clearly better choice is not offered to them. The Republicans have offered only bad choices, while the Dems really have offered no real alternative.
I don't think of Bill Clinton as a real Democrat but rather as a brighter-than-average moderate Republican. The differences between the Republicans and the DLC Democrats are like the differences between Sunni and Shia. The basic framework is shared; the conflicts are over small things that have less to do with policy and more to do with factional infighting about which clique holds power. Or another way to put it is that Clinton didn't change to mood of the country which was set by the vicious folks who operated under Reagan; Clinton accepted the GOP-defined world as 'reality' and was ok to work within it. Same with Hillary. And while Hill and Bill are brighter than the typical American political hack, they are nevertheless hacks. Either would be tolerable to vote for if there was only a choice, as is usually the case, between hacks, but Obama presents a significantly different choice. He offers the possibility of changing the country's mood by his ability to appeal to its better angels.
I remember listening to Obama's 2004 Convention speech and thinking that this guy doesn't sound like the typical Democrat. That speech was unlike anything I had heard from a Democrat in over a generation. It struck me then that he was someone not caught up in the silliness of the previous twenty five years of kulturkampf, that he held within himself a genuine Christian sensibility that was different from the formulaic platitudinous religiosity of most pols. There was something big-souled about that speech, and it seemed to be announcing to the world that there was the possibility of moving forward out of the pettiness and faction-defined politics of the previous generation. The question that remained for me was whether there was any substance behind the rhetoric, and that question was only answered in the affirmative for me after watching the way he handled his campaign this winter and spring. It astonishes me that anyone who looks at Clinton standing next to Obama can take her candidacy seriously. But then thirty percent of the country still think Bush is doing a good job.
But here is the challenge Obam faces in building a sustainable Democratic majority, at least one that I would feel comfortable belonging to: He must find a way to embrace a pluralism of worldviews while still remaining recognizably American, something Main Street can look at and say to itself, "This party represents the best aspects of what it means to be an American." During the seventies Dem politics got too identified with sexual identity politics and movements pushing an anti-traditional agenda, and in doing so lost Main Street as a natural constituency. Maybe it was necessary or unavoidable, but I think it is the single most important reason why the Dems have lost their way has been because it's so easy for Republicans to brand them with the pejorative word "liberal" which in the Main Street imagination is synonymous with "libertine." Uncomfortable.
Main Streeters might agree with the Democrats agenda on a head level, but they don't identify with Democrats on a soul level. Uncritical support of abortion hasn't helped. The abortion issue has become so identified with the Democratic brand, that I really wonder if hard-core Dems realize what a liability it has been for them. For many Main Streeters it's a deal breaker, and it has cost the Dems a constituency that would otherwise be naturally inclined toward it. It's astonishing to me how incapable some Dems are of recognizing how deeply offensive abortion is, not only to fanatics religious right, but to sane, thoughtful people in the middle.
But that's a boat that has left the dock, and I don't know what can be done about it at this point, but so long as the NARAL don't-give-an-inch mentality shapes the Dems' discourse about abortion in the same way as the NRA shapes GOP discourse about guns, it will continue to be a wedge issue that makes it difficult for people who would otherwise be eager to embrace the Dems' agenda. I think it would be a good step if at least the issue could be spoken about as one that is a sometimes necessary but always deeply tragic event rather than in the NARAL idiom to be celebrated as if it's some wonderful liberating step forward for women. But my point in this post is not to make an issue of abortion, but to point out the difficulty the Dems face in recapturing Main Street as part of a sustainable majority for the long run. The abortion issue is not going away, and the Dems have to learn to talk about it differently than they have been, even if it is politically impossible for them to do anything about it.
Whoever controls the mood controls the center, and it doesn't matter if most Americans approve of the Dems's heady agenda in the economic sphere; they vote their hearts, and after 1980 Main Street's hearts were won by the Republicans, even at the cost of abandoning its ability to think clearly about what was really happening to the country. We're reaping the bitter harvest during the Bush Administration of seeds planted during Reagan's. The Dems were blindsided and simply didn't understand what happened to them in the eighties. And nothing about their loss of moral authority on Main Street could change until someone arose from within the Democratic ranks who understood the American political heart. That's the basis of my optimism about the Obama candidacy. He's not just another liberal hack. He's someone who has the capability to retrieve the older Dem ability to appeal to the best parts of the American soul in the way FDR, the Kennedys, and MLK did.