My first substantive blog post! It gets to be first, even though it's a week out of date (horrors!), because I promised various people some in-depth analysis of Massachusetts, intending to do so on this blog, and then didn't get around to it for a while. So here goes. I am going to format this by asking myself a series of rhetorical questions, and then answering them, just because that's how this speech seems to be outlining itself in my head.
Was the Massachusetts Senate race a comprehensive referendum on the Obama agenda, and therefore a thorough rejection of that agenda?
No. I say mainly because the Massachusetts electorate approved of Obama by a 61-37 margin, which doesn't sound to me like they completely reject his agenda. Incidentally, that 24-point net-positive approval rating is eerily similar to his 26-point victory in Massachusetts in the Presidential election, when, oh yeah, he won a 2:1 Electoral College majority. So on the whole, it doesn't look like there's much evidence this was a rejection of all things Obama. (Also worth noting: Obama favorability scores, per pollster.com, are essentially unchanged from November 2nd, 2008. Remind me, again, what the evidence that this populace hates Obama is?) Oh, and of course, don't let's forget that Martha Coakley is a really lousy candidate. I'm sorry, I like most non-"centrist" Democrats, and I probably like her as a person (or would if I met her), but she was just a hideous candidate.
Since the Massachusetts election does seem to be a rejection of the Obama health-care bill, doesn't that mean the Democrats should drop that bill?
No. Firstly, I snuck into that question an assumption that the health-care bill's "unpopularity" was a major reason for the loss in Massachusetts, because I think it was. Those same voters dislike the bill, 48-43, which may not be strictly statistically significant but is certainly worse than it could be. Here's why I don't think this means the Democrats should drop the bill. First, Massachusetts is in this funny situation where it has a health care system more progressive than that being advocated in this bill. The electorate last Tuesday liked that system, 68-27. There is some possibility that health care in Massachusetts would get worse with the current bill, even if overall it gets better. Now, I honestly think that for basically leftist voters in a very liberal state with the most progressive health care in the nation to elect a Republican to a critical seat just to prevent a major improvement in the nation's health care that might marginally worsen their own system is both selfish and foolish; however, I do think it happened and I do think it lessens the extent to which this is a real "referendum on the Obamacare bill." Second, if 54,713 Massachusetts voters, or 2.5% of the electorate, had switched from Brown to Coakley, we would be talking about a "major vindication" of Obama's agenda and health care bill; that seems a pretty trivial difference in actual voting patterns to merit such a categorical divide.
But most importantly, we don't do government by referendum. And while some populists out there (I am not a populist) might wish we did, most of those same people also have probably lamented the extent to which elected officials "never make principled, unpopular decisions." Well, government by referendum would never, literally never, make an unpopular decision, at least viewing popularity in a majoritarian sense. Look, you get majorities for a reason. Especially since Obama is in office until 2013, I would much rather have the current Congress pass a good strong health care bill, a good strong cap-and-trade bill, a good strong financial regulation bill, etc., and then have the Republicans take the House in the fall, than pass none of the above and keep the House and Senate but with somewhat weakened majorities. The point of getting elected is to govern. Passing this health-care bill is the best policy right now, at least compared to passing nothing, so we should do it. Simple as that.
Doesn't this election indicate that Democrats need to move to the center to avoid electoral losses?
I addressed this partially in the last bit of my previous answer, but that was sort of assuming that the answer to this question is yes, and then proceeding from there. In reality, I think the answer is no. I'm largely responding here to posts on one of my Facebook statuses from a week or so ago from Jeff Jacobsen and Gawain Lau (http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?v=feed&story_fbid=440349150124&id=1339140027&ref=mf).
Jeff: The problem with legislation that centrists, center-leftists, and center-rightists like, and liberals don't, is that I am a liberal, and therefore don't like it. Now sure, that's "biased" of me, but it's still true: I don't think that legislation would be good policy, and that's insurmountable. Now, I also believe that working with Republicans would be damn near impossible. Remember the stimulus? One-third tax cuts? Smaller than liberals wanted? Made all sorts of concessions to conservatives? How many Republican votes? None in the House, three in the Senate (one of whom is no longer a Republican!). Remember health care? Did we go for what liberals want, namely single-payer? No. First we tried a market-based compromise (don't conservatives love those markets?) called the public option, which is all about competition. That was already a compromise, already a concession to the right. Then it turned out we couldn't pass that, so it was just axed outright, a further concession to the right, and 0 GOP Senate votes. And probably 0 House GOP votes. They're not playing ball. We can't compromise enough to make them happy. Jeff, we're passing the centrist legislation you want, and they're still not happy, because none of them are even center-right anymore! They're just hard-core obstructionists. To get GOP votes, we would need to enact hard-core Republican policies. And sure, I mean, Clinton was a "success," if you want to call him that, and he took a fairly moderate course, but he's not much of a success for us on the left, he's mainly a disappointment who managed to keep the Reagan-era badness at bay for eight years and of whom we are very fond, but who didn't really do much. As for the question of how many Senate moderates/liberals/conservatives there are, I'd say maybe 37-39 Conservatives (Republicans minus Snowe, Collins, maybe Brown, maybe one or two others). Liberals, somewhat more than that; most Senate Democrats are genuine liberals, though they aren't Dennis Kucinich or anything. That only leaves fewer than 20 "centrists", which is less than either the conservative or the liberal wing.
Gawain: Scott Brown is not a conservative, at least not in Massachusetts he was not (though I expect he will be perfectly obstructionist in the Senate). Isolated incidents do happen; turnout was low, the electorate approved of Obama, etc. etc. I don't think the country ever shifted that far to the right, at least not under Bush; he ran in 2000 as a "compassionate conservative" moderate, though that was bullshit and everyone on the left, at least, knew it (I suspect those on the right did so as well, and only the moderates were hoodwinked; and after all, he lost!). His popularity decayed at a constant pace throughout his term, but he managed to get re-elected on the strength of his 40-point bounce from September 11th. And even that election might not've been utterly legit, and was certainly razor-thin. And you can call Bush a non-conservative if you want to, but defining conservativism by spending is just outdated and outmoded. Every time conservatives get elected, spending and deficits go up, not down, so at this point it is reasonable to assume that all the deficit-hawks are just looking for something to complain and criticize about. None of them complained when Bush did it, so if Bush wasn't conservative, neither is anyone else in this country (except, maybe, liberals?!). Did we shift back left? Well, Obama ran as probably the most liberal Democratic candidate since LBJ, though few paid attention to that. The public option continues to be popular in polls. And what does it really mean to "shift" anyway? Our government's policies have shifted, a lot. Most voters aren't really ideologues of any variety.
Honestly, I agree with Paul Krugman that the vast majority of current Democratic political trouble can be summed up in two words: the job market. 'Cause honestly, I don't get what else voters are angry about. Oh, maybe the appearance of corporatism in the Administration. Well, first of all, people only get mad about that when the job market sucks, which it does, so they do; secondly, corporatism is, uh, a conservative/Republican kind of thing. Anti-corporatism is called Progressive (you know, like Teddy Roosevelt Progressive). It's certainly a major plank of liberalism. So if people are mad because of all the corporatism, doesn't that just mean Obama-tachi should get more liberal? [note: -tachi is Japanese, it's basically a pluralizer, so Obama-tachi is basically the Obama Admin. Bush-tachi would be Bushies.] More aggressively, demagoguically, anti-corporatistly, Huey Long-esquely, liberal? And, of course, fixing the job market also requires some good old-fashioned FDR-style fiscal stimulus (oh wait, we can't call it stimulus! the jobs bill!). So as best I can tell, the remedies to the two major sources of discontent, especially among so-called "centrist" voters, both involve aggressive liberalism. Why again are we moving to the center? So the economy will just keep getting worse and worse and bankers continue to loot us? That doesn't sound like a recipe for success from a policy or a politics standpoint.
No comments:
Post a Comment