The problem with Bush the moderate.
There's something rather man-bites-dog about the WaPo's headline: Bush Is Losing Hispanics' Support, Polls Show; Surveys Find the Immigration Debate Is Also Alienating White Conservatives. But, for me, this graf really gets at the heart of the problem:
A survey of 800 registered Hispanic voters conducted May 11-15 by the nonpartisan Latino Coalition showed that Democrats were viewed as better able to handle immigration issues than Republicans, by nearly 3 to 1: 50 percent to 17 percent. Pitting the Democrats against Bush on immigration issues produced a 2 to 1 Democratic advantage, 45 percent to 22 percent.
By formally staking out a (genuinely I think, except for a few showy details, like the National Guard border deployment) moderate position on border security and immigration, and chiding far-right xenophobia on the subject, Bush may have improved his overall poll position a little bit from the previous week. He reminded Andrew Sullivan of the Bush he thought we were getting in 2001. Steve Soto genuinely approved of Bush's speech. According to a recent survey, majorities of Americans share his basic take on the issue.
And -- not surprisingly -- that's reflected in Bush's numbers among Hispanics, who prefer him to his party and who, regardless of which 2004 exit poll result you believe -- have been trending strongly Republican since the 1996 election. But while, on this issue at least, Bush deserves his margin, he's still tied in popular opinion to his nutso party. Just like Clinton being a "third way" Democrat didn't change the fact that he was irreparably tied to the party of liberals and its values among voters who dislike liberal values, Bush is tied to the wackiness of the GOP coalition. The big difference is that the Bush White House has done absolutely nothing over the past 6 years to challenge his base's assumptions in a serious way -- which probably explains why the GOP base and blogs have reacted with such venum to the perceived condescension of Bush's recent centrist chidings.
That's the essential problem for the GOP. Whatever Glenn Reynolds and the rightwing blogs say, the Democratic activist base is pretty damn moderate today on policy, even those who don't like the Clintons personally. The base-popular politicians in the Democratic Party -- Russ Feingold, Eliot Spitzer, John Edwards, Howard Dean, Wes Clark -- are all essentially policy moderates. The GOP activists, by contrast, aren't moderate at all. And neither are the pols. High-ranking elected Republicans still say that cutting taxes raises public revenue; that hiring illegal immigrants is morally equivalent to slavery; that constitutionally outlawing gay marriage (always in election years) would do something to solve the nation's moral problems. That's not to say that the less-informed non-activist parts of the GOP coalition (who, for instance, seem to favour Giuliani, or at least McCain, for the 2008 nomination) aren't relatively moderate. But the activists want their Mexican border fence and mass deportations, their excalating war with the Jihadis, their constitutional ban on gay marriage, and they want it all now. And hopefully, come 2007, they'll demand a politician who eschews Bush's weasle words and swears in no uncertain terms this time that he'll deliver it all to them.
Bush campaigned and won election in 2000 as a centrist, on the grounds that everybody in politics was a centrist, that being moderate was the only way to win, that bases were meant to be tamed. Granted that, as applied to Republicans, "moderate" essentially means favouring business interests over Buchananite conservative interests, with little relevance for the public interest. But even within those iffy constraints, the Bushies squandered their moderation, did nothing to discipline the GOP's worse instincts or prepare the base to deal with the reality of how politics was going to have to adjust to demographic trends, like the growth of the Hispanic population. And now a party in which Bush stands out as a moderate -- a failed one at that -- and whose white conservative base is completely used to being pandered to ideologically, is a party in deep shit. Starting, but probably not ending, with the Hispanic vote.
A survey of 800 registered Hispanic voters conducted May 11-15 by the nonpartisan Latino Coalition showed that Democrats were viewed as better able to handle immigration issues than Republicans, by nearly 3 to 1: 50 percent to 17 percent. Pitting the Democrats against Bush on immigration issues produced a 2 to 1 Democratic advantage, 45 percent to 22 percent.
By formally staking out a (genuinely I think, except for a few showy details, like the National Guard border deployment) moderate position on border security and immigration, and chiding far-right xenophobia on the subject, Bush may have improved his overall poll position a little bit from the previous week. He reminded Andrew Sullivan of the Bush he thought we were getting in 2001. Steve Soto genuinely approved of Bush's speech. According to a recent survey, majorities of Americans share his basic take on the issue.
And -- not surprisingly -- that's reflected in Bush's numbers among Hispanics, who prefer him to his party and who, regardless of which 2004 exit poll result you believe -- have been trending strongly Republican since the 1996 election. But while, on this issue at least, Bush deserves his margin, he's still tied in popular opinion to his nutso party. Just like Clinton being a "third way" Democrat didn't change the fact that he was irreparably tied to the party of liberals and its values among voters who dislike liberal values, Bush is tied to the wackiness of the GOP coalition. The big difference is that the Bush White House has done absolutely nothing over the past 6 years to challenge his base's assumptions in a serious way -- which probably explains why the GOP base and blogs have reacted with such venum to the perceived condescension of Bush's recent centrist chidings.
That's the essential problem for the GOP. Whatever Glenn Reynolds and the rightwing blogs say, the Democratic activist base is pretty damn moderate today on policy, even those who don't like the Clintons personally. The base-popular politicians in the Democratic Party -- Russ Feingold, Eliot Spitzer, John Edwards, Howard Dean, Wes Clark -- are all essentially policy moderates. The GOP activists, by contrast, aren't moderate at all. And neither are the pols. High-ranking elected Republicans still say that cutting taxes raises public revenue; that hiring illegal immigrants is morally equivalent to slavery; that constitutionally outlawing gay marriage (always in election years) would do something to solve the nation's moral problems. That's not to say that the less-informed non-activist parts of the GOP coalition (who, for instance, seem to favour Giuliani, or at least McCain, for the 2008 nomination) aren't relatively moderate. But the activists want their Mexican border fence and mass deportations, their excalating war with the Jihadis, their constitutional ban on gay marriage, and they want it all now. And hopefully, come 2007, they'll demand a politician who eschews Bush's weasle words and swears in no uncertain terms this time that he'll deliver it all to them.
Bush campaigned and won election in 2000 as a centrist, on the grounds that everybody in politics was a centrist, that being moderate was the only way to win, that bases were meant to be tamed. Granted that, as applied to Republicans, "moderate" essentially means favouring business interests over Buchananite conservative interests, with little relevance for the public interest. But even within those iffy constraints, the Bushies squandered their moderation, did nothing to discipline the GOP's worse instincts or prepare the base to deal with the reality of how politics was going to have to adjust to demographic trends, like the growth of the Hispanic population. And now a party in which Bush stands out as a moderate -- a failed one at that -- and whose white conservative base is completely used to being pandered to ideologically, is a party in deep shit. Starting, but probably not ending, with the Hispanic vote.
4 Comments:
"...constitutionally outlawing gay marriage (always in election years)..."
Hey, why not outlaw it ONLY in election years, or, better yet, on election day itself? Gays could be married 364 days of every other year, but not that one day, the Tuesday after the first Monday in November. What they would be that day I don't know, but those "values voters" for whom this is a big deal could spend those days complaining and campaigning against those sinning, unmarried folks.
The rest of the time, they'd be required to shut the hell up.
How's that idea, eh?
Ed
That's a great idea. But I have one caveat: How about the day after election day? If it's election day, then probably there'd end up being all sorts of sense-of-the-nation propositions on the ballet "We hereby declare that we strongly disapprove of the moral decline of this country" to bring out the fundies to the polls. That's bad for Democrats.
If it's the day after, then the right can perpetually nurse its grievances, just like it likes. And no harm done to the rest of us.
Hey I resent that, Feingold is a liberal not a moderate.
Feingold is a political liberal but a policy moderate imo.
I say that because I'm a moderate and I always assumed he was a big lib until I read his vote history and positions, which are throroughly mainstream (or, for the most part, should be).
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