Rise of the Obamacons

This from The Economist. This trend was very much apparent when I was in the U.S., and John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as running mate and the nasty (and scatty) nature of the Republica campaign seems to have confirmed the trend of conservatives and libertarians shifting their support to Barack Obama.

IN “W.”, his biopic about his Yale classmate, Oliver Stone details Colin Powell’s agonies during George Bush’s first term. Throughout the film Mr Powell repeatedly raises doubts about the invasion of Iraq—and is repeatedly overruled by the ghoulish trio of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Karl Rove. In one of the final scenes, with his direst warnings proving correct, Mr Powell turns to Mr Cheney and delivers a heartfelt “Fuck you”.

The real Colin Powell used more diplomatic language in endorsing Barack Obama on October 19th, but the impact was much the same. Mr Obama is a “transformational figure”, he mildly said, and his old friend John McCain had erred in choosing a neophyte as a running-mate. But you would have to be naive not to see the endorsement as a verdict on the Bush years.

Mr Powell is now a four-star general in America’s most surprising new army: the Obamacons. The army includes other big names such as Susan Eisenhower, Dwight’s granddaughter, who introduced Mr Obama at the Democratic National Convention and Christopher Buckley, the son of the conservative icon William Buckley, who complains that he has not left the Republican Party: the Republican Party has left him. Chuck Hagel, a Republican senator from Nebraska and one-time bosom buddy of Mr McCain has also flirted heavily with the movement, though he has refrained from issuing an official endorsement.

The biggest brigade in the Obamacon army consists of libertarians, furious with Mr Bush’s big-government conservatism, worried about his commitment to an open-ended “war on terror”, and disgusted by his cavalier way with civil rights. There are two competing “libertarians for Obama” web sites. CaféPress is even offering a “libertarian for Obama” lawn sign for $19.95. Larry Hunter, who helped to devise Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America in 1994, thinks that Mr Obama can free America from the grip of the “zombies” who now run the Republican Party.

But the army has many other brigades, too: repentant neocons such as Francis Fukuyama, legal scholars such as Douglas Kmiec, and conservative talk-show hosts such as Michael Smerconish. And it is picking up unexpected new recruits as the campaign approaches its denouement. Many disillusioned Republicans hoped that Mr McCain would provide a compass for a party that has lost its way, but now feel that the compass has gone haywire. Kenneth Adelman, who once described the invasion of Iraq as a “cakewalk”, decided this week to vote for Mr Obama mainly because he regards Sarah Palin as “not close to being acceptable in high office”.

The rise of the Obamacons is more than a reaction against Mr Bush’s remodelling of the Republican Party and Mr McCain’s desperation: there were plenty of disillusioned Republicans in 2004 who did not warm to John Kerry. It is also a positive verdict on Mr Obama. For many conservatives, Mr Obama embodies qualities that their party has abandoned: pragmatism, competence and respect for the head rather than the heart. Mr Obama’s calm and collected response to the turmoil on Wall Street contrasted sharply with Mr McCain’s grandstanding.

Much of Mr Obama’s rhetoric is strikingly conservative, even Reaganesque. He preaches the virtues of personal responsibility and family values, and practises them too. He talks in uplifting terms about the promise of American life. His story also appeals to conservatives: it holds the possibility of freeing America from its racial demons, proving that the country is a race-blind meritocracy and, in the process, bankrupting a race-grievance industry that has produced the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

Farewell the Reagan Republicans

An interesting feature of the US Presidential election campaign has been the extent to which the 'Reagan coalition' has been falling apart, and how the Republican Party has lurched ever further to the far right. This is despite the fact that John McCain's best hope was to steer the party towards the centre and try and capture the large number of 'Clinton Democrats' who remained wary of Barack Obama until Sarah Palin appeared on the scene. It is also why conservatives are jumping ship en masse, with Colin Powell the most prominent recent example of what is becoming quite a long list.

This analysis from Forbes magazine - a conservative, pro-business media outlet, whose owner, Steve Forbes, twice ran for the Republican Party leadership - points to the longer term problems this is presenting for the Republican Party in the US. In pointing to the growing number of business leaders going the way of Obama and the Democrats, it had me wondering where Rupert Murdoch is politically now, and whether that has implications for the future of FOX News after 2009.

R.I.P. Reagan Revolution
Dan Gerstein 10.22.08, 12:01 AM ET

As a student of politics, I have been watching this campaign with one eye on the historic prospects of Barack Obama and one eye on the tenuous future of his Republican opponents.

I have been particularly fascinated by how the Republicans plan to begin rehabilitating the brand that President Bush and his allies have shredded over the last eight years, reconnect with their sunny Reagan roots and prepare themselves to compete again for the determinative center of the electorate.

Judging from the disturbing developments of the last two months, the verdict seems clear. Forget the self-reckoning and self-repairing--the Republicans seem intent on self-immolation. Indeed, instead of trying to work itself out of the deep electoral hole that Bush and company created, the GOP has apparently opted to apply the drill-baby-drill mantra to its own political fortunes--and, improbably, find ways to narrow the party's appeal to the swing voters they have done so much to alienate during the Bush era.

I'm not talking about what the hateful yahoos who are attending rallies for the Republican ticket are yelling (albeit after being egged on by a flurry of indefensible attacks by the McCain campaign and its surrogates). I'm talking about what Republican leaders and elected officials are actually saying and doing. All of which, taken together, suggests that the GOP of the moment is now far closer to being the party of Joe McCarthy than John McCain, and explains why Colin Powell and many other responsible Republicans are sending increasingly urgent distress signals over the sinking McCain ship.

We have seen the party that gave us Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Reagan nominate a woman for vice president who could not answer an interviewer's relatively gentle question about what news sources she regularly reads. This is not a matter of class or gender, but rather seriousness and credibility, which Sarah Palin lost with many voters who were willing to give her a fair shake the minute she claimed that seeing Russia from her state was a foreign policy credential.

We have seen Palin go on to falsely accuse her Democratic opponent of "palling around with terrorists." The most outrageous thing about this assertion is not the gross exaggeration of Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers, but the shameful, purposeful use of the plural: "terrorists." These are the kinds of loony accusations we are used to hearing from members of the ultraconservative John Birch Society, not running mates of John McCain.

We have seen one of McCain's campaign co-chairman, former Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating, use the racially loaded term "guy of the street" to try to paint Obama as extreme to white America. This about a black man who grew up in the suburbs of Hawaii, graduated from Columbia University, was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, taught constitutional law for 12 years and was attacked as an elitist by Republicans for talking about the price of arugula in Iowa? He is about as "street" as the late William F. Buckley, Jr.

Just last Friday, we saw a Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, Michelle Bachmann, explicitly attack Obama and his wife as "anti-American" and call on the media to investigate members of Congress to "find out if they are pro-America or anti-America." Then Palin repeated this patriotism-questioning line at a rally in North Carolina, saying she was glad to be in a part of the country that was "pro-America." One has to wonder what made these women think that this was acceptable in the United States of 2008?

And most recently, as if the overt hints of McCarthyism were not enough, McCain and his allies are now openly calling Obama a socialist because he wants to raise the top tax brackets back to their Clinton-era levels (when the country enjoyed the greatest peacetime expansion in our history) and provide a cut in the payroll tax to middle class workers.

For more see here.

Conservatives for Obama?

"If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism."
Ronald Reagan, interview with Reason magazine, 1975.

An intriguing article by Bruce Bartlett in The New Republic suggests that there may be more support among conservatives for Democrat presumptive presidential nominee Barack Obama than might be first suspected.

This came via Andrew Sullivan, one of the more prominent bloggers to have gone from being a Republican supporter to an Obama supporter.

It is well known that there are a lot of conservatives unhappy with the Bush administration and the Republican Party, and their unhappiness remains with John McCain. These include supporters of the Libertarian Party led by former Republican Bob Barr, or those still supporting Ron Paul's ongoing campaign for the Republican nomination. The gist of this unhappiness is, as Bartlett observes, "they don't much care for the Iraq war or the federal government's vast expansion over the last seven-and-a-half years."

But Obama? He is criticised by some conservatives for being the most liberal senator in Washington, Jimmy Carter Mark II, a high taxer, an elitist etc.

The gist of the points made in Bartlett's article are:

• Withdrawing from Iraq and scaling back the PATRIOT Act are key goal of libertarian conservatives, and Barack Obama has always been the candidate most committed to the first and far more likely than McCain to do the latter;

• He comes across to some as the first Presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan to really believe in the independent capacity of Americans to initiate change for themselves. Whether this would in fact be true in an Obama presidency is another matter, but frankly people still debate that about Ronald Reagan, to decades after his presidency (see e.g. Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan). The point is that, like Reagan, he can rhetorically convey a faith in the better instincts of Americans that doesn't sound like calculated pandering to an interest group or particular constituency;

• His election could trigger a purge at the top of the Republican Party. It took the Democrats over a decade to move from where they were in the Jimmy Carter days to a more centrist and electable position with Bill Clinton. Conservatives like Larry Hunter believe that its time for the same thing to happen to the Republicans: Obama has the potential to "scramble the political deck, break up old alliances, and bring odd bedfellows together in a new coalition."

• From Hunter again (my favourite quote): he views the Republican Party as a "dead, rotting carcass with a few decrepit old leaders stumbling around like zombies in a horror version of Weekend at Bernie's, handcuffed to a corpse." Unless the Republican Party is thoroughly purged of its current leadership, Hunter fears that it "will pollute the political environment to toxic levels and create an epidemic that could damage the country for generations to come."

The parallel to Ronald Reagan is the most interesting one. Reagan's is the most electorally successful, yet enigmatic, presidency of the last three decades. The interest of libertarian conservatives in Obama may be emblematic of a new set of divides from those forged during the Reagan era (conservatives versus liberals), to ones between personal freedom and state control.

If Obama can get US troops out of Iraq, repeal some of the more obnoxious attacks on civil liberties over the last eight years, and actually get some control over the budget deficit, then there's a bit there that libertarian conservatives could like. If his Presidency was in fact 'Jimmy Carter Mark II', the Republicans may come back in 2012 with a better candidate. After all, both Obama and Hillary Clinton were better Democrat candidates than John Kerry was, and that's seen in the primary votes they were both able to attract.


Footnote

For those outside the U.S. who are unaware of just how much Barack Obama has moved from a Presidential candidate to a pop-culture phenomenon, check out this advertisement for a KIA car dealership:

The Age of Reagan

I have just completed reading Sean Wilentz's The Age of Reagan: A History 1974-2008. This was to be my flight back to Australia read, but I got impatient. I finished reading it as a huge storm blew over Bloomington, so there may be a poetic analogy between that storm and the conservative uprising in US politics that is the subject of Wilentz's book.

Wilentz's key point is that just as the period in US history from the Great Depression to 1968 was an era of liberal reform, where Democrats dominated the presidency and those Republican presidents there were, such as Dwight Eisenhower, accepted the underlying premised of New Deal liberalism, the period from the mid-1970s to the present was a conservative era, dominated by Republican presidents, where Democrat presidents such as Bill Clinton had to adjust to conservative rules.

At the centre of this is Ronald Reagan, US President from 1980-1988, who was the standard bearer for conservatism prior to election, and who was the most electorally successful president of his time. The book's structure is complex, as it is not a biography of Reagan but also only partially a history of the period.

I will post further on The Age of Reagan, but it is worth noting the point made by Wilentz, who is personally a liberal democrat by political affiliation, that Ronald Reagan and his era have not been well served by authors. For those on the left, including much of the academy, it is almost as if it is too awful an era to go back to, as it is clearly the period when American liberalism got its most severe caning in the popular mindset and the political sphere. The right, however, don't do honest appraisal of the period, and hence fail to note how some of the failing of Reagan had within them the seeds of today's troubles in American conservatism and the Republican Party.

Well worth a read.

John McCain and the future of the Republicans

Most attention in the U.S. Presidential elections has been given to the Democratic Party, and the wide schism revealed in its support base between supporters of Hillary Clinton (majority of women, Latinos, older voters, lower income, lower average levels of education) and Barack Obama (majority of African-Americans, younger voters, higher income, tertiary educated). It has been cast as “a standoff between the Dukes of Hazzard and the Huxtables” , but its fault lines are pretty clear. This cannot be said for the Republican Party going into the 2008 elections.

John McCain does not bring a strong hand to the election, although the ongoing saga of the Democrat nominee has helped somewhat. There is usually a change in the governing party after eight years of one President holding office. While this was not true in 1988, George Bush gained the presidency with Ronald Reagan having a personal approval rating of about 60%. George W. Bush has a personal approval rating below 30%, and sinking. Even if his approval figures were better, this would be no guarantee against change. Bill Clinton left office with personal approval ratings over 60%, but his Vice-President Al Gore could not defeat the Republicans in 2000.

The position of the Republicans as a party is far worse than that of John McCain as its presumptive Presidential nominee. Having lost control of both the Senate and the House in the 2006 mid-term primaries, they have recently experienced three major losses in special Congressional elections. The most recent loss was in a presumed safe seat in Mississippi, where there was a 20% swing to the Democrats. Several Republican analysts have warned that the Republican ‘brand’ is ‘dog food’, and if it were a product it would be taken off the shelf.

Reasons for this are many and varied, and go well beyond commitment to the War in Iraq. Basically, the Republicans in Congress have been sinking with the Bush presidency, and the sense of malaise and policy failure that surrounds it. The question is where John McCain goes in relation to it.

McCain has some distance from Bush, and has accentuated it in recent times with a speech in New Orleans condemning how Hurricane Katrina was handled in 2005, and a recent speech (sort of) acknowledging the threat of global warming. The question, however, is not simply one of personal style and belief, but goes to the heart of where America’s conservative party wants to be over the next decade.

The question revolves around two axes. One is economic. Conservatives view the fiscal profligacy of the Bush years with horror, as it has combined large and regressive tax cuts (which they would otherwise support) with a big increase in government spending, not just on the war in Iraq, but also on a wide range of social programs. They see that as reversing the ‘Reagan doctrine’ and recreating a culture that all social problems are addressed through more government spending, throwing fiscal conservatism out the window, ad denying them any real point of differentiation from the Democrats. Moreover, the groaning fiscal and trade deficits adversely impact on foreign policy. The recent tax cuts to avert economic recession were described a “Borrowing more money from the Chinese to pay for oil bought from the Saudis.”

The other axis is cultural, or what are also termed ‘faith and values’ issues. McCain has recognized the problems that arise from the Republicans being tied to the evangelical Christian right, particularly with younger voters – he has made thirteen appearances on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which conservative pundits such as Bill O’Reilly would dismiss as a show for “stoned slackers”.

A move to the cultural centre would be to follow what might be termed the ‘Arnie strategy’. As Governor of California, the largest state in the U.S. in both population and economic terms, Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of the nation’s most politically successful Republicans. Schwarzenegger e governs what is otherwise now a Democrat state – even though it is the home state of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan – by recognizing that the social liberalism of the state and aligning this with economic conservatism and pro-business policies.

The centrist ‘Arnie strategy’ appeals to McCain, and makes a lot of sense in an election where the Republicans now have a real opportunity in capturing the vote of Hillary Clinton supporters if Barack Obama is the Democrat nominee and they can position Obama as ‘too liberal’. The catch is that the support base of the Republicans – from Christian lobby groups to influential donors to the bevy of conservative columnists, radio talk show hosts and TV pundits – have run so long and hard on a conservative ‘culture wars’ position that they will feel let down by a Republican nominee who does not align to these values and positions on their favoured ‘hot button’ issues.

The silence of all sides (McCain, Obama, Clinton) on the California Supreme Court decision to overturn the ban on same-sex marriages indicates how tricky these issues are becoming. They are much more complex for the Republicans than the Democrats, since making a big issue of such decisions in order to mobilise the conservative base has been the sine qua non of Republican politics for decades.

McCain’s dilemma, and how he addresses it, will influence the shape of conservative politics worldwide for some time to come, just as the ‘Reagan revolution’ has been a defining influence globally for the last 30 years.


PS: To get a sense of how hard it may be to retrain Republican supporters from well-established habits, see conservative talk-show host Kevin James’s responses to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews on whether talking to political enemies is the same as appeasement, which apparently ‘energized’ Hitler in 1939.