Obama’s Vanishing Base
Daniel Larison has a very interesting post up about the real reason for the president’s plummeting approval ratings. It has less to do with a conservative resurgence or alienated moderates than with discouragement among the Democratic base:
When we look at Gallup’s approval numbers and compare them with the presidential exit poll from 2008, we can begin to identify which demographic groups have disproportionately gone from being Obama voters to disapproving of his performance. By far, most of the largest slippage between November 2008 and now has come among core Democratic constituencies: women, liberals, and unmarried and secular voters.
Karl Rove was wrong about many things, but he was right that the way to win elections is to make sure more of your base than the other side’s base goes to the polls on election day. When your core voters are demoralized — as the Democrats’ were in 1994 and the Republicans’ were in 2008 — you lose. The polling is even worse for Obama than it would be if the GOP were making great gains among moderates, whose propensity to vote, and to vote for a given party, is limited. (That’s why they’re moderates.) Note that there are two reasons why a base gets discouraged: it doesn’t only happen when a president refuses to go far enough in his party’s ideological direction, it also happens when he goes as far as he can and the results are disappointing. Bush gave Republican voters most of what they wanted — lower taxes, more wars, and (however reluctantly) two antiabortion Supreme Court justices, as well as an effort at “privatizing” Social Security — but when none of this fixed the country’s problems, the GOP began to lose its grip, even on its own voters. Obama has not done what the Left would like in some arenas, particularly in foreign policy, and what he has done in healthcare hasn’t been working out the way the Left had hoped. The Republicans will feel similar dissapointment whenever the next get power. Both sides expect from politics something that politics cannot give.
I always find political maxims such as Rove’s statement above about making sure more or your base turns out than the other guy’s to be kind of meaningless since they are mostly if not totally uncontrollable. To me at least THE big determinant is always the question of what alternative does the electorate have other than your candidate?
I rather doubt, for instance, that McCain didn’t have at least a pretty good lock on the Republican base, esp. once he shotgun married Ms. Palin and thus swept up good bit of the fundamentalist voters who’d been hanging back. And while it still might be said that Obama won because he just energized more of the Dem. base, he also *had* to get moderates and so the only really valid equation saying why he won is that in general McCain stunk as an alternative to him, period. Any other equation, while perhaps looking valid, is still crucially unfinished and thus wrong.
I have a feeling we may see much of this tested because my radar at least sees none other than Jeb Bush on the horizon, and what a base-energizer he’ll be. Mark my words, Jeb is a’comin.
Obama’s base has figured out early on what it took Bush’s base seven years to realize: that the looters and thieves in the Wall Street financial sector are the powers really running the administration, heading up both parties’ brain trust, and setting the political and governmental agenda to serve their own economic agenda.
These people, including the bureacrats who serve them, are all essentially money-worshipping nihilists who pretend to have an altruistic agenda revolving around the imposition of Big Government and “progressivism,” (the Bushcons called it “compassionate conservatism”), but in reality, they’re are all far too warped and narcissistic to accomplish anything but self-serving chaos. Some are purely cynical, others are so nuts, they have confused their own malignancy with benevolence, and actually believe themselves to be serving a higher “good.”
Big Government and Big Capital have always been in the business of epic swindle, but to accomplish this most effectively, they must convince masses of useful idiots that they’re on the side of the angels. They accomplish this by first convincing themselves.
Metaphorically speaking, Satan has many tricks and guises, and plays these squirming toads and their dupes like a fiddle. On the other hand, they want to be played, so I guess it’s a partnership in evil.
“…doesn’t only happen when a president refuses to go far enough in his party’s ideological direction, it also happens when he goes as far as he can and the results are disappointing.”
This is a crucial insight, only the results were not just disappointing, they were sufficiently awful to expose to large numbers of suddenly thoughtful republicans what a bankrupt and blundering charade their party is, and for the most part has been since the end of the cold war. Ron Paul, whom the party has shunned because he is principled, and the Tea Party people, whom the party is trying to co-op because they are inchoate, reflect this awakening.
Our politics have been rendered absurd for reasons the historians will have to fathom. Barack Obama, an uncommonly unqualified person to be president, is president today only because the republicans left their rudder and screws on the reef. One year into office, Obama is on the republican boat giving orders to the wheel house like something is still connected only now he has taken on 2500 pages of health care garbage. His support is actually much less than it appears if you discount the people who feel sorry for him.
Can we all at least sit back and be thankful that Bush didn’t succeed at “privatizing” Social Security? Yes, the program is a mess, and it’s going to run out of money, but how bad would things be now if seniors were depending on the stock market for their dividends right now? The Bush privatization plan seems to be the only thing that could have gone worse.
If Social Security had been privatized it would only have affected people entering the system, not those already vested and claiming benefits. Still, your larger point is correct, tying social spending programs to the market only makes sense if non-psychopathic adults are administering the funds and the market is not the plaything of distant relatives of Ali Baba.