If the base is really so wary, how exactly is Mr. Giuliani so far ahead in the polls?

The fact is, the base is already fairly comfortable with Mr. Giuliani and is quite seriously considering his candidacy. ~Ryan “Blame The Christians” Sager

Mr. Sager’s “argument” here is a good example of a habit that a lot of activists and pundits on the right have: whatever it is that you believe and desire, “the base” somehow magically always believes and desires the same thing.  Hugh Hewitt is always talking about what “the base” wants, when he actually means to say, “what I, Hugh Hewitt, want.”  Many a socially conservative pundit will cluck his tongue about the “sophistication” of social conservative voters, when what I suspect he is basing this statement on is his own sense that he is a social conservative and a sophisticated voter and therefore other social conservatives must be similarly complex in their approaches to voting.  More than any of us like to admit it, political observers will substitute what we know or what we think we know for explanations of what is motivating other people.  To some degree, this is unavoidable, since we are alll bound up in our own contingent perspectives and have a hard time forgetting that other people are not necessarily viewing things as we do.  When this method is employed for obviously polemical purposes, however, as Mr. Sager has been employing it here, it becomes rather grimly self-serving.  Even being self-serving would be less of a problem if it were at least based on something more substantial than these ridiculously early polls. 

We are familiar with the politicians’ method of pretending to speak for “the American people,” and we’re all used to ignoring what they have to say on this score, but on the right we are still inclined to listen very seriously when someone begins speaking in hushed tones about “the base.”  Perhaps because the party leadership and talking heads have so assiduously ignored most ordinary folks on so many other their major policy decisions (e.g., immigration, trade, foreign policy, etc.) or simply paid mostly lip service to their socially conservative values, there is some desire to overcompensate by constantly gesturing towards the constituents whom they routinely ignore on almost everything that matters.  Still, you’d think we’d just received a prophect revelation the way some people fall all over themselves trying to scrutinise the true intentions of “the base.”  Just watch the haruspices fumble with the bird entrails that are polling results to divine the appropriate conclusion!  Of course, you, the pundit or activist, haven’t necessarily surveyed “the base” yourself, nor do you have some automatic telepathic connection to all other conservatives, but you just know (because it’s so obvious!) that “the base” agrees with your position.  That everyone on either side of every question is confident that this claim of support from “the base” is true might begin to inspire doubt that “the base” even exists and is actually just a figment of pundits’ imaginations. 

Even though it would normally be considered perilous and unwise to base an interpretation of the state of the GOP on preliminary polling ten months before the first primary, quite a few people are popping up to tell us how the rise of the Terrible Trio and Giuliani’s popularity show us that everything has changed.  The rise of the “metro” Republican, instead of being stunning proof that the party establishment is once again foisting a bunch of unpopular elites and Northeasterners on their constituents quite against their will, is taken as proof of a new “trend” in GOP politics.  There is, of course, nothing new about the GOP establishment imposing bad but well-connected candidates on the party.  That is what the GOP establishment does–it can do no other without losing its essential self.  Conservatives have just lived through six years of the results of that same practice when Mr. Bush was made the prohibitive favourite early on.  Unlike 1999, however, the “frontrunner” in the polls has not received the blessing of the overwhelming majority of party honchos.  Giuliani boosters would have us believe that his numbers in the low 30s (rather comparable to Liddy Dole’s 27% or so around this time in ’99) show that the party faithful are going for him even when the leadership is not.  If so, this would be a rather shocking change in Republican practice.  It is the case that GOP voters do tend to follow where the party leadership takes them (whether it is to follow Dole off an electoral cliff or to follow Bush to Iraq), which makes Giuliani’s lack of support from those leaders a clear sign that he will ultimately not go very far.  Even so, why anyone should wish to repeat the undemocratic anointing of a mediocrity, such as the GOP experienced in ’99-’00, I will never understand.  Yet to listen to some tell it, the field of three has already been determined.  The early polling for Giuliani is being taken as “proof” that the traditional leaders of social and religious conservatives no longer have the same influence they once did, which works very nicely with Mr. Sager’s story of a social conservatism in decline.  Here’s Sager:

And these gatekeepers are becoming increasingly irrelevant in a party that wants to find its way out of the political wilderness and, to some extent, blames the more extreme elements of the religious right for leading it into the woods in the first place.  

This is Mr. Sager’s “base”-invoking rhetoric at its laziest.  The “party” doesn’t blame the “more extreme elements of the religious right” for electoral defeat–Ryan Sager does.  In fact, whenever you see him make a generalisation about what the GOP wants or needs today, it is usually a statement of what Sager believes and not much more than that. 

In fact, however, there are actual conservative voters whose apparent preferences for Giuliani have nothing to do with their “comfort” with Giuliani and everything to do with celebrity, ignorance and misconceptions about who and what Giuliani is.  Giuliani the pro-life evangelical sounds like a formidable candidate, and for a sizeable percentage of voters (roughly 15% or so) Giuliani evidently must be pro-life and evangelical because, well, he just has to be.  What it means for the rise of secular and “libertarian” forces in the GOP that many of the people who back Giuliani may actually think they are backing a pro-life evangelical candidate is not something that Mr. Sager would want to have to talk about.  If I were Sager, I would probably also say that the polling is “unambiguous” (even though there is rarely anything more ambiguous than early primary polling), because if I were Ryan Sager I would have to believe that this is true. 

Mr. Sager’s “discovery” that “the base” is comfortable with Giuliani fits very nicely with his other “discoveries” that the GOP is dominated by religious maniacs (unbeknownst to all but Andrew Sullivan and Heather Mac Donald) and that it was this supposedly overflowing religious mania (not outrageous deficit spending, the war, catastrophic incompetence and, well, failure in almost everything) that doomed the GOP in ’06.  Strange that someone like Harold Ford could come very close to winning in a strongly Republican state by talking up his religiosity and traditional upbringing–Tennesseans must simply have been driven towards him by their disgust with that Bible-thumping theocrat Bob Corker.  Yeah.  It’s a good thing that Michelle “Fool for Christ” Bachmann didn’t win election to the House, or you might begin to think that religious conservatives aren’t that much of an electoral liability after all. Oh, wait, she did get elected.  In Minnesota.  But obviously a big social-con such as Marilyn Musgrave would get swept out in the “libertarian West”…oh, wait, no, she’s still there.  Mr. Sager is confident about all of these “discoveries” because they also fit very nicely with his own policy views and factional preferences, which are decidedly not those of a religious conservative.  After the year when Democrats felt compelled to fall over themselves in talking about God (and a year in which, separately, economic populism triumphed all over the place), Mr. Sager is selling secular “libertarian”-conservatism.  No wonder he is clutching on to the hem of Giuliani’s dress–he needs to find some sign that his kind of politics is not destined for complete marginalisation.  How better than to go on the offense and declare that his rivals are finished and their time has ended?  Religious conservatives are in full retreat, he declares to us.  “There are no American soldiers in Baghdad,” said another equally confident propagandist.  

Mr. Sager’s preferred policies and loyalties wouldn’t be as much of an issue, except that he has decided to make virtually everything he writes these days part of this unfolding narrative that religious/social conservatism has destroyed the Republican Party and he has chosen to tell this particularly unconvincing story without much in the way of evidence.  Since virtually nothing much that might be confused with a social conservative agenda was ever passed or signed into law in the last six years, it is difficult to understand what that ever had to do with Republican defeat.  This is not a problem for Mr. Sager’s arguments, since his “blame the Christians” rhetoric benefits from its sheer vagueness: social-cons are to blame because, well, they just are and everyone knows it (but you should still buy my book!).  Hence the importance of Rudy’s early lead in the polls–it proves that “the base” is headed Sager’s way and that “the base” agrees with his diagnosis about what’s ailing the party.  What could be a better indication that the rank-and-file share Sager’s weariness with social conservatism than the full-on embrace of someone like Giuliani, right?  Presumably the early “embrace” of Joe Lieberman by a plurality of Democratic voters in early ’03 reflected their abiding love of the Iraq war and their conviction that unrealistic hawkishness was the wave of the future.  That would pretty well describe the Democratic Party rank-and-file of the last three years, wouldn’t you say?  It’s not as if there would be some revolt of “the base” later on in the year that would propel a staunchly antiwar candidate to the front of the pack!  How could that happen?  After all, the polling was unambiguous, right?