George H.W. Bush won the White House not because of the tawdry Willie Horton ad but because he convinced the country he was the only candidate ready to be president in an unknown post-cold-war world [bold mine-DL]. ~Jonathan Darman

The post-Cold War world was so unknown in 1988 that it did not yet exist.  I know some people like to credit the voting public with wisdom and common sense–don’t ask me why–but I don’t know many who attribute to them the powers of prophecy.  What’s very odd about this claim, besides being so wrong that it subverts much of Darman’s argument, is that Bush ran for re-election as the only candidate ready to be President in the changed post-Cold War world and lost.  Perot factored into it in an important way, of course, but what one finds in the ’92 result is the public’s indifference to the appeal to the extensive foreign policy experience Bush insisted made him more fit for the office.  That doesn’t mean that America is not in some respects still a center-right country, even though we are constantly defining down what center-right means, but it does mean that Darman gives the public far too much credit for making its presidential choices for substantive reasons, or at the very least Darman gets the reasons for those choices completely wrong.  While we’re at it, Nixon did not win re-election because “he offered an effective alternative to the New Deal consensus that government could help mankind be its better self,” since his first term offered nothing of the kind, and his win in ’68 was an anti-incumbency victory every bit as much as Carter’s was in ’76. 

Finally, if Darman were right about the electorate and past elections, he could not seriously conclude that the Democrats should try to fashion a new center-left consensus in the closing weeks of the election, since the lesson he has just tried to teach them reinforces the argument that Democrats cannot win presidential elections without playing it safe, hedging on their progressivism and running to the center as quickly as possible.  Indeed, to the annoyance of the netroots and many other progressive activists, Obama consistently ran a more modestly progressive campaign in the primaries compared to Clinton and Edwards and has tacked still more to “the center” since he secured the nomination.  Obama’s own campaign has already accepted the idea that a robust, full-throated progressive presidential campaign cannot win in the United States, and he probably owes his small lead to the recognition of this political reality.  What Darman also does not take into account, of course, is that it was precisely Rovian base-mobilization strategy and purely symbolic culture war tactics that kept Bush the Younger in office, and it has also been the only thing that has made McCain a viable candidate over the summer months.  The evidence is hard to ignore: as McCain’s campaign became more trivial and more obsessed with the symbolism and politics of cultural grievance, the better it did.  There is a certain annoying quality to the oft-heard complaint that Democratic policy positions are obviously better and more in the interests of the electorate, since this is not always obvious and frequently not true, but this complaint also misses the point: elections are not decided by the relative merits of policy proposals, but by salesmanship, slogans and affected bonhomie.  If there is one thing that ties together Democratic nominees across the last three decades, it is their relatively greater fascination with earnest wonkery, and it is this that explains many Democratic defeats over the years.