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New Candidate, Same Old Song
Mark Strichertz, author of “Why the Democrats are Blue: Secular Liberalism and the Decline of the People’s Party.” writes today at NRO that the “new” candidate, Obama, is singing the same old song for the Dems:
The party continues to deny pro-life Democrats from reaching a national audience, the most famous victim being former governor Robert Casey of Pennsylvania. Also, Obama, seemingly the most tolerant of the party’s major candidates, does not embrace diversity when it comes to social and cultural issues. Besides his unwavering support for abortion rights, he struggled to connect with rural Iowa voters: “[a]t many stops,” the New York Times reported, “he would face questions from conservative Democrats about gun control and immigration and his answers did not always meet the approval of voters.” As Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg has shown, the same cultural disapproval from working-class and rural voters sank the candidacies of Al Gore and John Kerry.
A final claim has been that Obama attracted new groups of voters — the young, independents, (liberal) Republicans, and altogether new voters. As Joe Conason wrote, such voters “all actually showed up to help him win. His politics of inclusion, which has sometimes sounded ephemeral and ethereal, suddenly seems to be rooted in reality.” Conason’s words echoed those of the late Fred Dutton, the unheralded founder of the McGovern coalition and key actor on the McGovern Commission. Dutton had been impressed with Gene McCarthy’s showing with such voters in the 1968 Democratic race. In April 1969, Dutton wrote a confidential memo in which he urged that the party form ties with “younger voters, black citizens, and college-educated suburbanites — three constituencies on which the Democratic Party must build as the lower-middle class, blue-collar vote erodes.”
Dutton called this electoral alliance a Social Change coalition, and he admitted later that the coalition had been a dud. “It might not have been politically shrewd,” he told me in 2004. “What surprised me was that young people didn’t vote until they were 35 years old. And black leaders talked a good game [about delivering the black vote] but they didn’t walk a good game.”
Dutton might have added one other fact: his liberal coalition was smaller than that of his chief rival, Ronald Reagan. (The two men had become nemeses during their time on the University of California Board of Regents in the 1970s; at one meeting, Governor Reagan called Dutton a “liar.”) More than a third of Americans identify as conservatives, while only a fifth identify as liberal. As Democratic strategists William Galston and Elaine Kamarck have noted, Democrats have to three-fifths of independent voters to win. And few Democrats have managed to pull off that feat; John Kerry couldn’t. Although he won more than half of the independent vote, his vote totals weren’t enough.
So it has gone for Democratic presidential nominees since 1972. Most have inspired enthusiasm and even devotion among the party’s base. But they don’t do the same for everyone else. It’s an old story, told time and time again.