Suppose you were a person who didn't want to think too hard; and suppose you were a centrist pundit for one of the nation’s leading newspapers. But I repeat myself.
Your assignment at this point in the political cycle—still a year away from next summer’s nominating conventions—is to survey the field of candidates and find them all lacking. The reason? None of them are saying just what you think they should be saying. Your gut tells you that the ideal candidate is one who resembles that paragon of calm reason and moderation: the centrist pundit!
You will see, as early as it is, a distinct threat on the horizon. There are candidates competing to lead the Democratic Party who want to pull the party to the far left. You must sound the alarm. These candidates will commit to stances that will scare away moderate voters. As they pander to the activist wing of their party, they are hurting their chance to win the general election next November. Being a seasoned political observer, you are well aware that this often happens in Democratic primaries: candidates veer left to get the nomination, and then pivot to the center for the general. But you also know this: it’s not going to work. Too many responsible moderates, such as yourself, will worry the candidate is still harboring those leftist plans. You don’t want someone who is going to bankrupt the nation.
The column writes itself.
The Democratic debates in June (and the internecine debates among congressional Democrats) set off a chorus of such columns, all making the same point: we do not like what we’re hearing. On the New York Times op-ed pages alone there were: 1) a Bret Stephens complaint in which he channeled the impressions of “ordinary people” (i.e., white nativists) and concluded that the Dems were off to “a wretched start”; 2) a Maureen Dowd column in defense of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, featuring former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel assailing the left flank of the Democratic Party with the challenge, “Do they want to beat Trump or do they want to clear the moderate and centrists out of the party?”; 3) Thomas Friedman confessing that he was “shocked” by some of the rhetoric he heard in the debates; and 4) David Brooks, under the title “Dems, Please Don’t Drive Me Away,” warning that “the party is moving toward all sorts of positions that drive away moderates and make it more likely the nominee will be unelectable.”
And now, just in time for the next round of Democratic debates, Dowd has returned with a second defense of Pelosi’s “pragmatism,” while deriding progressives as “modern Puritans,” while also blaming Democrats for spending too much time “knifing one another.” Her stated motivation was anger that Left Twitter roasted her recent Washington soiree, which was attended by Pelosi. The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel summarized the column as “the Democrats will lose if the left keeps making fun of my parties,” but it was even worse than that—Dowd was insisting that because Nancy Knows Best, any “puritan” push for impeachment reflected not just the nastiness of the left but its stupidity.
You could gather examples of this kind of standard punditry from the archives, feed them into a computer, and produce this year’s batches through artificial intelligence. You’d have to plug in new names, but not new ideas.
In the 1980s, the candidate who sparked pundit-panic was Jesse Jackson. The Chicago-based civil rights leader ran in the Democratic primary in 1984, and again in 1988. That first race was especially instructive. Imagine: an angry black man running for president, and in a year when the overarching mission for Democrats should have been to deny Ronald Reagan a second term. Obviously, Jackson could not win against Reagan, so what was the point?
From the op-ed page of the New York Times, William Safire surveyed the field in June of 1983 and saw Jackson “marching out with the blacks,” as well as other emerging threats to the Democratic Party establishment’s preferred candidate, former vice-president Walter Mondale. Illinois congressman John Anderson, who had run as an independent in 1980, was considering another run (he decided against it). California senator Alan Cranston was campaigning for a freeze on nuclear weapons production. Cranston was winning the “greens,” according to Safire, “who make nominatable whomever they rally behind and make unelectable whomever they help nominate.” Safire saw a parallel in the landslide 1983 reelection of Margaret Thatcher in Britain: even if Reagan didn’t run for reelection in 1984, he surmised, “any Republican candidate would win, as Mrs. Thatcher did, on the dangerous kookiness of a far-left government.”
As it turned out, of course, Mondale won the nomination and ran as a conventional middle-of-the-road Democrat. He went on to win thirteen electoral votes (Minnesota and the District of Columbia) to Reagan’s 525. Good times. (...)
The foundational fallacy of most mainstream campaign punditry is that presidential elections are decided on some kind of left-right binary axis. It happens to be the belief of most of the operatives and funders of the Democratic Party establishment, as well. Their first principle is: if voters see policy proposals that seem to be coming from the American left, they will choose a conservative like Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush as the safer alternative. It’s remarkable that so many veteran political columnists and political “pros” seem to think it works this way. But that they cling to this article of faith in the third year of the Trump presidency is not just curious—it’s perverse.
Even if it was mostly due to a series of freakish accidents that Trump found a narrow path to the presidency, does anyone believe his policy proposals ensured his success? That somehow American voters considered the details of the immigration issue, for example, and decided “yes, let’s build a wall and require Mexico to pay for it.” Or that perhaps he was correct in saying that Obamacare should be dismantled for some unspecified Republican approach to health care?
You could list any number of factors that are more decisive in a presidential election than what’s in a candidate’s policy papers. It’s unfortunate, but one of the most determinative factors is how well a candidate performs in front of large audiences, especially on television—that is, does the candidate have what are essentially acting skills: looking good, speaking with confident facial expressions, attracting viewers instead of turning them off? (In television infotainment and newscasts, there are attempts to measure this appeal by “Q Scores.”)
In a more general way, being able to move voters emotionally obviously has more relevance than where a candidate comes down on any particular policy proposal. Take the matter of what kind of health care system is best for the United States in the coming decade. Our centrist pundits are gnashing their teeth because several Democrats are willing to discuss the idea of universal health care. Any Medicare for All proposal is going to be too scary once voters realize it means “getting rid of private health insurance.” Supposedly the Republicans will have a field day by rallying people to the cause of corporate insurance. If you get a Democratic candidate who believes that and tries to deflect the charge with detailed explanation of how the system would gradually evolve— that if you like your employer-sponsored health insurance you can keep it, etc. etc.—you are on the losing side. But if you tap into what many people feel—that is, that big insurance companies are not your friend, and that the business model of most private insurance is to wriggle out of paying for health care and to saddle you with as much cost as possible . . . why not rescue people from the clutches of profit-driven insurance companies? These are businesses that, until it was disallowed, insisted they would not cover people with “pre-existing conditions.”
It would be pretty to think that America’s course is decided by rational voters who closely examine the policy choices in front of them. Who can believe that in the age of Trump? Here’s a counter-theory then: in most presidential elections, the vast majority of voters will choose the Democratic or Republican based on ideology or partisan loyalty. The remaining small sliver of “persuadable voters” are responding to something that is not necessarily a preference or rejection of conservative or liberal policies. Often it is just a vague sense of which candidate seems more plausible in offering hope for a better politics, or a better economy, or a better country, or a better deal for people like them.
by Dave Denison, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: PBS NewsHour/The Baffler
[ed. I just want a candidate who's sincere and authentic (vs. poll or media or advisor driven), who can articulate a path forward that feels like progress (instead of pandering to everyone).]
Your assignment at this point in the political cycle—still a year away from next summer’s nominating conventions—is to survey the field of candidates and find them all lacking. The reason? None of them are saying just what you think they should be saying. Your gut tells you that the ideal candidate is one who resembles that paragon of calm reason and moderation: the centrist pundit!
You will see, as early as it is, a distinct threat on the horizon. There are candidates competing to lead the Democratic Party who want to pull the party to the far left. You must sound the alarm. These candidates will commit to stances that will scare away moderate voters. As they pander to the activist wing of their party, they are hurting their chance to win the general election next November. Being a seasoned political observer, you are well aware that this often happens in Democratic primaries: candidates veer left to get the nomination, and then pivot to the center for the general. But you also know this: it’s not going to work. Too many responsible moderates, such as yourself, will worry the candidate is still harboring those leftist plans. You don’t want someone who is going to bankrupt the nation.The column writes itself.
The Democratic debates in June (and the internecine debates among congressional Democrats) set off a chorus of such columns, all making the same point: we do not like what we’re hearing. On the New York Times op-ed pages alone there were: 1) a Bret Stephens complaint in which he channeled the impressions of “ordinary people” (i.e., white nativists) and concluded that the Dems were off to “a wretched start”; 2) a Maureen Dowd column in defense of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, featuring former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel assailing the left flank of the Democratic Party with the challenge, “Do they want to beat Trump or do they want to clear the moderate and centrists out of the party?”; 3) Thomas Friedman confessing that he was “shocked” by some of the rhetoric he heard in the debates; and 4) David Brooks, under the title “Dems, Please Don’t Drive Me Away,” warning that “the party is moving toward all sorts of positions that drive away moderates and make it more likely the nominee will be unelectable.”
And now, just in time for the next round of Democratic debates, Dowd has returned with a second defense of Pelosi’s “pragmatism,” while deriding progressives as “modern Puritans,” while also blaming Democrats for spending too much time “knifing one another.” Her stated motivation was anger that Left Twitter roasted her recent Washington soiree, which was attended by Pelosi. The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel summarized the column as “the Democrats will lose if the left keeps making fun of my parties,” but it was even worse than that—Dowd was insisting that because Nancy Knows Best, any “puritan” push for impeachment reflected not just the nastiness of the left but its stupidity.
You could gather examples of this kind of standard punditry from the archives, feed them into a computer, and produce this year’s batches through artificial intelligence. You’d have to plug in new names, but not new ideas.
In the 1980s, the candidate who sparked pundit-panic was Jesse Jackson. The Chicago-based civil rights leader ran in the Democratic primary in 1984, and again in 1988. That first race was especially instructive. Imagine: an angry black man running for president, and in a year when the overarching mission for Democrats should have been to deny Ronald Reagan a second term. Obviously, Jackson could not win against Reagan, so what was the point?
From the op-ed page of the New York Times, William Safire surveyed the field in June of 1983 and saw Jackson “marching out with the blacks,” as well as other emerging threats to the Democratic Party establishment’s preferred candidate, former vice-president Walter Mondale. Illinois congressman John Anderson, who had run as an independent in 1980, was considering another run (he decided against it). California senator Alan Cranston was campaigning for a freeze on nuclear weapons production. Cranston was winning the “greens,” according to Safire, “who make nominatable whomever they rally behind and make unelectable whomever they help nominate.” Safire saw a parallel in the landslide 1983 reelection of Margaret Thatcher in Britain: even if Reagan didn’t run for reelection in 1984, he surmised, “any Republican candidate would win, as Mrs. Thatcher did, on the dangerous kookiness of a far-left government.”
As it turned out, of course, Mondale won the nomination and ran as a conventional middle-of-the-road Democrat. He went on to win thirteen electoral votes (Minnesota and the District of Columbia) to Reagan’s 525. Good times. (...)
The foundational fallacy of most mainstream campaign punditry is that presidential elections are decided on some kind of left-right binary axis. It happens to be the belief of most of the operatives and funders of the Democratic Party establishment, as well. Their first principle is: if voters see policy proposals that seem to be coming from the American left, they will choose a conservative like Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush as the safer alternative. It’s remarkable that so many veteran political columnists and political “pros” seem to think it works this way. But that they cling to this article of faith in the third year of the Trump presidency is not just curious—it’s perverse.
Even if it was mostly due to a series of freakish accidents that Trump found a narrow path to the presidency, does anyone believe his policy proposals ensured his success? That somehow American voters considered the details of the immigration issue, for example, and decided “yes, let’s build a wall and require Mexico to pay for it.” Or that perhaps he was correct in saying that Obamacare should be dismantled for some unspecified Republican approach to health care?
You could list any number of factors that are more decisive in a presidential election than what’s in a candidate’s policy papers. It’s unfortunate, but one of the most determinative factors is how well a candidate performs in front of large audiences, especially on television—that is, does the candidate have what are essentially acting skills: looking good, speaking with confident facial expressions, attracting viewers instead of turning them off? (In television infotainment and newscasts, there are attempts to measure this appeal by “Q Scores.”)
In a more general way, being able to move voters emotionally obviously has more relevance than where a candidate comes down on any particular policy proposal. Take the matter of what kind of health care system is best for the United States in the coming decade. Our centrist pundits are gnashing their teeth because several Democrats are willing to discuss the idea of universal health care. Any Medicare for All proposal is going to be too scary once voters realize it means “getting rid of private health insurance.” Supposedly the Republicans will have a field day by rallying people to the cause of corporate insurance. If you get a Democratic candidate who believes that and tries to deflect the charge with detailed explanation of how the system would gradually evolve— that if you like your employer-sponsored health insurance you can keep it, etc. etc.—you are on the losing side. But if you tap into what many people feel—that is, that big insurance companies are not your friend, and that the business model of most private insurance is to wriggle out of paying for health care and to saddle you with as much cost as possible . . . why not rescue people from the clutches of profit-driven insurance companies? These are businesses that, until it was disallowed, insisted they would not cover people with “pre-existing conditions.”
It would be pretty to think that America’s course is decided by rational voters who closely examine the policy choices in front of them. Who can believe that in the age of Trump? Here’s a counter-theory then: in most presidential elections, the vast majority of voters will choose the Democratic or Republican based on ideology or partisan loyalty. The remaining small sliver of “persuadable voters” are responding to something that is not necessarily a preference or rejection of conservative or liberal policies. Often it is just a vague sense of which candidate seems more plausible in offering hope for a better politics, or a better economy, or a better country, or a better deal for people like them.
Image: PBS NewsHour/The Baffler
[ed. I just want a candidate who's sincere and authentic (vs. poll or media or advisor driven), who can articulate a path forward that feels like progress (instead of pandering to everyone).]
