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Sunday, November 02, 2008

Obama's Liberalism As An Acceptable Option

If the current polling holds up, Democratic presidential candidates will have won more of the popular vote than Republican presidential candidates in four of the last five elections. (Al Gore lost the election in 2000, but received more of the popular vote.) After two terms of Bill Clinton, more voters wanted to essentially have a third term for the Clinton administration, by means of electing Gore, than wanted George Bush to become president. This year, after John McCain and his campaign have repeatedly referred to Barack Obama as a liberal and have described his liberal positions in many highly visible forums (debates, television ads, etc.), Obama is consistently leading in the polls. Obama isn't just liberal in the manner in which somebody like Gore or Kerry is liberal. Obama is more liberal than his predecessors, has significantly less experience at a time when the prominent issues of the day call for more experience, and has personal problems worse than Kerry's, Gore's, and even Clinton's (his associations with men like Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers, his taped comments about Pennsylvania voters, etc.).

I think I'm more pessimistic than most conservatives about the nature of the American people. I don't think most Americans are liberal, but I don't think most are conservative either. Conservatism is a large minority, but it is a minority. I suspect that Ronald Reagan and the current George Bush won largely with the support of non-conservatives who liked them as individuals, who had a vague desire for change, or who agreed with them on some issues while disagreeing with them on many others. Both men probably would have lost if they had been supported only by conservatives. Even when Republicans had control of the White House and both houses of Congress, I was skeptical of the positive view of the American people that we often hear from conservatives (see, for example, here and here).

But if Barack Obama wins this election, then I wasn't pessimistic enough. I've already been proven wrong to some extent. I expected the race to tighten significantly in the closing days of the campaign. That might happen in the remaining two days, but I thought McCain would already have gained significantly more ground than he has. I was also expecting the Democrats to have less turnout than commonly predicted and the Republicans to have more turnout than expected. I might have been wrong about that also, but we'll see. I've heard some encouraging reports from Republican states, suggesting that Republicans have been getting better turnout in the early voting than many had anticipated.

I don't think an Obama victory would suggest that the American people are liberal, much less as liberal as Obama. But it would demonstrate that Obama's liberalism is within the range of acceptable options for those voters. And those voters probably would represent a majority of Americans.

I consider polls generally reliable. If the polls are wrong about this election, I think it's an honest mistake, perhaps a mistake resulting from wrong turnout models. I'm not convinced by conservative suggestions that all or most of the pollsters are liberal and are misrepresenting what voters believe. Considering how widely the polls differ in the lead they give Obama, at least some of them have to be significantly wrong. But they do agree in giving Obama a lead.

People who like Obama as a person and have a vague desire for change this year, and are therefore voting for Obama, could like the Republican candidate as a person and have a vague desire for change that leads them to vote for the Republican in 2012. I don't think an Obama victory would suggest a major shift to the left. It would suggest a shift to the left in the degree of liberalism that most Americans are willing to accept. They'd prefer somebody less liberal than Obama, but they'll accept his liberalism in a context like 2008.

In a post about the election last month, I quoted a passage from one of David Wells' books:

"It is one of the defining marks of Our Time that God is now weightless. I do not mean by this that he is ethereal but rather that he has become unimportant. He rests upon the world so inconsequentially as not to be noticeable. He has lost his saliency for human life. Those who assure the pollsters of their belief in God's existence may nonetheless consider him less interesting than television, his commands less authoritative than their appetites for affluence and influence, his judgment no more awe-inspiring than the evening news, and his truth less compelling than the advertisers' sweet fog of flattery and lies. That is weightlessness. It is a condition we have assigned him after having nudged him out to the periphery of our secularized life....Weightlessness tells us nothing about God but everything about ourselves, about our condition, about our psychological disposition to exclude God from our reality." (God In The Wasteland [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1995], pp. 88, 90)

One of the reasons why issues like abortion, homosexuality, marriage, and judges are so weightless to so many voters is the weightlessness of God in their lives. The same party that tells us "It's the economy, stupid!" objects that its opponents are too concerned with money, that they're selfish, greedy, and too concerned about the upper class. There is a party in America that's more greedy than the other, but it isn't the Republicans.

For those trying to decide whether to vote or who to vote for, you may be interested in a post I wrote this past September about the differences between Obama and McCain.

5 comments:

  1. 1.A lot of voters don’t begin with the issues, and then choose a corresponding candidate or party. Rather, they begin with their party affiliation which, in turn, chooses (for them) what issues to prioritize and which side of what issues to take.

    Put another way, they choose their party affiliation for sociological reasons. And that selects for their political beliefs and values rather than the other way around.

    2.I think a lot of voters don’t even listen to what a candidate is actually saying. They don’t ask themselves if this makes sense. They just believe whatever they want to hear.

    3.Many voters are too lazy to do elementary fact-checking.

    4.For many voters, the only politician they know by name is the president. They don’t know their major or governor or senator or Congressman. They don’t know who’s on SCOTUS. They don’t know who’s the Secretary of State, or Defense, or the Attorney General, or the DCI, &c.

    So, for them, the president becomes the stand-in for the totality of the Federal gov’t. If he’s a Democrat or Republican, then, as far as they’re concerned, that’s party in power.

    5.A lot of voters also have an odd habit of relying on someone else’s memory rather than their own. Even if they saw live coverage of an event, what they recollect is subsequent commentary rather than what they heard and saw for themselves.

    6.A lot of voters are crisis-driven. They live in the present. They never look ahead. For them, the future is just an abstraction. For them, anything abstract is unreal.

    7.Many voters want a certain amount of social corruption. They want enough corruption to excuse their own corruption, but they don’t want so much corruption that it cramps their style.

    My paternal grandfather was businessman who had a reputation for honesty. When he ran for mayor, many of his friends told him that they were going to vote against him because he would put them out of business (since they ran shady operations). So he lost. He lost because he was too honesty. He was more honest than the electorate, which made him a threat to the electorate.

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  2. Steve said:

    "For many voters, the only politician they know by name is the president. They don’t know their major or governor or senator or Congressman. They don’t know who’s on SCOTUS. They don’t know who’s the Secretary of State, or Defense, or the Attorney General, or the DCI, &c. So, for them, the president becomes the stand-in for the totality of the Federal gov’t. If he’s a Democrat or Republican, then, as far as they’re concerned, that’s party in power."

    I recently heard Michael Medved comment about people who don't know that the Democrats are now in control of Congress. I don't know what percentage of voters are ignorant of that fact, but I suspect it's at least several percent, maybe even a percentage in the double digits. I'd be interested in seeing polling on that subject, if there is any, particularly exit polls on election day. How many voters will vote for Obama and other Democrats under the assumption that the Republicans are not only in control of the White House, but also both houses of Congress?

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  3. Steve and Jason -- I've appreciated what you guys have said this election season. I agree with much of what you've been saying, though not everything. I'm going to vote for McCain, probably not for all of the reasons that you've espoused, but some of them. I still think he can win. Whether pollsters are liberal or not, I think they have failed to understand how to ask questions to generate a response that will predict how people will vote this year. We saw that consistently in the Democrat primaries, when Hillary Clinton pulled off some surprise wins, even though the polls said she was behind.

    Even if Obama wins and the Democrats increase their margins in congress, I still don't see the end of the Republic. I see a pendulum swinging -- as, I think the Founders intended -- and an opportunity for conservatives and Republicans to have the time to think through the difficulties (and successes) they've had in the last 15-20 years, and re-emerge at some point in the future, with new ideas and a platform that will be more well calibrated for the times.

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  4. John Bugay wrote:

    "Even if Obama wins and the Democrats increase their margins in congress, I still don't see the end of the Republic. I see a pendulum swinging -- as, I think the Founders intended -- and an opportunity for conservatives and Republicans to have the time to think through the difficulties (and successes) they've had in the last 15-20 years, and re-emerge at some point in the future, with new ideas and a platform that will be more well calibrated for the times."

    I agree. And I think the Republicans already have some promising potential candidates for future elections, like Bobby Jindal.

    And I haven't given up on a McCain victory, though it seems less likely than I had previously anticipated. Obama is so bad a candidate that it would take a lot to convince me to no longer give McCain the advantage, but it's getting close to that point. Some of the polling data I saw earlier today is encouraging, but it's still not as much of a shift to McCain as I was expecting.

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  5. From a Los Angeles Times article by a scholar who studies voting in the United States:

    "Unfortunately, 'rational' rewarding and punishing of incumbents turns out to be much harder than it seems, as my Princeton colleague, Christopher Achen, and I have found. Voters often misperceive what life has been like during the incumbent's administration. They are inordinately focused on the here and now, mostly ignoring how things have gone earlier in the incumbent's term. And they have great difficulty judging which aspects of their own and the country's well-being are the responsibility of elected leaders and which are not. This election year, an economic downturn turned into an economic crisis with the dramatic meltdown of major financial institutions. John McCain will be punished at the polls as a result. Whether the current economic distress is really President Bush's fault, much less McCain's, is largely beside the point. Does all of this make voters stupid? No, just human. And thus -- to borrow the title of another popular book by behavioral economist Dan Ariely -- 'predictably irrational.' That may be bad enough."

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