Rove-ing Moderator

The Wrap: It’s Time to Start the Music

The campaign looks substantially less like The Muppet Show than it did ten days ago. The good news: candidates are talking about issues again. The bad news: you can’t retire until you’re 90. Fear not: our president is on the case.

 

So far, neither candidate proposed a real solution to the financial crisis. McCain said he’d fire the SEC chairman and increase financial regulation, but the prez can’t fire the chairman and McCain is a lifelong deregulator. Obama tried to look presidential by meeting with economists, but no new policy was born.

 

Other stories fester in the economy’s shadow. Sarah Palin’s friends in Alaska’s legislature sued to stop the trooper inquiry, calling it partisan and tainted. No word on why they waited to express indignation until after Palin’s nomination.

 

McCain, who once called the press “my base,” now hates the press.

 

New polls show Obama leading in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Colorado, and Virginia. The GOP is gaining on Democrats in generic congressional polls.

 

Feature: Rove-ing Moderator

Our political system emphasizes trivia over substance, self-promotion over honesty, consistency over curiosity. If we read the right signs, however, politics can still show us how candidates might behave as president.

 

The 2000 election is a good place to start. Let’s say we lined up 100 voters left to right, number 1 being most liberal and number 100 being most conservative. In 2000, 33 percent of Americans called themselves Democrats and 29 percent called themselves Republicans. So in our lineup, voters 1-33 cast ballots in Democratic primaries and voters 71-100 participated in GOP contests.

 

If the middle voter is what counts, Al Gore knew he had to win voter number 17 to secure his party’s nomination, while George W. Bush needed to win voter number 85. To do that, both Gore and Bush staked out policy positions in the political center of their own party. But in November, voter number 50 counts most. You might think both candidates would talk less about issues popular with their base, and talk more about issues that matter to the middle.

 

But a funny thing happened on the way to the White House. Bush campaign guru Karl Rove saw the flaw in our 100-voter lineup. Usually, only about half of voting-age Americans hit the polls. If Governor Bush could make sure each of his 29 base voters showed up to the polls on Election Day, Rove realized he wouldn’t have to worry about centrist voters. He would win without them.

 

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Rove’s politics is about division. If voters think others share their beliefs, they’ll let others vote for them and stay home. To win, your base voters must believe people who disagree with them are different from them. It’s good versus evil: if your friend agrees with you, they’re good. If they disagree, they aren’t.

 

President Bush has governed that way. Personal loyalty is paramount. With a GOP congress for most of his term, he consistently pursued policies popular among Republicans, but which hamper the interests of average Americans.

 

Though intel on Iraq’s WMD and al Qaeda ties was tissue-thin, many Republicans wanted to expand the War on Terrorism. So we did.

 

Though tax cuts for the wealthy promised to reverse our course from surplus to deficit, Republicans supported the idea. The tax cuts passed.

 

Though Wall Street showed serious signs of malpractice, Republicans argued deregulation was the only way to strengthen our economy. Lookout below.

 

There is a time to pre-empt threats, lower tax rates, and free financial markets from regulation. But it is always time to include a broad spectrum of American voices in setting our country’s course. That idea is not part of the Bush ethos.

 

This year, we hoped for a return to unity politics. Even during the primaries, Senators Obama and McCain articulated abhorrence for Rove’s methods (Rove slandered McCain in 2000). As the general election began, Obama and McCain emphasized moderate views.

 

But throughout, McCain trailed Obama by several points. As the homestretch approached, McCain’s poll numbers weren’t moving. He needed a shakeup. He floated moderates like Tom Ridge and Joe Lieberman as veep candidates, but soon saw how his chances would improve if he ditched the center for the base.

 

Thus Sarah Palin. Palin was chosen in part to sway disaffected Hillary voters, but any of several women could have done likewise. Her real value was among the base. Palin answers conservatives’ questions about McCain. They thought McCain was soft on guns because he didn’t quote Charlton Heston. He was soft on business because he hinted global warming might be real. He was soft on values because he didn’t make hay about being pro-life.

 

Palin is passionate about gun ownership, passionate that business always trump environment, passionate that even rape victims must bear their attacker’s child. Conservatives trust her to guard their values from liberal conniving in McCain’s White House.

 

Choosing Palin was the opening salvo in the latest round of the culture wars. Since then, McCain’s staff, Palin’s staff, and their message have abandoned the middle for Karl Rove’s model: turn out the diehards and forget about the rest.

 

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After being personally and politically crushed by Karl Rove in 2000, John McCain took stock. In his memoir Worth the Fighting For, McCain wrote of that race, “I didn’t decide to run for president to start a national crusade for the political reforms I believed in, or to run a campaign as if it were some grand act of patriotism. In truth, I wanted to be president because it had become my ambition to be president. . . . In truth, I’d had the ambition for a long time.”

 

Today McCain demonstrates the same ambition but changed tactics. Centrism failed him in 2000. He saw it buckling again this year. If his beliefs were still more important to him than winning, he might have stuck by them. Instead, he so embraced Rove’s politics the architect himself said it went too far.

 

Division begets division. Rove’s aides, his style, and his message now permeate the McCain campaign. The same aides, style, and message will find employment in a McCain Administration, because McCain’s ideals have yielded to his ambitions. Conservative ideas will count. The rest need not apply.

 

On Deck: Oxford Crew

Friday, the campaigns clash in a cataclysmic contest of cosmic consequence. Actually, it’s just a debate, and presidential debates aren’t even really debates. They’re more like joint press conferences. This one’s on foreign policy, so naturally it’s being held in Oxford, Mississippi.

 

If you’re keeping score, the arguments on stage only account for a third of the tally. Another third is setting expectations before the debate, and the final third is controlling the spin afterward. Obama’s great in front of big crowds, and McCain likes town halls. This is sorta in the middle.

 

Also this week, mail-in voting begins. If you’re voting absentee, dear reader, the blog strongly encourages you to make sure your election authority is sending a ballot your direction. No matter who you vote for, make sure you vote.