The NYT’s Robin Toner had an interesting piece today with this headline: “Obama’s Test: Can a Liberal Be a Unifier?” My first assumption was that this would be an analysis of Obama’s ability to put together a winning electoral coalition. Can he win independents against McCain? Could he peel off frustrated Republicans disgusted after eight years of Bush?
Those are clearly important angles to consider, but Toner takes this one step further, and poses the question of whether any center-left Democrat can win a majority right now.
In many ways, the Obama campaign is challenging the fundamental political premise that has prevailed in Washington for more than a generation: that any majority coalition must be carefully centrist, if not center-right. Bill Clinton ran in 1992 as a candidate willing to break with liberal orthodoxy on many issues, including crime and welfare, and eager to move the party — which had lost five of the six previous presidential elections — to the middle. Mr. Clinton’s New Democrats assumed a certain level of conservatism among voters.
Mr. Obama and his allies are basing his campaign on a different bet: that the right-leaning political landscape Mr. Clinton confronted has changed. Several major Democratic strategists, and outside analysts as well, argue that the country has shifted to the left because of the Iraq war, the economy and seven-plus years of President Bush, and that it has become open to a new progressive majority.
Obama, not surprisingly, sounded an optimistic note, and I suspect he’s right about the landscape: “What I’m certain about is that people are disenchanted with a highly ideological Republican Party that believes tax cuts are the answer to every problem, and lack of regulation and oversight is always going to generate economic growth, and unilateral intervention around the world is the best approach to foreign policy. So there’s no doubt the pendulum is swinging.”
Is this really so hard to believe?
The NYT piece added:
[M]any of Mr. Obama’s supporters say he has recognized this new political climate in a way that Mrs. Clinton has not. They say he is ready for a new, self-assured era in which progressives (few have returned to using the word “liberal”) make no apologies about their goals — universal health care, withdrawing troops from Iraq, ending tax breaks for more affluent Americans — and assume that a broad swath of the public shares them.
Mrs. Clinton, on the other hand, often displays the wariness of Democrats who came of political age in the Reagan era, when the party was constantly on the defensive. As The New Republic recently put it, “Clintonism is a political strategy that assumes a skeptical public; Obamaism is a way of actualizing a latent ideological majority.”
That sounds about right to me, and it’s been one of the interesting undercurrents of the campaign. The Clinton pitch is that Obama is naive to think Democrats can re-work the electoral map in the party’s favor, and the Obama pitch is that Clinton lacks the vision and ambition to even try. For those who perceive the U.S. as a center-right country, the Clinton approach sounds safe and reassuring. For those who think the pendulum has swung, and Dems have less to be afraid of, Clinton’s approach sounds stuck in the ’90s.
For what it’s worth, I tend to think a liberal — more specifically, Obama — can be a “unifier.” The WaPo recently asked Americans which party they trusted more on the economy, immigration, Iraq, the deficit, taxes, the campaign against terrorism, and health care. Dems led Republicans in every category, in some instances, by quite a bit.
It doesn’t look like a center-right nation, and there’s very little reason for Dems to campaign from a defensive crouch, assuming that it is.
Part of this is political packaging — an appealing messenger taking a progressive message to the country in such a way that appeals to a broad audience — and part of this is taking advantage to the nation’s desperate desire for change.
Can a liberal be a unifier? Why on earth not?