When it comes to the three leading Democratic presidential candidates, differences on issues have been practically non-existent. When the most serious, substantive policy fight is over one universal-health care plan with mandates and another universal-health care plan without mandates, you know it’s a primary fight that probably won’t be decided on clear policy distinctions.
Instead, we’re dealing with credible, electable candidates — Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama — who each want to be the superior agent of change. Mark Schmitt explains today that it’s the “first ‘theory of change’ primary I can think of.”
Schmitt takes Clinton’s recent frame and accepts it as an accurate reflection of the different candidates’ pitches — Clinton would achieve change through hard work and experience; Edwards would achieve change through populist demands; and Obama would achieve change through a hopeful agenda based on a sense of common purpose.
Edwards and some of his supporters, most notably Paul Krugman, have argued that Obama’s approach is “naive” because it rests on the premise that a Democratic president can achieve positive results through cooperation with Republicans and business interests with intractable agendas.
But Schmidt has a fascinating rejoinder to the pitch.
Suppose you were as non-naive about it as I am — but your job wasn’t writing about politics, it was running for president? What should you do? In that case, your responsibility is not merely to describe the situation exactly, but to find a way to subvert it. In other words, perhaps we are being too literal in believing that “hope” and bipartisanship are things that Obama naively believes are present and possible, when in fact they are a tactic, a method of subverting and breaking the unified conservative power structure.
Claiming the mantle of bipartisanship and national unity, and defining the problem to be solved (e.g. universal health care) puts one in a position of strength, and Republicans would defect from that position at their own risk. The public, and younger voters in particular, seem to want an end to partisanship and conflictual politics, and an administration that came in with that premise (an option not available to Senator Clinton), would have a tremendous advantage, at least for a moment.
In this sense, the “politics of hope” isn’t about bringing everyone to the table to compromise; it’s about an effective rhetorical strategy to achieve a progressive result.
OK, but how might this “theory of change” actually work? Schmidt offers two answers.
The mundane answer is just congressional math. The most important fact about the next administration is nothing about the president’s character or policies, but simply how many Democratic Senators there are. To get health care passed in 2009, we’ll need 60 votes in the Senate. There won’t be 60 Democrats. So a Democratic president will need to, first, get within range by bringing in Democratic senators from Arizona, Colorado, Virginia, and several other red-trending-purple states. And then, subtract the total number of Democrats from 60, and that’s the number of Republicans you’ll need. If that number is two or three, almost anything is possible. If it’s five, it will be much harder. If it’s eight, impossible.
This is the math of bipartisanship. It’s not a matter of sitting down with thugs like John Boehner and splitting the difference, but winning over just a few Senate Republicans from outside the South. And if the number is small enough, that’s entirely possible. This is not 1993, when the Republicans could see that a majority was just around the corner, and the conservative takeover had given it a coherence and enthusiasm. It will be a party in some internal crisis after losing both houses of Congress and the presidency in short order, and the sense of a “party establishment” will be weaker. There will be an effort to hold the party together in united opposition, but the ties holding a Senator Snowe, Voinovich, Grassley, Lugar or Specter to a strict party line — as they contemplate retirement, legacy, and their own now-Democratic states — will be much weaker than in either the Clinton or Bush eras.
Obama’s approach is better positioned to take advantage of this math. First, I think (though if I tried to prove it, I’d be relying on useless horse-race polls) that Democratic Senate candidates in red/purple states will do better with Obama’s national-unity pitch at the top than with Senator Clinton. I worry about the Senate seats in Colorado (where she polls poorly) and Arizona with Clinton at the top of the ticket, and I think the opportunity to take out Mitch McConnell in Kentucky would be lost. And after the inauguration, I think that opposition to Hillary Clinton will remain a galvanizing theme for Republicans, whereas a new face and will make it harder to recreate the familiar unity-in-opposition.
Now for the cosmic explanation: What I find most interesting about Obama’s approach to bipartisanship is how seriously he takes conservatism. As Michael Tomasky describes it in his review of The Audacity of Hope, “The chapters boil down to a pattern: here’s what the right believes about subject X, and here’s what the left believes; and while I basically side with the left, I think the right has a point or two that we should consider, and the left can sometimes get a little carried away.” What I find fascinating about his language about unity and cross-partisanship is that it is not premised on finding Republicans who agree with him, but on taking in good faith the language and positions of actual conservatism — people who don’t agree with him. That’s very different from the longed-for consensus of the Washington Post editorial page.
The reason the conservative power structure has been so dangerous, and is especially dangerous in opposition, is that it can operate almost entirely on bad faith. It thrives on protest, complaint, fear: higher taxes, you won’t be able to choose your doctor, liberals coddle terrorists, etc. One way to deal with that kind of bad-faith opposition is to draw the person in, treat them as if they were operating in good faith, and draw them into a conversation about how they actually would solve the problem. If they have nothing, it shows. And that’s not a tactic of bipartisan Washington idealists — it’s a hard-nosed tactic of community organizers, who are acutely aware of power and conflict. It’s how you deal with people with intractable demands — put ’em on a committee. Then define the committee’s mission your way.
I find all of this quite persuasive, but it requires something akin to a leap of faith.
Kevin Drum has been talking all week about the Democratic primary becoming “more a Rorschach test than an actual contest,” and I think it applies here, too. For a voter who’s sympathetic to Obama, his “theory of change” includes a wink-and-a-nod understanding of his rhetoric — his talk about “hope” isn’t naive, it’s a means to a progressive end. The rhetoric isn’t to be taken literally; this is a strategy.
For a voter who’s unsympathetic, Obama’s “theory of change” should be taken at face value, and dismissed as naive and overly interested in compromise with right-wing forces who don’t play fair and aren’t interested in “hope.”
If there’s more of the prior than the latter, Obama may very well be the Democratic nominee.