Seth Masket did something important and admirable at Politico this week: He examined the historical premise for some advice being offered to President Biden by many voices and found it to be ill-founded:
“Joe Biden needs a ‘Sister Souljah Moment.’ At least, that’s according to the quickly congealing conventional wisdom in Washington. That is, Biden and Democrats are in dire danger of losing control of Congress next year, and the one thing that could save them would be by bashing someone to Biden’s left on matters of race.”
The allusion is to a speech famously made by Bill Clinton in the summer of 1992 (when he had already nailed down the Democratic presidential nomination) to a conference of the Jesse Jackson–chaired Rainbow Coalition criticizing the organization for holding a panel the previous day that included Sister Souljah. The rapper had recently made remarks related to the L.A. riots that some interpreted as promoting the killing of white people (a claim she denied).
Jackson (who had expressed pride in Souljah’s appearance at his conference) was sitting on the stage near Clinton as he spoke and understandably felt blindsided and exploited by what Clinton said. So it has gone down in legend as a “moment” when a Democratic politician pandered to swing voters (and perhaps to white racists) by conspicuously separating himself from Black political activists. And that, as Masket notes, is what some commentators want Biden to do to stem the political bleeding over controversies surrounding racial justice, including Black Lives Matter protests, the “defund the police” movement, and the alleged influence of critical race theory in public-school classrooms.
The principal trouble with the claim Biden can do wonders via a little measured race-baiting, Masket explains, is that it didn’t do Clinton much good in 1992. A lot of factors lifted him to victory that fall, but clearly it was the economy (stupid!) and the temporary withdrawal of Ross Perot from the race that were most important. There is little-to-no evidence that the Sister Souljah “moment” had any particular effect on the contest. Yet the legend persists:
“Is it possible that Clinton got some help on Election Day from his bashing of Souljah five months earlier? It’s possible, but unlikely. Campaign effects just generally don’t last that long. It was a very old story by then, and it’s hard to even discern much of an effect when the story was fresh. Polling that year shows that voters were more likely to trust Clinton on issues related to racial politics, but that was true prior to the Souljah moment, as well.
“So why is it important to interrogate this piece of political lore three decades later? Because clearly many opinion leaders take it as an article of faith that a Democratic president can make himself more popular by bashing advocates for racial justice. The evidence doesn’t really support this, but they make the argument anyway.”
I would go a step further than Masket in debunking the “Sister Souljah Moment” theory. I say this not because I have any insider information on what was going on in the Clinton campaign (or in the candidate’s mind) before he made that Rainbow Coalition speech. But I was an early Clinton supporter and later worked for the decidedly Clintonite Democratic Leadership Council, and I sure didn’t think the incident was mostly about race. Obviously, racists in the electorate probably perceived it that way, though few of them at that point in history were likely to vote for a Democratic presidential candidate. The broader perception at the time was captured by Tom Edsall’s on-site report on the speech for the Washington Post:
“Clinton’s frank remarks seemed designed to demonstrate his willingness to challenge core Democratic constituent groups and to begin to break his image in the public as a “political” person who would bend to pressure from major forces within his party …
“The power of the Perot campaign, and growing public animosity to both the Republican and the Democratic parties, has been interpreted in the Clinton campaign as a powerful message requiring the Arkansas governor to attempt to regain the status of an ‘outsider’ candidacy — a status first lost to former Massachusetts senator Paul E. Tsongas, then to former California governor Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr. and most recently to Perot.”
Indeed, the idea that Clinton was triangulating against Black folks generally on race was not borne out by the reaction from, well, Black folks, other than those very close to the justifiably insulted Jackson, as Steve Kornacki later observed:
“Clinton did not suffer any discernible fallout among black voters; in fact, many black political leaders — some nursing their own grudges against Jackson — used the occasion to throw their support behind Clinton.”
That could be in part because even if you think Clinton was pushing off the left, he wasn’t exactly moving right. In the same speech in which he chastised Sister Souljah for allegedly smiling upon the hypothetical killing of white people for the sins of their race, Clinton sounded some familiar populist themes that were entirely congenial to his audience:
“The speech included repeated attacks on the Bush administration, with a well received line about Vice President Quayle — ‘I’m tired of people on trust funds telling people on food stamps how to live’ — and praise for ‘the real story of Los Angeles — that most people who live in that city did not burn, loot or riot.’”
So what would a more nuanced understanding of the “Sister Souljah Moment” tell Joe Biden?
First of all, Biden is in a vastly different position than was Clinton in 1992. There is no Ross Perot on the horizon, appealing to a huge block of swing voters temporarily estranged from both parties. When Clinton rejected Jesse Jackson’s advice to run a base-mobilization campaign, there were plenty of reasons to fear that identification of Clinton with Democratic orthodoxy would be disastrous: At the time of the Sister Souljah speech, Clinton was running third in many polls behind Perot and George H.W. Bush. And when Perot did (temporarily) withdraw from the race right after the Democratic convention (I was involved in speech preparations for that convention and remember when the word came down: No more criticisms of Perot!), he basically confirmed that Clinton had succeeded in redeeming his pledge to become “a different kind of Democrat,” as the Los Angeles Times explained:
“’When we started … there was a climate there where we could win outright,’ Perot asserted. But now, he said, ‘the Democratic Party has revitalized itself. They’ve done a brilliant job, in my opinion, in coming back.’
:Perot did not elaborate on that point. But Morton H. Meyerson, a longtime Perot confidant and campaign adviser, later cited the Democratic Party’s platform as something that ‘Ross feels good about.’
“Meyerson added: ‘The Democrats seem to be listening to the people.'”
Biden, by contrast is operating in a highly polarized climate with few swing voters and no Perot-like centrist to challenge him. He has zero reason to gamble on separating himself rhetorically from his party.
Second of all, while Clinton was dealing with decades of perceived Democratic subservience to the party’s interest and constituency groups, Biden is dealing with a conservative media environment in which nothing he says will effectively contradict assertions that he wants to defund the police, open the prison doors, impose “woke” speech codes and racial quotas on colleges and workplaces, and usher in a socialist revolution. It’s all preposterous, but Biden has already tried and failed to challenge the smears with rhetorical signals. Some hypothetical equivalent to the supposed message Clinton sent in the “Sister Souljah Moment” would mostly be heard by those who feared, not hoped, he was separating himself from his party under pressure.
And third, even if Joe Biden thought he needed to “push off” the left (as though defeating Bernie Sanders in the 2020 presidential primaries wasn’t enough “pushing off”), he should stay far away from racially inflammatory subjects. Biden would have never won the presidential nomination without the kind of staunch Black support that destroyed the potentially strong nomination campaigns of Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, even though Biden’s history on racial issues was far more problematic than Clinton’s in 1992. Besides, now and in 1992, the idea that “the left” and “Black voters” are somehow synonymous is simply wrong.
If Biden feels the need to make it clear he’s still the moderately progressive Democrat who hates racism but is by no means a socialist or especially “woke,” he should just say so, as often as possible. No “pushing off” is necessary.
First off, as a devoted fan of both the book and this website, I agree with Max.
Ruy and Alan, would you pleassssssssse critic what was being said by you two the weeks and days before the election. It is time for some honesty and evaluation! Before I hear anymore positive pie in the sky stuff we need to look seriously at went wrong with your analysis and then what went wrong in this election.
So Ruy and Alan
Respond to the following which you preached:
The incumbant 50% rule
The undecidededs will breck for the challenger.
The last polling # for a President, is the highest that he will recieve.
Gallup’s polling techniques are way off.
Republican ID could not possibly have increased 5 to 10%
Large turnout equals Democratic win.
I and several of your fans needs some answers to these questions, or you loose credibility!
Give it a shot!
Bill Richardson as VP(not Pres) is the key to immediate success in ’08. We got something like 55 percent of the Hispanic vote, but we can do much better, and quickly with Richardson. Florida and AZ, would be great places to pick up the hispanic vote, probably enough to make the difference. 2008 will see McCain or Jeb, probably Jeb as the opponent Richardson as a candidate only makes sense if they don’t team up(I assume Jeb would take FL and McCain AZ). A Jeb-McCain ticket is hard for the dems to counter, Ohio, Missouri, Arkansas, would have to be where the battle would be fought.
Judging for DLC and moderate dem response, as a whole, the party has more losing to do before they give up the republican-lite mantra. At this point, it has to be more a question of pride, I mean how many times can you lose before you realize you need to throwout the playbook? These DLC and middle road Dems not only have made understandable errors thinking we should go centrist, but they’ve also refused to admit mistakes and show any ability to change tactics…
One last note, if we have to duke it out within our party to change leadership, let’s do it now.
Alan,
As I noted in an earlier comment, before we can start immersing in your hopeful analysis of why 2008 looks good, we need a fair explanation from you of why our optimistic interpretation of the polling data was so wrong. This is important.
No offense.. but this sounds suspiciously similar to “the incumbent rule.” I know Ruy, Prof. Abramowitz and others have their little poll-watching demographic niche in all of this.. but could we get a clue here??
Is this how we lead.. by looking at polls and gauging people’s values from surveys?? By looking at past history and divining averages?? Trends change, countries change. There’s nothing hard and fast here as we’ve seen of late. There’s reason for optimism.. but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
I enjoyed Ruy’s co-written piece in The New Republic today. He wrote that the Democrats need someone who “can talk to both PhDs and tractor-trailer drivers,” and that demography is on the Democrats’ side in Virginia. It seems like there’s an obvious messenger who fits this bill: Mark Warner, Virginia’s Governor. I’ve started a blog touting Warner here:
http://warner2008.blogspot.com
The race Democrats can learn the most from is not the presidency, but the Kentucky senate race. This was a race the conventional wisdom said the Dems had no chance of picking up, and they came within a point of winning. How? Why? Because the Republican incumbent was painted as crazy. Think about it. Democratic candidates in Alaska, Oklahoma, Florida, Louisiana, etc. thought they could win on “the issues.” Sorry, but no. Issues don’t matter and these candidates went down in flames. Mud and smears stick better than rational debate. The Republicans have known this for years. Wake up Dems!
The key blurb from DLC What Happened? …
http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=131&subid=192&contentid=253002
“They add up to the urgent need for a party strategy and message that’s strategic, not tactical; that conveys a comprehensive message, not just targeted appeals to narrow constituencies; that’s national, not regional…”
The Dems need to undergo a major ‘shape shifting’ effort to build a populist progressive party on a national level that can engage more of America and better challenge the Bush Republican Party of Theocrats. To do this they need to covert a a few moderate Senate or House Republicans who believe The Republican Party has come loose of its moorings. This would be in addition to Lincoln Chafee (R-RI ) which is a strong possibility.
Then the DNC/DLC should combine to form a co-chair position i.e. have an “outside game” with converted moderate Republican and an “inside game” with Howard Dean who is the best person to transform existing Dem party to a more progressive one.
This would likely produce some significant wins in 2006 that could followed up with winning back control of all branches in 2008.
It’s time for a bold and aggressive move or I’m afraid the Dems will fall further behind in ensuing elections.
In 2008 who would we even field that would beat the McCain/Gulliani ticket? They will be extremely difficult. (assuming they are the ticket) All the talk about historical trends I think all goes out the window cause I don’t buy it anymore.
So again I ask, George Bush won the election with all this anti-Bush sentiment out there (Iraq, Economy, Michael Moore, etc.) and he still won, he would’ve won in a landslide if it not for those anti-Bush issues. The 2008 GOP ticket will be even tougher to beat.
I don’t think Hillary will win, she has NO shot at winning the south or the heartland. Obama will be great but I think 2008 is a little early for him.
I can’t see Kerry running again in 2008 and if he does, I can’t see him winning. Unless there’s a new candidate that leaves the logical choice to be John Edwards for 2008 as our best hope. He has the best chance of picking up some states in the South, Midwest, any maybe Iowa, Missouri, etc.
The election was lost because our side expected the vote to be based on logic and reality. It wasn’t; they knew how to tap into emotion and fear but we didn’t. Time to realize that choosing a candidate is like choosing soap and get better at packaging our brand. To quote Bertrand Russell “Many people would sooner die than think. And they do.”
The Redskins lost and Nickelodeon viewers picked Kerry. Historical hocus-pocus similar your statistics. Democrats need to get their noses out of their Excel charts and start smelling the coffee!
If this election has taught us nothing else, it is that past indicators probably no longer apply. Relying on “patterns [that go] all the way back to the beginning of the 20th century” won’t get it done. We need to restate our principles and rethink our message; relying on polling histories is a recipe for failure.
While we should not forget that the Dems have won the popular vote three of the last four cycles, they have done very well in the Electoral College in the two losses. Depending on how IA and NM shake out, Bush will have won two elections with the LOWEST number of electoral votes (271 in 2000, 274 or a few more in 2004) since Wilson in 1916 (277) or McKinley in 1896 (271), back in the days there were fewer EVs anyway. The margins for his two wins were each razor-thin by historical standards. Don’t fall for the “broad, nationwide victory” and “mandate” garbage. There is good news: one more state can tilt the White House blue.
That doesn’t make the loss sting any less, but looking ahead, it means the Dems don’t need a complete overhaul. We need a very targeted strategy to hold the base and gain a few incremental votes in the right places.
Meanwhile, it is critical the Dems pickup seats in 2006. A 10-seat difference in the Senate and a 31-seat difference (w/3 undecided) in the House is too much to make up in one cycle. But with gains in the midterms, the Dems may be able to win back at least one house in ’08.
It seems to me that Karl Rove has really laid a lot of “what usually happens in this/that type of election” rules to waste. I think he and Ralph Reed have done a great job of changing the base line American electorate.
I think time is on our side in the sense that problems Bush promised he would deal with (the budget deficit, Iraq, the spread of nuclear weapons) are not going to be getting better with time. And I’m afraid they may grow to a point where 59 million Americans can’t ignore them anymore.
Forgive me if I’m not too receptive to this sunny outlook right now. I just got through believing it throughout the past few months, and after the shock of the election, both in the WH and Congress, it’s too soon to be delivering the same happy talk about 2008. We need some time for reflection, and a solid working strategy to deal with the impending conservative legislative onslaught. BTW, as bad as the Kerry loss is to me, it’s the Senate losses that really upset me. They were our safety valve, and that protection (filibuster) is virtually gone.
I think we need to count all of the absentee ballots before we concede that Bush even won a majority of the popular vote. I’ve heard that there were 5 million absentees in California, and a million in Florida, so nationwide there are probably more than enough to swing the popular vote, even though there aren’t enough in any one state to swing the electoral.
Yeh right, just keep on thimking Ruy, keep on thimking.
I disagree with the contention that the Dems did not have a message. The message got burried by non-issues. A big part of the problems seems to be that the press corp does not like our candidates. They were openly hostile to Gore and it was no secret that they did not like Kerry. Can we buy them off or hire someone to keep them entertained so they don’t dump on our candidate next time? Maybe if we are more creative about presenting our message the press will pick up on it and not be so hostile.
WHEN ARE THE DLC Democrats going to stop spinning the polls and start facing up to how the ignoring of the flipflop spin and of the distortions in Matt Bai’s article that formed the basis of the last three weeks of the Republican press and political campaign — both of which I have detailed at length many times — point to the throwing (and not for the first time) of the election. When everyone is too busy in the media justifying the lying instead of standing up to it and pointing it out to the mass public, there’s no way victory is possible. You can’t let a flimsy spin like the flipflop issue (as devasted by, eg, Jonathan Chait in the Oct 18 New Republic ‘The Invention of Flipflop’ solidify for five months into a national cliche and expect to win. The public felt by a strong majority that the country was going in the wrong direction. There was Clarke on tape pointing out in Fahrenheit 9/11 that Bush on 9/12 was ONLY interested in Iraq and didn’t even ask about Al Qaeda and the Democrats shied away from using it. They should have had this election in the bag. They didn’t just blow it, they threw it — “reporting for duty” is one thing but duty to the Constitution and not merely to the powers that pee really needs to be primary. This is more important than whether the Demcrats should move “right” or “left” or whatever. It is the ignored elephant in the room — the justifying of the lying.
Matt Bai put out a picture of Kerry on the war on terror tailored to match the Bush characterization of him, even though it was Kerry who proposed increasing the special forces and being much more aggressive about going after Al Qaeda. You can’t expect that the public is supposed to overcome the campaign AND THE MAINSTREAM AND LIBERAL MEDIA rolling over on issues like the flipflop spin and the Bai distortion, echoed in daily columns for the past several weeks. THIS IS THE IGNORED ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM. Everything else is just beating around the Bush. (I could similarly discuss the 2000 election and the 1988 election, as well as the more complex but nevertheless clear strategy of Clinton in 1993-1994) But all this stuff about “winning strategy” is meaningless as long as these issues are evaded, which they continue to be.
Hi Ruy and All
The “time for a change” factor does give *some* room for hope, but in the meantime Bush is certain to continue the Republican mission of repealling the New Deal. The 45 Democrats we have in the Senate have *got* to act like an opposition party and obstruct their heads off–fillibuster radical judges, fillibuster right wing tax “reform”, fillibuster Social Security privatization. Bush can do a lot more damage in the next four years and now is not the time to cooperate with our nation’s demise. For the future we have to cultivate candidates who can speak the language of the working class and of socially conservative folks, but in the mean time we have to stand up or the gains our nation made when it was the Republican party that carried the “elitist” label.
keith
This isn’t a plan, this is feel-good fluff. There is no reason to think Democrats will able to take the Presidency in 2008, given the another moderate approach. Again, people are suffering from two misconceptions, the first being that Clinton was a big success because he was moderate, the second is thinking there isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with the party. Clinton won as a moderate because of Perot. Second, take a look around, we aren’t winning. It wasn’t just Kerry, it’s the entire party that is to blame.
Yes we need think tanks of our own. Yes we need a serious answer to the Federalist Society. Yes we need a need focus on workers, wages and reform. Yes we need liberal tv funded(fstv) along with Air America Radio. Yes, we have to package the Democrat message as one of benefits to the voter.
There are now 100,000 Iraqis dead thanks to our party’s incompetence in 2000, more are to follow. Sit back and go moderate? NO. Let me make this more clear, if the Party doesn’t change in a major way, you’re going to see a major defection to the Greens. We aren’t winning as a party, so why should the liberal base stick with a party that’s soldout? Why not lose with the Greens and at least stand for something? Feingold, Kucinich and the Progressive Caucus are the future. Obama-Richardson 2008! The hispanic vote would switch, Florida to Dem, possibly AZ too.
It’s not issues, it’s candidates.
We put up an emotional stiff this time, same as last.
I like and respect John Kerry. In a time less consumed by superficiality, he’d be a great presidential candidate. He speaks like a nice young man who went to finishing school, and he retains those boarding school manners.
I also like and respect Al Gore, but he looks like he forgot to take the coathanger out of his jacket.
Neither guy can tell a joke, and if you can’t tell a joke, you’ll never get elected president in this world any more.
Look at Elvis.
Bill Clinton is the Mack Daddy. It’s not an issue. It’s HIM.
We need to forget ideology and think MESSENGER. The messenger IS the message. I don’t know who it is, but I can tell you who it isn’t. It isn’t Hillary. She’s a terrible speaker, just awful.
I’ll offer two names of guys who can sell on TV in today’s world.
Joe Biden and Bob Kerrey.
Yes … and an incumbent always loses the undecideds … and an incumbent never gets more than his approval rating … and LV polls mean nothing in a big turnout year. Ruy/Alan, you guys are great analysts and observers and your optimism is inspiring. But after the other night, I’ll never believe a “rule” ever again. There are simply too many bigots out there susceptible to GOP appeals, both coded and overt. I hope you are right, but I’m snakebitten. And disgusted.
Still he did better than Clinton in 92 ( a lot), so dont shoot on the pianist.
We need to get rid of the DLC consultants and we will win. They have impaired this campaign and now are beginning to shoot the messager.
In fact Kerry got more votes that Clinton ever did, and did barely less than Clinton did in 96 %wise.
But his campaign was impaired by the handwringing of the Democrats. We will never win like that.
Only Carter lost? What about Daddy Bush?
With all due respect, I’m a bit wary of any argument based on historical trends. Here’s why: during the run-up to this election, we heard many times that an incumbent with approval ratings below 50 percent was in serious trouble, coupled with the fact that an incumbent stuck in the mid- to upper-40s in polls was as good as gone. No such luck.
This, of course, was the most serious misfire of historical analysis, falling by the wayside along with the Redskins win-loss record and other dubious tools of prognostication, including claims that the taller candidate always wins, and the one with the most syllables in his name always wins, and so on.
In any case, you’re right about the need for a strong candidate and broader appeal. The talent pool looks a little thin right now with so much Republican dominance at every level of government.
It seems clear that the GOP won by mobilizing their base and getting a lot of their people to the polls. But this can work in reverse too. There are fissures within the Republican party, barely perceptible to the public at large. A lot of conservatives, for instance, are unhappy about the administration’s fiscal policies, though they still voted for Bush. But over time their disaffection will grow and they may stay away from the polls. Likewise, not everyone within the party shares the far right’s views on abortion, gay rights, etc. These are controversial positions, which is why the Republicans went out of their way to avoid these subjects at their convention. But the social extremists are hungry for results now and they are going to push Bush to do something that may backfire politically. I wish the Democrats could find a way to exploit these tensions, to force the Republicans to put up or shut up. I mean, watching Giuliani get cheered at the Republican convention, I couldn’t help but wonder how that crowd would respond when they see all those pictures of him marching in the Greenwich Village gay pride parade when he was mayor.
If we depend on that analysis, we will lose for sure. 2008 will be even harder to win than 2004. There will probably be another war, driving patriotism and thus support for the president’s chosen successor. Iraq will likely be going much better than it is now. Repulicans will start the next war without the silly rumsfeldian idea of cutting troop strength in wartime and probably will reverse their policy of cutting military pay and benefits. The economy will get better because it doesn’t often stay this bad for eight straight years even with bad policy from the congress.
And the next nominee from the Rs will be better than this one. It may be McCain or Jeb or Bill Frist, but it will be somebody even more attractive to the center than W.
And Republicans will be secretive and sneak their policies into force without taking the consequences at the ballot box now that there is no threat of congressional or judicial oversight.
Our nominees, on the other hand, look not only bad but worse than Kerry. Hillary is a guaranteed loser and will have coattails losing a lot more seats in congress, too. Edwards didn’t even move the results in his home state by even one percent and will be out of office four years. Wes Clark might be plausible, but he still isn’t much of a politician. Maybe he can run for governor of AR and try for president in 2012. Napolitano and Richardson couldn’t deliver their own states to Kerry but one of them might be the best hope we have. As for Dean, well, maybe we should have tried it his way in 2004 but his time to run has come and gone and his kind of Democrat won’t likely be any kind of force in 2008.