Editor’s Note: we’re very happy to feature this item, originally published at The Huffington Post, by Mike Lux, founder and CEO of Progressive Strategies, LLC, and author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came To Be. This is an important contribution to our ongoing discussion of intraparty and intraprogressive debates. It was first published here on June 10, 2009
There has been some interesting writing lately on the whole Obama and the left thing, a wave of discussion that started when Obama declared his candidacy for president, and won’t end until humans stop writing history books.
The first was kind of a silly article by Josh Gerstein in Politico, which basically described the left as being Rachel Maddow, some civil liberties groups, and some LGBT activists. Not surprisingly given that definition, all “the left” in Gerstein’s article cared about were civil liberties, gay rights, and having a Supreme Court Justice picked.
Now don’t get me wrong, all of those are incredibly important issues and activists, but to describe “the left” in that way seems like pretty bad reporting. Doesn’t mention the labor movement, health care advocates, advocates for low-income people, environmentalists, bloggers, community organizers, progressive think tanks, feminists, progressive activists of color, MoveOn and other online activists, the progressive youth movement, the peace movement, or any other parts of the remarkably diverse and interesting progressive movement. He didn’t mention how progressives had both pushed for the stimulus package to be bigger but also were an essential part of getting it passed in the end; or how progressives have been organizing big coalitions on behalf of helping Obama get health care, immigration reform, climate change reform, and a re-write of banking legislation passed; or how progressives have expressed concern on a range of issues like trade and banking.
There have also been articles in the Washington Post about how Obama’s election and the sausage making of passing legislation had deadened progressive excitement, and the excellent grasp of the obvious file — one about how progressive groups now had more power in lobbying than they had under Bush.
Easily the most thoughtful pieces of all have been two recent pieces by members of the progressive movement themselves (both personal friends, so I’ll admit my bias upfront). The first, by Gara LaMarche of Atlantic Philanthropies, was a thoughtful and nuanced discussion of the challenges of both Obama and progressives, and was fairly hopeful in general, both about Obama and about the relationship between him and the movement. The second, by Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, was a more frustrated discussion of the way progressive leaders aren’t challenging Obama enough, and the distancing of Obama from progressives.
From my experience in the Obama transition as the Obama team’s liaison to the progressive community, and in all my conversations with folks both inside and outside of Obamaland before and since, the tension between being hopeful about the possibilities and upset that better things aren’t being realized will always be there. If managed right by both Obama and progressive leaders, it can be the kind of constructive, creative tension that leads to the kind of big breakthrough progressive changes we saw in this country at key moments in our history- the 1860s, the early 1900s, the 1930s, and the 1960s (the Big Change Moments I write about in my book, The Progressive Revolution). If managed poorly, it can lead to the kind of presidential meltdowns we saw with the LBJ and Jimmy Carter presidencies, and on the Republican side with the first Bush presidency: Presidencies that started with high hopes but ended with destructive conflicts between the base and the presidency, tough primary challenges, and lost re-election hopes.
So far, I’m feeling quite good about Obama’s chances for the former. After some initial stumbles, he pushed through the stimulus package — and the biggest progressive public investment package — in history. His budget was very bold and as strongly progressive as any budget at least since 1965, and it has made its way through the first rounds of the congressional budget process in good shape. He has so far handled the politics around his first big legislative initiatives, health care and climate change, very pretty, giving us a solid chance at success.
Progressive leaders have handled themselves well on balance, too. A lot of us thought the stimulus was too small, but we pushed hard to get it passed once the die was cast. A lot of us prefer a single-payer health care system, but are also pushing hard to see a strong public option kept in this reform package, and are putting big resources into the passage of a good plan. Progressive groups and leaders are working hard and constructively to push Obama and other Democrats to improve the climate change bill that came out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and to move forward on the strong financial regulation and immigration reform legislation. And where Obama has disappointed many of us — on civil liberties, on LGBT issues, on Afghanistan, and on financial regulation — we have pushed back strongly but generally not been destructive in doing so.
Going forward, though, there are certain things history and common sense teach us that both sides need to understand very clearly:
1. We need each other. Progressives need to understand that our fates for several years to come are tied, fundamentally and completely, to Obama’s success as president. If he loses his big legislative fights, we won’t get another chance at winning them for a generation (see health care, 1993-94), and early losses will make the Democrats more cautious, not more bold (see health care, 1993-94). If Obama’s popularity fades, Democrats will lose lots of seats in Congress. If he loses re-election, Republicans and the media will say he was a failed liberal and run against him for many elections to come, even if his actual policies are more centrist (see Jimmy Carter). But Obama’s team needs to understand that they need a strong progressive movement as well, and as Jane alluded to, they haven’t generally acted like they do. Without progressives’ passion, activism, lobbying, and money, Obama can’t win those incredibly challenging legislative battles. Just as Lincoln never would have won the civil war or ended slavery without the passion of the abolitionists, just as FDR never would have won the New Deal reforms without the labor and progressive movement, just as LBJ would never have passed civil rights bills without the civil rights movement, Obama can’t win these big fights alone. And he can’t win re-election either without the passion of his base: see LBJ, Ford, Carter, George H.W. Bush, and many other presidents for more info on that topic.
2. Obama needs a left flank. It is a natural tendency of any White House to be dismissive of criticism, and to play hardball when people disagree with you. The Obama team should not hesitate to defend itself when being pushed from the Left, but I would caution against playing too hard at hardball. The Obama team needs a vibrant and vocal Left flank, because the stronger their Left flank is, the more Obama seems solidly in the middle. The White House would be well-served to fully support and empower progressive groups, media, and bloggers — even when they sometimes disagree with Obama.
3. There needs to be both an inside and an outside strategy for progressives. Progressive leaders who get jobs in the administration are sometimes derided as sell-outs, and progressive groups who are not openly critical of the Administration are sometimes criticized as being too cozy with those inside. At the same time, insiders get very worked up about “irresponsible” bloggers and outside activists who they say don’t understand the system and the challenges they are facing.
Having been both on the inside and the outside, I see the grain of truth in both sides’ perspective, but also respectfully disagree with both sides.
We need progressive people in government, even if the cost of that is that they have to trim their sails on issues where they disagree with administration policy. We need progressive groups in regular in-depth policy meetings with the administration, even if that means they have to soft-pedal their criticisms some of the time to keep that access. And we need outsiders who will push like crazy for doing the right thing now no matter what.
Change and progress never happened in this country without both insiders and outside agitators playing a strong role. The administration needs to respect the role of those outsiders, and those working for progress from the inside and the outside need to respect each other. There is no other way this is all going to work for the good.
Ed Kilgore
I’m still not totally down with my colleague Matt Compton’s enthusiasm for Twitter. But I will have to say that its use by Republican politicians–which seems to short-circuit their mental filters–has been a source of constant edification.
The latest example is a tweet from warhorse GOP Rep. Peter Hoekstra of MI comparing his fellow House Republicans protesting a procedural maneuver by Nancy Pelosi last year to the people in the streets of Tehran. Politico’s Anne Schroeder Mullins says it all in her Shenanigans column:
Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) may be reaching with his analogies here, Tweeting this: “Iranian twitter activity similar to what we did in House last year when Republicans were shut down in the House.”
Really?
So he’s comparing the Iranian uprising – and the use of technology to spread the word globally – to the House Republicans’ mini rebellion in the darkened House chamber last summer? Hundreds of thousands of people in the streets protesting for democracy, is comparable to Drill Here Drill Now?
Hoekstra spokesman Dave Yonkman cleared a few things up for Shenanigans and said: “Congressman Hoekstra did not compare the ongoing violence in Iran to when Democrats shut down the House chamber during the energy debate last summer. The two situations do share the similarity of government leadership attempting to limit debate and deliberation, and the ability of new technologies to bypass their efforts and allow for direct communication. That’s the only point that he was trying to make.”
That clears it up. So Hoekstra was merely comparing Nancy Pelosi’s refusal to hear drilling amendments to the censorship and crack down by the Iranian ruling regime.
These guys ought to stick to staff-edited press releases.
We’re all used to being told that the Christian Right as we used to know it is dead, dying, moribund, divided, leaderless or rudderless. But for at least two putative candidates for president in 2012, the Old Time Religious Right in all its atavistic glory is an important constituency to be wooed. And that’s why (as Sarah Posner discusses in today’s edition of her FundamentaList column for TAP) southern Baptist minister Mike Huckabee and Baptist-turned-Catholic Newt Gingrich recently went to one of the Christian Right’s holy cities, Virginia Beach, for a “Rediscovering God in America” event that was webcast live by God.TV (an interesting site, BTW).
It’s no surprise that Huckabee showed up; he’s struggling to hang onto the Christian Right as an electoral base. Those who remember his 2008 campaign as representing a refreshing and light-hearted break in the grim and monotonous presentation of Republican dogma might not recognize him now. According to the local newspaper in Virginia Beach, here’s some of what he had to say to the event:
Huckabee told the audience he was disturbed to hear President Barack Obama say during his speech in Cairo, Egypt, on Thursday that one nation shouldn’t be exalted over another.
“The notion that we are just one of many among equals is nonsense,” Huckabee said. The United States is a “blessed” nation, he said, calling American revolutionaries’ defeat of the British empire “a miracle from God’s hand.”
The same kind of miracle, he said, led California voters to approve Proposition 8, which overturned a state law legalizing same-sex marriages.
Nice, eh?
Other speakers included the Virginia-based Christian Right warhorse Ollie North, and David Barton, the leading advocate of “Christian Nation” revisionist history.
But this was really Gingrich’s event, as you might guess from the name, which is also the title of his latest book and movie.
The Newtster wasn’t about to let Huckabee outdo him on the subject of America’s unique divine mission:
“I am not a citizen of the world,” said Gingrich, who was first elected to the U.S. House from Georgia in 1978 and served as speaker from 1995 to 1999. “I am a citizen of the United States because only in the United States does citizenship start with our creator.”
I guess Newt has never heard of Saudi Arabia.
In any event, Newt’s maintenance of close ties to the hard-core evangelical Right is interesting because he recently left Protestantism altogether and was accepted into the Roman Catholic Church (for those interested in how this twice-divorced confessed philanderer managed that, the answer is that his first wife died after their divorce, and his second marriage was annulled by the Archdiocese of Atlanta because that wife had been previously married; thus officially, Newt is merely a remarried widower with a very bad habit of engaging in fornication, adultery and illicit cohabitation).
Newt’s long transition from Southern Baptist to Catholic tells you a lot about the past and present of both faith communities in the United States.
The new issue of Democracy magazine–the first since my esteemed friend Michael Tomasky took over as editor of the journal–feaures an essay, styled as a “re-review” of several books from a few years ago, by the equally esteemed journalist Ron Brownstein on the subject of why Karl Rove’s “realignment” project failed. It’s a good question worth pondering at some depth. But I think Ron’s take, which faults several of the authors of the “re-review” volumes for overestimating and emulating “base polarlization” as a political strategy, misses some key points.
Here’s his basic hypothesis:
To reread the major political books from the years around Bush’s reelection is to be plunged, as if into a cold pool, back into a world of Democratic gloom and anxiety. Those books were linked by the common belief that Republicans had established a thin but durable electoral advantage that threatened to exile Democrats from power for years, if not decades. Many books from that time assumed Democrats could avoid that eclipse only by adopting the tactics used by Republicans in general and Rove in particular. Liberal activists and thinkers all exhorted Democrats to attack Republicans in vitriolic terms, to find liberal “wedge issues” that could divide the electorate as sharply as the conservative stand-bys of abortion, gun control, and gay marriage, and most important to emulate Rove’s approach of seeking to win elections more by mobilizing the party’s base with an uncompromising message than by persuading swing voters with a more centrist appeal….
[But] Bush’s reelection proved the high point of Rove’s vision, and even that was a rather modest peak: Bush’s margin of victory, as a share of the popular vote, was the smallest ever for a reelected president. Through Bush’s disastrous second term, the GOP’s position deteriorated at an astonishing speed. By the time Bush left office, with Democrats assuming control of government and about two-thirds of Americans disapproving of his performance, his party was in its weakest position since before Ronald Reagan’s election. Rather than constructing a permanent Republican majority, Rove and Bush provided Democrats an opportunity to build a lasting majority of their own that none of these books saw coming.
I quoted this section at considerable length because Brownstein seems to be conflating two different if not contradictory themes: (1) that lots of people failed to understand the demographic “upside” for Democrats of the Republican focus on “wedge” issues that divided the electorate, and (2) that Rove failed because “base mobilization” and “polarization” drove a decisive number of voters into the Democratic coalition.
On the first point about demography, the puzzling omission in Brownstein’s “re-review” is any reference to The Emerging Democratic Majority, the 2002 book by (TDS Co-Editor) Ruy Teixeira and John Judis, that pretty much got it all right, not that they got much credit for it when it was published on the eve of a big Republican midterm victory.
The omission, I suspect, is attributable to Brownstein’s focus on the second point, and his concern that Democrats who wanted to emulate Rove with a counter-polarization strategy were wrong, and thus weren’t vindicated by Rove’s subsequent failure. This preoccupation may also account for an inclusion in the re-review that’s as odd as the exclusion of Teixeira and Judis: Tom Schaller’s Whistling Past Dixie, which sharply distinguished itself from other mid-decade handwringing progressive tomes by predicting a bright Democratic future, but which also endorsed an anti-southern polarizing strategy that Brownstein wants to knock down.
Since I share Ron’s general antipathy to political strategies that focus excessively on base mobilization and polarization, it pains me somewhat to say that I think he exaggerates the role of those strategies in Rove’s failure.
By the time you read this, it’s possible that the U.S. House will have already voted on a conference committee report for a supplemental appropriations bill mainly dealing with funds for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But whichever way the vote goes, it’s very interesting to watch Republicans line up to vote against the bill in the teeth of years of harsh rhetoric they deployed against Democrats for failing to “support the troops” by voting for Bush-era war supplementals. Yes, they claim they are voting not against “the troops” but against non-germane amendments, but then they voted for bills with non-germane amendments in the Bush supplementals regularly. Democrats voting against war funding in the past weren’t voting to defund the troops, either, but were trying to influence the overall war strategy in Iraq.
If I had to guess, it’s the nature of the “non-germane amendment” this time around that is proving to be catnip to GOPers. It involves money for the International Monetary Fund to help countries hurt even worse than we are by the financial meltdown. And so, before you can say “Frank Luntz,” they’ve come up with a term for the IMF money that looks like polling dynamite: “foreign bank bailout.”
It’s not often that you get to demonize a piece of legislation using a combination of three very unpopular words. That’s probably at least one more than they could resist.
There’s an old joke about a narcissist being someone who goes to a football game and thinks the team is talking about them in the huddle. There’s a dangerous element of that attitude in some U.S. reactions to unfolding events in Iran.
Already the chattering classes are falling into the habit of handicapping the twists and turns of the Iranian election crisis in terms of a “win” or “loss” for President Obama (viz, Martin Peretz’s post on Saturday entitled: “Ahmadinejad: 1; Obama: 0”). While international events do often affect the standing of the chief executive of the world’s most powerful nation, it’s a really bad idea to begin thinking that the rest of the world calibrates every action in reaction to U.S. policies. Believe it or not, foreigners have their own fish to fry.
Today Matt Yglesias tries to make this simple point in reacting to some hysterical tweeting by the man who might well have been in charge of the United States right now, John McCain (“If we are steadfast eventually the Iranian people will prevail,” said the Arizona senator’s thumbs):
That’s right. Whether or not the Iranian people prevail depends on how steadfast we are. How steadfast we are in what? In wishing them well? In tweeting mean things about the Iranian security services? Of course what Americans do isn’t totally irrelevant, but it’s unquestionably a peripheral factor in this drama. Iran is a country populated by Iranians, and their fate is primarily in their own hands.
Some of what Yglesias calls “neocon egomania on Iran” is coming, of course, from people who have favored military action against Iran for years, and who will treat every development in Tehran as reflecting the degree to which America or Israel is or isn’t conveying a credible threat of force. Worse yet, others think of Iran as part of an undifferentiated “Islamofascism” that is bent primarily on the destruction of The West, and believe Iranian repression should be viewed as a mocking reaction to Barack Obama’s “appeasement” of Islam in his Cairo speech. Check out this characteristic take from the Washington Times‘ Wes Pruden:
If Iranian voters had thrown Mahmoud Ahmadinejad into the street, the American president would have assumed that he was the One who did it, and the American press would have led the hosannas for the messiah from the south side of Chicago.Just a few more speeches, a few more respectful bows toward Mecca, and all the rough places would be made smooth and plain. But now even Mr. Obama must wake up and smell the tear gas.
Lest it be objected that Pruden is a marginal, extremist figure, his argument was pretty much the same one made Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” by Mitt Romney, the early frontrunner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination:
The comments by the president last week, that there was a robust debate going on in Iran, was obviously entirely wrong-headed. What has occurred is the election is a fraud, the results are inaccurate, and you’re seeing a brutal repression of the people as they protest. … It’s very clear that the president’s policies of going around the world and apologizing for America aren’t working. … Look, just sweet talk and criticizing America is not going to enhance freedom in the world.
One of the most destructive tendencies of contemporary conservatism has been its determination to conflate recognition of the limits of American power with “weakness” or “appeasement.” With that comes a strong tendency to overrate the global impact of every word uttered in Washington, to the point that we Americans are expected to sacrifice our own freedom of action and self-interest in submission to our awful responsibilities as a world power.
The delusions associated with narcissism should be rejected if and when Iran’s crisis subsides, and we get around to considering what happens next in U.S.-Iranian relations. To quote Yglesias again:
[Whatever] the outcome of Iran’s domestic political struggles, the fundamental strategic calculus remains the same. Airstrikes against Iranian nuclear facilities will not accomplish the goal of maintaining a verifiably non-nuclear Iranian military, and an agreement on nuclear issues between the U.S. and Iran would still serve the interests of both countries. Under the circumstances, no matter what the outcome, pursuit of such an arrangement should continue to be a priority.
Recogning that basic reality will be easier if conservatives would stop talking as though Iranians are backward children whose every act is dictated by their reaction to “rewards” and “punishments” meted out by the United States.
UPDATE: John Judis of TNR has published a very good post about the cautious approach to a situation like Iran’s that a “prudent idealism” would suggest.
As a total political history junkie, I love strolling down memory lanes for precedents that might offer insights as to how contemporary political developments might unfold. But for that very reason, one of my pet peeves is the use of half-baked or outdated “lessons of political history” that get cited in the chattering classes as though they came down from Mount Sinai on stone tablets.
Over at fivethirtyeight.com a couple weeks ago, I challenged one of the most settled “lessons of political history,” that the party controlling the White House might as well forget about winning the governorships of New Jersey or Virginia. And yesterday I took on a much-cited “rule” in my home state of Georgia suggesting that former governors can’t win “comebacks.”
I’m always on the lookout for such “lessons of political history” to examine, so any readers with some examples, either national in nature or from your own neck of the woods, please feel free to post them as a comment.
As part of the endless efforts of conservatives to treat the last two election debacles as aberrations in a “center-right nation” (or as somehow-conservative reactions to that godless freespending liberal George W. Bush), you can expect some reaction to the latest Gallup survey of the ideological self-identifications of Americans. It shows a slight uptick in “conservative” self-identification during 2009, up to 40% from 37% last year. But it’s basically the same findings almost always found in recent decades when voters are offered the three choices of “conservative,” “liberal” and “moderate.” Self-identified “conservatives” have been bumping around 40% since 1992, with “liberals” around 20% and “moderates” holding the balance. Moreover, Gallup confirms the very old news that Republicans are heavily conservative (73% “conservative,” 24% “moderate” and 3% “liberal”), while Democrats are more ideologically diverse (40% “moderate,” 38% “liberal” and 22% “conservative”).
There’s no real evidence here that anything’s changed since November of 2008.
And as always, the C-M-L choice doesn’t seem to tell us as much as more nuanced measurements of ideology. The big recent Center for American Progress study released in March, State of Political Ideology, 2009, added “libertarian” and “progressive” to the usual menu of self-identification options, and after pushing leaners, found that 47% of Americans think of themselves as progressive or liberal, while 48% self-identify as conservative or libertarian. The CAP survey also found that when you probe deeper in terms of more specific statements of values and beliefs, there’s a reasonably solid progressive majority when it comes to most matters of international and domestic policy. The conservative “brand” may still be relatively strong, but it doesn’t always translate into issue positions, much less voting behavior.
Virtually everyone agrees that the long-stable C-M-L findings disguise generational trends that are worth watching closely. The new Gallup survey finds that “liberals” outnumber “conservatives” by a 31%-30% margin among voters under 30. And a May analysis by CAP on “millennials” shows 44% self-identifying as progressive or liberal, and just 28% as conservative or libertarian.
None of this, of course, will deter “center-right nation” fans from claiming the latest Gallup survey as evidence that Americans were misled during the last two election cycles, or were offered insufficiently stark ideological choices, or were simply tired of George W. Bush and will return to the Republican Party almost automatically in 2010 or 2012. This argument is essential to the conservative project of keeping the GOP firmly on the Right, or driving it even further Right. When you are a hammer, everything–and certainly every poll–looks like a nail.
In The Hill today, Aaron Blake has a story about an important but little-discussed phenomenon that’s shaping the landscape for U.S. House campaigns in 2010: candidate calculations about the impact of redistricting after 2010:
As they enter a key decision-making phase of the 2010 election cycle, the chance that they will encounter a very different map in 2012 could serve as both a deterrent and motivation to go for it.
For some, 2010 might be their last best hope to win a given district before it is shored up by redistricting, while others might want to wait for the post-redistricting election, when the grass could be greener thanks to a friendly reapportionment process.
The go-for-broke temptation that Blake mentions refers to the strong tendency of legislatures to protect congressional incumbents, sometimes including those from the opposite party (often voters from the same party of a strong incumbent are “packed” into his or her district to make neighboring districts friendlier to the other party). Incubment-protection is a particularly strong impulse in those many situations where neither party completely controls redistricting.
But sometimes circumstances cut in the opposite direction:
Since redistricting often aims to shore up incumbents, it’s rare that it leads to better takeover opportunities. But that could be the case with members like Reps. Dennis Moore (D-Kan.), Peter King (R-N.Y.) or any number of vulnerable Illinois Republicans.
King and Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), who are weighing Senate runs, could actually be encouraged to run for statewide office because of the upcoming changes to their tenuous districts, which are likely to be handled by Democrats.
All in all, the wait-and-see tendency is naturally strong, since incumbents tend to settle into their districts between redistricting cycles. Moreover, among challengers, no one wants to risk an entire career to win a House seat and then see the district become unwinnable after just one term. Here’s Blake’s bottom line for 2010:
Overall, history shows that the number of quality challengers who emerge to run for Congress declines as redistricting maps become more entrenched, with the final election before redistricting – 2010, in this case – having the fewest quality challengers.
Vanderbilt political science professor Marc Hetherington, who has also studied redistricting’s effect on candidates, said the upcoming election cycle could be something of an exception, given the number of Republican seats that have flipped Democratic the last two elections.
It’s worth remembering that state legislatures are also redistricting themselves even as they draw congressional district lines. And that can have strange and interesting impllications, as Blake explains:
In perhaps the weirdest redistricting conundrum in the country, state Sen. Darrel Aubertine is a Democratic favorite to run in the upcoming special election for Army Secretary-designate Rep. John McHugh’s (R) upstate seat. But Aubertine could be risking his party’s control over redistricting by giving up his state Senate seat to run for Congress.
The Democratic majority in the Empire State’s upper chamber was always tenuous, but Monday’s coup by 30 Republicans and two Democrats put everything in focus. The 30 remaining Democrats will be fighting hard to regain their majority status and, provided Democrats retain the governor’s mansion, control congressional redistricting.
Aubertine’s district is one of the most difficult they hold. So, in effect, he could actually help his party win more congressional seats by staying in the state Senate.
As is often the case with redistricting cycles, candidate calculations going into 2010 may well involve many games of three-dimensional chess around the country. That complicates the national picture significantly.
Most Democrats understand the downside of winning elections and then being held accountable for conditions in the country they did not produce. Consider the endless talk about the federal budget deficits in the Obama administration’s first budget. As David Leonhardt of the New York Times explained yesterday, Obama inherited most of the red ink from Bush policies and from the recession (indeed, as Jonathan Chait argues, Leonhardt may have actually underestimated that inheritance). But it’s considered poor form for Democrats to keep “blaming Bush,” doncha know.
One often underestimated benefit of holding the White House, though, is the extraordinary power and visibility of the Bully Pulpit. And that factor is nicely illustrated by a new Gallup survey that shows Americans clearly think of Barack Obama as the leader of the Democratic Party, while having little idea whom to treat as the leader of the opposition.
Worse yet, the three people most often cited by Gallup respondents in an open-ended question about the “main person who speaks for the Republican Party today” are Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich; 29% named one of these three gents (as did 29% of Republicans and 34% of Democrats). These are precisely the three “spokesmen” most Democrats would wish on the GOP. But that may overstate their prominence: a remarkable 46% of Republicans and GOP-leaners in the poll either couldn’t name a party leader or asserted there wasn’t one.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama is considered the main Democratic spokesman by two-thirds of Democrats and 58% of Americans generally. The latter number is as low as it is because fully 20% of Republicans (but only 6% of Democrats) named Nancy Pelosi as the main Democratic voice, reflecting the obsession of conservative media with the House Speaker.
This situation obviously helps the president serve as a messenger and agenda-setter for the Democratic Party. But it also helps explain the hyper-partisan and ideologically rigid atmosphere among would-be Republican “spokesmen,” who are competing for attention by focusing on the hard-core conservative base. It’s enough to drive a party crazy.
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