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.