Daily Archives: November 7, 2008

Dear Conservatives: Pick Your Fights

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This is to be the first of an irregular series offering advice to conservatives, explaining to them why they lost and what they need to do to win in the future. They won’t take it, but there are things that need to be said, for the record.

Today’s advice: Pick Your Fights.

During the Clinton years I tried giving this same advice to righties when they wondered why most Americans still liked Clinton after all the mud that was slung at him. Righties I talked to wanted big, screaming banner headlines in the newspapers every single bleeping day about whatever allegation was being pushed by the Right at the moment. They wanted this whether there had been new developments or not.

As it was, every bleeping time one opened a newspaper or flipped on cable television, there was Trent Lott or Bob Barr or Tom DeLay or somebody accusing the Clintons of one thing or another. And I truly think after a while most Americans tuned it out. The constant stream of allegations became white noise. The economy was good, there were few apparent crises (and what crises did exist seemed far, far away), gas was cheap, life was good. Plus, the President was a likable guy whose public persona didn’t mesh with the way the Right portrayed him.

I honestly think the steady drumbeat of Whitewater Whitewater Whitewater to some extent inoculated President Clinton from fatal damage when the Monica, um, involvement was exposed. People were so used to the Right screaming about scandal that, when a real scandal came along, it didn’t seem that big a deal.

Also, the Right’s perpetual ire over everything Clinton was out of touch with the public mood. There is much to criticize about the Clinton Administration. Just one example — free trade policies. But the buzzword of the later Clinton years was complacency. Not hysteria.

I think a similar phenomenon took hold during the recent election campaign. Every bleeping day the Right was going on about Bill Ayers or the Rev. Wright, or twisting something Barack Obama said into a scandal. But when people saw Obama for themselves, they saw he was hardly the wild-eyed radical. And while the Right frantically looked for the magic bullet — some scandal that would soil Obama’s public image — Obama talked about real issues and what he thought ought to be done about them.

And they haven’t stopped. The minions are still in campaign smear mode, holding up every single thing Barack Obama does as evidence that he’s the bad guy. Now they’re complaining about Obama’s transition web site, for pity’s sake.

Personally, I hope they stay in perpetual campaign smear mode. It’s good for our side. There’s a rule in business management — when everything is an emergency, nothing is an emergency. Emergency becomes the “normal.” Well, I’d say that when everything is a scandal, nothing is a scandal. If the Right would learn to STFU until something happened that actually mattered, they’d have more credibility, and their accusations would have some impact.

I think we can count on them not learning that, however.

The Myth of Liberal “Overreach”

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So far I haven’t seen a single Democrat, or independent liberal for that matter, claim that the election of Barack Obama means there will be a permanent Democratic majority forever and ever amen. The best outcome most of us hope for is that Dems will at least keep if not increase their seats in Congress in the 2010 midterms and that President Obama gets a second term. Beyond that, anticipation dissipates into the Unknowable Unknown.

The only certainty is that all compounded things will decay. Nothing lasts forever, in other words.

This has not stopped a number of conservatives from wagging fingers at us and warning us not to expect a permanent Democratic majority. Of course not, dears, but nobody thinks in terms of “permanent majorities” except you. Oh, and clue: As long as there are human beings, history will not end.

The disconnect may be that conservatives don’t grasp the meaning of the word “permanent.” James Antle, associate editor of the American Spectator, writes,

After Tuesday, the Republican remnant in Washington is fearing the worst. While they seem to have dodged a filibuster-proof Democratic Senate, they will have less ability to shape and block legislation than at any time since Jimmy Carter’s administration. Conservative Democratic senators are few, and many moderate Republicans from blue states will feel pressure to cave into Obama’s agenda. Republican opinion leaders warn of a big, and perhaps permanent, shift to the left.

It’s happened before and could happen again.

A permanent shift to the left happened before? But it didn’t last, did it? That means it wasn’t permanent.

Conservatives also are warning us not to “overreach,” meaning don’t go all New Deal on us. Antle continues,

But these concerns could be as overwrought as Democratic worries that their party would forever be shut out of power by an ascendant right wing after November 2004. Undivided American government leads to overreach, and overreach leads to defeat. It took four years of Carter to bring about eight years of Ronald Reagan. It required just two years of Clinton to give way to Gingrich and a dozen years of Republican domination of Congress.

Let’s think about this. Did Reagan sweep Carter out of office in 1980 because of “overreach”? Did George Bush and the GOP win in 2000 because the Clinton Administration was guilty of “overreach”? That’s not how I remember it. There were many factors that caused Dems to lose those elections, some of which were the fault of Dem administrations and Dems in Congress, and some of which were not. But “overreach” was not one of those factors.

Carter lost in 1980 mostly because he seemed weak and ineffectual, not because he “overreached.” His actual policies were middle-of-the-road for the time. Among his achievements were deregulation of the airline and telephone industries.

Regarding “It required just two years of Clinton to give way to Gingrich and a dozen years of Republican domination of Congress” — let us note that President Clinton won re-election easily in 1996. And, frankly, I think it’s possible that he would have been re-elected in 2000 if he could have run for a third term.

So what “overreach” is Antle talking about? If you want to see an example of “overreach,” let’s see — invading Iraq? the Patriot Act? The Terri Schiavo episode?