Here in America, We Are Still Very Far from 150-Day Battles, But Close to Mid-Term Elections

KCJ’s comment here, on the fawning Songs of Obama sung in a New Jersey classroom, inspired me to write a response that may warrant its own post. Here is the video KCJ is talking about:

This is creepy stuff, and I’d be livid if my kids ever come home singing something like this. Now, where is the evidence that this is the work of the Obama Administration, as opposed to that of one unintelligent Kool-Aid drinking teacher? WSJ blogger James Taranto notes that the teacher in question has since retired, and that there’s no evidence that this was orchestrated from any sort of Central Committee for Popular Enlightenment Und Freudediktat. We are still a long way from 150-day battles here, and anyone in the administration who was so inclined (Van Jones?) still faces such significant obstacles as a mid-term election that will almost certainly cost the governing party dozens of seats in Congress.

(This, on the other hand, is the work of the Obama Administration, and it only amplifies the disgust I’d first expressed here at the herd mentality of our “artistic community,” and the willingness of some in our government to make it a tool of state power. I like the way Iowa Hawk lampooned it here. This will give many of us a sense of unease that will outlast the memory of the overreach itself. It should.)

Still, let’s not overstate cycles that most of us are old enough to recognize as natural and recurring seasons in any democratic system of government. Political parties — and this is especially true of the Democrats, whose tent is much wider at the fringes — are dominated by activists who define “change” in revolutionary terms. Consider the simplistic genius of the very slogan, “Change.” It is ingenious for the same reason that it is so perilous for the politician who rides to victory on it: because it is void for vagueness. It means nothing more than whatever the hearer wants it to mean, up to the moment when the candidate is elected and must govern, and offer specific proposals that often turn out to be different from what voters may have imagined (or been led to imagine).

By now, you may be about to ask for examples. First, I’d cite Obama’s passivity about gay marriage. Obama the President is smart enough to know that the voters aren’t ready for it, but the activists want revolutionary change, even if the result is a series of consequential, long-term setbacks. Consider the administration’s retreat from its early promise to close Gitmo in a year. The Administration made that promise without giving much thought to the question of what are we to do with the terrorists there, terrorists whose plans could not have been disrupted if they had been captured or questioned in ways that conform to our domestic judicial rules of evidence. Yes, some imagined that they would be let go to kill again, but our President has enough sense not to propose that. He also learned that the American people aren’t ready to share their country with terrorists, and the clumsy initial efforts to shut Gitmo down, justified in part on appeasing our “allies,” — often, really the most inflexibly and irrationally anti-American citizens of nominally allied nations — ended up doing significant damage to our most important trans-Atlantic alliance. Now that the war in Iraq seems to be winding down with most key U.S. interests standing a good chance of being secured for at least a while after we leave, some on the far-left are dropping their past pretenses that Afghanistan was “the good war” from which Iraq was a distraction. Now, there is another war that must be lost. There certainly are legitimate debates about how the war there should be fought or can be won, but I don’t expect the far left to take much of a serious interest in those. They no doubt imagined that Obama’s election would mean an accession to their demands for unconditional withdrawal, something Obama can’t give them. That sets us up for the sort of rebellion among the unpatriotic left we haven’t seen since 1968, though probably on a much smaller scale.

For most voters, however, dissatisfaction with the status quo doesn’t translate into enduring support for any particular alternative, and that’s particularly so when the alternative bears a hint of radicalism. Voters are repelled by revolutionaries. Consider: isn’t it possible that dissatisfaction with Iraq in 2006 might have meant dissatisfaction with how the war was being fought, or that it hadn’t been won yet? Certainly most of that dissatisfaction has eased. Iraq is no longer among the most contentious issues in our country, and there is no great popular demand for the kind of calamitous helicopters-on-the-embassy-roof withdrawal that our most craven politicians, many of whom voted to authorize the war, had called for so recently. Nor did dissatisfaction with the economy necessarily equal popular support for the kind of overspending that both Presidents Bush and Obama supported, and which McCain would have. The Great Silent Majority’s imagined idea of “Change” turns out to be unlike the cultish socialist-realist hues of Shepard Fairey’s imagination. The voters’ mandate may have been nothing more than a mandate to manage things back to the halcyon days before 9/11, when the economy also happened to be pretty good. Activists have sharp-edged plans to change the world. Voters have gauzier directions to make the stuff that was good to be good again, and to make the stuff that’s good now better. And during elections, especially mid-term elections, voters tend to punish any sign activism furiously.

I’ll close with the most important point of all — voters think more strategically than we give them credit for, and they tend to display this in their affinity for divided government. Recall, after the 2006 mid-terms, I noted how voters tend to check the president’s party by giving victories to opposition parties:

1958: Republican President (Ike), second mid-term, Dems gain 16 in the Senate, 48 in the House.

1966: Democratic President (LBJ), second mid-term, Republicans gain 3 in the Senate, 47 in the House.

1974: Watergate. Republican President (Ford), sorta-second mid-term, Dems gain 4 in the Senate, 49 in the House.

1978: Democratic President (Carter), first mid-term, Republicans gain 3 in the Senate, 15 in the House.

1986: Republican President (Reagan), second mid-term, Dems gain 8 in the Senate, 5 in the House.

1994: Democratic President (Clinton), first mid-term, Republicans gain 2 in the Senate, 54 in the House.

2002: President’s party actually gains 2 in the Senate, picks up 8 in the House.

Today, we have a likely net switch of 26 House seats and 6 Senate seats. It’s a solid win, more so in the Senate, but not a blowout in light of the historical trends. Dislike of the governing party turns voters out for mid-terms, and governing parties tend to lose seats as a result. [link]

Events like 1994 and 2006 were mostly reactions to an excessive accumulation of power by one party. They were negative mandates, voter-directed terminations. In the broader historical context, they were inevitable reactions. We’re probably going to see the same thing in 2010, because the Democrats’ great accumulation of power isn’t reflected in broad popular support for their ambitious plans. The voters smell radicalism in the government’s excessive spending, its amorphous but too-ambitious health care schemes, and (somewhat unfairly, I think) its obsequious foreign policy. But if the policy in practice isn’t that different from Bush’s, its conciliatory tone certainly hasn’t done us any good with Iran or North Korea, and can’t persuade Europe to behave like an ally (something it ceased to be when it stopped needing us at the end of the Cold War).

Negative mandates tend to be of limited endurance because they’re mostly reactionary in nature. Once the governing party is duly rebuked, the sense of purpose is spent. Once in power, opposition parties typically fail to realize the visions they’ve sold to their voters. The Republicans didn’t close the deal after 1994, because Newt Gingrich was a superficially unappealing figure in the same ways Barack Obama is superficially appealing, and because he cultivated the sort of radical image that gave the voters unease. In this, he certainly had a strong assist from a hostile news media. Obama’s is a case of what I’d describe as vicarious hubris — hubris that’s mostly evident in the swooning of an adoring media, who are still smitten by the Obama of their imaginations in the same way a few of them are still smitten with John Kennedy, with all the erotic and sometimes homoerotic overtones that implies.

With a few obvious exceptions, however, Obama’s own policies have been marked by a cautious cognizance of the backlash to come and a certain calculated willingness to disappoint his base. But triangulation is a very easy thing to get wrong, because it tends to leave everyone disappointed. That can cause disgruntlement even among the supporters of a “stewardship” kind of president, but just imagine the bitterness of the jilted adorers who did not just vote for “Hope,” but who embraced their own imaginations of it.