Category: Politics

The Democrats’ Demographic Problem

Peter A. Brown has an interesting piece on why demographics won’t save the Democrats from minority party status:

Democrats see themselves as standing up for the victims of capitalism’s excesses. They back organized labor (union members were 14 percent of the electorate) against business and racial minorities (blacks were 11 percent) against alleged discrimination.

They fight for the poor against the rich, but they wrongly assume how much smaller that group is than the middle class. In 2004, 55 percent of voters had incomes above $50,000; another 22 percent from $30,000 to $50,000. Median U.S. family income is about $42,000, and the poverty line for a family of four is $18,850.

Democrats oppose what they see as rising U.S. militarism and unilaterialism, yet Americans see Republicans as much stronger on defense, even if a narrow majority does not think the president’s Iraq invasion made us more secure.

Democrats may argue they are following their moral compass, but large chunks of the middle class view that mentality as arrogance. They think Democrats see some voters as more important than others.

The fundamental problem the Democrats have is that they’ve become the party of vicious class envy. The two biggest Democratic constituencies are the super-rich and the super-poor. The super-rich because their wealth insulates them from the effects of taxation, and the super-poor because they’re the benefits of Democratic largesse. The rest of the country gets stuck with the bill. When the median income in the United States is $42,000 and a majority of Americans are invested in the stock market, the Democrats are still playing by a playbook written in the Great Depression. The cries against capitalism are far less convincing to someone whose retirement depends on the growth of big business. The notion that the investor class consists solely of the super-rich has been false for decades now, and until the Democrats get that through their heads they will remain a minority party.

The Democrats also remain stuck on the wrong side of the values issue. Especially with minorities, there is strong opposition to the effects of a culture that degrades the traditional family. Hispanics tend to be one of the most strongly pro-family voting blocs in the country, and the traditional values of marriage being between a man and a woman are stronger among Hispanic voters than nearly any other group. On social issues, both Hispanics and African-Americans are closer to the Republican Party platform than any other group.

The problem for the Democrats is that the Hispanic vote is becoming less reliably Democratic. President Bush garnered 44% of the Hispanic vote in 2004, up 9% from 2000 and his largest gain of any ethnic group. As Hispanics become increasingly less likely to be poor workers and more likely to be small business owners and entrepreneurs, the Republican share of the Hispanic vote will only increase. Furthermore, the Democrats have positioned themselves in such a way as to exacerbate this slide. Hispanic voters are not going to accept a party that is openly hostile to their values and arrogantly assumes that they’re all a bunch of poor immigrants who can’t achieve success without the paternalistic hand of government.

The Democrats are in the midst of a major battle for power between moderate Democrats and the far left MoveOn crowd. It appears that the latter is winning — and if they do the Democrats will remain a minority party for some time. The Democrats no longer speak to the interests of middle America either in values or in economic terms. The longer they stick to their losing formula, the worse their predicament will become.

Volokh Cleans Slate

Eugene Volokh takes Slate to task for another of their “Bushisms” that was taken completely out of context.

The President does have a tendency towards malapropisms (“make the pie higher” and “is our children learning” being a few of the more notable ones), but the media continues to flog them to death in the Quixotic quest to justify their view of Bush as being some kind of simpleton. There are plenty of quantum physicists who can’t form a straight sentence to save their lives, but that doesn’t mean that they’re stupid. For all of the insinuations about Bush’s intelligence, he’s managed to do what no US President has done since 1988 and win reelection with a simple majority.

The constant barrage of unwarranted criticisms over Bush’s verbal stumbles reflect more on the media’s Ahab-like fixation on the President than it does on his intellect. Given that the left isn’t smart enough to figure out that their sneering contempt for middle America isn’t winning them any friends, they’re in no position to criticize.

O’Reilly Defends Rather

Bill O’Reilly of all people is riding to the defense of Dan Rather, albeit in a rather half-assed way:

Right-wing talk radio in particular pounded Kerry and also bludgeoned Dan Rather for his role in another smear incident – the charges against President Bush about his National Guard service. Again, Rather was found guilty without a fair hearing. Charges that he intentionally approved bogus documents that made Bush look bad were leveled and widely believed. It was chilling.

As a CBS News correspondent in the early ’80s, I worked with Rather and have known him for more than 20 years. Listen to me: There is no way on this Earth that he would have knowingly used fake documents on any story.

It may be true that Rather did not vet the information supplied to him by producers, but few anchor people do. They are dependent on other journalists, and this is a huge flaw in the system.

Dan Rather is guilty of not being skeptical enough about a story that was politically loaded. I believe Rather, along with Andy Rooney, Walter Cronkite and other guardsmen of the old CBS News, is liberal in his thinking. That is certainly a legitimate debate – how for years CBS News has taken a rather progressive outlook. But holding a political point of view is the right of every American, and it does not entitle people to practice character assassination or deny the presumption of innocence. Dan Rather was slimed. It was disgraceful.

So, according to O’Reilly, Rather wasn’t being deliberately disingenious, he’s just an idiot. When you all of a sudden get a pile of documents of dubious provenance that just so happens to match the DNCs talking points, you have the obligation as a journalist to check those sources and accurately and fully vet those documents. Rather should have never done that story until the documents had been thoroughly vetted. Arguing that he’s “dependent on other journalists” is no excuse, he ran the story and it appears that CBS deliberately shopped portions of the documents to various experts so that they wouldn’t be revealed as hoaxes. That is clear evidence of deliberate intent to decieve.

O’Reilly is hardly a paragon of journalistic ethics himself, but he should know better than to try and defend someone like Rather when he was responsible for running a story designed to smear the President based upon clearly fraudulent documents. For someone who supposedly inhabits a “no-spin zone”, it seems that O’Reilly himself is all too willing to excuse a massive and inexcusable breach of the public trust.

No Shrimp Left Behind

It appears that the insatiable taste for pork on behalf of members of Congress continues unabated.

As always, John McCain has the nota bene:

The spending plan awaiting President Bush’s signature is packed with [pork-barrel spending projects], doling out $4 million for an Alabama fertilizer development center, $1 million each for a Norwegian American Foundation in Seattle and a “Wild American Shrimp Initiative,” and more, much more.

Despite soaring deficits, lawmakers from both parties who approved the $388 billion package last weekend set plenty of money aside for home-district projects like these, knowing they sow goodwill among special interests and voters.

They also raised the ire of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a pork-barrel critic who took to the Senate floor to ask whether shrimp are so unruly and lacking initiative that the government must spend $1 million on them.

“Why does the U.S. taxpayer need to fund this `no shrimp left behind’ act?” he asked.

McCain is considering a possible run in 2008. He’s got my vote…

Qui Desiderat Pacem, Praeparet Bellum

Michael Totten has an excellent piece on why the Democrat’s inability to understand war hurts them on national security issues. As he notes:

It is possible to be some kind of anti-Bush lefty and write thoughtful books and articles about national security without being a backseat heckler who opposes but offers no alternate vision. Paul Berman has managed to do it. But he labors away in an inhospitable left-wing environment that hardly has any room for him. For someone like me who doesn’t have a lifetime’s worth of street cred in the lefty press, I’m all but forced to play in the right’s sandbox whether I like it or not. (But I don’t dislike it as much as I did, and that’s bad news for the Democrats. An entire genre of intellectuals like me exists and has a name – neoconservatives – because mine is all-too common a storyline.)

These kinds of problems are self-reinforcing. The fewer intellectuals there are on the left who study military history and strategy, the less likely any otherwise left-minded person who is interested in such things will want or be able to work with or for liberals and Democrats. What has been happening is a nation-wide brain-drain from the left to the right – at least in certain areas.

I have a sinking feeling things will remain this way in the future to the horizon. Come on, Dems. Prove me wrong, would you please?

Indeed, Totten points to this piece by the Texas Thucydides that also gets to the heart of the matter:

Listening to neo-conservative voices is important for Democrats, because contrary to popular belief, these people used to be liberals. This constituency should be a natural member of the Democratic coalition. They believe in a moral foreign policy that is driven by values instead of cold, hard, Realism.These are the intellectual heirs to the Scoop Jackson Democrats. The reason they left the Democratic Party is because we lost credibility on foreign policy issues when we decided to embrace the Marxist worldview as our primary ordering principle in the late 1960’s. Should we bring them back into the fold, we’ll be a majority party once more.

The fact is that the Democratic Party has no foreign-policy vision. The Kerry campaign utterly failed to present any realistic view of what America’s role in the world should be, other than deference to our erstwhile “allies” in Europe. This vision didn’t have much appeal, and it was those 9/11 Democrats like Mr. Totten who helped swing this election towards the President. (Not “moral values” voters as some surveys had indicated.)

In contrast, the President’s vision is anything but unclear. To the President, America has the responsibility for promoting democratic society worldwide as only democracy can counteract the tide of Islamic fundamentalism that is the largest threat to world security we currently face. That means that we will do whatever it takes to see to it that the Iraqi people become free and democratic – that we will support the “road map” to peace so long as the Palestinians chose the path of freedom and cooperation with their neighbors, and that we will tie our foreign aid to moves towards transparency and democratization. That is a clear and moral vision for the future of our foreign policy.

What the Democrats completely fail to understand is that “soft power” isn’t going to replace hard military power – not now, and not ever. There are issues that require the use of JDAMs, not pieces of paper. The left has embraced the doctrine of Neville Chamberlain, that if one can just get everyone to sign a treaty, there would be no need for war. Like the Kellogg-Briand Pact, such a worldview is deeply naive. There are times when armed conflict is absolutely necessary, and there is no substitute for victory against those who would destroy the West.

Furthermore, the Democrats naive worldview extends to the actual practice of warfare. The left seems entirely unable to differentiate the difference between the intentional murder of civilians and collateral damage.

The problem with this is that one is in a completely different moral category than the other. We don’t charge someone who accidentally runs over a pedestrian with capital murder. We don’t send a doctor who kills a patient while performing a risky procedure to jail. Yet the left condemns our soldiers for every action that may endanger civilian life while condemnations of the Hussein’s regimes atrocities and the brutality of the terrorist “insurgency” in Iraq are few and far between. Israel is the object of scorn for building a wall designed to keep out suicide bombers, while a mass murderer like Yasser Arafat is celebrated as a hero.

Even with more moderate Democrats, there is still a lack of any overarching foreign policy vision. If Bush was wrong to engage Iraq and not North Korea, what should he have done? Would the left really like to argue that an attack on North Korea that would involve the utter destruction of Seoul would be a viable foreign policy option? Or is it just a throwaway argument? What of the arguments that Bush should have pursued Iran or Saudi Arabia – under what circumstances would the Democrats find a reasonable causus belli to engage in military action against those states? Or again, are we facing an argument that is designed as a distraction rather than as a statement of principle?

With few exceptions, liberals don’t understand terrorism. Terrorism doesn’t spring from poverty, your average Palestinian suicide bomber is relatively well off and the membership of al-Qaeda tends to come from the middle and upper classes of Arab society. American action doesn’t cause terrorism – Latin America has far more to complain about in terms of American meddling than the Middle East, but you don’t see Chileans or Colombians flying passenger aircraft into office buildings.

The root of Islamist terrorism is an ideology that is no less pernicious than Naziism and no more subject to negotiation or reason. Against this threat we can afford to spare no quarter. Many on the left completely and utterly fail to understand this. It is not enough to merely “go after al-Qaeda” – unless we change the systems that cultivate terrorism more will just take their place.

Furthermore, in such instances where we do this, the left ignores our efforts. Our troops have provided countless amounts of humanitarian aid and assistance in Afghanistan and Iraq – almost all of which goes unregarded by the popular press. Shortly after September 11 the hue and cry from academia was “we need a new Marshall Plan for the Middle East.” What we have done is exactly that – we have begun to remove the cancerous and tyrannical regimes in the Middle East and provided aid and a new chance at freedom for the people of Iraq. Yet too many want to embrace the vision of our troops as a bunch of mindless kill-bots who have been given video-game visions of war and cannot possibly understand the ramifications of the policies they support. It’s the same type of liberal arrogance and false sense of nobless oblige that we’ve seen time and time again.

Bush’s foreign policy vision has little do with the straw man charges of “imperialism” and “colonialism” and “racism” that are thrown out by the academic left towards anything that doesn’t fit into their narrow worldview. Instead, it is a deeply liberal (in the classical sense) vision for the world. The Scoop Jackson/John F. Kennedy Democrats understood that it was the mission of the United States to bear any burden in pursuit of democracy and freedom worldwide. It is too bad that the left has abandoned this vision in their quest to delegitimize the current President.

Colin Powell Resigns

Secretary of State Colin Powell, as many have been expecting, has tendered his resignation, effective once a suitable replacement has been found.

Powell did the best he could, but had been saddled with a bureaucracy of entrenched interests that often went to the contrary of the President’s policy objectives. Powell also had to deal with the arrogance and the cynicism of European powers who had every interest in constraining the United States no matter what the cost. Such circumstances would be straining to anyone. However, Powell did some impressive shuttle diplomacy in securing the release of American pilots in China early in the Bush Administration, as well as helping get as much international support as he could for the war in Iraq. No amount of persuasion would change the minds of Jacques Chirac or Dominique de Villepin, which meant that Powell’s task was nearly Sisyphean in scope.

My guess would be that Condoleezza Rice would be the natural successor to Powell. She’s fluent in several languages, is extremely accomplished, and practically unflappable – all qualities necessary for success in the cutthroat world of international diplomacy. She also has the will to reform the Foreign Service and ensure that State works for American interests rather than against them. It’s a difficult task, but she would be one of the few who could pull it off.

UPDATE: Also resigning is Secretary of Education Rod Paige, Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman, and Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham. Cabinet resignations between Presidential terms like this are fairly normal, the turnover of Cabinet-level personnel is quite high.

One wonders if Rumsfeld will stay on or not…

Ashcroft, Evans Out

The White House is stating that Attorney General John Ashcroft and Commerce Secretary Don Evans are resigning from the Bush Administration. This isn’t particularly unusual, as turnover in the White House is always high, and the period between a President’s term is a common point for overworked Cabinet officials to return to the private sector.

More later.

Polling Postmortem

Jim Lindgren crunches the numbers and finds which pollsters were the most accurate in 2004. Rasmussen and Survey USA came out on top, with the worst being (unsurprisingly) the LA Times poll and Fox News’ polls also being wildly inaccurate (ironically Fox’s polls significantly overstated support for Kerry).

The lessons of the 2004 elections: as I’ve said before, partisan ID can change over time. Pollsters like Zogby who applied the partisan balance from 2000 were far off the mark while pollsters who either assumed an even partisan balance caught the increase in GOP registrations that erased the traditional Democratic advantage in voter ID.

Ironically, my estimates well understated Bush’s popular vote performance (I guessed around 49.5% at most and Bush got 51%), and overstated the Electoral College (Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Hawaii all went to Kerry). Indeed, from the analysis of the numbers, it appears that the 9/11 Democrats (not moral values voters) were enough to lift Bush’s numbers. It was terrorism, and not gay marriage that reelected President Bush. This was indeed a realigning election, and unless the Democrats start to understand Middle America rather than deride their faith and work ethic, a period of lasting Republican control similar to the Democratic coalition of FDR is quite possible. The real lesson of this election is that the Democrats drifted dangerously far out of the mainstream of American politics – and given the petulant reaction we’ve seen so far, it’s seems they’re failing to learn from their mistakes.

The Bush/Gay Marriage Myth

David Brooks runs the exit poll numbers in The New York Times and finds that gay marriage was not the defining issue of this election. In fact, evangelicals weren’t any larger a voting bloc in this election than they were in the last as a percentage of the electorate. Yes, more evangelicals voted, but turnout was up among all groups. As Brooks notes, hitting it right on the head:

He won because 53 percent of voters approved of his performance as president. Fifty-eight percent of them trust Bush to fight terrorism. They had roughly equal confidence in Bush and Kerry to handle the economy. Most approved of the decision to go to war in Iraq. Most see it as part of the war on terror.

The fact is that if you think we are safer now, you probably voted for Bush. If you think we are less safe, you probably voted for Kerry. That’s policy, not fundamentalism. The upsurge in voters was an upsurge of people with conservative policy views, whether they are religious or not.

The red and blue maps that have been popping up in the papers again this week are certainly striking, but they conceal as much as they reveal. I’ve spent the past four years traveling to 36 states and writing millions of words trying to understand this values divide, and I can tell you there is no one explanation. It’s ridiculous to say, as some liberals have this week, that we are perpetually refighting the Scopes trial, with the metro forces of enlightenment and reason arrayed against the retro forces of dogma and reaction.

In the first place, there is an immense diversity of opinion within regions, towns and families. Second, the values divide is a complex layering of conflicting views about faith, leadership, individualism, American exceptionalism, suburbia, Wal-Mart, decorum, economic opportunity, natural law, manliness, bourgeois virtues and a zillion other issues.

But the same insularity that caused many liberals to lose touch with the rest of the country now causes them to simplify, misunderstand and condescend to the people who voted for Bush. If you want to understand why Democrats keep losing elections, just listen to some coastal and university town liberals talk about how conformist and intolerant people in Red America are. It makes you wonder: why is it that people who are completely closed-minded talk endlessly about how open-minded they are?

And that’s the question at hand: for all the talk about how open-minded the left is, the incredibly petty and bitter reaction to Bush’s reelection has belied any such notions. For example, look at the post from The Daily Kos:

Marching order #1, therefore, is this: No matter whom you talk to outside our circles, begin to perpetuate the (false, exaggerated) notion that George Bush’s victory was built not merely on values issues, but gay marriage specifically. If you feel a need to broaden it slightly, try depicting the GOP as a majority party synonymous with gay-haters, warmongers and country-clubbers. Because I, for one, am tired of hearing whiny complaints from conservatives that, not only do I not have values, but that I fail to properly respect the values of people who are all too happy to buy into, no less perpetuate, inaccurate caricatures of the 54+ million Americans who voted Tuesday for John Kerry.

So, the poster of this piece wants to see that it’s an inaccurate characture that liberals don’t have strong moral values, in order to do that they’re going to spread a blatant lie. The irony in that statement couldn’t be any more clear.

Liberals, here’s why you lost: because in the marketplace of ideas your products don’t see. Statism doesn’t work. Government programs don’t create wealth, they diminish it. International institutions that pay lip service to justice then make deals with tyrants are worthless. A media that is willing to peddle lies to get a candidate out of office is unbefitting of a democracy. A resume is not a replacement for having a position on the most critical issue of our time. Petulance is not the same as policy.

So long as the left wallows in their own self-superiority, they will lose again as they did in 2000, 2002, 2003, and 2004. For all the supposed intellectualism of the liberal elites, the fact that they can’t even grasp the reason why they lost speaks volumes.