More Than Better

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(For those of you who missed the announcement on the two million social media accounts I have to keep up these days, the first episode of my new web series on teaching, Socratic Sense, is now up. Yep, I’m getting back into video production again, this time with more expensive software and crappier visuals. Enjoy or not, as the case may be. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blogging.)

One of the problems with using politics as a frequent topic for class discussions is that students may tend to think of you as some kind of expert on politics and their various processes. Yes, I may know more about politics than the average talking head they may have seen on television, but I’m fairly convinced that most farm animals know more about politics than the typical “expert” who winds up on cable “news” these days. I’m not sure how much my analysis matters, but I try to give my students as much information as possible so they can make their own decisions. (I only offer my opinions on politics in class rarely, and for very limited topics, because I’m there to teach my students how to think, not what to think. When I do offer personal opinion I make it clear to them that I’m doing that, and I reiterate that I won’t treat them negatively or lower their grades if they disagree with me. I put up with enough of that shit when I was younger; I’m not about to force my students to deal with it as well.)

Even years after the 2012 elections, I was still being asked by students how Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama that November. There were hundreds of factors at work there, of course, but when I discuss the 2012 presidential election with students I tend to focus on two main factors. First of all, there’s no getting around the fact that Mitt Romney was a deeply flawed candidate. Setting aside policy issues for a moment, if the Ronald Reagan “beer test” still holds true for presidential candidates (and it’s hard to tell if any of those old maxims are going to stay true for this year’s election), Mitt Romney was one of the last candidates Republicans should have considered putting up against Obama. Even back in the Republican primaries, Newt Gingrich demonstrated repeatedly that Romney was far too easy to caricature as the unfeeling boss who lays people off simply because it puts a few extra bucks in his pocket. In the Tea Party era of Republican politics, it’s hard to imagine that any Republican is going to come along who can both capture the anger on near-constant display in the conservative base and still appear likable enough for those “beer test” moderate and non-ideological voters.

More importantly, though, I think that Republicans had a very flawed strategy. Ever since President Obama took office in 2009 there’s been a very concerted effort on the American right to make him as unpopular as possible. (Let’s not forget that conservative talk show host Michael Savage was calling for Obama’s impeachment less than fifty days into his first term.) It was a very effective strategy for the 2010 midterms — with Democrats in control of both houses of Congress and the presidency, they didn’t have to do anything except talk — but after Republicans took back the House in that election and severely cut Democrats’ majority in the Senate, it seemed like “undercut Obama” wasn’t just the primary strategy for Republicans looking to take back the White House in 2012, but it was the only strategy. It didn’t help that the lead Republican in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, basically said as much shortly before the 2010 election.

What this translated to in the 2012 election was that it didn’t seem like Republicans had more of a strategy than just telling voters, “You don’t like Obama? We’re not Obama! Vote for us!” I don’t think that Republicans counted on so many voters saying, “Yeah, but you know what? I may not like Obama, but I like what you’re offering even less, so I’m gonna hold my nose and vote for Obama.” (Although the Libertarian Party and Green Party more than doubled their popular vote totals from the 2008 election, they still weren’t taken that seriously, much to the chagrin of people like me.) To the extent that the Republican Party offered a vision for America that went beyond “stop what Obama and other Democrats are doing,” voters just weren’t buying it, and as much as the GOP tried to readjust and recalibrate after their 2012 losses, it didn’t take long for them to go back to the exact same things they were doing from 2009 to 2011. (See: Immigration reform, holding the federal budget hostage to try to get more budget cuts, etc.)

Needless to say, it’s highly problematic to try to analyze a presidential election eight and a half months out, when no party’s nominee has been determined and ten million things can happen between now and election day. I’ve frequently decried the media’s attention to the “horse race” of the election when there are so many problems in America right now that aren’t being taken care of while so much of the country — and especially those twerps in Washington — seem to be taking a two-year smoke break to see who our next president is going to be. That being said, the numbers nerd in me likes following the polls, the artist in me likes imagining all the what-ifs of the various scenarios that could play out, the strategist in me likes seeing how so many of the old rules about the nomination process are being thrown out and we’re seeing an entirely new game with new rules being shaped in front of us, and as I watch this new game play out I’m struck again by how the “we’re not X, so vote for us” dynamic is so strong again. This time, though, I’m seeing it in both the Republican and Democratic parties.

It’s really hard to tell just how things on the Republican side are going to play out at this point, especially with no candidate getting even close to 50% of the vote. The possibility of a brokered convention — and if that happens then it could make the Democrats’ 1968 Chicago convention look like a campfire singalong in comparison — creates so many different possibilities that you can’t really rule out any of the candidates still left in the race. The possibility of a third-party run by Donald Trump, which seems a near-likelihood if he gets to the convention with a plurality of delegates but doesn’t get the nomination, just throws things into even more chaos. No matter which of the nominees you look at, though, there still isn’t much of substance there except to go after Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (and sometimes Bernie Sanders as an afterthought). It seems like all the candidates are trying to follow the same strategy that didn’t work for them in 2012, when they aren’t busy getting in their circular firing squad and taking the piss out of each other.

Right now, though, it really feels like Democrats, especially the doctrinaire Democrats in and around Hillary Clinton’s campaign, are playing the exact same game. Yes, all the Republican candidates have some very major negatives — some more than others — but the idea that any of them is unelectable in a general election is downright foolish. Whoever wins the Democratic nomination is probably going to face at least half a trillion dollars in negative advertising from Republican and other conservative groups; the only question right now is whether those ads repeat “Benghazi” or “socialism” over and over again. Bernie Sanders is running a campaign of relative substance, but it’s hard to see him getting the nomination at this point with all the structural factors at work against him. Whether Clinton or Sanders gets the nomination, each of them has more than enough negatives that it’s far too easy to see moderate voters going with whichever Republican gets nominated.

Obviously, as a member of one of the third parties here in America, I have a vested interest in pointing out to people that nothing is forcing them to choose between a Democrat and a Republican in November (except for people in states that make it practically impossible for third-party candidates to get on the ballot). Even if I felt like I agreed enough with one of the Democratic or Republican candidates that I’d consider voting for them in November, I’d have a hard time doing that just because of all the problems that America is going through because of our two-party system, and the fact that I don’t believe that either the Democratic or the Republican parties are best suited to be the instruments through which we effect the changes that America needs. I suspect that third party votes will be much bigger than they were four years ago, but probably not enough to make a dent in the elephant-versus-donkey “main event” match.

More to the point, the fact that so many of the presidential campaigns have become so reductionist makes me more and more fearful of the future of not just American politics, but American culture as a whole. These past couple of years it’s been hard for me not to notice a growing tension and anger among “everyday people” pretty much anywhere I go, and the idea of basing these important campaigns and movements so much around the message of “we’re not the other big side” just feels like it’s going to add even more fuel to that fire. No matter who wins the election in November, it’s hard to imagine that I’ll be able to go grocery shopping the next day, or the evening after the 2017 inauguration, and not feel like a good chunk of the people I pass in the aisles are ready to explode at any moment.

Then again, this election cycle has already proven that we need to throw out a lot of our old assumptions about political campaigns, and we’re talking about an election that won’t even take place for over eight months. As such, all of this is wild speculation, and I can very easily see myself looking back at this blog after the election and cringing at what a jackass I was for making a whole lot of statements that never panned out. If past is prologue, though, you can take my analysis with a lot more weight than whatever you may see on television, for whatever that’s worth. (Hint: It’s not much.)

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