Believing their own press
The GOP is feeling its oats, Adam Nagourney says. Of course, as he points out, nothing has really changed about their situation—they are still faced with “a string of electoral defeats, evidence that its membership is getting smaller and older, the demands of coming up with a new ideological agenda to meet changing times,” and a popular President with a popular agenda. And yet they feel hopeful. Why? Well, they had such a good August! Of course, the only real difference about August (we’d seen protests before) is that Congress wasn’t in session, and so for purely formal reasons Obama’s agenda couldn’t advance. But now that it’s back, you’re going to see health care reform at a minimum, with a few other things thrown in too, one hopes. Just because one side of the equation was taking a break doesn’t mean that the other side was doing better; they just didn’t have any opposition for a little while.
So why the widespread Panglossian sentiment? Well, it’s funny, actually: it’s because the media keeps telling conservatives they’re doing well. This is another example of the right’s past tactical strengths becoming weaknesses. The modern conservative movement put a heavy focus on the media, trying to convince Ivy League-educated media elites that what they took to be indisputable truths were in fact liberal bias, and that there was some other “authentic” sentiment out there that it was their duty to capture and represent equally. But conservatives got so good at gaming the media, and political success for the right was so closely correlated with the dominance of conservative sentiment in the media that they came to confuse the two. But that just means they’re doing the very thing they accused the “liberal media” of doing: taking reality as expressed in the media as an accurate representation of political realities in the electorate. Conservative viewpoints were prominent in the media over the last couple months, but you can point to newsworthiness (the “news hole,” deviance) or work routines as way more comprehensive explanations that a shift in the electorate. Just because the media makes it seem like everyone think something doesn’t mean that everyone does. Hell, the right popularized that idea, so they should know it better than anyone, but they seem eager to ignore it. If that were just a matter of faking it until you’re making it, it would be one thing. But given that this supposed “success” has come without the party making any major changes, it’s unlikely that whistling past the graveyard is going to get them to a majority. Continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result isn’t a successful strategy just because your media coverage gets a little more positive.
The Bush administration was wrong about pretty much everything, but it was almost right on some things. Karl Rove’s electoral strategy, for instance, was a good one, but if you’re going to shoot for 50% + 1 and no more, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for error, and there were more than enough policy and implementation fuckups to make Dean’s 50 states strategy more effective. The right’s refusal to see the W disaster as an actual failure of ideology (a full-throated embrace of conservativism leading to both practical and moral failures) has made each of the various branches convinced that the problem was that W wasn’t ideological enough. But no one ever gained an electoral majority in America by being unapologetically ideological; you do it by being just ideological enough to allow your gamesmanship to pay off. As a Democrat, it’s nice that this lesson is still going unheeded, but it’s a bit mysterious, too.
3 months ago
