Is the Democratic party the tribune of the underdog or the slave of special interests?
For much of his first three years in office, President Obama has struggled to maintain the loyalty of the liberal wing of his party. Suddenly, in 2012, he has put on a full court press.
The president’s policy shift in favor of same-sex marriage, for example, has allowed him to win back the hearts, minds and wallets of the gay rights community, a crucial source of Democratic support.
On another front, no week goes by without one or more events designed to secure and deepen Obama’s advantage among women. On May 14, he pointedly gave the graduation address at Barnard, the women’s college affiliated with Columbia (his alma mater), informing graduates:
After decades of slow, steady, extraordinary progress, you are now poised to make this the century where women shape not only their own destiny but the destiny of this nation and of this world.
From Barnard in upper Manhattan, Obama traveled downtown to ABC and an appearance on “The View,” to tell Barbara Walters, Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar, Sherri Shepherd and Elisabeth Hasselbeck, “I like hanging out with women.”
In an effort to revive the strong margin of support he received from young voters in 2008, Obama has stressed his support for legislation keeping the student loan interest rate at 3.4 percent, instead of allowing the scheduled increase to 6.8 percent. Loan burdens, especially on recent graduates struggling to find work, are a major issue for voters under the age of 30 – voters Obama must mobilize this year.
On Capitol Hill, Democrats are also taking up similar themes. The Senate passed what would normally be routine legislation reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, but with added provisions to protect those in same-sex relationships from abuse — a pro-gay rights amendment anathema to House Republicans.
Individually, these and other steps taken by the administration and Democratic legislators to build support among diverse constituencies have varying degrees of popular support. In and of themselves, they would not create political problems.
Democrats have paid a higher price for policies favoring their constituencies, especially the poor and minorities, than Republicans have paid for doing the same thing on behalf of the rich.
The difficulty for the Democratic Party and its candidates arises when voters perceive that elected officials are granting special, non-universal privileges or preferences for political gain. With some regularity over the past four and a half decades, many voters — moderates and conservatives in particular — have demonstrated an aversion to contemporary liberal public policy that provides benefits and protections to groups defined by race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation.
The volatility of this issue can be seen in the current controversy in Massachusetts over the Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren’s past description of herself as of indigenous American descent, which prompted opponents to accuse her of using that status to gain special consideration in hiring and promotion decisions.
“For years, Harvard has claimed special minority status for Professor Elizabeth Warren as a member of a Native American tribe and their first minority hire,” declared Jim Barnett, who is managing Senator Scott Brown’s re-election campaign.
That Warren allowed Harvard to hold her up as an example of their commitment to diversity in the hiring of historically disadvantaged communities is an insult to all Americans who have suffered real discrimination and mistreatment, and Warren should apologize for participating in this hypocritical sham.
Some evidence that Obama must walk a fine line as he seeks majority backing can be found in the May 15 CBS News/New York Times poll, which showed that 67 percent of respondents said Obama came out for same-sex marriage “mostly for political reasons,” while just 24 percent said he made the decision “mostly because he thinks it is right.”
These numbers do not mean that two thirds of the public oppose same-sex marriage; in fact, the public is fairly evenly split. What the numbers do reveal is that a majority of the electorate believes that political calculation, rather than moral principle, drove the president’s decision.
In an equally troublesome finding for Obama, the Times poll recorded a dramatic drop in the level of support for Obama among women, with Romney actually pulling ahead, 46-44. Obama’s support among female voters has fallen from 49 to 44 percent over the past two months, while Romney’s rose three points.
Stephanie Cutter, deputy manager of the Obama campaign, has challenged the accuracy of the Times poll, arguing that the methodology – calling people who have been previously surveyed, known as a “panel back” — resulted in “a biased sample.”
But even if the poll findings can be reasonably disputed, they still suggest that Obama’s aggressive bid to strengthen his support among women may be backfiring. Separate polling by Marquette Law School in Wisconsin shows Obama holding a strong, but declining advantage among women voters. In February, Obama had a 21 percentage point lead among women, 56-35; by mid-May, his margin among women had fallen to 9 points, 49-40.
The roots of Democratic Party vulnerability on affirmative action and other forms of group-based “preferences” lie in the social, cultural and moral revolutions of the 1960s and 70s – revolutions that have been the source of contemporary liberalism’s strengths and liabilities.
This is perhaps best illustrated in the following chart, created by two political scientists, Christopher Ellis of Bucknell and James Stimson of the University of North Carolina.
Courtesy of James StimsonThe chart tracks the percentage of the electorate that identifies itself as liberal. There is an abrupt and steep drop in self-identified liberals in the mid-1960s, which coincided with the emergence of the rights revolution – including civil rights, women’s rights, and the right to sexual privacy – as well as the anti-war movement. The Democratic Party and liberalism were increasingly identified with these movements.
Ellis and Stimson write that from 1963 to 1967, “the ranks of self-identified liberals fell by 10.5 points – about one fourth – and never recovered.” They argue that the shift resulted from “the new clientele of liberalism”:
The New Deal had for clients the working people of America. In one phrase it was “the common man.” Thus liberalism was conjoined with pictures of workers, often unionized, hard-working people, playing by the rules, and trying to get ahead…. With the coming of the Great Society there was a new clientele of liberalism, the poor – and the nonwhite. The focus of Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty was the underclass of people whose usual defining characteristic was that they did not work. And although there were – and are – more poor white people than black people, the image of poverty from the very beginning was black.
Successful Democratic presidential candidates – especially Bill Clinton and Obama – have been acutely aware of these liabilities.
Many of the strategies undergirding the campaigns of 1992, 1996 and 2008 were explicitly designed to mute or eliminate perceived liberal vulnerabilities. Clinton famously promised to “end welfare as we know it,” to reward those “who work hard and play by the rules.” He also went out of his way to demonstrate his support for the death penalty as Arkansas Governor by rejecting clemency for convicted killer Ricky Ray Rector, who was executed in Arkansas during the 1992 campaign despite serious brain damage resulting from a self-inflicted wound.
In 2008, Obama confounded liberal supporters when he praised a Supreme Court ruling overturning a Washington, D.C. ban on handguns, endorsed a proposed wiretap law and spoke favorably about applying the death penalty to those convicted of raping a child.
One of the interesting phenomena demonstrated in the Ellis-Stimson chart above is the ebb and flow of liberal self-identification after the drop in the mid-1960s. While never rising to previous levels, liberal self-identification increases during Republican administrations (Nixon-Ford-Reagan-Bush) and decreases when Democrats take over the presidency (Carter-Clinton). The sole exception is the increase in liberal self-identification in the latter years of the Clinton administration, likely a negative response to the Republican take-over of the House and Senate in 1995, the ascendance of House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the Republican attempt to impeach Clinton in 1998.
A second interesting political development in recent decades is that Democrats have paid a higher price for policies favoring their constituencies, especially the poor and minorities, than Republicans have paid for doing the same thing on behalf of the rich.
Both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush won approval, soon after winning election, of tax policies decisively favoring the affluent, and both went on to win re-election.
The relative invulnerability of the Republican Party in recent years to backlash after pushing through regressive tax policies is even more surprising because a plurality of the public, 46 percent, believes the rich are rich as a result of their connections, not their hard work, according to Pew surveys. In other words, while voters are hostile to policies benefiting those seen as the “undeserving” poor, they are more tolerant of policies benefiting the undeserving rich:
Part of this difference is rooted in the power of race in American politics. Some of the most controversial policies supported by Democrats, including civil rights generally, affirmative action and busing, have alienated a portion of white voters, especially those in the South and in northern working-class communities.
At the same time, part of the tolerance of policies that favor the rich comes from the fact that voters place a much higher value on increasing opportunity than they do on decreasing inequality.
Gallup reported in December that 70 percent of survey respondents said it was “extremely” (29 percent) or “very” important to increase the equality of opportunity for people to get ahead,” while 46 percent said it was “extremely” (17 percent) or “very” (29 percent) important to “reduce the income and wealth gap between the rich and the poor.”
In the same survey, Gallup found that 52 percent described “the fact that some people in the United States are rich and others are poor” as acceptable, while 45 percent said it is “a problem that needs to be fixed.” The percentage answering “acceptable” actually grew seven points, up from 45 percent in 1998, despite the efforts of the Obama administration and the Occupy Wall Street movement to make inequality a more salient issue.
Perhaps most fascinatingly, a majority of Americans, 58 percent, identify themselves as “haves” while 34 percent say they are “have nots,” according to Gallup. A person identifying him or herself as a have is more likely to see a threat to their own assets in redistributive government policies.
As the 2012 election progresses, there is every sign that Republicans will seek to strengthen the perception of the Obama administration as dependent on constituencies that are often disadvantaged or that have been previously marginalized. They will gleefully label their advocates “special interests.”
The conservative columnist Jay Cost wrote last week:
You, me, and almost everybody else in this country wants to talk about jobs, the deficit, national security, but the Democratic party simply does not listen to us. It is not responsive to what we want, but rather only to the special interests that now dominate it. Organized labor, the environmentalist left, the feminists, big city machine politicos, and all the rest – they hum the tune to which the party dances. If you are lucky enough to be in one of those groups, then the Democrats will be happy to hear what you have to say. If you aren’t, then you’ll be lucky if they don’t hang up on you!
The campaign will require Obama to reinvigorate support among core constituencies – minorities, single women, the young, “knowledge workers” and “creatives”– without antagonizing moderates. It will not be easy.
There is one factor helping Obama to negotiate this political minefield on the path to Nov. 6: the taint of racial or anti-gay prejudice that clings to some Republican initiatives. It can all happen very quickly. The disclosure by the Times of a plan under consideration by a conservative super PAC to run tough, racially-freighted ads using the comments of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to attack Obama, forced the super PAC to back away from the proposal.
Republicans and Democrats are aware that attack ads can prove highly counterproductive if voters see them as divisive and intolerant. Both parties and their candidates run the risk of putting a foot wrong and slipping off the tightrope.
Thomas B. Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of the book “The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics,” which was published earlier this year.
