April 16, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Normally, politicians face a difficult tradeoff between taking positions that satisfy their party’s base and appealing to the broader public. You can see that happening right now to the Republicans: to have a chance of winning the party’s nomination, Republican presidential hopefuls have to take far-right positions on Iraq and social issues that will cost them a lot of votes in the general election.
But a funny thing has happened on the Democratic side: the party’s base seems to be more in touch with the mood of the country than many of the party’s leaders. And the result is peculiar: on key issues, reluctant Democratic politicians are being dragged by their base into taking highly popular positions.
Iraq is the most dramatic example. Strange as it may seem, Democratic strategists were initially reluctant to make Iraq a central issue in the midterm election. Even after their stunning victory, which demonstrated that the G.O.P.’s smear-and-fear tactics have stopped working, they were afraid that any attempt to rein in the Bush administration’s expansion of the war would be successfully portrayed as a betrayal of the troops and/or a treasonous undermining of the commander in chief.
Beltway insiders, who still don’t seem to realize how overwhelmingly the public has turned against President Bush, fed that fear. For example, as Democrats began, nervously, to confront the administration over Iraq war funding, David Broder declared that Mr. Bush was “poised for a political comeback.”
It took an angry base to push the Democrats into taking a tough line in the midterm election. And it took further prodding from that base — which was infuriated when Barack Obama seemed to say that he would support a funding bill without a timeline — to push them into confronting Mr. Bush over war funding. (Mr. Obama says that he didn’t mean to suggest that the president be given “carte blanche.”)
But the public hates this war, no longer has any trust in Mr. Bush’s leadership and doesn’t believe anything the administration says. Iraq was a big factor in the Democrats’ midterm victory. And far from being a risky political move, the confrontation over funding has overwhelming popular support: according to a new CBS News poll, only 29 percent of voters believe Congress should allow war funding without a time limit, while 67 percent either want to cut off funding or impose a time limit.
Health care is another example of the base being more in touch with what the country wants than the politicians. Except for John Edwards, who has explicitly called for a universal health insurance system financed with a rollback of high-income tax cuts, most leading Democratic politicians, still intimidated by the failure of the Clinton health care plan, have been cautious and cagey about presenting plans to cover the uninsured.
But the Democratic presidential candidates — Mr. Obama in particular — have been facing a lot of pressure from the base to get specific about what they’re proposing. And the base is doing them a favor.
The fact is that a long time has passed since the defeat of the Clinton plan, and the public is now demanding that something be done. A recent New York Times/CBS News poll showed overwhelming support for a government guarantee of health insurance for all, even if that guarantee required higher taxes. Even self-identified Republicans were almost evenly split on the question!
If all this sounds like a setting in which Democrats could win big victories in the years ahead, that’s because it is.
Republicans will, for a while at least, be trapped in unpopular positions by a base that’s living in the past. Rudy Giuliani’s surge into front-runner status for the Republican nomination says more about the party than about the candidate. As The Onion put it with deadly accuracy, Mr. Giuliani is running for “President of 9/11.”
Democrats don’t have the same problem. There’s no conflict between catering to the Democratic base and staking out positions that can win in the 2008 election, because the things the base wants — an end to the Iraq war, a guarantee of health insurance for all — are also things that the country as a whole supports. The only risk the party now faces is excessive caution on the part of its politicians. Or, to coin a phrase, the only thing Democrats have to fear is fear itself.
It’s the DLC all over again. They can’t handle success!
[...] Way Off Base April 16, 2007 Op-Ed Columnist By PAUL KRUGMAN Normally, politicians face a difficult tradeoff between taking […] [...]
“Beltway insiders, who still don’t seem to realize how overwhelmingly the public has turned against President Bush…”
One of many many issues that the “insiders” don’t get. Much of last year’s elections was about the disconnect between the priviledged class of Beltway insiders and the rest of us. It led to getting some much-needed new blood into congress but there are still too many rut-stuck clueless self-important fools down there.
Is it that the Beltway insiders don’t get it, or is it that they won’t get it? You have to wonder; after a while, what the media and the Beltway ‘don’t get’ is starting to look fishy….
Fortunately, polling is done on a regular basis to show that the people don’t actually want what pundits regularly and confidently predict that they want. That doesn’t mean they’ll stop, but perhaps we can stop listening.
The victories of last November can receive some credit from a previously apathetic class of voter who before didn’t vote because these beltway politicians are frankly revolting. Bush has forced this majority in America to participate in politics and they have reluctantly signed on with the Democratic line. That doesn’t mean the Democrats have won these new voters. What it means is that they are on probation and either with us or against us. The new previously apathetic majority will not think twice about throwing beltway democrats to the curb if they won’t be our bitch. It’s an exciting time to be a part of this movement, and a revolution that the television may someday have to acknowledge.