A Murder of Cows

A friend who voted for Obama wrote, before the election:

Maybe this feeling is still true, and the zeitgeist is still against ‘us’. It’s possible that if Obama wins, it will have been a mix of tactics, luck, and exasperation with the Bush years: a vote against Republicans rather than for Democrats. But it’s also possible that the country isn’t so inimically hostile, and that we’re wrong to think of politics as “us versus the masses”. No matter how much we’ve been telling ourselves otherwise - in jokes about ignorant hicks and in laments about the Unstoppable Republican Propaganda Machine - maybe Republicans don’t have an ideological monopoly on what Middle America is or what it wants. People might actually be voting for Obama because they like what he has to say about the kind of country we should be making for ourselves. If that’s true, it will bring up hard questions for those of us whose political identities are based on being, if not exactly outsiders, then at least somehow out of the mainstream.

Or, Obama could lose after all, and we’ll go back to our defensive crouch, secure in the feeling that the country really is against us. Between those two possibilities - losing or having to face the thought that those people might not be so alien to us after all - I’m honestly not sure which would be harder for me and some of my self-styled ‘progressive’ friends to swallow.

Let’s look at this election in context. For the last 40 years before this election—and I’m choosing 1968 as an endpoint not because it bolsters my case. but because the Democratic and Republican Parties really were very different before the Johnson admnistration—Americans have elected Democrats to the White house only reluctantly. In 1976, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, in the midst of an economic disaster, when things couldn’t be worse for the Republicans, Democrats won by a tiny margin (a few thousand votes in Ohio and Hawaii) over an unelected president saddled with the pardon of Richard Nixon.

In 1992, facing an unpopular Republican incumbent, Bill Clinton managed a whopping 43%, while an erratic, weird, on-again/off-again billionaire candidate pulled almost 19 points of the anti-Bush vote. In 1996, in the middle of an economic boom and relative peace and prosperity, a majority of voters still couldn’t be convinced to vote for Clinton.

So that brings us to 2008. Let’s consider the factors working in the Democrats’ favor:

• an incumbent Republican president whose approval ratings flirted with -273.15°C;
  
  
• an unpopular war in Iraq, dragging along in its fifth year;
  
  
• a Republican Party that had alienated much of its base by spending like the McGovern administration in some parallel universe;
  
  
• a Republican presidential nominee who much of the party never really liked or trusted, who left lots of scorched earth in his political path;
  
  
• a Republcan presidential nominee whose age was troubling for a huge percentage of the electorate (for all the talk of Obama’s race, polls showed that McCain’s age was a huge concern among swing voters, on a scale that may have cost him the election);
  
  
• a Republican vice presidential nominee whose grossly mishandled introduction to the American people turned her into a lightning rod;
  
  
• a Republican campaign with a treasure trove of dirt on the Democratic nominee which failed to weave their negative talking points into a coherent narrative, choosing instead to launch them randomly;
  
  
• a Republican campaign spending down its treasury chasing a state (Pennsylvania) they couldn’t win and didn’t need to win;
  
  
• a massive Democratic fundraising advantage over Republicans;
  
  
• and, last but not least, a financial meltdown of historic proportions happening during the final weeks of the election, in which people see their retirement savings and home values evaporate by the day.

So what did the Democrats get for all that? A landslide of 20 or 30 points? Nope, a 6.9% margin of victory, in an election with relatively low Republican turnout. Arguably, the real margin of victory was 3.7%, as a swing toward McCain of more than 3.7% would have delivered him an Electoral College majority.

Americans don’t like to elect Democrats to the White House, and do so only reluctantly, and under only the most unfavorable of circumstances for Republicans. They elect Democrats because they know they’re supposed to elect someone else when Republicans screw up badly enough. To think for even a moment that Middle America might finally be on board with the Democratic view of the world is to risk the overreach nearly every pundit expects of the Democrats. Obama’s victory wasn’t the result of an epiphany that Democrats were right about anything; it was the result of circumstances which were so ridiculously unfavorable to the Republicans that, if the D’s and R’s were reversed, the Republicans would have turned it into a sweep of every electoral vote outside Vermont and the District of Columbia.

So resume that defensive crouch. Obama’s election was a product of syzygy. That he ran such a spectacularly effective campaign only underscores how difficult it is to persuade Americans to give a Democrat the keys to the executive mansion. It might even be fair to say that Americans regard electing Democrats to the presidency as a last resort. If not, it’s darn close to that.

Be careful out there, Democrats. The pretty girl asked you to the prom to get back at her boyfriend, with whom she’s fighting. If you think she’s going to let you into her dress at the end of the evening, you’re in for quite a chilly surprise.