The Center-Right Nation Exits Stage Left

[ProSense]

TURNING POINT

The Center-Right Nation Exits Stage Left

By Tod Lindberg
Sunday, November 16, 2008; Page B01

Here's the main thought Republicans are consoling themselves with these days: Notwithstanding President-elect Barack Obama, a nearly filibuster-proof Democratic majority in the Senate and the largest Democratic majority in the House of Representatives since 1993, the United States is still a center-right country. Sure, voters may be angry with Republicans now, but eventually, as the Bush years recede and the GOP modernizes its brand, a basically right-tilting electorate will come back home. Or, in the words of the animated rock band the Gorillaz, "I'm useless, but not for long/The future is comin' on."

Thus Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, in Outlook last week: The United States "is indeed, as conservatives have been insisting in recent days, a center-right country." On election night, former Bush guru Karl Rove opined on Fox News, "Barack Obama understands this is a center-right country, and he smartly and wisely ran a campaign that emphasized it." And it's not just conservative pundits and operatives singing this song. Take Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, who wrote an Oct. 27 cover essay entitled "America the Conservative," which argued that Obama will have to "govern a center-right nation" that "is more instinctively conservative than it is liberal."

The only problem: It isn't true. Or at least, not anymore. If you'd asked me a year ago whether the United States is really a center-right nation, I would have said yes -- after pausing for a second to contemplate the GOP's big congressional losses in 2006. At the time, Republicans cheered each other up by assuring ourselves that the worst was over: If you were running for Congress and survived 2006, you could hold your seat forever.

Tell that to Christopher Shays. After 2006, he was the sole surviving GOP House member from all of New England, but he went down this year, 51 to 48 percent. We are now two elections into something big. This month's drubbing is just the latest sign that the country's political center of gravity is shifting from center-right to center-left. Republicans who fail to grasp this could be lost in the wilderness for years.

Here's the stark reality: It is now harder for the Republican presidential candidate to get to 50.1 percent than for the Democrat. My Hoover Institution colleague David Brady and Douglas Rivers of the research firm YouGovPolimetrix have been analyzing data from online interviews with 12,000 people in both 2004 and 2008. It shows an overall shift to the Democrats of six percentage points. As they write in the forthcoming edition of Policy Review, "The decline of Republican strength occurs by having strong Republicans become weak Republicans, weak Republicans becoming independents, and independents leaning more Democratic or even becoming Democrats." This is a portrait of an electorate moving from center-right to center-left.

Some analysts like to explain this shift by pointing to Democratic gains and Republican losses among particular regions and demographic groups, arguing that the GOP has growing problems winning over such areas as the Southwest and such groups as Latinos, educated professionals, Catholics and single women. There's something to this, but the Republican problem is actually larger and more categorical. In 2004, Republicans and Democrats each constituted 37 percent of the electorate. In the 2006 congressional election, Democrats outnumbered Republicans 38 percent to 36 and won big. This year, the Democrats made up a stunning 39 percent of the electorate, compared with just 32 percent for the Republicans. Add the painful fact that Obama outpolled McCain among independents, 52 percent to 48, and you have a picture of a Republican Party that has lost its connection to the center of the electorate.

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Conservative commentator: 'Center-right' nation exits stage left

by: Joe Bodell
Sun Nov 16, 2008 at 09:09:55 AM CST

An editorial from former Washington Post editor and informal McCain campaign advisor Tod Lindberg this morning calls out the recent spate of "America is still a center-right nation" talk from Republican strategists and officials for what it is: nonsense.

<...>

Lindberg is no liberal, or even a moderate -- quite the contrary, he's a pretty conservative guy on trade and fiscal policy. But he still paints a pretty grim picture for a Republican Party that has repeatedly shot itself in the foot on immigration and other issues important to growing minorities in electorally important areas of the country.

<...>

Latino voters in particular make up a large and growing segment of the voting populace in states like Florida, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and -- dare I say it? -- Texas. That group shifted heavily in the Democratic direction in the 2008 election. It's increasingly difficult to see any scenario, let alone a likely one, in which a Republican candidate gets to 270 electoral votes without most of those states.
And yet that's the gauntlet that Republican candidates must run today: play to the base, which on a nationwide basis seems to hate brown people and teh gayz and atheists and Muslims too, and thus lose the moderate swing voters...or be a true "maverick" and let the base scream and moan and stay home on Election Day because the candidate just isn't "conservative" enough.

It's going to be a deep, gut-wrenching, and in all probability a violent fight in the Republican Party in the next several election cycles to figure out if they stick to the base and remain in the political wilderness, or move in a more moderate direction, abandoning their base and remaining in the political wilderness.

Pass the popcorn.

"Don't go away mad, Karl, just go away."

[ProSense]

1. No comment?

Ignore this: It can't possibly be true.

[BeFree]

4. GOP is the biggest and best

....bunch of lying, cheating politicians Diebold could get elected.

Supported and enabled by the corporate media, the GOP drove us off a cliff with their partisan control.

Like all cheaters and liars, they now blame everyone but themselves. Witness the anti-bush, palin, and mccain actions.

Now that we have a semblance of control over the elections process, we can once again resume making progress. Let Diebold have unfetterd access to our vote and bush3 would come to power.

Let us kick them while they're down. Never forget, and never again surrender our votes!

[ProSense]

5. It's an interesting phenomenon

People chatter about progress, but whenever there is progress, they deny it.

The Repubs are still trying to push to the head of their Party some of the most regressive people, the flat-earth caucus. You're right, they are cheaters and liars, and many of them are completely repulsive on the issues---from the environment to war.

[BeFree]

6. So

Ask yourself, how did they get where they are?

[ProSense]

7. I have a pretty good idea

how they did it.

[BeFree]

9. Maybe you don't

You have a clue, it seems. But you seem, here and now, to be missing the root cause of their rise to illegal activities.

They stole elections. They stole votes by the millions.

I know its hard for some intellectuals to be bothered by such monumental affairs. But it's the truth.

[ProSense]

12. No, that wouldn't be the root cause.

The root cause is allowing them to rebuild during the 1990s. That came before the stolen elections.

[BeFree]

14. Ha

They got just strong enough to steal the 2000 election and have been in power ever since.

Your present idea which excludes stolections as a root cause, makes the GOP happy. Thank Gawd most of DU knows better.... the rest of you we will keep educating.

Did you hear there was a <5% increase in the vote this time? Yeah right.

[ProSense]

16. "They got just strong enough... "

I think that indicates you see that as the root cause.

If they weren't strong enough, theft would have been impossible.

[BeFree]

18. Just strong enough

Hey, we agree, they should have been outlawed a long time ago. If they had been outlawed they could have never been strong enough to steal the election, but once they did, they got away with murder.

Too, you are looking backward way too much. They are weak, as proven by the last, fairly clean elections. They have always been weak. You give them way to much credit while deducting credit from the American people, never did the majority of the American people want bush in power. NEVER

[Occam Bandage]

2. References I was not expecting to see in the Washington Post:

1. Clint Eastwood.

[ProSense]

3. Thanks for your comment. n/t

[ShortnFiery]

10. It's now the Whoresington Post since the Matriarch died the Editorial Pages tend to lean

right of center on the political scale. I guess that the commentators for the GOP right don't know what it was like when they were lowly Middle Class pundits. They're gravely out of touch but they don't care ... Rock On! let's enable the right wing GOP to remain in their own special world? :evilgrin:

[Doremus]

8. I think the country is far more left than Lindberg, a Repug, wants to admit.

He's right about one thing though: The R's tent shrunk in the last 2 cycles. How small it ends up before the next Karl Rove comes along is anybody's guess.

[BumRushDaShow]

11. K&R

I have put the full articles in other tabs to savor as part of my Sunday reading! :thumbsup:

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

13. Live by the Angry White Southern Male, Die by the Angry White Southern Male.

[Berry Cool]

Pure conservatism harbors within itself the seeds of its own destruction.

The natural movement of all living things is toward evolution, toward progress, toward becoming hardier and better able to survive by adapting to accommodate changes in its environment. Conservatism, in its purest sense, is all about not changing, about keeping everything exactly as it is, or reverting to exactly as things were in some real or oftentimes imagined past, because that past is perceived as being safer, better, more virtuous, less scary than the present and future. It is about trying to stop or even turn back the clock. And as we all know, that is impossible.

Despite the huge backwards steps a civilization sometimes makes in the name of preserving what is supposedly worthwhile from the past, progressive thoughts and ideas always win in the end.

The trick, for all of us, is managing to survive those terrible times when conservative ideas temporarily take over and delude the majority of the civilization in which we live, causing painful and sometimes fatal lapses in its ability to carry on.

The way I see it, we've just gotten through one of those periods. If we can hang on a little longer, things will get better and it will be a long time before the majority is once again temporarily deluded into thinking conservatism is the way to go. And even when they do, it will be a different degree of conservatism, because its perpretrators won't be old enough to remember what the old conservatism was really like. They may have a nostalgic affection for it, but that affection will be deadly if they ever try to implement it. The majority won't let them.

So there you have it. We take a step back once in a while, but most of the steps we take are forward. Those who ignore this, who believe that the time we're in now is a mere hiccup or anomaly in the lifespan of a civilization that really and truly just wants things to revert to some never-existed "good old days" of their own conception are fools.

[Berry Cool]

15. accidental dupe

Now I'm hiccuping...

[LynnTheDem]

17. We the People elect "the most liberal senator in the senate" ...

and the Republic Party says they lost coz "we weren't conservative enough".

The disconnect is total.

[ProSense]

19. TACKLING THE CENTER-RIGHT MYTH....

TACKLING THE CENTER-RIGHT MYTH....

Regular readers know that I've been annoyed by the constant refrain from Republicans and mainstream media figures that the United States, even now, is a "center-right nation." I'd hoped the cold, hard facts of the election results would have proven otherwise, but many conservatives prefer not to believe their lying eyes.

Today, Policy Review editor Tod Lindberg, a fellow at Stanford's conservative Hoover Institution and an informal foreign policy adviser to the McCain campaign, explains that it's time for the right to realize that the electorate has shifted and the "country's political center of gravity is shifting from center-right to center-left."

<...>

Just to reemphasize, Lindberg clearly wishes he were wrong. He's a conservative who, among other things, was the editor of the far-right Washington Times's editorial page. He's not Christy Todd Whitman, urging the Republican Party to move to the center; he's a conservative urging the Republican Party to acknowledge reality.

I suspect, however, that the party and its base will ignore this kind of analysis, and Democrats everywhere are probably hoping that they do. The longer the GOP is convinced it's a center-right country, the longer it will take the party to adjust to the new political landscape.