Politics

Chicagoboyz elder JLG makes a point about Rudy Giuliani that I haven’t heard elsewhere.

Giuliani is widely respected, and one reads suggestions that Bush should appoint him head of Homeland Security, Defense or (until Bush selected someone else) the CIA. The problem with doing this would be similar to one of the problems associated with having Colin Powell as Secretary of State: Giuliani is a major political figure in his own right, with a significant constituency, and would be difficult to fire. He might perform well in his appointed role, but if he decided to pursue his own agenda Bush might be able to prevent him from doing so only at high political cost. That’s not a good deal for Bush, or for the voters, who have a right to expect the president’s appointees to implement his policies faithfully.

President Bush reshuffles his cabinet. OK, got no problem with that, it’s what presidents do after being reelected. But is the least distinguished cabinet secretary going to be replaced or not? I hope the announcement comes soon. If not, what gives?

Ted Rall seems to have calmed down a little – this column is more condescending than hysterical. The customary sneering at Jesusland is there, and he does not diminish the importance of hatred and bigotry in explaining the election results, but he seems to feel that stupidity was the major factor. It’s always nice to have Rall’s contribution to rational discourse.

Though there is a religious component to the election results, the biggest red-blue divide is intellectual. “How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?” asked the headline of the Daily Mirror in Great Britain, and the underlying assumption is undeniable. By any objective standard, you had to be spectacularly stupid to support Bush.

As evidence, he cites a poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland. I looked up the poll, and it is a real piece of work. Here is a sample question: Is it your impression that the US has or has not found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the al-Qaeda terrorist organization? According to the poll, 63% of Bush voters but only 32% of Kerry supporters said that the US had such evidence. Rall cites this as an obvious falsehood. To me, the question seems badly worded and the conclusion is not warranted. It is quite clear that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was in Iraq before the war. He was in Afghanistan for the war against the US, was wounded, and came to Iraq for treatment. He stayed on to fight the coalition and carry out the blood rituals of his deviant sect. He has re-branded his terrorist outfit as “Al Qaeda in Iraq.” We’ll leave out the Czech intelligence report about Mohammed Atta meeting with Iraqi agents. The connection looks clear enough to me. I suppose Lex and Nito would agree that there may be enough here for an arrest warrant but we would need more for a conviction. Neither do I see enough evidence to convict someone of stupidity for believing it.

The poll also asks opinions on the national economy, compared to the prior year. Bush supporters answered that it had gotten better (48%), while Kerry supporters tended to think it had gotten worse (70%). Again, the question is badly worded, but this time the answers can be checked. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the US unemployment rate was about 5.5% when the survey was taken. It had been between 5.7% and 5.4% for 2004, compared to 6.0% for 2003. Gross domestic product grew at 3.0% in 2003, and at 3.7% annualized for the third quarter of 2004 (US Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis). If giving a “wrong” answer to a badly-worded survey is proof of stupidity, well …

Finally, maybe I’m just too suspicious, but PIPA, on whose survey Rall bases his meager analysis, did not even publish its entire survey or the complete results. The questions “to be released” are questions 3-6, 7b-12, 12b, 18, 19, 22, 23, 27-32, 35, 39-40, and 42a-44. It makes me wonder if they failed to make the Bush supporters look sufficiently stupid.

Perhaps encouraged by the low standard set by PIPA, Rall tries some statistics himself:

Educational achievement doesn’t necessarily equal intelligence. After all, Bush holds a Harvard MBA. Still, it bears noting that Democrats are better educated than Republicans. You are 25 percent more likely to hold a college degree if you live in the Democratic northeast than in the red state south. Blue state voters are 25 percent more likely, therefore, to understand the historical and cultural ramifications of Bush’s brand of bull-in-a-china-shop foreign policy.

By the same logic, Mitch is a geek; Bill Gates is a geek; therefore Mitch is Bill Gates. No, really, Ted that doesn’t work, and the bank won’t cash my check for a million dollars. Without going through a couple of layers of supposition, here are the results of the election by level of education. Bush won among high school graduates, people with some college, and college graduates, stated in terms of highest educational attainment. Kerry won those with less than a high school education and those with post-graduate study. Kerry’s winning categories came to 20% of the electorate. That’s a tough way to win an election, or maybe I’m just too stupid to do the math.

A hat tip to Jardine Davies.

Update 11/21/04: Ted Rall proved a little too much for the Washington Post, which has dropped his cartoon. Naturally, he believes this is censorship. Ted, read the first amendment again. The first five words are “Congress shall make no law…”

There is an excellent article in current Public Interest entitled A New GOP? by James W. Ceaser and Daniel DiSalvol, which analyzes the GOP on the eve of the recent election. (Read it all, as well as William Galston’s companion piece on the Democrats.)

Despite the polarization of the base voters of both parties, who are noisy and get all the attention:

… the main story of the last decade has been one of the parties moving to the center, at least in presidential contests. The New Democrats with whom President Clinton often sided were closer than old Democrats to Republicans, while George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatives” are closer than orthodox conservatives to Democrats.

In the present situation of parity in party strength, two strategies tempt party tacticians. One is to play to the party base, hoping to win by getting out more committed supporters than one’s opponent. The other is to appeal to the floating voters in the center, because neither party can win with its base alone. The bases of the two parties are fairly equal in size, each making up about a third of the electorate, leaving a large portion of the electorate up for grabs. Rather than embrace either one of these strategies completely, both parties oscillate between them, crafting a message to appeal to the particular “market” they are addressing. The conventions of 2004 were scripted mostly to appeal to the middle, while much of the advertising targets partisans.

Market segmentation, narrow-casting, etc. The techniques of modern marketing are being employed skillfully in the political arena as well. Despite the new tools, the aim of the game is the same as it has been since Martin van Buren invented the modern political party — find the middle, find the 50% point, and push beyond it, but not too much.

In one especially noteworthy passage, the authors explain that Democratic politicians have tried to avoid the political exposure which has come with support for socially liberal positions. As a result:

…they have turned the initiative over to the judiciary (at both the federal and, increasingly, state levels), which serves as the de facto legislative branch of the Democratic party. Once the courts take favorable action, Democratic politicians rally less to the defense of the policies themselves than to the Constitution and the independence of the judiciary, all the while charging that Republicans who object are “politicizing” these issues.

This is a pithy and accurate way to put it — the courts are the Democrats’ legislature because the policies they support cannot command legislative majorities. It is legislation by stealth, it is illegitimate, and thankfully it seems to be working less well recently.

The authors note that Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,”

…seems to have found the political center of the Republican party, at least in a period when foreign affairs have eclipsed domestic policy. On the cultural front, Bush has satisfied traditional conservatives with the ban on partial-birth abortion and opposition to gay marriage, even while some traditionalists have strongly opposed his stance on immigration. In economic policy, Bush won the early favor of libertarians with his income tax cuts. But other conservatives and many libertarians have watched with dismay as the administration enacted new federal programs in education and Medicare, while proving reluctant to curb government growth. Underneath the headlines from Iraq, Bush has pushed a velvet revolution in Republican domestic policy, promoting a more nationalist kind of conservatism. The fate of this approach will depend on the November election, as a Democratic victory will almost certainly spark a libertarian revolt within the GOP.

This small-l libertarian outrage has been apparent on this blog for a long time now. The intra-GOP libertarian revolt may yet come, despite Bush’s victory. Whether a more “libertarian” policy focus would lead to a more electorally viable GOP is another question. I expect we will see this struggle fought out in the primaries leading up to the 2008 election. Whoever wins, will both wings rally to the winner? Or will one sulk off and not vote? Or. catastrophically, will one of them form a third party and hand a crushing victory to the Democrats?

Bush has so far been extremely adept at papering over the cracks between the “traditional values” wing and the “libertarian” wing of his party. As the authors note, the war has given him cover, providing an external source of unity. In the future, will these two wings, neither of which commands anything like a national majority, have the discipline to utilize this current victory to continue to march together, to get some of their agendas enacted? Or will they fall into conflict and thereby hand power over to their mutual enemies?

This intra-party conflict will be one of the two big political stories of the next few years. First: Will the GOP be able to build on their recent gains and form a new, long-lasting realignment, or will its coalition disintegrate? Second: What path will the Democrats choose to take to try to regain their competitiveness, and how effective will they be at it? And the great imponderable looming over all this: How will the Iraq war and the war on terrorism develop and what major events from abroad will impact the political process?

Stay tuned … .