What and Why

By Ron Beasley

I spent the afternoon looking at the polls and playing with an interactive electoral map and came up with what I though would be the likely result tomorrow.  Before I had a chance to post I discovered I had reached the same conclusion as none other than Karl Rove, Obama - 338, McCain - 200.  Not quite a blowout but close. (note: I see that Larry Sabato is sticking to his 364 -174 prediction).  That's the what, the why, (or whys) is more complex.  There are a number of reasons but most of them are related to number one on the list:

1. George W. Bush:  A Republican with an approval rating of 25%.  This makes the R a toxic tag to begin with.  I made it clear to anyone who would listen eight years ago that I thought the election of George W, Bush was a disaster.  I didn't dream how right I would be - he exceeded my expectations.
2. The Economy: I made it clear two and a half years ago that the so called Bush recovery was no recovery at all but a credit driven unsustainable boom. It was based entirely on consumer spending driven by cheap credit.  I'm convinced that many in the Bush administration knew that the boom was going to go bust but had been trying to put it off until after the election.  As we have seen they failed in that.  After the major collapse in September McCain never had a prayer.
3. The Republican Model:  The Lee Attwater/Karl Rove model of using prejudice disguised as "Social Conservatism"  simply doesn't work like it has for years.  I'll discuss this in more detail below.

Josh Marshall takes a look at Sarah Palin and questions if she is really the "rising star" many think she is.  Josh thinks she is probably just a brief shooting star.  I think he is right but perhaps not for entirely the right reason.  Josh says it's because she is:

The woman is an ignoramus of almost unprecedented magnitude in the annals of national politics. It's not just that virtually every-non-Republican has a negative view of her. I just don't see a national party getting behind someone like that.

While that's true it's only part of the story.  A couple of years ago I told a friend that the so called social conservatives were at the peak of their power because Calvinistic religious movements rarely last more than a generation.  Go by the evangelical mega churches here in the Portland area on Sunday morning and you will no longer see filled parking lots and a few have actually gone bankrupt and closed.  The young people who grew up in the church are not sticking around once they grow up.  Peter Beinart touches on this in his commentary, Last of the Culture Warriors.

Why has America turned on Sarah Palin? Obviously, her wobbly television interviews haven't helped. Nor have the drip, drip of scandals from Alaska, which have tarnished her reformist image. But Palin's problems run deeper, and they say something fundamental about the political age being born. Palin's brand is culture war, and in America today culture war no longer sells. The struggle that began in the 1960s -- which put questions of racial, sexual and religious identity at the forefront of American politics -- may be ending. Palin is the end of the line.

This won't be the first time a culture war has come to a close. In the 1920s, battles over evolution, immigration, prohibition and the resurgent Ku Klux Klan dominated election after election. And those issues played into that era's version of the red-blue divide, pitting newly arrived, saloon-frequenting, big-city Catholics against old-stock, teetotaling, small-town Protestants. In 1924, the Democratic convention split so bitterly over prohibition and the Klan that it took more than 100 ballots to nominate a candidate for president.

Then, in the 1930s, the culture war died. A big reason was the Depression, which put questions of economic survival front and center. In the 1920s boom economy, politicians were largely free to focus on identity politics. By Franklin Roosevelt's election in 1932, that was a luxury America's leaders could no longer afford.

The other thing that killed the '20s culture war was generational change. Over time, Catholics and other immigrants left their ghettos and began to assimilate.

The culture war this time was already declining before the economic decline but making this a generational change.  Once again the country simply outgrew Calvin. 

Comments

[Phil]

"I made it clear to anyone who would listen eight years ago that I thought the election of George W, Bush was a disaster. I didn't dream how right I would be - he exceeded my expectations."

I said the exact same thing before he was even put into office. Also, on 9/11 I said that Bush would be given a blank check and he would abuse it. He did.