Suicide of a Superpower_Will America Survive to 2025?

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  What these numbers and Frey’s point demonstrate is that McCain, who refused to focus on issues of concern to Christians, such as same-sex marriage and right to life, and issues of concern to the white working and middle class, such as affirmative action, illegal immigration, NAFTA, and the racist rants of Rev. Wright, forfeited his chance to be president. Only once during the election did McCain move into the lead. That was for the two weeks after he chose Sarah Palin, a charismatic Christian with immense appeal to Evangelicals and Nashville-NASCAR “real Americans.”

  Frank Rich, though socially and culturally repulsed by Palin and those for whom she speaks, recognized her appeal to the forgotten Americans.

  [Palin] stands for a genuine movement: a dwindling white nonurban America that is aflame with grievances and awash in self-pity as the country hurtles into the 21st century and leaves it behind.… The real wave she’s riding is a loud, resonant surge of resentment and victimization.43

  Rich is talking of those “bitter” folks, clinging to their Bibles, bigotries, and guns, Obama spoke of at that closed-door fund-raiser in San Francisco, where he explained why white Pennsylvanians were not rallying to him. The resentment to which Palin appeals, writes Rich, as he sketched his caricature of Middle America, “is in part about race”:

  When Palin referred to Alaska as “a microcosm of America” during the 2008 campaign, it was in defiance of the statistical reality that her state’s tiny black and Hispanic populations are unrepresentative of her nation. She stood for the “real America,” she insisted, and the identity of the unreal America didn’t have to be stated explicitly for audiences to catch her drift.44

  There is some truth in what Rich writes. In the fortnight following Palin’s selection, McCain vaulted from eight points down to four points up for the first time in the election year. Those “bitter” folks of Obama’s derisive depiction, who gave Hillary her crushing victories in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky, had suddenly swung over to John McCain.

  What the above points to is a strategy from which Republicans will recoil, a strategy to increase the GOP share of the white Christian vote and increase the turnout of that vote by specific appeals to social, cultural, and moral issues, and for equal justice for the emerging white minority. If the GOP is not the party of New Haven firefighter Frank Ricci and Cambridge cop James Crowley, it has no future. And although Howard Dean disparages the Republicans as the “white party,” why should Republicans be ashamed to represent the progeny of the men who founded, built, and defended America since her birth as a nation?

  In 2009, Virginia and New Jersey showed the way. In Virginia, the GOP candidate for governor, Bob McDonnell, got 9 percent of the black vote to McCain’s 8 percent. No gain. But the white share of the electorate rose from 70 percent in 2008 to 78 percent in 2009, and McDonnell won 67 percent of that vote to McCain’s 60. Thus did McDonnell turn McCain’s 6-point defeat in the Old Dominion into a 17-point Republican landslide.

  In New Jersey, Republican Chris Christie got 9 percent of the black vote to McCain’s 8 percent. But Christie took 59 percent of the white vote to McCain’s 50 percent, and won the governorship.

  In January 2010, Scott Brown pulled off the upset of the century, capturing a Senate seat held for almost sixty years by John F. Kennedy and his brother Edward. How did Brown turn Obama’s 26-point victory over McCain into a 6-point victory over Attorney General Martha Coakley? By sweeping the white vote as massively as had Obama.

  In the 2008 election, 79 percent of Massachusetts voters were white. Obama carried them by 20 points. While there were no exit polls from the Brown-Coakley race, analysts believe the white vote was over 80 percent and Brown carried two-thirds of it. For the independents in the Bay State who went overwhelmingly for Brown are largely white folks who have left the Democratic Party, while blacks and Hispanics have stayed loyal. Brown won a huge majority of those independents.

  Moreover, the clash between Sergeant Crowley and Professor Gates took place in Cambridge. And when Obama rushed to judgment to charge Crowley with having “acted stupidly,” his support sagged in white America but sank in the Bay State, where Governor Deval Patrick joined Obama in piling on the Cambridge cop.45

  The McDonnell, Christie, and Brown campaigns have shown a light on the path to victory over Obama in 2012. The Republican road to recapture of the White House lies in increasing white turnout and raising the party’s share of that turnout—three-fourths of the entire electorate—from McCain’s 55 percent closer to the two-thirds won by Nixon and Reagan.

  In the final analysis, however, a serenely confident Bill Clinton was probably right. Asked by David Gregory on Meet the Press if the “vast right-wing conspiracy” Hillary had identified was “still there,” Clinton replied, “Oh, you bet. Sure it is. It’s not as strong as it was because America has changed demographically.”46

  WHAT PANDERING PRODUCED

  At the 1988 convention that nominated him, Vice President George H. W. Bush promised a “kinder and gentler” administration, which caused conservatives to ask, “kinder and gentler than whom?” The campaign Bush was conducting, however, as he spoke that August night, was anything but kind and gentle.

  Far behind after the Democratic convention in late July, Bush and campaign chief Lee Atwater turned a 17-point deficit on August 1 into an 8-point lead by Labor Day that Bush never lost. How did they effect a 25-point turnaround in five weeks? They eviscerated Michael Dukakis on social and cultural issues: specifically, Dukakis’s veto of a bill that mandated recitation of the pledge of allegiance in schools, his opposition to the death penalty, his pride in being “a card-carrying member of the ACLU,” and his weekend furloughs for convicts and killers like Willie Horton.

  After the Houston convention of 1992, however, President Bush—Lee Atwater having passed away—recoiled from social and cultural issues and sought to win on foreign policy and the economy, where his approval rating was only 16 percent. The social issues could have derailed Clinton, which is why James Carville told the War Room to stay laser-focused: “It’s the economy, stupid!” Bush and James Baker seemed to think social and cultural issues beneath the dignity of a president. So it was that George H. W. Bush ceased to be president.

  Under Bush II, the GOP sought to broaden its base by pandering to liberal minorities at the expense of its base. In July 2005, Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, traveled to the NAACP convention in Milwaukee to apologize for a Southern Strategy that from 1968 to 1988 produced five GOP victories in six presidential elections and two forty-nine-state landslides. “Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization,” said Mehlman. “I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.”47 White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan seconded Mehlman.

  Yet Bush was even then boycotting the NAACP convention for the fifth year. And understandably so. For the NAACP had run ads in 2000 implying that Bush had been indifferent to the dragging death of James Byrd, a disabled black man in Waco, Texas. NAACP chairman Julian Bond had compared his cabinet choices to mullahs. President Bush, said Bond, had “selected nominees from the Taliban wing of American politics, appeased the wretched appetites of the extreme right wing and chose Cabinet officials whose devotion to the Confederacy is nearly canine in its uncritical affection.”48

  A month after Mehlman’s apology, Katrina struck, and some in the black community charged that Bush had failed to act swiftly to rescue New Orleans because most of the victims were black. Bush had won 9 percent of the black vote in 2000 and 11 percent in 2004. He saw his approval among African Americans plunge to 2 percent.

  Mehlman would lead the GOP into 2006, where the party would lose both houses of Congress. He resigned and went to work for Henry Kravis on Wall Street. How did his outreach effort succeed? In 2008, McCain would lose the African American vote 24–1. In 2010, Ken Mehlman came out of the closet and went to w
ork in support of same-sex marriage.

  “ILLIBERAL DEMOCRATS”

  “I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” Hillary Clinton boasted to USA Today in May 2008, speaking of her stronger appeal to white voters. She cited an AP article, which, in her words,

  found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.… These are the people you have to win if you’re a Democrat in sufficient numbers to actually win the election. Everybody knows that.49

  The Democratic Party can’t win with just “eggheads and African-Americans,” Paul Begala added helpfully.50

  What Hillary and Begala were saying was politically incorrect but palpably true. She was describing “Reagan Democrats,” white folks who would give her 10-point victories in Ohio and Pennsylvania and 41- and 35-point victories in West Virginia and Kentucky. Obama’s success in bringing them home in November cost John McCain the election.

  Who are these Democrats, half of whom had said in exit polls from North Carolina and Indiana that if Hillary lost the nomination they would stay home or vote for McCain? In his derisive way, Frank Rich described them:

  a constituency that feels disenfranchised—by the powerful and well-educated who gamed the housing bubble, by a news media it keeps being told is hateful, by the immigrants who have taken some of their jobs, by the African-American who has ended a white monopoly on the White House. Palin is their born avatar. She puts a happy, sexy face on ugly emotions, and she can solidify her followers’ hold on a G.O.P. that has no leaders with the guts or alternative vision to stand up to them or to her.51

  They are working class and middle class, Protestant and Catholic, small-town and rural, often unionized, middle-aged and seniors, surviving on less than $50,000 a year. In the forty years from 1968 to 2008, two Democrats won the presidency. Both did so only after connecting with these folks.

  In 1976, Carter ran as an Annapolis graduate, Navy submariner, nuclear engineer, born-again Baptist Sunday-school preacher, and peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, who wished to preserve the “ethnic purity” of northern neighborhoods. In 1992, Bill Clinton ran as a death-penalty Democrat from Hope, Arkansas, who had the nerve to diss Sister Souljah right in front of Jesse Jackson.

  The morning after the 2006 Democratic capture of both houses of Congress, Jacob Weisberg identified the new breed of Democrat that was now the decisive swing vote on Capitol Hill as “economic nationalists” and “illiberal Democrats”:

  Most of those who reclaimed Republican seats ran hard against free trade, globalization, and any sort of moderate immigration policy. That these Democrats won makes it likely that others will take up their reactionary call. Some of the newcomers may even be foolish enough to try to govern on the basis of their misguided theory.52

  After losing the Pennsylvania primary, Obama, to appeal to these people, reinvented himself as a proud patriot whose grandfather fought in Patton’s army, who enjoyed a bottle of Bud like the next guy, a kid raised in poverty by a single mom who had turned his back on Wall Street to fight for steelworkers laid off when the mills closed in south Chicago.

  McCain, a POW and war hero, was a natural for middle Pennsylvania and middle Ohio. But on the populist issues, the outsourcing of American jobs and the invasion of illegals from Mexico, he stood with the Wall Street Journal, the K Street lobbyists, and corporate America—for NAFTA and for amnesty.

  Like Bush I in 1992, McCain recoiled from cultural and social issues. He denounced Tarheel Republicans for linking Obama to the Reverend Wright. He berated a conservative talk show host who mocked Barack’s middle name. He went to Canada to swear allegiance to NAFTA. The mainstream media applauded, but, before Palin arrived, the Republican base was sullen and the Reagan Democrats were silent.

  McCain’s diffidence on right to life, affirmative action, and gay rights, his embrace of amnesty and NAFTA, explain the enthusiasm gap. On election day, twice as many voters were excited about the prospect of an Obama presidency as were about a McCain presidency.

  McCain would learn his lesson. In 2010, when challenged by former congressman J. D. Hayworth in a GOP primary, McCain ceased to be the maverick beloved of the national press and did a passable imitation of Tom Tancredo. He ran a tough-talking television advertisement charging that illegal aliens were responsible for “home invasions [and] murders.” The ad ended with McCain walking the border with a sheriff and demanding, “Complete the danged fence!”

  COMEBACK ROAD

  For conservatives, How Barack Obama Won reads like something out of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of the macabre. Yet, on closer reading, one can discern the Republican path to victory in 2012, even as the light shone upon that path in 2010.

  First, the bad news.

  Obama raised the black vote to 13 percent of the national vote, then carried it 95–4 percent. The Republican share of the Hispanic vote—9 percent of the electorate in exit polls, 7.4 percent in census figures—fell from Bush’s 40 percent in 2004 to 32 percent for McCain. Young voters aged eighteen to twenty-nine went for Obama by a margin of 66–31 percent. Obama ran stronger among white voters with a college education than Kerry or Gore.

  Put starkly, the voting groups that are expanding as a share of the electorate—Hispanics, Asians, African Americans, and whites with college degrees—were all trending ever more Democratic in 2008. The voters most loyal to the GOP—white folks without college degrees and religious conservatives—were shrinking as a share of the electorate.

  Where were the signs of hope?

  First, in 2008, 75 percent of voters thought the country was headed in the wrong direction. Obama won these voters 62–36 percent. But if the country is seen as headed in the wrong direction in 2012, as most Americans believe today, this will cast a cloud over Obama’s candidacy. McCain’s albatross in 2008 would become Obama’s in 2012.

  Second, only 27 percent of voters in 2008 approved of Bush’s performance by election day. Only Truman, as a sitting president in an election year, had a lower rating, 22 percent in 1952. That year, Democrats lost the White House and both houses of Congress.

  Todd’s point is dramatic: “With the single exception of Missouri, which barely went for McCain, Obama won every state where Bush’s approval rating was below 35% in the exit polls, and he lost every state where Bush’s approval was above 35%.”53

  Obama rode Bush’s coattails to victory. Had Bush been at 35 or 40 percent on election day, McCain might have won. In 2012, Obama will not have George Bush to kick around anymore.

  Third, on election day, 93 percent rated the economy as not so good or poor. The GOP will not have to wear those concrete boots in 2012. Obama will, as he wore them in the 2010 wipeout.

  Fourth, on candidates’ qualities, the situation looks even rosier for Republicans. In 2008, no less than 34 percent of the electorate said the most important consideration in a candidate was that he be for “change.” Not only was Obama the “change candidate,” he patented the issue and carried this third of the nation looking for change by an astounding 89–9 percent. But in 2012, Obama will be the candidate of continuity, the incumbent. The candidate of change will be his Republican opponent.

  Fifth, the second most critical consideration of voters in choosing a president was “values.” Thirty percent of the electorate put values first. Among that 30 percent, McCain won 65–32.

  Values issues are the GOP’s ace in the hole.

  What that two to one McCain advantage argues is that the neoconservatives instructing the GOP to dump values issues should themselves be dumped.

  Traditional values are a powerful magnet for the most Democratic of minorities. African Americans gave McCain 5 percent of their votes in California, but gave Proposition 8, the proposal to outlaw gay marriage, 70 percent of their votes. “[N]o ethnic group anywhere,” said the Washington Post, “rejected the sanctioning of same-sex unions as emphatically a
s the state’s black voters.”54 California Hispanics gave McCain 23 percent of their votes, but gave 53 percent of their votes to Proposition 8. Why would the GOP throw away these cards?

  McCain lost Colorado by 10 points. But the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative, which would have outlawed race and gender preferences, lost in a dead heat. In Michigan, California, Washington, and Nebraska, the ban on affirmative action has won a huge majority of whites and a larger share of black, Hispanic, and Asian voters than did John McCain. If the conservative side of these issues is more popular than the GOP, why would the GOP abandon them?

  THE SOCIAL ISSUES

  Those who urge Republicans to call a truce in the culture wars are uneasy with social issues and prefer to pound the table for lower taxes and less spending, common ground upon which all Republicans can stand.

  But if Republicans are conservatives, what do they wish to conserve, if not the lives of unborn children and matrimony as ordained by God? The traditional family is the cinder block of a good society. When it crumbles, society crumbles. Can we not see the consequences of the collapse of traditional morality and marriage in a country where 41 percent of all children are born out of wedlock?

  Where is the evidence that the social issues are losing issues?

  • A CBS poll in April 2008 found that when asked, “Would you like to see religious and spiritual values have more influence in the schools than they do now, less influence, or about the same influence?” 49 percent called for more influence, and only 16 percent said less influence.55

  • In a 2005 Pew poll, two-thirds of Americans felt liberals have “gone too far in trying to keep religion out of schools and government.” By 75 to 21, blacks agreed. Independents, 2 to 1, endorsed the proposition that liberals have gone too far in de-Christianizing America.56 Is this not ground to stand on to drive a wedge between liberals and black folks whose religious affiliation rate is higher than that of any ethnic group?