Pivotal Tuesdays

by Margaret O'Mara

  George W. Bush—despite being son of a president, grandson of a U.S. senator, and governor of one of the largest states in the nation—seized the “outsider” mantle and positioned himself as a fresh face, ready to take on the establishment and fight for ordinary men and women. Just as Gore distanced himself from Clinton, Bush distanced himself from his father. Folksy instead of preppy, rough-edged instead of genial, and possessing a genuine Texas twang, the younger Bush appealed to both conservatives and independents. He also appealed to the Southern voters who had left the Democrats for the Republicans in the years since 1968. He called himself a “compassionate conservative,” willing to take on tough social issues like immigration and poverty. As Reagan had conveyed so effectively twenty years before, Bush promised independent-minded voters that he’d get an intrusive federal government out of their lives. “He’s getting us back to the importance of the individual person,” said one Wisconsin voter on the eve of the election. “He’s saying that we can do our own thinking, that we don’t have to depend on Washington.”2

  By 2000, both the Democratic and the Republican parties had become more conservative than they had been at any point since the New Deal. The language of limited government and individual rights articulated by figures like Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, and Ronald Reagan since the 1960s had become mainstream. As president, Clinton had burnished his New Democrat credentials—and horrified liberals—by signing into law a massive welfare overhaul. Gore had overseen a major effort to “reinvent government” by streamlining regulation and reorganizing executive branch programs. The “Rockefeller Republicans” who had dominated the GOP through much of the twentieth century had become a dying breed. Some of the loudest and most influential voices in the party in the 1990s were Sunbelt conservatives like Georgia’s Newt Gingrich, who commandeered a Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 1994.

  Given the conservative tack of both major parties, it was perhaps unsurprising that the most potent third-party challenge of the 2000 campaign came from the left, not the right. Frustrated by the influence of business and conservative forces in politics, consumer advocate Ralph Nader ran for president under the banner of the Green Party, positioning himself as a fighter for the common worker like Debs, an iconoclastic independent like Perot.

  Unlike Perot, however, Nader drew much of his support from disillusioned liberals who felt abandoned by the Democratic Party of Clinton and Gore. Nader and his supporters had little illusion he would actually win anything, and he rejected accusations that his run would spoil Gore’s fragile chances for election. “You can’t spoil a system spoiled to the core,” he said to his cheering supporters on election night.3

  Yet the 2000 election proved to be one with a razor-thin margin, and the votes garnered by Nader turned out to have a decisive influence. Nader siphoned most of his support from Gore voters. “More than half of Nader voters said in exit polls that they would have voted for Gore if Nader weren’t on the ballot,” noted the Washington Post, “and only one in five said they would have voted for Bush.”4

  As election night wore on, the electoral map became more uncertain, and the outlook more grim for the Gore campaign. By 2000, the polling and electronic slicing-and-dicing of the electorate had become a sophisticated art employing advanced technology. That wizardry was cobbled onto an archaic electoral system that dated from the era of Washington and Adams. The result was campaigns that focused their energies on a small number of states which, because of their demographic and ideological diversity, could swing to either the Democratic or Republican column. The greatest prizes were the big swing states. And the biggest and most elusive of these was Florida, whose governor was none other than George W. Bush’s kid brother Jeb.

  As in 1968 and 1992, the great drama of election night played out on television. All of the network news divisions had created sophisticated polling systems of their own, and had set up elaborate technological operations to analyze the data coming in from counties and cities, towns and precincts. In 2000, despite this deluge of information, the television networks made the wrong calls—not just once, but twice and thrice, taking the candidates and voters on an all-night roller-coaster ride.

  At 7:00 P.M., the networks called the swing states of Florida, Pennsylvania, and Michigan for Gore. The mood in Austin was despondent. Yet as more results rolled in, signs of trouble emerged for Gore. States that had remained safely Democratic in the Clinton years began to go Republican. Gore lost West Virginia and Arkansas, and then—unbelievably—lost his home state of Tennessee. The networks then took back an earlier call. Florida, it turned out, was too close to call.

  Through the night, the verdict ricocheted back and forth. Florida was in Gore’s column. No, it was in Bush’s. Amid all the high-tech gadgetry, NBC anchor Tim Russert scribbled the ever-changing results on a smudged and decidedly low-tech dry erase board. Chaos reigned. By 10:00 P.M., CBS anchor Dan Rather referred to Bush’s lead as “shakier than cafeteria jello.”5 By 1:00 A.M., Florida was in Bush’s column and the networks called the election for the Republican. Gore called Bush to concede.

  No sooner had the call been made when Gore operatives noticed a sudden shrinking in Bush’s Florida lead, as more votes came in from heavily Democratic precincts. At 2:30 A.M., the vice president called his rival once again, to take back his concession. Bush was incredulous. “You don’t have to be snippy about it,” responded Gore.6 Election night ended without a winner. It took 36 days and a decision by the Supreme Court to decide the election in Bush’s favor.

  Disrupted by a third-party spoiler, altered by shifting social demographics, and occurring in a media hothouse, the 2000 election had quite a few things in common with earlier pivotal elections. However, its cliffhanger results were fueled by phenomena quite different from those that shaped the eras of Teddy Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, or Richard Nixon.

  The American economy had changed profoundly by the turn of the twenty-first century, dominated by the money of Wall Street and the computer companies of Silicon Valley instead of the automakers of Detroit and the steel mills of Pittsburgh. More Americans lived in suburbs than in cities or rural areas. Waves of immigration from Latin America and Asia had changed the demographics of the electorate and destabilized old ethnic and racial coalitions. Multiple media outlets—including the vast and bewildering landscape of the Internet—had created a cacophony of commentary that stymied campaigns’ ability to control the story. There was a level of unpredictability and instability in politics as a result. Conservatives and liberals alike were skeptical about the abilities of Washington politicians and the power of government to effect positive change. The self-styled independent voter was now a permanent fixture in the political landscape.

  Most significantly, the costs of 24-hour media and the demands for the advice of highly paid professional campaign consultants had turned national elections into extraordinarily expensive affairs. Candidates and elected officials now had to engage in almost perpetual fundraising, and had to spend an inordinate amount of time asking wealthy donors for money. Millionaires and billionaires followed the lead of Ross Perot and financed their own runs for office. For those coming into politics without fat bank accounts, getting elected became a far more daunting task.

  After 2000, Al Gore left politics behind. George Bush moved into the White House, and despite his unpopularity among liberal and moderate voters, won reelection in 2004. Eager to regain the White House, the Democrats looked toward a new generation of politicians who might provide the message and the substance to lead. Some thought the answer was a return to the politics and personalities of the Clinton years. In the wake of her husband’s public disgrace, Hillary Clinton made a remarkable transition from First Lady to politician, getting elected U.S. senator from New York in 2000 and establishing a reputation as a collaborative and effective legislator. The political establishment buzzed with the possibility of a Hillary Clinton presidential run, and by the time the 2008 election season got into
full swing, she had become a formidable candidate.

  Other Democrats saw the answer in a figure unconnected to the Clinton years, a member of the next generation who—like Woodrow Wilson in 1912—had made an unexpected and meteoric rise to national prominence. Barack Obama was a Chicago law professor and state legislator making a long-shot run for the U.S. Senate when he was tapped to give the keynote at the Democratic Convention in 2004. Unlike Clinton, whose disastrous convention address in 1988 had nearly sunk his presidential aspirations, Obama gave a stirring speech that electrified an apathetic and disillusioned Democratic base. He talked about his personal history as the biracial son of a white Kansas mother and an African father. He talked about the frustration and disillusionment Americans had with politics, and politicians. It was time, Obama declared, to transcend these divisions: “There are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.”7

  By 2008, Obama had parlayed this ability to deliver powerful oratory into a presidential run that attracted a diverse group of supporters—including a cadre of young people whose fervent support recalled Gene McCarthy’s 1968 campaign. He was not the first African American to run for president, but his campaign success eclipsed all candidates of color who had come before him.

  Other opponents fell away in the early primaries, leaving just Clinton and Obama to battle it out for the nomination. While much of the attention focused on having two such strong candidates fighting it out for the Democratic nomination, what sometimes got lost was the most remarkable fact that the two leading presidential candidates were an African American and a woman. Neither candidacy would have been possible in 1912, 1932, or 1968. The rights revolution set in motion in the 1960s had paved the way for a more conservative politics, but it also had created a foundation for a more equitable politics in which race and gender no longer was an insurmountable obstacle to achieving high office.

  However, the primary battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama highlighted how far the political center had moved to the right. Unintentional hilarity ensued as the two Ivy-League-educated candidates battled it out for the conservative, working-class ethnic vote. Clinton did shots of whiskey with factory workers. Obama made a very bad attempt at bowling. Yet the primary fight also showed how the American political scene had made some peace with formerly divisive social issues. The nation was far from being a postracial society, or one of gender equality, but it had come far enough that the idea of a black or female commander-in-chief seemed possible.8

  Ultimately, Obama was the victor in both the nomination fight and the general election. He and Hillary Clinton morphed from rivals to allies, and as his secretary of state, Clinton once again reinvented herself as a master diplomat, and revived her presidential aspirations to become the most talked-about Democratic possibility for 2016.

  Obama’s 2008 victory had echoes of Franklin Roosevelt’s in 1932. Like Roosevelt, Obama grasped the power of big ideas and oratorical flourishes to inspire and instill trust. He spoke boldly of unity, of transcending political divisions, and of hope and change. Like Roosevelt, he focused on inspiring rather than informing. He stayed rather skimpy on the details. And, like FDR, he effectively harnessed the power of new media—in this case, the Internet—to organize, fundraise, and communicate with voters.

  In both 2000 and 2008, as in all the elections profiled in this book, the ultimate secret to the winners’ electoral success was their opponents’ failures. By the end of his second term, Bush had become miserably unpopular, his approval ratings sinking lower than Clinton’s post-Lewinsky numbers. Barack Obama was a new face, a figure of promise, a path out of a decade of war. The hopes pinned on his candidacy were so high they were impossible to meet, yet despite not quite living up to all expectations Obama secured reelection in 2012. Like Wilson, both Roosevelts, Nixon, and Clinton, he became a two-term president.

  As America moves into the second decade of the twenty-first century, the lessons of the elections of the twentieth century still resonate. They help us determine where American politics are now, and where they might go next. In 1912, the great progressive debates revolved around how to govern a large, messy, dynamic industrial capitalist democracy. In the twenty-first century the debate revolves over whether to govern. The Democrats, by and large, have become the party identified with government-centered policy solutions. The Republican Party has become identified as the party of free markets, of small government, and of curbs to government spending. The answer to policy problems, many Republican legislators and political figures argue, is to get rid of the policies and their associated programs altogether. The result has been legislative gridlock in Washington, significant austerity and cost-cutting measures, and plummeting approval ratings for both parties.

  The reputations of tax-and-spend Democrats and free-market Republicans persist despite the fact that Democrats have presided over transformative deregulation and privatization measures during the past two decades, while Republican leadership has overseen military interventions and domestic security programs that have vastly expanded the reach of government into everyday life. Just as in the past, on both sides of the aisle there remain persistent contradictions between the language of politics and the actions of governance.

  Yet while the independent voter bloc continues to grow—as of 2012, those identifying as independents hovered at 40 percent of the electorate—the two major parties manage to hold on. Their resilience is remarkable, yet not all that surprising in the context of the profound changes that have occurred in the parties and their major constituencies since the era of Roosevelt, Wilson, and Taft. Ironically, the Democrats and Republicans endure in part because of the fractious and fractured nature of modern media. The cable news hothouse is now intensely partisan; CNN, in fact, struggled in the Obama era because it lacked strong identification with either a liberal or conservative point of view. Voters pick and choose from many options for receiving their political news, and often choose to get it from sources that resonate with their existing political beliefs. Multiple Internet channels—some of them seriously journalistic, some barely credible—have intensified the echo chamber effect.

  At the start of the twentieth century, the American political spectrum became animated by progressive ideas about an activist government that could serve as a counterweight to large corporations and the powerful men who ran them, and that could regulate the wild unpredictability of modern capitalist markets. These ideas became law in the 1930s. The liberal-progressive era of politics that followed in the New Deal’s wake started to disintegrate in the late 1960s through a combination of economic transformation, technological and geographic changes, and cultural and generational transformations. They further receded with the landslide election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. After Reagan came new, right-to-moderate sets of politics from both parties. Democrats realized that New Deal liberalism no longer could win national elections. Republicans were pushed further to the right by cultural conservatism.

  Yet at the same time, there were political undercurrents throughout the twentieth century that ran counter to the broader trends. In between the two progressive moments of the 1910s and 1930s was a more conservative and cautious Harding-Coolidge era of the prosperous and isolationist 1920s. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal met with fierce critique from the right as well as from the left, and his broadest and most aggressive interventions into markets proved to be short-lived. The brand of conservatism that seemed to burst into the mainstream with Reagan’s election had been gestating for nearly half a century before 1980.9

  We see these contradictions still on display in the current political era. While ideas about the role and size of government, taxation, and regulation skew toward the right, notions of racial and gender and sex equality have gained more traction than ever before. As in the Progressive Era, cities and
states have become the places where reformist ideas take root and gain traction. While Congresses and presidents have resisted joining global environmental treaties, mayors of large cities have joined together in low-carbon pledges of their own. While national debates around drug enforcement and gay rights have become increasingly conservative, states have begun to legalize same-sex marriage and recreational marijuana use. All these are signs that the center may be shifting once more, although not necessarily back toward the big-government liberalism of the New Deal era. Changing demographics, changing communication, and changing party structure point toward something new.

  Despite the liberal turn in social attitudes, particularly among the younger generation, Democrats, Republicans, and the great independent middle seem increasingly unconvinced that big, central government programs are the answer. Potent third-party movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street articulate populist discontent on both left and right, echoing the chaotic swirl of ideas that shaped the elections of 1912, 1932, 1968, and 1992. The growth of the Internet has compromised message discipline, making it challenging for candidates and campaigns to stay on-message amid tweets and status updates and Reddit “ask me anything” sessions.

  Will this produce more discord, or more democracy? Let us hope for the latter, and take what lessons we can from history. From the very start, Americans have argued over the same core values in election after election: the people versus the powerful, big government versus small government, the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Elections have been the battleground on which these debates play out, but none of them have upended the basic premise of American democracy. For however fiercely we fight, the shared goal remains of turning this into a more perfect union. The best we can hope is that every four years, on the first Tuesday in November, we come a little closer to that goal.