One year after the 2008 election, one thing is certain: the average American voter is center-right. After Obama’s win, many pundits and bloggers opined about how America had moved left. In reality, Obama’s election was more about a rejection of eight years of Bush, not to mention the rejection of a boring, moderate McCain campaign. Now that the Democrats are in power their coalition is falling apart. The National Review’s Jonah Goldberg makes some good points about this phenomenon:
The Democratic Party’s leaders are a lot more liberal than their voters (the dynamic is even more true when it comes to committee chairs who are to the left of the average Democratic congressmen). The Democrats came into power in 2008 thinking they had a huge mandate for liberalism, when they really had a huge mandate for competence (for want of a better word). Obama and his coterie misunderstood this. They used a lot of “pragmatic” rhetoric, but they governed from the left, starting with the calamitous stimulus bill. Obama’s personal popularity is still sustaining him, but it seems to me that the Democratic Party missed an enormous opportunity. I don’t think they’re doomed or anything like that. But, they’ve managed to rebrand themselves as a very liberal party again, and that’s a problem when 80% of Americans don’t describe themselves as liberals.
Gallup released a new poll measuring ideological groups in America. There’s nothing really startling about the poll. It’s relatively unchanged over the last two decades. Liberals enjoyed a small jump toward the end of the Bush years, but have settled back to 20%. Goldberg is correct; Obama and the Democrats cannot maintain a winning coalition governing from the left. Obama will most certainly tack to the center at some point or risk a reelection nightmare.
Simply moving to the center will be more difficult for Obama than it was for Clinton. President Clinton campaigned for a few centrist ideas. The cornerstone issue for Clinton was welfare reform. When Clinton ran for reelection his most significant first-term achievement was something Republicans wanted. In 1996 the economy was doing better and Clinton has taken a valuable campaign issue from the Republicans. Obama doesn’t have any popular centrist plans. The President is unwilling to adopt any health care reform ideas from the right. Instead, Obama contrasts his opponents as having no ideas.
The President was able to run as a moderate in the last election because no one was willing to look at his record. Obama basically won by default against an old Republican who refused to differentiate himself in a winning year for Democrats. Even if the economy bounces back 2012 will not be a cake walk. Al Gore ran for president in 2000 when the economy was doing well and Clinton was still popular and lost. The economy was doing well in 2004, but Bush didn’t win handily against Kerry. The nation is still divided. Obama’s best hope is the rise of a third-party candidate to drain votes from the Republicans. Since the Republicans do not have a leader and there’s populist unrest within both parties a third-party candidate is becoming more likely. Who will it be?
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