We know now the upcoming presidential campaign will be one where foreign policy will be an issue – we will be asked if we would best be served by a bully and a thug, someone who lets the world know no one messes with America, and anyone who even thinks about messing with America dies, or by someone who is careful and diplomatic and attempts to get the rest of the world to work with us on some basic issues of making things safer for everyone. Subsidiary to that is what we do here at home – do we allow full surveillance of all citizens without any need to prove specific probable cause to do so, do we agree that any citizen can be arrested, held without charges and without any legal recourse, and interrogated secretly by any means at all, as the president sees fit, because we face a threat more dire than any in our history, or do we do things more traditionally, with what used to be called decency, justice and transparency, but now seem a luxury we can no longer afford? After that there are matters of social justice – should we do something about the nearly fifty million people who have no health insurance, working out some way to fix things so everyone gets some sort of basic healthcare, or should we let them pay the price for their irresponsibility and fiscal incompetence? Should we reward those who made something of themselves, and became rich, by making sure their taxes remain a low as possible, - providing an incentive for others – or should we return to the previous tax tables, where those who earn more pay more and the bulk of consumers in the middle range have a bit more to spend on this and that? And what should we do about all the illegal immigrants who keep the economy going but really shouldn’t be here, and look and talk funny, and use social services? Should the individual woman make her own choise about abortion, or the will of the majority, the government? And what should we do about gay folks who want to get married? There is no end to the issues.
But it could be possible those issues are actually secondary. They’re “big” issues, and that may be the problem. They’re not personal.
Think back on Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign against George H. W. Bush, this president’s father, a president who was riding high on the end of the Cold War and the international success of the Persian Gulf War – everyone had been on our side in that one, or been fighting beside us (even the French), and everyone chipped in so it hardly cost a thing, and we got Iraq out of Kuwait and all was well. Everyone knew we did the right thing. In the year prior to the election George H. W. Bush’s approval ratings were running around eighty percent. Bush was considered unbeatable.
Enter one James Carville, that strange little bald man from Louisiana, Clinton’s campaign strategist. Carville came up with a single, focused strategy to win the White House and deny the war hero a second term, and it was all in one sentence – “It’s the economy stupid.” Clinton ran on that – Clinton was a better choice because Bush had not adequately addressed the economy, which was falling into a recession at the time. And it worked.
It didn’t hurt that the elder Bush had a tin ear – he didn’t get that individuals were in economic trouble. To him that was intangible and somewhat abstract – not his world, nor the world of any successful industry leaders, the world of those who supported him and advised him. He did what he thought was right, but it always sounded wrong. And it seems his son has inherited his tin ear, on Tuesday, October 30, saying things like this –
President Bush told Republican lawmakers on Tuesday he will not agree to legislation expanding children’s health insurance if it includes a tobacco tax increase, a decision that virtually ensures a renewed veto struggle with the Democratic-controlled Congress.
… Bush’s remarks represented a hardening of the administration’s public position in a running veto showdown over Democratic-led attempts to enact legislation that provides coverage for six million children who now lack it. The officials who disclosed his comments did so on condition of anonymity, saying they were made in a closed-door meeting.
Some think he has a point about the insidious threat of socialized medicine creeping up on us (even if some wonder what the big deal with that is) – but making sure six million children don’t get any health insurance coverage just sounds bad, and coupled with “you will not tax tobacco” it sounds awful. No matter how you feel about the “big” issues, this seems extraordinarily simple – and not very abstract. When he chooses the abstract principle here, he falls into the Carville trap. Someone might have advised him that this “principled approach” was good for his party – it would rally the base. But most people think about their kids, and leave the principle involved for later, if ever.
Note too that in a brief appearance the same day the president complained about press reports that Democrats in Congress may combine the appropriations bill for the Department of Defense with those for Veterans Affairs, Labor, Health and Human Services and Education in order to create one package that would be difficult for the president to veto. He didn’t like that – “It’s hard to imagine a more cynical political strategy than trying to hold hostage funding for our troops in combat and our wounded warriors in order to extract $11 billion in additional social spending.”
Go back to December 2005 – Senate Republicans, with the support of the White House, tried to force Democrats to vote to allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge by attaching a measure that would have done so to a bill providing funds for the war in Iraq and Katrina relief. Yeah, yeah – everyone knows the game. And it doesn’t matter.
They have other concerns – “With Christmas only about eight weeks away, shoppers are feeling more forlorn about the economy than they have since hurricanes Katrina and Rita battered the Gulf Coast two years ago.”
Yep, housing prices are spiraling downward and consumer confidence plunged four full points in September, and we’re not dealing with principles and abstractions. This is neither – some of the summary from a set of focus groups run by Democracy Corps –
In the focus groups, we handed people a page of positive facts about the economy… These swing voters - about half non-college and half college graduates - nearly attacked the moderator because many are on the edge: “Over half of Americans are what? Two paydays away from living on the street” - “Absolutely” - “That’s me.”
Nobody except the super-rich has seen salary increases in years; not if you are in a “straight regular job”; “people don’t make any raises,” and if you are lucky, your spouse gets two percent in some years. Some are working 2nd and 3rd jobs because they “can’t make ends meet”; “I’ve never known so many people to have two jobs or more than I have lately.” Still, “they are cutting back on everything.” They are struggling to fill up the gas tank twice a week; and they fear a visit to the hospital will wipe them out. They are watching their own companies, even the large ones, reduce and freeze hiring.
The full report is here, including this –
They are looking for leaders in business and government who will understand what is happening with the middle class and act in the interest of their companies and the country, though skeptical it will happen and feel they must take things in their own hands. There is a fundamental breakdown in trust that takes this beyond any specific issue: they lack confidence leaders will do anything right and hold the right priorities.
When you ask in a national survey the 70 percent who say the country is off on the ‘wrong track’ what underlying developments they are thinking about, they point to three interrelated themes, fully consistent with the more emotional response of the groups: big business getting whatever they want in Washington, leaders forgetting the middle class and America doing nothing about problems at home.
And that is only reinforce by items like this –
On the eve of an important Senate committee meeting to consider the legislation, Nancy A. Nord, the acting chairwoman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, has asked lawmakers in two letters not to approve the bulk of legislation that would increase the agency’s authority, double its budget and sharply increase its dwindling staff.
Ms. Nord opposes provisions that would increase the maximum penalties for safety violations and make it easier for the government to make public reports of faulty products, protect industry whistle-blowers and prosecute executives of companies that willfully violate laws.
Ah, Nord, who used to be a corporate attorney for Kodak up in Rochester, stands by her principles – reports of faulty products should NOT be made public, industry whistle-blowers damage American industry by making it look bad, and executives of companies that willfully violate laws can be dealt with quietly, embarrassing no one, so consumers do not lose confidence in the economy. The idea is industry can police itself – the threat of competition will keep them honest. And do keep the maximum penalties for safety violations as low as possible.
Others see little Jimmy licking the lead paint off the Mattel toy.
Digby sees the problem –
That’s what Republicans mean when they say they want to “keep the government out of your lives.”
Warrantless eavesdropping, torture and throwing you in prison indefinitely? Not so much.
It’s all in the specific versus the abstract, of course. They can get confused. But for most people, as Carville understood, everything is personal. Deciding who is more of a bully and thug and who is more reasonable, and what to do about tax policy, and “creeping socialism” and the “gay problem” – is all sounds important. Lots of things do. But that’s not where people live.
Garrison Keillor points out many of them live in Iowa, and Iowa matters – “It’s full of driveway philosophers, the guys who lean against the car and talk about manly things, which don’t include sports or politics. But they know which candidate is real, and they vote.”
Of course the item is about more than Iowa, and full of whimsy. And his own family may be not at all unusual –
Aggressiveness was not a prime value in my family. Only two of my fifteen uncles played football and not one of them was a hunter. They were gardeners, not warriors. Gentle godly men with husky voices who leaned against cars and talked quietly about manly things which, for them, included:
1. Cheap things that are better than expensive ones
2. The peculiarities of neighbors
3. The relative merits of makes of cars
4. Amazing coincidences in everyday life
5. The art of raising strawberries
6. The absurdities of urban life
7. Road trips, past and future
That sounds familiar. Sports and politics didn’t loom large in their world, as it does not in the world of so many –
So when I tune in to talk radio and hear guys ratcheting on and on about the home team betraying them or how much they hate Hillary, it has an exotic tinge for me, like hearing space alien dialogue in a movie. My male role models didn’t raise their voices. They stood with their backs to a 1947 Ford and looked off across the field and murmured.
So what’s going on in your neck of the woods?
Oh, not so much. Keeping busy.
How’s that car of yours running?
Got us to Idaho and back.
So how was that?
Well, she burned a little oil but she was getting almost 20 miles to the gallon.
That’s life, and campaign strategists forget about these people –
The radical feminists of my day did not grow up with men like my uncles, or perhaps they forgot, and other intellectuals who explore maleness do not include the Men Leaning Against the Car Murmuring archetype, but I remember them well, especially on these golden Saturdays in late fall, the gentle voices of the philosophers of the driveway.
What they say is that life is made up of a richness of small things and you need to keep them all in perspective. Read the Bible but don’t forget to cover your strawberry beds or change your oil. Go places, see things. Don’t get carried away. Moderation. Don’t get mad. Don’t make things more complicated than they are. If you’re too busy to stand around and talk, you’re not living right.
And those of us deep into the “big” issues seem odd to the “Men Leaning Against the Car Murmuring” crowd –
We are expected to give up our lives for work. We have a tendency to obsess and orate and that is something the driveway philosophers didn’t go in for. They were a chorus, not an audience, and they spoke softly and contrapuntally of the wonders of the world, the benefits of pruning and mulching, the qualities of apples, the science of forecasting winter by observing woolly caterpillars, the plans for flooding the backyard to make a hockey rink, the difficulties of growing roses, the trials and tribulations of plumbing.
And “they” matter –
They constitute a large invisible bloc that looks at candidates for public office and gets an intuitive sense of who is real and who is not. They know that politicians live in stone canyons and hire smart designers to create their personas, but they check out Hillary and Obama and Giuliani and Romney and they wonder who knows about gas mileage, who has a normal relationship with children, who can truly appreciate a really good apple.
And that may be why Iowa is important. We don’t live in the abstract. None of us do. There are the “big” issues, and there are the bigger ones.
