(I am inspired to write this post after reading Lee’s thoughtful post below about the selection of Rick Warren to give the invocation at Obama’s inaugural.)
Remember back to the Democratic primaries, when Barack Obama was attacked by both Hillary Clinton and John Edwards for saying something non-hateful about Ronald Reagan? Here is what Obama said:
I don’t want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what’s different are the times. I do think that for example the 1980 was different. I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.
There’s no disputing the fundamental accuracy of Obama’s remarks above. By the time Reagan arrived on the national stage, many Americans felt — rightly or wrongly — that it was time to reject the Democratic Party, which had dominated American politics for decades.
But Obama wasn’t just offering up an analysis of Reagan’s presidency; Obama said what he said in order to indicate that he, too, wants to “change the trajectory of America” — but in a left-wing direction. And Obama believes the “times” are right for such a realignment, which will rebrand the Democratic party and set the stage for major progress on a whole host of issues, from health care, to taxes, to the environment, to foreign policy. These days, many Americans feel that it is time to reject the Republican Party, which has dominated American politics since Reagan.
Obama took an important step toward acheiving this goal when he selected Envangelical preacher Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inaugural. Obama also indicated how he intends to achieve this change in trajectory — and his strategy isn’t pretty for many on the left. Obama intends to minimize the significance of “God, guns and gays,” in the tradition of 2004 presidential candidate and current party chairman Howard Dean.
Throughout this year’s presidential campaign, I heard pundits say over and over again that the Republican Party’s electoral success has been based on a “conservative coalition” — a coalition of social conservatives, fiscal conservatives and foreign policy conservatives — that came together in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s under the leadership of Ronald Reagan.
Now, for the first time in decades, this coalition is showing signs of fraying, creating an awesome opening for Democrats and liberals to reshape American politics.
One of the first Democratic leaders to seize upon this vulnerability of the conservative coalition was Dean, who said he was “tired of coming to the South and fighting elections on guns, God and gays. We’re going to fight this election on our turf, which is going to be jobs, education and health care.”
Chris Wallace asked Dean about those comments on Fox News Sunday in Dec. 2003:
WALLACE: What do you mean by that, when you say that you don’t want to talk about guns, God and gays?
DEAN: What the Republicans have been doing since 1968 was actually the subject of a speech I’m about to give in a couple of hours here in South Carolina, is dividing us along racial lines by talking about quotas, dividing us about abortion or guns or other issues like that.
Well, let me tell you something about South Carolina. There’s 102,000 children here with no health insurance. Most of those kids are white.
White people and black people in the South have a common interest. Their jobs are going offshore. They haven’t had a raise because health-insurance premiums have eaten up all their money. They need — $70 million was cut, got cut out of public health insurance — public education here, because the president’s economic program has been such a disaster.
Everybody deserves a break — not just in the South, but everybody else. And working people, no matter what color they are, need to vote together, because their economic interests are not served by the Republicans. And I think that’s why the election needs to be about health insurance, economic opportunity and jobs, and better educational opportunities for everybody.
WALLACE: Governor, I don’t think anybody would deny that those are very important issues, but why take the others — abortion, guns, God, gays — off the table? I mean, it sounds like you’re uncomfortable talking about values.
DEAN: I’m very comfortable talking about values, but we’re never going to agree on some of these issues. I actually have a more conservative positions on guns than many Democrats, although I do support the assault-weapons ban and background checks and all that. But…
WALLACE: But aren’t those legitimate issues, whether it’s a woman’s right to choose versus right to life, whether there should a national ban on assault weapons, gay rights?
I mean, aren’t those issues — I have to say, I remember back in 1988, because I was covering the campaign, when Michael Dukakis said that the campaign is about competence, not ideology, and the Republicans killed him on that.
Don’t American voters care about values?
DEAN: They care about values. And there are a lot of different kinds of values. My attitude is, each state’s going to make their own kinds of decisions about these difficult issues that we’re — you know, the social issues that divide us.
My question is, what we have in common is what we ought to look at. This president ran as a uniter, not a divider, and that was a complete falsehood. What he has done is use words like “quota” to send race-coded words to folks, talking about scaring them into thinking somebody from a minority community is going to take their jobs. On and on it goes.
What about what we have in common? What we have in common is we need better education for everybody. We need health care, health insurance for everybody. Every industrialized country in the world has health insurance except for us. We don’t have to have a complicated government-run system. But we ought to have it, like we do, for the most part, in Vermont, at least for all our kids.
So why can’t we talk about jobs, health care and education, which is what we all have in common, instead of allowing the Republicans to consistently divide us by talking about guns, God, gays, abortion and all this controversial social stuff that we’re not going to come to an agreement on?
I really believe that states ought to have a role. My gun policy basically is let’s keep the federal laws, let’s enforce them with great vigor, and then let’s let every state make additional laws if they want to. You’re going to have states that want gun control making more, and you’re going to have states like my state saying, look, we’ll enforce the federal laws and leave it at that.
Why can’t we take that kind of an approach to these issues and stop getting exercised about them? That’s what cost this election. Why can’t we look at what we have in common: economic opportunity, educational opportunity, health insurance? Those are the things that I think are value-driven.
And I think that’s where this administration falls short on values. They don’t seem to care about ordinary people. They’ll do everything for corporations. They give $26,000 in tax cuts to the top 1 percent. The rest of the people get $304 and a big property-tax increase, big health-insurance increases and big college-tuition increases.
That’s where I think that the battle about values is in this country and in this election.
Dean was basically proposing that the Democratic party target voters who are socially conservative but otherwise open to Democratic ideas. Dean wanted to draw those voters into a new “working majority” that would enable the country to make important progress on issues like education, health care, the environment, the wars, etc. Of course, drawing these voters in means not alienating them — which in turn means offending gays and others who want to fight these battles vigorously.
The continuing disintigration of the conservative coalition was evident during this year’s Republican primary, when it was clearly hard for voters to find a candidate who could rally all three legs of the stool. Candidates such as Mike Huckabee seemed to represent social conservatives who were willing to move to the center on fiscal issues. Candidates such as Rudy Guliani seemed to represent fiscal conservatives and foreign policy conservatives who were willing to move to the center on social issues. Ultimately, nominee John McCain — a foreign policy hawk and fiscal conservative — was saddled with the task of “reaching out” to social conservatives, who weren’t comfortable with his seeming ambivalence about their agenda.
In my view, the most appealing Republican candidate was Mike Huckabee, partly because he seemed like the least angry man in America, and partly because he seemed open-minded and moderate on foreign policy and economic issues. He seemed to represent the kind of conservatives that Dean thought he could reach in his 2003/2004 campaign. Consider this excerpt from a New York Times article about Huckabee’s appeal entitled “Huckabee Splits Young Evangelicals and Old Gaurd”:
WASHINGTON — Much of the national leadership of the Christian conservative movement has turned a cold shoulder to the Republican presidential campaign of Mike Huckabee, wary of his populist approach to economic issues and his criticism of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. But that has only fired up Brett and Alex Harris.
The Harris brothers, 19-year-old evangelical authors and speakers who grew up steeped in the conservative Christian movement, are the creators of Huck’s Army, an online network that has connected 12,000 Huckabee campaign volunteers, including several hundred in Michigan, which votes Tuesday, and South Carolina, which votes Saturday.
They say they like Mr. Huckabee for the same reason many of their elders do not: “He reaches outside the normal Republican box,” Brett Harris said in an interview from his home near Portland, Ore.
The brothers fell for Mr. Huckabee last August when they saw him draw applause on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” for explaining that he believed in a Christian obligation to care for prenatal “life” and also education, health care, jobs and other aspects of “life.” “It is a new kind of evangelical conservative position,” Brett Harris said. Alex Harris added, “And we are not going to have to be embarrassed about him.”
Mr. Huckabee, who was a Southern Baptist minister before serving as governor of Arkansas, is the only candidate in the presidential race who identifies himself as an evangelical. But instead of uniting conservative Christians, his candidacy is threatening to drive a wedge into the movement, potentially dividing its best-known national leaders from part of their base and upending assumptions that have held the right wing together for the last 30 years.
His singular style — Christian traditionalism and the common-man populism of William Jennings Bryan, leavened by an affinity for bass guitar and late-night comedy shows — has energized many young and working-class evangelicals. Their support helped his shoestring campaign come from nowhere to win the Iowa Republican caucus and join the front-runners in Michigan, South Carolina and national polls.
And Mr. Huckabee has done it without the backing of, and even over the opposition of, the movement’s most visible leaders, many of whom have either criticized him or endorsed other candidates.
“Some of them have been openly hostile to him, and others merely lukewarm in their hostility,” said John Green, a scholar with the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
If Mr. Huckabee can continue to galvanize evangelicals around his novel message while attracting other Republicans and perhaps independents, he will do more than advance his own campaign. He will also challenge the establishment of the Christian conservative political movement.
“To the extent that Governor Huckabee succeeds in advancing this new agenda that combines cultural conservatism with an economic and foreign affairs populism,” Mr. Green said, “it could undermine the existing Christian conservative political leaders and their organizations.”
In other words, Huckabee is a religious conservative (anti-choice, anti-gay marriage, etc.) but he isn’t afraid to use the frame of religion to prioritize government involvement in education, health care, jobs, etc. I remember his campaign pitch to improve the economy by spending heavily on infrastructure, and thought, “for a Republican, he’s not nearly as bad as he could be.” In a way, Huckabee’s strategy was based on the same ideas as Dean’s: that Republicans win on social issues, and Democrats win on everything else. So Huckabee figured he stay true to the social issues, move to the center on everything else, and remake the Republican Party.
Huckabee also seemed remarkably open to the sort of politics Obama was putting forward at that time. Consider this excerpt from a column by conservative pundit William Kristol immediately after the Iowa Caucus:
Who, inquiring minds want to know, is going to spare us a first Obama term? After all, for all his ability and charm, Barack Obama is still a liberal Democrat. Some of us would much prefer a non-liberal and non-Democratic administration. We don’t want to increase the scope of the nanny state, we don’t want to undo the good done by the appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, and we really don’t want to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory in Iraq.
For me, therefore, the most interesting moment in Saturday night’s Republican debate at St. Anselm College was when the candidates were asked what arguments they would make if they found themselves running against Obama in the general election.
The best answer came, not surprisingly, from the best Republican campaigner so far — Mike Huckabee. He began by calmly mentioning his and Obama’s contrasting views on issues from guns to life to same-sex marriage. This served to remind Republicans that these contrasts have been central to G.O.P. success over the last quarter-century, and to suggest that Huckabee could credibly and comfortably make the socially conservative case in an electorally advantageous way.
Huckabee went on to pay tribute to Obama for his ability “to touch at the core of something Americans want” in seeming to move beyond partisanship. And, he added, Senator Obama is “a likable person who has excited people about wanting to vote who have not voted in the past.” Huckabee was of course aware that in praising Obama he was recommending himself
I was watching the debate at the home of a savvy, moderately conservative New Hampshire Republican. It was at this moment that he turned to me and said: “You know, I’ve been a huge skeptic about Huckabee. I’m still not voting for him Tuesday. But I’ve got to say — I like him. And I wonder — could he be our strongest nominee?”
Alex Harris says “we are not going to have to be embarrassed about him.” The New Hampshire Republican says “I’ve got to say — I like him.” I think people like him for the same reason that I “liked him,” (although I would never vote for him) — he’s not angry, he’s a great communicator and he’s not running on the discredited ideas that have defined Republican ideas about the economy and foreign policy.
More from the New York Times article:
“Some of my Christian friends, just like some of my not-so-Christian friends, have become a little too Washingtonian,” said Rick Scarborough, an aspiring successor to the previous generation of conservative Christian leaders. He recently argued that his allies were wrong to balk at Mr. Huckabee’s turn toward environmentalism and “social justice.”
“Can you imagine Jesus ignoring the plight of the disenfranchised and downtrodden while going after the abortionist?” Mr Scarborough wrote on the conservative Web site WorldNetDaily.com.
Make no mistake: the “plight of the disenfanchised and downtrodden,” as a subject of public policy, is still owned by the Democratic Party, in the same way that lowering taxes is owned by the Republican Party.
The libertarians and fiscal conservatives in the Republican Party hated Huckabee precisely because he and his ilk intended to introduce this sort of framework into Republican politics. The real ideological “base” of the Republican party — fiscal conservatives — want to privatize social security, get rid of the Department of Education, eliminate public education, criminalize unions, and take other steps that will weaken the “disenfranchised and downtrodden.” They will absolutely oppose taking the steps that are necessary to rescue the American economy, starting with a bailout of the auto industry.
There’s no doubt that Obama’s selection of Warren sends a message that “God, guns and gays” will not be at the top of Obama’s agenda. It also sends a message that Obama is trying follow through on Dean’s plan to lure social conservatives into a new Democratic coalition by targeting the sort of voters who were attracted to Huckabee – which means Obama will try to avoid alienating them, even if it means alienating gays.
Even Kristol had to acknowledge the significance of Obama’s gesture, and also conveyed a sense of the alienation social conservatives feel when attacked for their views:
The assault on Prop 8 supporters has been extraordinary in its mean-spiritedness and extremism–but the left knows what it’s doing. The purpose has been to intimidate people with an opposing point of view from defending their position. To be against same-sex marriage, even against the judicial imposition of same-sex marriage, is to be a bigot. As one leftwinger said on CNN, Warren is a “hatemonger” comparable to “the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.” Or, as the Human Rights Campaign’s Brad Luna told Byron York of National Review, dismissing the fact that the benediction will be delivered by the Reverend Joseph Lowery, who is more friendly to gay marriage: “I don’t think any Jewish Americans would feel much comfort in knowing that an anti-Semite is starting the inauguration with an invocation, but we’re going to end it with a rabbi.” So the claim is, opposing same-sex marriage is tantamount to being a racist or an anti-Semite.
Making that charge is at the heart of the agenda of the gay lobby. They don’t want to debate same-sex marriage. They want to demonize its opponents. Ironically, Lowery himself, who is a (somewhat equivocal) supporter of gay marriage, refuses to equate the gay rights and the civil rights movements: “Homosexuals as a people have never been enslaved because of their sexual orientation,” he told the Associated Press. “They may have been scorned; they may have been discriminated against. But they’ve never been enslaved and declared less than human.”
And, one could add, gender and sex are at least potentially morally relevant in a way a decent society will not allow skin color to be. Skin color is skin deep. Gender and sex are more complicated, which is why even in our “enlightened” age, all distinctions based on gender and sexual orientation haven’t collapsed.
God knows, Obama isn’t going to be out there defending such distinctions, or explaining which are reasonable and which aren’t. And it’s certain Obama is going to govern as a pro-abortion rights, not-particularly-pro-traditional-family, social liberal. But he at least seems open to a discussion of these issues. And that leaves some political space for social conservatives to continue making their case over the next few years.
Conservatives have to be ready to stand up for themselves–and for each other–if and when the left comes at them from the academy, Hollywood, and the media. Obama’s invitation to Rick Warren doesn’t mean his administration won’t put a heavy thumb on the left side of the scale in our cultural conflicts. It doesn’t even mean that organs of the federal government, over which Obama will of course be presiding, won’t try to stifle nonconforming opinions. But the Warren invitation means that one can at least appeal to Obama’s own precedent against suppressing out-of-favor views.
The left senses that the invitation to Rick Warren is a blow to their effort to establish a soft tyranny of “correct” opinion, to enforce society-wide political orthodoxy, on social issues. They’re right. This isn’t the time for conservatives to snipe at Obama’s motives. It’s time to welcome him into the American mainstream, to salute the president-elect’s progress from Reverends Wright to Warren.
So now those of us on the left who find Rick Warren’t views offensive have to do a cost/benefit analysis. The Dean/Obama strategy has costs and benefits: the costs are that the Democratic Party can’t be too aggressive in its tactics or its rhetoric in fighting for issues such as gay marriage, abortion rights, or gun control. The benefits are that the Democratic Party may win over a good chunk of socially conservative voters, giving Democrats an opportunity to govern this country for the foreseable future in ways that will be great for our economy, our foreign policy and our long term viability as a planet.
Is it worth it?