5 Myths About Obama's Win

by: Bill Dupray   posted: 2008-11-16 11:36:00
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Chris Cillizza debunks five nuggets of (liberal) Conventional Wisdom about the meaning of Obama's win.

1. The Republican Party suffered a death blow.

There's no question that losing six Senate seats and 24 House seats (not to mention the White House) wasn't a step forward for the Grand Old Party. But there are two good reasons to believe that Republicans will be back on their feet sooner than many people expect.

First, much of the Republicans' permanent political class has concluded that electing Sen. John McCain as president would have amounted to applying a Band-Aid to a gaping wound. . .

Second, historical electoral patterns suggest that Republicans could pick up a passel of Senate and House seats in 2010 -- the first midterm election under President Obama.

McCain was a moderate (Democrat-Lite) and moderates lose because they are unable to draw crisp distinctions between themselves and their opponents. Also, moderates do not have a coherent governing philosophy. For example, if you believe in free speech, you don't pass McCain-Feingold limiting it. If you believe in capitalism, you tell the American people that the Democrats in Congress caused the financial meltdown by manipulating the market with their Socialist everybody-can-own-a-home policies. You don't rail against the "greed of Wall Street."

2. A wave of black voters and young people was the key to Obama's victory. . . .

Or not. Exit polling suggests that there was no statistically significant increase in voting among either group. Black voters made up 11 percent of the electorate in 2004 and 13 percent in 2008, while young voters comprised 17 percent of all voters in 2004 and 18 percent four years later.

Remember this in four years when they tell us, once again, that the youth will turn out in huge numbers for the Democrat. If they didn't do it this year, of all years, it proves, once and for all, that the youth of America are congenitally incapable of increasing their turnout over historical norms.

3. Now that they control the White House and Congress, Democrats will usher in a new progressive era.

Not likely. At first glance, the numbers do look encouraging for proponents of a new New Deal era in government: Obama claimed at least 364 electoral votes and more than 52.5 percent of the overall popular vote, while Democrats now control at least 57 seats in the Senate and 255 in the House.

But look more closely, and you see a heavy influx of moderate to conservative members in the incoming freshman Democratic class, particularly in the House. . . .

The fact that roughly a third of the Democratic House majority sits in seats with Republican underpinnings (at least at the presidential level) is almost certain to keep a liberal dream agenda from moving through Congress. The first rule of politics is survival, and if these new arrivals to Washington want to stick around, they are likely to build centrist voting records between now and 2010.

This one I am not so sure about. Pelosi and Reid have not waited this long to control all the levers of power only to have a couple of do-gooder young punks come in and throw cold water on the agenda. It's the same old story, especially with Democrats - you play ball or you get no reelection money from the Party. The upstarts will be brought to heel. The only thing stopping the Democrats from turning us into a solid gold Socialist country is the Senate filibuster. But even that is of limited usefulness.

4. A Republican candidate could have won the presidency this year.

I doubt it. In the hastily penned postmortems of campaign '08, much of the blame for McCain's loss seems to have fallen at the feet of the candidate and his advisers, who (so the narrative goes) made a series of lousy strategic decisions that wound up costing the Arizona senator the White House.

McCain made some mistakes in not going after Jeremiah Wright, etc., but these were tactical errors. He lost for 3 major reasons. Cillizza mentions President Bush's unpopularity (although given a choice between McCain and Bush this year, I would have chosen Bush, hands down). I would add that had the economy been humming along, Bush's popularity would have been much higher and the election would likely have had a different outcome. The third reason is that McCain is a moderate. He was the last choice of the Conservative base of the Party. If you can't jazz your base, you are handicapped from the outset.

The only thing keeping this election from having been a 50 state landslide for Obama was the final myth - Sarah Palin

5. McCain made a huge mistake in picking Sarah Palin.

Remember where McCain found himself this past summer. He had won the Republican nomination, but the GOP base clearly felt little buy-in into his campaign. A slew of national polls reflected that energy gap, with Democrats revved up about the election and their candidate and Republicans somewhere between tepid and glum.

Enter Palin, who was embraced with a bear hug by the party's conservative base. All of a sudden, cultural conservatives were thrilled at the chance to put "one of their own" in the White House. In fact, of the 60 percent of voters who told exit pollsters that McCain's choice of Palin was a "factor" in their final decision, the Arizona senator won 56 percent to 43 percent.

For skittish conservatives looking for more evidence that McCain understood their needs and concerns, Palin did the trick. It's hard to imagine conservatives rallying to McCain -- even to the relatively limited extent that they did -- without Palin on the ticket. And without the base, McCain's loss could have been far worse.

Bingo. Many conservatives were voting for 2 reasons in this election: (1) Get Sarah Palin in the Vice-President's mansion, and (2) Deny the White House to a radical Marxist. The identity of the Republican nominee was irrelevant. Had McCain not picked Palin, this election would have been a bloodbath.

Tags: 2010, Moderate, McCain, republicans, election, 2008, Obama, 

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