Kevin Phillips on the election

[Dan Scanlan <dscanlan@xxxxxxx>]

How Kerry Can Win

 By Kevin Phillips

(The Nation, July 15) -- John Kerry can win, given George W. Bush's
incompetence, and White House strategists realize that. All the
Democrats need to do is to peel away some of the Republican "unbase"
-- the most wobbly members of the GOP coalition. The caveat is that
not many Democrats understand that coalition or why it has beaten the
Democrats most of the time since 1968. Nor do most understand the
convoluted but related role of Bill Clinton in aborting what could
have been a 1992-2004 (or 2008) mini-cycle of Democratic White House
dominance and in paving the way for George W.

       Elements of this shortsightedness are visible in both the
party and the Kerry campaign. While attempts to harness "Anybody but
Bush" psychologies and to attract voters without saying much that is
controversial might win Kerry a narrow victory, this strategy would
be unlikely to create a framework for successful four- or eight-year
governance. Deconstructing the Republican coalition is a better
long-term bet, and could be done. The result, however, might be to
uncage serious progressive reform.

       Republicans, in contrast, have been successful in thinking
strategically since the late 1960s. From 1968 until Bill Clinton's
triumph in 1992, Republicans won five of the six presidential
elections, and even Jimmy Carter's narrow victory in 1976 was in many
respects a post-Watergate fluke. The two main coalitional milestones
were Richard Nixon's 61 percent in 1972 and Ronald Reagan's 59
percent in 1984.

       The two Bushes, notwithstanding their dynastic achievement,
represent the later-stage weakness of the coalition, which would have
been more obvious without the moral rebukes of Clinton that were
critical in the 1994 and 2000 elections. In the three presidential
elections the Bushes have fought to date, their percentages of the
total national vote have been 53.9 percent (1988), 37.7 percent
(1992) and 47.9 percent (2000) -- an average of 46.5 percent.

       Keep in mind that in 1992, Bush Sr. got the smallest vote
share of any president seeking re-election since William Howard Taft
in 1912, while in 2000, the younger Bush became the first president
to be elected without winning a plurality of the popular vote since
Benjamin Harrison in 1888. The aftermath of 9/11 created transient
strength, but the essential weakness of the Bushes was palpable again
by mid-2004.

       Strategizing on behalf of a family with more luck and lineage
than gravitas, the principal strategists for each Bush president --
Lee Atwater for [Bush] number 41 and Karl Rove for number 43 -- have
necessarily been Machiavellian students of the Republican
presidential coalition and how to maintain it. After helping to elect
[Bush] 41 in 1988 because Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis was an
Ivy League technocrat unconvincing as an occasional populist, Atwater
observed that "the way to win a presidential election against the
Republicans is to develop the class-warfare issue, as Dukakis did at
the end. To divide up the have and have-nots." Since then, the focus
on keeping Republicans together has evolved and intensified.

       Despite the Republican weakness evident in 1992 and Bush's
second-place finish in 2000, Rove is notable for his preoccupation
with the GOP "base," which he presumably thinks of in normal
majoritarian terms. However, in the case of Bush's running for
election or re-election, it is also useful -- and the Democrats of
2004 would find it particularly worthwhile -- to focus on the GOP's
"unbase." This, in essence, is the 20-25 percent of the party
electorate that has been won at various points by three national
anti-Bush primary and general election candidates with Republican
origins: Ross Perot (1992), John McCain (2000) and, in a lesser vein,
Patrick Buchanan (1992).

       Most of the shared Perot-McCain issues -- campaign and
election reform, opposition to the religious right, distaste for
Washington lobbyists, opposition to upper-bracket tax biases and
runaway deficits, criticism of corporations and CEOs -- are salient
today and more compatible with the mainstream moderate reformist
Democratic viewpoint than with the lobbyist-driven Bush
administration. Perot and Buchanan's economic nationalism
(anti-outsourcing, anti-NAFTA) and criticism of Iraq policy under the
two Bushes is also shared by many Democrats.

       Taking things somewhat further, these members of the "unbase"
of the Republican presidential coalition ought to be the Democrats'
key target because (1) they have some degree of skepticism about Bush
and (2) they are the segment of the GOP coalition most logically open
to recruitment for a progressive realignment, short-term or
otherwise. That is the way small or large realignments work: by
wooing the most empathetic part of the current coalition.

       In 1992, when Perot drew 19 percent of the November vote,
George Bush Senior got only about 80 percent of the Republican vote.
Most of the "unbase" and part of the base deserted. If McCain had
been well funded in 2000, he might have been able to get 30-40
percent in GOP primaries nationally, and even without serious money,
he did win the primaries in seven states, including New Hampshire,
Michigan and Connecticut.

       Sticking with the idea that the GOP "unbase" is somewhere
between 20 percent and 25 percent, Bush can afford to lose 5 to 7
percent of the overall Republican electorate. But if he loses 10
percent, he's probably done for, and if he drops 15 percent, he's
finished. It could happen. Back in late winter, when Kerry still had
a winner's aura from the primaries, one CBS News poll showed 11
percent of those who had voted for Bush in 2000 were unprepared to do
so in 2004. That was enough to put Kerry ahead, at least until the
GOP's spring advertising blitz.

       Kerry looked better by late June, but part of the reason for
Kerry's -- and the Democrats' -- failure to capitalize on Bush's
weaknesses is that they seem unable to decide between two very
different strategies. One might be called the Wall Street strategy,
which includes rhetoric about failed policies in Iraq and GOP tax
cuts that pander to the rich, but avoids most specifics or bold
indictments of Bush failure. Critiques of U.S. economic polarization,
NAFTA or globalization are sidestepped, and the example of
Clinton-era federal deficit reduction so admired by Wall Street is
held up. Indeed, Kerry's demeanor is appropriate to a man married
into one of the biggest U.S. corporate fortunes.

       It is plausible to think that this will enable Kerry to draw
a slightly improved vote among upper-middle-class and even fat-cat
Republicans disenchanted with Bush as an incompetent cowboy who has
bungled Iraq and pandered to Falwell, Robertson and Bob Jones
University. Pinstriped caution has already helped the Massachusetts
Senator to haul in record levels of Democratic contributions, some
from Republicans and independents. Still, for all its success in
Manhattan, the Hamptons and Santa Barbara, this is not a strategy
that resonates with swing voters in battleground states from Ohio to
New Mexico.

     The alternative -- at once bolder and riskier, but with a larger
potential electorate -- involves targeting the ordinary Republicans
who rejected at least one generation of Bushes to back Perot or
McCain. These voters -- not a few thousand elites but millions of the
rank and file -- are concentrated in the middle-class precincts of
swing states like Maine, New Hampshire, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin,
Iowa, Minnesota, Colorado and the Pacific Coast.

       Even by the campaign's own polls, it is precisely the
Perot-McCain states that Kerry most needs to win. For Democratic and
left-tilting progressives, the second benefit is luring voters drawn
to the outsider economics of Perot and McCain, not to the insider
calculations of big donors and fundraisers like former Clinton
Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. It is the Perot-McCain constituency,
more than the elite Democratic entente, that could best catalyze a
bipartisan progressive coalition.

       A partial analogy, at least, can be made to the role that GOP
progressives like George Norris, Hiram Johnson and Robert La Follette
Jr. played during the 1930s in launching the New Deal. Convincing
John McCain to run for vice president in a Kerry fusion ticket would
have been the strongest tactic, but Edwards is a persuasive
alternative. Now for Kerry to repeat the boldness and refreshing
candor would be an important further change of pace.

       In addition to adopting a bolder style, national Democrats
also need to grasp Bill Clinton's role during the 1990s in aborting
some national trends and stirring others that did his party
considerable harm. Indeed, Clinton's moral notoriety was central to
the rise of George W. Bush at two junctures -- Bush's initial
election as governor of Texas in 1994, a year dominated (especially
in Dixie) by an anti-Clinton backlash, and the presidential race of
2000, in which regional disgust with Clinton was so strong that even
Tennessee Southern Baptist Al Gore could not carry Arkansas and
Tennessee against the religion-linked Bush campaign for moral
restoration.

       Without these offsets to Clinton's lengthy prosperity, it
seems clear that 1992 should have ushered in a 12- to 16-year
Democratic mini-cycle. Indeed, the 16-point collapse in Bush Sr.'s
vote between 1988 and 1992 was the sort of hemorrhage mostly seen on
previous realignment occasions. Clinton's failure to take advantage
of this opportunity, instead facilitating the Bushes' return in
dynastic form, is one of the too-little-understood ingredients of the
2000 upheaval.

     Part of the emptiness of the Democrats' pinstriped or
don't-rock-the-boat strategy is that it doesn't grapple with these
circumstances. Not just the South but the kindred pivotal border
states and the Ohio Valley cannot be counted on to reward a Democrat
trumpeting the Clinton memory and legacy. Nor does bland centrism
effectively respond to the Bush family's regaining of the presidency
in 2000 by tactics and subsequent inroads on 'small D' democracy and
'small R' republicanism to which only a feckless Democratic nominee
could turn the other cheek.

     However, let it pass for the moment that Bush was put in office
only by a 5-to-4 decision of the Supreme Court, hijacked the
Democrats' mini-cycle, fought and botched the first father-and-son
war in U.S. annals and convinced 55-60 percent of Americans that the
nation is on the wrong course. There is a more stark yardstick that
even cautious Democrats should understand: In 1991-92, George H.W.
Bush, prior to his defeat, fell from a record high job-approval
rating of 90 percent after the Gulf War to a low 30s summer bottom
before the election. His son, who hit the low 90s right after 9/11,
by early June had fallen to 42-43 percent, another 50-point decline.
No elected president has ever done this; the Bushes have done it
twice. Maybe it's the gene pool.

     Back in 1992, Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot went after Bush with
the gloves off, softening him up so that the Democratic nominee
Clinton didn't have to do that much. In 2000 Al Gore didn't run a
strong campaign -- his occasional populism was as labored as fellow
Harvard man Dukakis's in 1988 -- but some Republicans and
independents had taken their cues from McCain. This year, by
contrast, Bush had no primary challenge and will have no
ex-Republican third-party opponent. Sure, some Republicans have
attacked Bush through books, but while that's probably been worth a
point or two, it's not the same thing.

     To win this election decisively, John Kerry is going to have to
feel the same outrage that Howard Dean felt, and he's going to have
to express some of it with the same merciless candor that the
Republican dissidents have employed against two generations of
Bushes. In today's circumstances of a nation on the wrong track, most
swing voters -- especially wavering GOP men who grew up on John Wayne
movies -- will not be content with pablum. The Edwards selection
seemed assertive, but if Kerry reverts to equivocation, he could face
the ultimate epitaph on a political tombstone: Here lies John Kerry,
the first Democratic nominee to lose to a Bush president who'd
already dropped 50 points in job approval and earned the snickers of
half the world.