As anyone who follows Democratic politics closely knows, the idea of an Obama-Clinton “unity” or “dream” ticket has been confidently buried by a host of pundits, usually citing sources in the Obama campaign. And so long as the unity ticket was perceived as a demand from Sen. Clinton or her camp, as a tribute to her candidacy, her following, her husband’s legacy, or even her gender, it made perfect sense for Team Obama to throw cold water on the concept.
But now Clinton has folded her campaign and endorsed Obama in terms that satisfied all but the most bitter-end Hillary-haters, and Obama has signaled that he’s going to take his time in determining a running mate (a leisurely pace now ensured by the need to vet a new vetter after Jim Johnson’s implosion). That means he can, if he wishes, take a good, long look at the unity ticket in the real-life context of his available options. If he does, it may start looking a lot better.
The positive case for the unity ticket is pretty simple. With the political landscape (from issues, to partisan ID trends, to voter motivation) favoring Democrats in November, a united party will almost certainly win. And at present, the divisions in the party aren’t about ideology, or policy, or even how to conduct the general election. They are largely feudal, in the sense that they have emerged from the passionate personal attachment of activists and voters to these two powerful and historic chieftains. Merging their candidacies for the general election is the obvious way to address the problem, and thus the unity ticket ought to be treated as having a rebuttable presumption of sensibility.
It is an idea that is far more popular with rank-and-file Democrats than with the chattering classes. Polls show that a consistent majority of the self-identified Democrats — and big majorities of those who voted for Clinton in the primaries — favor putting her on the ticket. In the few days between Obama’s victory speech and Clinton’s concession, there were rumblings of an organized effort in Congress (and hence among superdelegates) to endorse the unity ticket, but Clinton’s instructions to supporters to refrain from pressuring Obama drove such talk underground.
I don’t think there’s much doubt that Clinton’s supers and donors would be very pleased to see her at least asked to go on the ticket. There is also abundant, alarming evidence that a significant share of Clinton primary voters are currently peeved enough to stay home in November or vote for John McCain. Will many of these voters “get over it” and get with the program absent a pro-Clinton gesture? Almost certainly. But does that justify dismissing the whole problem as something that will take care of itself? Not if you care about winning what may be a close election.
Aside from the salutary impact on intra-party divisions, the unity ticket would benefit from Hillary Clinton’s specific political strengths. No, I’m not talking about her impressive primary performance among Catholics, non-college-educated voters, and the “white working class” generally, since we don’t really know how much of that success is transferable to a general election. But no one can rationally deny that Clinton has a strong, demonstrated, personal appeal to at least two major categories of voters who will be targeted by the GOP: older women and Hispanics.
Those who dislike the unity ticket concept (often people who just don’t like Hillary Clinton and/or her husband) sometimes concede the above points, but respond that her negative “baggage” far outweighs any advantages she would bring to Obama. Let’s go through a few of their arguments.
First, you often hear that Bill and Hillary could not possibly serve as obedient foot soldiers (or, more accurately, senior officers) in the Obama campaign or administration. If true, this would indeed be a disqualifier. But how, really, do any of us know that? For all the power they’ve enjoyed, Sen. Clinton and her husband have had to accept about as much humiliation and frustration as any two politicians you could imagine. Obama would definitely and rightly demand complete authority in his administration, and if the Clintons can’t live with that, it’s unlikely they’d sign on in any event. Just as important, this is a difficult threshold issue for many of the people you hear “mentioned” for the vice-presidency. Hillary Clinton is hardly the only one with a “difficult” personality, a “loose cannon” spouse, a fawning retinue of loyalists, or a habit of seeing the next president of the United States in the mirror each morning. Sure, some Obama supporters think that the Clintons are outsize villains, pathologically devoted to themselves and nothing else. But by Washington standards, where every member of Congress is a Sun King in his or her own realm, the Clintons really don’t stand out as especially self-focused.
Second of all, we are often told that Clinton as running mate would undermine Obama’s message of “change,” either because of her last name and past notoriety, or her vote for the Iraq war resolution, or her symbolic role in the Washington Democratic establishment. Aside from the dubious nature of the claim that many voters are particularly interested in Obama’s specific “theory of change,” there’s the fact that most Democratic voters, and a good majority of independents and some Republicans, look back fondly at the Clinton administration, and have never really bought into the idea (occasionally expressed by Obama) that the corruption and incompetence of Washington is as attributable to Democrats as to the GOP. Moreover, is Hillary Clinton really more identified with the Washington establishment than, say, Tom Daschle, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd or, for that matter, Al Gore (all of whose names have been floated for the veepship)?
As for HRC’s war vote, it’s important to acknowledge that the Democratic Party (and not just electeds or elites, but actual voters) is a coalition of people who supported and opposed the Iraq war, but are now largely united in favoring what Obama calls a “responsible withdrawal.” (Quite a few of the alternatives to Clinton being discussed voted for the war resolution as well.) If Barack Obama can’t manage to distinguish himself clearly from John McCain on this subject without a “right from the start” antiwar running mate, then he’s in deep political trouble.
Finally, opponents of the unity ticket argue that Clinton on the ticket will “energize” Hillary-hating conservative activists who have been relatively cool to McCain. (Talk about letting the enemy control the battlefield!) I personally have no doubt that the McCain campaign will inevitably become a low-road enterprise that, if nothing else, will energize conservatives, and its arguments against Obama are already heavily slanted toward “character” attacks. They’ll get the haters no matter what, but the haters only get to vote once.
And that brings us to what is perhaps the strongest pro-Hillary argument. Let’s do something that Clintonphobes often forget to do: compare her to realistic alternatives. Obama doesn’t have any obvious alternative option that will please everyone, much less provide the political payoff of an Obama-Clinton ticket. To cite just one problem, Obama will be under intense pressure to name a woman as a running mate, and under equally intense pressure not to do so, since anyone other than Hillary Clinton will be perceived as representing a “pander.” But who would that other woman be? Kathleen Sebelius has no international experience. Janet Napolitano doesn’t either, and she would face innuendoes about her marital status. Claire McCaskill has a shorter résumé than Obama’s.
While there are plenty of qualified Democrats — and even Republicans — available to Obama, none is without handicaps, risks or shortcomings. Edwards and Strickland have taken themselves out of the running. Many feminists consider Jim Webb unacceptable, and many gays and lesbians feel the same way about Sam Nunn. Mark Warner’s running for the Senate. Daschle’s been a lobbyist. Biden’s been a Washington fixture for 36 years, and supported the war resolution. Like Sebelius, Daschle, Nunn, Evan Bayh and Brian Schweitzer are from states no Democrat is likely to carry. Bayh or Dodd would immediately lose Democrats a Senate seat. Sherrod Brown’s not a very unifying figure. And Al Gore excepted, none of those mentioned have been endorsed by 17 million-some-odd primary voters.
I could go on, but you get the idea: There ain’t no easy running mate. Those who are so quick to dismiss the unity ticket have an obligation to come up not just with a better idea, but a better idea that can command broad support in the party. It’s obviously Barack Obama’s choice, and his choice alone, but he should remember that this is one year when a united Democratic Party will have an overwhelming advantage in the general election. That’s a change we can believe in.
When you are a hammer, the saying goes, everything looks like a nail. So it is with Tom Schaller, whose current mission in life is to persuade Democrats to eschew and even attack the “reactionary” South. It’s not surprising, then, that Schaller looks at Harold Ford, an African-American former congressman slated to become chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, and sees just another reactionary Southerner.
Schaller’s oddly polemical piece in Salon on Ford and the DLC overlooks lots of things about its twin targets. To Schaller, Ford’s near-miss Senate campaign in Tennessee last year was all about “pandering” — to gay haters, to racists and to those terrible people who love Jesus, “rebuking and thus [sic!] affirming almost every cultural trope Republicans deploy to vilify Democrats.” Schaller is not talking about the actual Ford campaign, which for the most part projected a “change” message focused on restoring fiscal responsibility, reducing healthcare costs, achieving energy independence, changing course in Iraq, etc., etc. — pretty much what all Democrats in every region were talking about. And far from being a “conservative,” Ford has done things no conservative would imagine, like voting against the original Patriot Act and driving around on the campaign trail in a biodiesel-fueled car. But it’s what Ford said, or failed to say, about a race-baiting television commercial near the end of the campaign that really caught Schaller’s attention. And it’s revealing that Schaller views Ford as perpetrator rather than victim in this exchange — just another atavistic Southerner caught up in atavistic Southern culture.
His view of the Democratic Leadership Council is equally superficial. Founded, Schaller says, to move “Democrats rightward in order to pacify the party’s fading Southern wing” (which is why, of course, Dick Gephardt was its first chairman), the DLC is devoted to “bipartisan, triangulating” politics. You’d think a man of Schaller’s formidable research skills would have bothered to spend about 15 minutes on the DLC Web site checking out what the organization has actually been up to in recent years: mainly a vast and wonky set of policy proposals on national security, globalization, healthcare, education, tax policy, and on and on, supplemented by repeated and interminable and redundant attacks on the extremism and incompetence of the Bush administration and the latter-day GOP. Ten more minutes or so of heavy research might have informed him that far from being some sort of Southern “conservative” redoubt, the DLC’s national political network has involved Democrats ranging from Martin O’Malley to Janet Napolitano to Gavin Newsom to Bill Richardson to that well-known Southern conservative, Hillary Rodham Clinton. It also includes hundreds of state legislators and municipal officials from around the country.
The real core of Schaller’s take on the DLC — and more circumspectly, the Clintons — is that these centrists are “increasingly out of step with the zeitgeist,” as evidenced by the 2006 elections, which “settled the dispute” in intraparty debates between hyperpartisan counterpolarizing progressives and Bill Clinton’s “fence-straddling ‘third way.’” Well, that’s one way of looking at the 2006 results. Another way is to suggest that voters were repudiating the hyperpartisan, polarizing extremism of the GOP, and hope Democrats can produce better results — you know, like Bill Clinton did.
And it’s in contextualizing the Clinton tradition that Schaller really shows some myopia. His Salon essay concludes with a long passage comparing Clinton to Grover Cleveland and the DLC to the “Bourbon Democrats” Cleveland led. How so? Like Cleveland, Clinton temporarily staved off a Republican ascendancy through his willingness to “accede to Republicans on key policies,” most notably Clinton’s pro-open-trade position, which Schaller compares to Cleveland’s support for the gold standard. And just as Democrats had to repudiate Cleveland to build a progressive majority, Schaller strongly implies, so too do Democrats today have to repudiate Clinton.
In reality, far from being a “Republican” position, support for open trade has been championed by every Democratic president since Martin Van Buren, and was a particular passion for those progressive leaders who succeeded Cleveland, most especially William Jennings Bryan and Franklin Roosevelt. And let’s all profoundly hope that Schaller’s analogy is false prophecy, since by his own accounting it took Democrats more than 30 years to build that progressive majority after rejecting the “Bourbons.”
But more immediately, it’s Schaller’s breezy willingness to consign the Clinton tradition to the dustbin of history that makes his essay something more disturbing than just a paint-by-the-numbers hit job on the DLC, guaranteed to win applause in those progressive precincts where the organization enjoys the obsessive boogeyman status some conservatives used to give the Trilateral Commission.
Last time I checked, Bill Clinton was enjoying a stronger-than-ever rock star status among actual rank-and-file Democrats; virtually everyone hungers and thirsts for a restoration in the party of his political skills and policy acumen, and his wife isn’t the only potential presidential candidate who tries to appeal to that desire. If Grover Cleveland ever packed ‘em in at party events after his presidency, the historical record is silent about it. So Schaller is writing a premature obituary.
I don’t know what the future holds for Harold Ford, for the Clinton tradition in the Democratic Party, or for the DLC. Neither does Tom Schaller.
But it might make sense for Democrats generally to remain open to what party “centrists” offer in the way of policy ideas and political analysis.
As the subtitle of a column by Harold Myerson (no triangulating centrist, he) put it last August: “In style and substance, Harold Ford Jr. channels Bill Clinton.” Anyone who looks at Harold Ford and somehow sees the resurrection of the Dixiecrats needs to look again.
You have to hand it to Tom Schaller. The moment the midterm election results were more or less in, he crunched some numbers and stared at the exit polls, and took to the cyber-pages of Salon to trumpet the results as a confirmation of his idée fixe. As explained most thoroughly in his new book, “Whistling Past Dixie,” and in many fewer words in his recent Salon article, “Do Democrats Need the South?” Schaller is a Captain Ahab whose Great White Whale is to persuade Democrats not only to write off the South for the foreseeable future but to campaign consciously against the benighted region in order to consolidate a non-Southern majority.
Salon invited me to respond, presumably as the most conspicuous Cracker Democrat close at hand. And I must begin by noting that Schaller’s generally well-constructed case, here and in other venues, is consistently flawed by an overstatement of opposing views. Aside from the occasional Mudcat Saunders, I don’t know any Democrats, Southern or otherwise, who think that the South is going to be a majority-Democratic region at the presidential level anytime soon, or that Democrats should obsess about the South at the expense of other opportunities. But there’s a whole lot of ground between this alleged Southern strategy and Schaller’s run-against-the-South prescription, and that’s where I’ll take my stand.
With that stipulation, let’s look at the 2006 numbers. Since Democrats did in fact gain ground in the South and did not lose a thing, Schaller is at pains to show how meager those gains were in comparison with the gains in other regions. But he largely ignores the constraints of the Southern political landscape this year. In a quirk of the electoral calendar, only five Senate seats were up in the South (accepting Schaller’s definition of “the South” as the 11 states of the old Confederacy), four held by Republicans. Democrats won two, for a net gain of one senator, which is a perfectly proportional contribution to the conquest of the Senate. Similarly, there were six gubernatorial contests in the South, five in seats held by Republicans. Democrats won two for a net gain of one, again a proportional contribution to the national results. (Democrats also won the single Southern governor’s races held in 2004 and in 2005, which means they now control five of the 11 executive offices.)
There’s no question Democrats underperformed in Southern House races, picking up five net seats (with a sixth and a seventh possible in disputed races in North Carolina and Florida). But it should be remembered that nearly half the region’s House seats are in three super-gerrymandered states, Texas, Florida and Georgia. Schaller emphasizes two near losses by Democratic incumbents in my home state of Georgia. But in fairness, he should acknowledge that both of these districts were re-gerrymandered by the Republican Legislature last year, making Jim Marshall’s district (the 8th) significantly more Republican, and taking John Barrow’s home base out of his district (the 12th) entirely. The close Georgia outcomes also owed a lot to the decision of the national GOP to make Marshall and Barrow two of the three incumbents they spent heavily to defeat, in the end falling short.
As for state legislators, Schaller sniffs that Democrats picked up a small percentage of their national gains in seats in the South, and didn’t win control of any new chambers. But the national seat-gain number is distorted by big Democratic pickups in the mammoth New Hampshire House, and Democrats were already stronger in Southern legislatures than in many other parts of the country. As of today, each party controls five Southern state legislatures, with one split (Tennessee). Not too shabby.
However you slice and dice it, these 2006 results just aren’t consistent with Schaller’s broader argument that Democrats should actively distance themselves from the region and its voters as a permanently lost cause, and make Dixie-phobia a talking point in appeals to other regions, especially the interior West, which he appears to consider the Promised Land. I’m happy about recent Democratic gains in the West, too, but I wouldn’t get too carried away with this Rocky Mountain high, given the interior West’s relatively small size and the generally dismal record of Democratic presidential candidates there since 1964.
Part of the problem with Schaller’s approach is that he dismisses contrary evidence as irrelevant to the irrefutable case for the solid Republican South. In his Salon piece, he says: “Over four decades, in fits and starts, the Republicans captured the South.” Well, one man’s “fits and starts” is another’s “cycles and countercycles.” At the risk of dating myself, I can say that I’ve been hearing that the South was on the verge of becoming a one-party Republican “base” region quite literally since 1964. But every time that Republican “great gettin’ up morning” has been about to dawn, one of those “fits and starts” has occurred — in 1970, 1974, 1986 and 1998 at the sub-presidential level, and in 1976, 1992 and 1996 at the presidential level. Sure, the overall trend has been toward the GOP, but that’s hard to avoid, since the starting point was a one-party Democratic region.
Schaller is absolutely right, of course, that Democrats can put together a presidential or House majority without much of anything in the South. The eight large states in the North, West and Midwest that Democratic candidates have carried in each of the last four presidential contests put the party well past the halfway point to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House. But those states have actually suffered a net loss of six electoral votes — and six House seats — in the past decade, and are likely to lose a few more after the 2010 census. And so long as we have a federalist system and care about control of state governments, and have a Senate in which every state has two seats, conceding small states to the GOP, whether in the South, the Plains or the interior West, will place a huge anchor around the donkey’s neck.
Although he doesn’t go into it much in the Salon piece, Schaller’s biggest concern is that any effort to appeal to the South is inconsistent with progressive politics, primarily because he considers Southern culture deeply and inherently reactionary. And that’s why he thinks it makes sense to become an explicitly anti-Southern party, battening on an alleged hostility to Southern folkways in the rest of the country, much as Republicans have demonized Massachusetts and Northern California. In “Whistling Past Dixie,” after 236 pages of relatively dispassionate prose, Schaller finally cuts loose with this paragraph of anti-Southern bile:
When Democrats give the president authority to start a preemptive war in Iraq, they acceded to southern bellicosity. When Democrats go soft on defending social policies, they lend credence to the southernized, “starve the beast” mentality of governance. When Democrats scramble around to declare that they, too, have moral values, they kneel in the pews of southern evangelism. This absurdist catering to the worst fitting, least supportive component of the Democratic coalition must cease. Here as elsewhere, Schaller seems to be channeling the Dixie-obsessed, Texas-born polymath Michael Lind, who has spent much of the last decade or so deploring the invidious influence of the Southern Scotch-Irish, whose bigoted, Bible-thumping and militaristic habits are ruining the nation. The hatred of all things Southern isn’t much more attractive dressed up in regression analysis and charts.
Schaller’s assumption that successful Southern Democrats have to run on platforms more irreconcilable with progressive values than their counterparts in the interior West is dubious indeed. But the idea that Democrats will do well by attacking Southern culture is just plain dangerous.
For one thing, no one can deny the Southern cultural flavor of many areas outside Schaller’s definition of the South, most obviously border states such as Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, Maryland and Delaware, but also portions of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. And anyone who thinks most of the nation despises Southern culture hasn’t paid much attention to the rapid spread of enthusiasm for NASCAR and country music, not to mention evangelical Protestantism and megachurches. Let’s also remember the pervasively Southern character of African-American culture throughout the country. It’s no accident that Southern Democratic politicians who run nationally seem to do especially well in presidential primaries among African-American voters.
This last observation leads me to a fundamental reason Democrats would be foolish to write off the South entirely, much less spurn its voters as contemptible yahoos. The demographic composition of the South, with rapidly rising Hispanic populations in some states supplementing a sizable and loyal African-American base, means that there is a floor to Democratic losses in the region. It also explains residual Democratic strength at the state level, and creates potential opportunities for future gains. Schaller is right that racial polarization characterizes the politics of states like Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina, but that has been true for decades, and it’s not at all evident the phenomenon is becoming universal.
In the end, I’m with Howard Dean: In this closely divided national electorate in which red states still outnumber blue states, Democrats should pursue a 50-state strategy with a common progressive message, tolerating some regional differences, and let individual candidates, especially those running for president, target their resources and appeals as opportunities dictate. If that means writing off the South in 2008, fine by me. But please don’t prejudge the map based on unreasonable prejudices toward one region, even if it’s the one populated by us crazy Crackers.
