If my respondent were correct, then McCain and the GOP should have done much better than they did. On immigration, affirmative action, denouncing Confederate symbols and paying homage to MLK, one could not have found a more accommodating standard bearer than Arizona’s senior senator. Even in defeat, he was congratulating the American people for having “transcended our country’s shameful racist past” by electing Obama. Clearly the Rove strategy didn’t work in this case. In fact it didn’t work any better than the GOP strategy of reaching out to Jews by allying with the Israeli Right. While the Republican Jewish vote was as high as 32 percent in 1980, it fell to 18 percent in 2008. By the way, only a fool would believe that the current 33 percent of Jewish support for the GOP, as indicated by a Pew Poll last week, will hold. That increased support is entirely centered on one issue, namely Obama’s failure to do enough for Israel.
Moreover, I can’t imagine that people would reject the GOP because it hasn’t apologized for slavery often enough or because its Southern candidates aren’t insulting the Confederacy with sufficient indignation. Perhaps Southern Whites, who form an indispensable pillar of the party, would stop voting for the party of Lincoln (and the fictitious party of MLK) if the GOP stopped insulting their ancestors’ memories.
In all the years I’ve been hearing that the bogus American Right sucks up to leftist constituencies in order to preserve and expand their voting base, I haven’t encountered even a sliver of evidence for the effectiveness of this course. What I’m not saying is that a GOP candidate running from a very leftist state does not have to sound different from a candidate running in Oklahoma or Utah. The argument I’m disputing is that the national party organization and the “conservative movement” have to mimic the rhetoric of the NAACP or NOW on our evil bigoted past. These groups seem addicted to throwing dirt on the very constituencies they need to stay in business.
But there is a very plausible reason for this. The establishment Right moves left because that is the direction in which one has to go in order to gain social acceptability in the NY-DC-LA social circuit. On the other hand, one can survive professionally outside of this social network, as witnessed by Michael Savage and his very popular radio program. Although Savage rants like a neocon against “Islamofascism” and calls for further wars against this new form of Hitlerism, he is unflinchingly right wing on everything else. He denounces victimology and delights in calling attention to the high rates of violence in the disintegrated “black community” and among illegal immigrants Although is hard to think of anyone who has departed more flagrantly from the GOP’s reaching-out strategy, Mike has no trouble raking in bucks and attracting listeners.
But this shock-jock in not likely to be invited on to FOX, except when the Europeans try to keep him out of their countries for insulting Muslims and when O’Reilly subsequently decides to showcase him as an enemy of terror.. And I doubt that Mike gets invited to those swell shindigs that the NR staff attends with their liberal buds or that like Rich Lowry, Mike the chance to engage in a love-fest with the Stalinist editor of The Nation Victor Navasky. The GOP and movement conservatives truckle to supposedly victimized minorities and target Southerners, Germans, Russians, etc. because they live and move in urban leftist circles. In the process they have absorbed the mindset of those circles they are trying to penetrate. That is the most obvious reason for their behavior. And I would not deny that my subjects believe what they say about the themes under discussion. Given the society in which they travel and the education they’ve received, those beliefs must be second nature for them.
As a final comment, I would note that The American Prospect has just published the single most dishonest article on the subject of my essay that I’ve ever run into. Frum move over, you’ve met your match! The author, Alan I. Abramowitz, warns Republican leaders to stop listening to their fanatically right wing base. For “every ten percent” a candidate moves to the right, according to Abramowitz, he loses 1 percent support. In contrast every time a Democratic candidate moves leftward, he holds his numbers and may even do better in the polls. Presumably Norman Coleman would still be the U.S. Senator from Minnesota, if he had not been so right wing and had been willing to move ten percent to the left.
Note Abramowitz never suggests what moving right or left entails. Does moving left mean supporting Obama’s health plan? Or does it refer to a willingness to support more affirmative action programs for black women in higher education? Does moving right mean being in favor of nation-building in the Middle East or supporting the privatization of social security? Abramowitz claims he is able to prove his thesis by providing cogent evidence but offers nothing of the kind.
Finally his remarks about Coleman, who was one of the most liberal Republicans in the Senate, are nothing less than risible. Coleman went down to defeat against his fellow-liberal Franken because he turned off the Republican base. He also faced a third-party (Reform Party) challenge from a former centrist Republican, Dean Barkley, with whom he had to divide votes. The only way Coleman could have won was by energizing the conservative Republican base, which he studiously avoided doing. Still and all, I shouldn’t be unfairly hard on Abramowitz. He presents us with an invaluable portrait of the mindset of our esteemed GOP strategists.
