Serious question: Why is it conventional wisdom among strategists that Dems can't be too "left?"

[BurtWorm]

Clearly someone on the Obama campaign believes this and is successfully pushing it, because Obama is beginning to act (or returning to act?) like every other Democratic nominee since 1980.

I tend to agree with digby and dday that "Enthusiasm counts." So why does it not seem to count with the strategists?

I know the tendency to want to mock those assholes mercilessly, but I'd really appreciate thoughtful replies to this question. What is this strategy honestly based on? Is there really any evidence that moving to the center benefits Demcorats more than acting like a real Democrat does?

[ClassWarrior]

1. They're bought?... But I don't think Obama's doing that.

I think he is where he's been all along. What's happened is that the Radical RW falsely painted him as "the most liberal Senator in Congress" throughout the primary, and now that he's starting to elaborate on the moderate positions he's held all along, they're screaming that "he's moving to the center." Nice and tidy for them.

NGU.

[BurtWorm]

5. But he switched his position on FISA.

He was promising months ago to join Feingold in a filibuster, and now he joins the Blue Dogs to give Bush what he wants? I don't get that.

[John Q. Citizen]

10. Except Rassmusan has him down to +3 today., lowest since 6/20. I still bet the

"must move center" folks are too dumb to pick up the correlation

[BurtWorm]

11. Exactly. Why is "not Bush = McCain" suddenly muddying his difference from the Republicans?

:wtf:

[ClassWarrior]

12. True. And that's a mistake both because it's wrong, and because it makes him LESS electable...

...not more.

The losing strategy is to move to the right, to assume with Republicans that American values are mainly conservative and that the Democratic party has to move away from its base and adopt conservative values. When you do that, you help activate conservative values in people’s brains (thus helping the other side), you offend your base (thus hurting yourself), and you give the impression that you are expressing no consistent set of values, which is true! Why should the American people trust somebody who does not have clear values, and who may be trying to deceive them about the values he and his party’s base hold?

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/15/3174

NGU.

[John Q. Citizen]

14. We have a winner! (except, we keep ignoring the data and end up losers)

[Fire_brand]

2. you can't possibly be this dumb

[BurtWorm]

3. Enlighten me, Einstein.

:eyes:

[John Q. Citizen]

7. Do you mean that "good to move center" is a myth or that you buy it?

Personally, I think it's a myth. People don't look at issues and place them on a left to right scale before deciding where they stand.

So am I dumb in your opinion?

[GreenPartyVoter]

4. It's that freaking fear of the RW calling them socialists or commies or liberals, I guess.

[rudy23]

6. Why aren't they just as afraid of us calling them fascists?

Oh yeah, it's because we wouldn't hurt a fly (as long as it was a Republican).

[question everything]

8. For the same reason that there will never be a revolution here

The poor may suffer, the rich will get richer, yet there will never be a revolution here. Most Americans still believe in the mythic "American Dream." Most do not hate the rich; they want to be the rich. Most hope to work hard, or just to be "clever" to be rich and damn everyone else.

And by the time many reach middle age and realize that they are not going to be as rich and successful as they hoped, they start listening to hate radio to blame - take your pick - others for their failure.

Most Americans are too lazy or too dumb to sit and contemplate the situation around them. It is their right to drive the meanest, wasteful car, their right to own the biggest house on the block, their right to waste resources and everyone else can go to hell.

Only when they personally get hurt, or when someone in their family is sick who - gasp - may benefit from stem cells research, do they change position.

Thus, whatever you consider "left" will never gain traction with most of the voters. And our goal is to win elections so that we can make changes, even if not true "leftists." We are going to improve the life of most Americans - even against their wishes.

[mrreowwr_kittty]

15. Very well said.

I know sooooo many non-rich people, even fellow Dems, who support tax cuts because they are convinced that they'll be "movin' on up" to a much higher economic class any minute now. On the one hand, optimism can be a healthy thing, but when it is so out of whack with reality, it starts to look more like delusion. And like you say, it get's to where you have to help them against their wishes.

[Asgaya Dihi]

9. When the only tool you have is a hammer

pretty soon everything starts to look like a nail. It's an old saying from the drug reform circle and probably others but it fits here too. Our tool is the compromise, the triangulation, the so called safe bet where we don't have to take a stand. The dem party got into a rut years back and started trying to compete with the repubs for a shrinking pool of voters without ever putting too much thought or effort into wondering why growing numbers of potential voters just stay at home instead. For too many of us out there neither party represents us or even tries to.

They haven't hit bottom so been forced to change yet and I'm starting to think they never will. If natural forces guided things we might get change at some point but with so many business and press interests involved in politics and government these days they'll weave false impressions to prop up the system we have now for as long as possible. What we really need to do is to start in the primaries to remove and punish "dems" those who vote with the repubs but we never will as long as we can be suckered into competing for shrinking pools of conservative leaning voters instead of trying to restore the faith of those who stay home. Just convince us it's too risky to change and we'll never notice that it's a sure path to hell if we don't change.

We can't think long term, we don't even notice that the same compromises, justifications and capitulations we're making today to "win" the next election is how we got here in the first place. Why we're sure it'll work better this time than it has the last few decades I'm not sure but we do seem to be convinced of that much at least. This time it'll work.

[Captain Hilts]

13. Because everyone's competing for that 15% in the political middle.

The worst liberals will do to Obama is stay home, they won't vote for McCain.

[John Q. Citizen]

16. What does the middle mean? Do they believe every other woman who wants an abortion should be able

get one?

Or does that mean every woman who wants an abortian should be able to get one as long as it's in the first trimester?

Or does that mean only rich people should be able to get an abortion because they are moral?


I just can't figure out what the so called middle believes.

Do they believe only good people should be able to have guns? Or that everyone, as long as they go through an extensive background check should be able to have guns?

What do these middle people believe?

[Lilith Velkor]

17. Decades of Cold War propaganda have taken their toll.

That's pretty much it.

[jobycom]

18. History and math lesson.

Math first. A third of voters will back any Democrat, a third any Republican. Candidates only care about the middle third, and by basic definition, that group is largely moderate--not ideologically liberal or conservative. That's not to say the group is homogeneous or consistent, just that they generally have a moderate tendency.

Now, if a candidate pisses off people in his third, those people will still vote for him (I say him because, you know, that's our history), or at worst will stay home or vote third party. If the candidate pisses off someone in that middle third, then that person will vote for the other candidate. So the middle votes count twice--one against you, one for the other guy--whereas those on the fringes count once--against you.

Thus, in general, both candidates try to please the middle voters while angering their own as little as possible, since you can get enough of your own supporters mad enough to hurt your vote total.

Now, history. History always favors conservative politicians--people hate change unless everything really sucks, and even then they only want to change the sucky part, not everything else. So now, everyone hates Bush and the economy and the war, so they want those things to change. That does not mean, though, that everyone therefore hates everything Bush stands for and loves everything we stand for. A broke homophobe wants to change the broke, not the homophobia. That's a generalized historical reason. A more specific one is Civil Rights. When LBJ signed the Civil Rights Bill, he predicted he had cost the South for the Democrats for the next couple of generations, and that, so far, has been the case. It's not just about race anymore, it's about the South convincing itself that liberals were the enemy and Republicans were their friends.

The thing is, that can all change, and may be changing now. Every generation or so a politician steps in and goes against conventional wisdom, and either changes the dynamics, or more likely, takes advantages of changes no one has so far recognized. Reagan did that for the Republicans in 80s, for instance, campaigning on different issues than the conventional divisions had accounted for before then. Kennedy and LBJ did that, too, as did FDR and Lincoln and others. Presidents who take over where history books start new chapters.

So, historically since the 70s "left" has been frowned on by the South, and so it's been hard for a candidate to appear too "left" and still win. The only Democrats we've had since Kennedy were southerners who could break up the South by winning their home state--Texas, Georgia, Arkansas and Tennessee.

Obama might be in a position to change things. It looked like that a month ago, but lately he's been acting like he's afraid to believe that. We'll have to see. He's got polling that measures key areas constantly, so he knows better than any of us what people are saying they want. There is always room for a charismatic leader to convince people they want something else, though. Maybe Obama will be that type of leader.

Anyway, just my thoughts, and opinions, and they are as likely to be wrong as right. But I like to type, so there they are.

[BurtWorm]

19. Politics lesson: You don't have to win the popular vote to win the election.

You just have to win the biggest portion of electoral votes. You don't need to worry about the wishy-washy third. You need to worry about getting your base out in the key states. You won't be able to do that if you keep disappointing them.

[jobycom]

20. That cuts both ways.

They only have to win the EC, too, and they are the only ones in recent memory to win without the popular vote. With the South voting as a solid block, that's a lot of EC's to overcome. Dividing the nation up along traditional lines, if both groups get out their base, the Republicans win the presidency.

Which means, for the Dems to win, they need to win the middle third.

Not to mention, if you don't worry about the "wishy-washy" third, the other side will, and you lose in a landslide. I don't care what kind of electoral map you draw, if you only get one-third of the vote, you lose.

Too many Democrats seem to think that a voter who really, really, really wants to win really bad counts for more than a voter who just does what the media tells him to do. Sadly, that doesn't work.

[BurtWorm]

21. This year the lines are not as traditional as you seem to think they are.

The Republicans are extremely unpopular because everyone knows how incompetent they are at governing. So why take the trouble to blur the distinction between Democrats and Republicans this year? That's been working so well for Democrats in the past, hasn't it? Why would it work any better for them this year?

[jobycom]

23. Proving you didn't read to the bottom of my post, where I said just that.

No big. It was a long post. :)

[BurtWorm]

24. You're right, I didn't read to the bottom of your post.

But now that I did ( ;) ) I don't see you saying just that. You seem less sure of the seismic shift than I am (at the moment). I assert, given the consistent low marks Republicans have been getting in poll after poll in almost all Demographics except Republicans and Fox News watchers, that this is not a good year to act all Republican. And given how poorly the Congress has been faring with the public in its current establishmentarian mode, it's especially dumb, it seems to me, for Democrats to be acting all Republican.

[Buck Rabbit]

22. You may be wrong, but if you are we both are.

And as you like to type and I don't I have appointed you as my surrogate. I didn't get your consent on this as I don't need it. Tag, you're it.