Obama was one of the more successful coalition builders of recent memory, but after securing 69.5 million votes in 2008 and getting swept into office with a mandate he then proceeded to enact an agenda that saw his party steadily lose control of congress. He's probably been one of the more effective presidents we've seen in the last few decades but has still been regularly stymied in trying to enact his agenda since successfully passing Obamacare.
Meanwhile, Bush set his party back several years and doomed McCain (and arguably Obama) with a combination of disastrous wars and economic calamity brought about through misguided lending policies.
You see, there are two key ingredients needed to become the president of the United States and finding someone who checks off both boxes is becoming impossibly difficult.
Ingredient 1: The ability to build a coalition and winning mandate to get things done in an increasingly diverse and fractured country
As the candidacies of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Bernie Sanders daily demonstrate, there are major chunks of America's middle class that believe their values and interests currently aren't but definitely should be the guiding force governing the country.
People are taught that democracy is where you find the candidate that most closely aligns with your interests and then you vote for them. If someone doesn't align with you? Forget them, this is a democracy not a dictatorship!
This is becoming increasingly difficult in an age that is defined by access to information, the increasing numbers of college educated Americans who think their degree confers to them the knowledge of how best to govern the country, and the increasingly disparate interests of the people who make up the electorate.
The democratic candidate is going to have a heck of a time winning a general election if they can't get these middle class voters flocking to Sanders' socialist standard to turn out with enthusiasm but even more importantly, a low turnout election amongst the nation's minority groups will certainly doom their candidate.
Meanwhile on the Republican side, what Bush and later candidates have created the possibility of doing is making the GOP the party of white Americans. White voters made up 72% of the electorate in 2012 and went to Romney by a 59-32 margin. A larger margin of victory here, though perhaps dangerously divisive, would guarantee GOP success for the foreseeable future
However, in that block you have the Alt-Right and more hard-line conservatives who have seized greater control of the party through the tea party and wave elections in the last two mid-term elections and then you have the standard, traditional white American who leans more conservative but is more driven by the interests of the time than ideology.
If the GOP candidate can't get the kind of turnout that allowed the Republicans to seize congress then they aren't winning a general election. However, they also aren't winning in election without appealing to moderates and more pragmatic voters. They also still need to pick off minority voters who are convinced that the GOP's Anglo-American values and leadership are best suited to running the country and build inroads into those groups for the future day when white voters may not be the overwhelming majority of the electorate as they are now.
For a candidate to replicate these winning coalitions, or to build a new one, requires that they have a personality which is suited to coming across as trustworthy (this is likely Cruz's downfall), that they possess an identity which gives them a foot in different camps (see Rubio's devout conservative Catholicism and immigrant upbringing), and that they have a message that resonates clearly and effectively across the different groups (Hillary's problem, as her message is "I'm a qualified woman and that means it's my turn!).
This is all rather difficult, especially when there's a figure in the race with limited appeal but a real knack for clearly and viciously underlining everyone else's deficiencies.
As difficult as it is, it's also massively important to the party. Many voters pay attention primarily to the president and the executive branch sets the agenda for the legislature and defines the coalition and the mandate that the party is responsible for carrying out.
For instance, if that vicious man with limited appeal somehow becomes president then the clear mandate for the Republican party will be to engage in nationalist policies with the goal of making America great again. Either that or else to collapse within itself like a dying star.
Ingredient 2: The ability to effectively represent said coalition and govern in a way that pursues their interests without actively hurting Americans outside the coalition
This has become a big problem for Obama as very few people have drawn a major net positive effect on their lives from his presidency save for America's wealthiest citizens while many Americans have seen their values and preferences degraded. That result has now made it very hard for Hillary to cleanly win the democratic nomination in the face of Sanders' "this process is rigged for the wealthy!" message.
She's clearly one of the more qualified people to actually lead the government in terms of experience doing so, although she's arguably done a terrible job in the past in that post.
Obama's path to winning relied heavily on an incredibly non de script run as a senator and as a virtual outsider previous to that. Americans got to know Obama through the message he crafted and presented during his campaign and then through what he did in office. Many responded very negatively to this, obviously, as it sparked a huge movement within the GOP to reverse as much of what he accomplished as possible.
There was no clarity on how exactly Obama might govern, no track record to indicate what his strengths and weaknesses would be in this regard.
The problem facing America's political system is that because the executive branch is becoming increasingly powerful, it's becoming increasingly important that someone particularly competent man the post. However, the path of building a diverse coalition that can lead just over half the electorate through messaging, personality, and identity automatically disqualifies most everyone from the job.
You begin to see how someone like Putin is made the de-facto King of Russia, or why different nations have had kings to begin with. Once you have someone who's actually qualified to unite the country and then govern effectively it's a real wrench to see them step down after no more than eight years on the job. Most other modern democracies have parliamentary systems with multiple parties and unelected heads who serve as the frontmen for the parties after working their way up and proving themselves at lower levels of government. Not so here.
Instead the man who looks best equipped to unite a big enough coalition to win, Marco Rubio, suffered a major setback when he was characterized leading up to the New Hampshire primary as robotic and false (and also when most every other candidate made him their major target of negative ads) though this doesn't seem to be sticking. The vociferous nature of the primary also makes things more difficult in that it because it's ruled by the more stringent members of either part, it's more difficult for someone with a broader coalition to win.
Take Ohio Governor John Kasich for instance, a man with a stellar record of governing Ohio for the last six years who's attempting to win the GOP primary by coming across as the more moderate option. With years of successful executive experience combined with a long run in the house where he served on the armed services committee, he's probably one of the best qualified candidates in the whole race to serve as president.
However, he's facing a tough challenge in winning the nomination thanks to the fact that he's not a first choice for most Republican primary voters. He might pull it off, but he's far from the favorite right now.
So how will this be resolved?
There are three ways that America's current dilemma of requiring a strong executive branch but lacking candidates to lead it could go. The first is that perhaps the country will find more talented politicians who are capable of running and winning the presidency.
By tweaking the rules of the nomination process, perhaps either party could make it easier for strong leaders to emerge and win the consensus of the party without having to endure the primary season and cobble together a winning coalition while adhering to the Iowa-NH-SC-etc state by state process.
Another possibility is that the United States could weaken the executive branch and handle things more at the local level. After all, the country was designed from the beginning to accommodate diversity and national differences by allowing different states to largely govern themselves while the federal level simply made sure that everything fit together adequately.
The US has been moving towards more and more centralization, in part because that's what urbanized nations tend to do and in part because the slavery issue required a strong executive branch and tremendously costly war to resolve and that set the precedent that the nation handles major issues with a strong executive.
A final possibility is that the US will find a strong leader in a time of crisis and determine to keep them in power, essentially setting up a king and undoing the deepest wishes of the founding fathers. You can laugh if you wish, but it wouldn't be the first time that a republic went down this path.
In the meantime, it'll be interesting to see which of the main candidates left in the election is able to piece together a winning coalition and then whether they can wield it in office effectively enough to win a second term or whether a stronger leader is waiting to take over in 2020. Hopefully we aren't on the verge of a crisis that would sweep someone into power who would remain there.
No comments:
Post a Comment