Guest post: If you’re going to get in the game
Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on That’s showbiz.
Maroon @2: “And then four years later, Lester Holt sandbagged Dukakis by asking him if he would support the death penalty if someone raped his wife.”
It was Bernard Shaw, by the way.
It was perhaps in poor taste, but it was the easiest question in the world to answer politically. Dukakis could have said something like this:
“[optional: Bernard, that’s a disgusting and offensive question.] Would I support the death penalty for my wife’s killer? I’d want to do it myself with my own bare hands, slowly and painfully. I would be blinded by my rage and grief, and not interested in hearing any reasons why his life should be spared. And that’s exactly why we don’t let victims’ families sit as judge, jury, and executioner. We have a system of justice where impartial judges and jurors decide on guilt and punishment, and that’s as it should be. So would I want bloody vengeance for my wife? Yes, absolutely. But what I want most of all is to live in a country where justice is done. [optional puffery about how wonderful American justice is, even though it isn’t really true, but this is 1988]”
Rightly or wrongly, many Americans want to believe that their President has emotions, is a fighter, etc. (It’s why some people like Trump.)
Dukakis’s problem wasn’t that he was asked an unfair question, or that opposition to the death penalty was inherently unspinnable. It was that he gave a bland, unemotional answer to a question that should have provoked a reaction. Dukakis had already built up an image as a somewhat robotic technocrat — if he had showed some anger and feeling in his response, nobody was going to paint him as unhinged, it would have rounded him out as a human being. Hell, he could have just ripped Shaw a new orifice and that would have been a much better answer.
Dukakis was a politician. He had no excuse for botching that. One of the frustrating things about Democrats is that so many of them just plain suck at politics, and then complain that voters and the media focus on the wrong things. Well, yeah, of course they do. Voters are mostly idiots. I learned that in 8th grade student council elections, and have found no reason to change that opinion since. It’s one of the many reasons I’m not in politics. But if you’re going to get in the game, for fuck’s sakes, play to win, don’t complain about the rules of the game.
I wonder though, if Democrat politicians face a harder time of it. To be a progressive you have to safely navigate waters, that aren’t just uncharted – they change from minute to minute. The tent for a Democrat is indeed large. So many interest groups with so many uncompromising positions. A minefield of conflicting priorities. Just look at how much progressive energy is pumped into ignoring biology while the house is burning down around us..
A current Republican really just has to put the hate on liberals. Hate and fetuses – that’s the core platform.
Pliny, I’ve thought for some time that part of the problem on the left was the extremely big tent. Some of the groups and issues actually conflict with other groups and issues. A good for instance is the trans and the women. The question is, how many feminists can the Dems afford to lose to make trans and their allies happy? Same with issues around guns. The Democratic tent holds people who love guns, people who want strong controls over guns, and people in between. Abortion? Pro-life Democrats are sometimes the bane of my existence. As for economic issues, we run the gamut from far left socialism/communism to neo-liberalism. Like, from Bernie Sanders to Bloomberg.
As a centrist, some people think Biden can walk that line between the groups. I personally don’t think anyone can. There are too many on the left who demand absolute purity, utter acquiescence to whatever their issue is, and whatever their doctrine about it is today. Many of the hard left are as rigid as those on the hard right, seeing the world through a narrow lens and not willing to concede even inches to another party to get what they want. I can be purist, too, in my goals, but at some point, there needs to be a way to achieve them. The Dems have compromised too much on most issues, and have pissed off the progressive left (including me). Now they have to figure out how to keep the moderate left while bringing the progressive left back into the tent. Not an easy trick. I hope they have a magic hat.
I agree that Democrats have a tougher problem in terms of the breadth of their needed coalition. But we shouldn’t overstate the unity on the Republican side. In the key swing states in 2016, Trump pulled something like 25% of his support from pro-choice voters. The GOP is really good at (1) raw politics — get out the vote operations, registration drives, etc.; (2) playing hardball — gerrymandering and other manipulations of the rules; and (3) getting voters to identify as “conservative” even when they may not agree with policy specifics.
It’s amazing how many reliable GOP voters actually support “liberal” economic policies, but still describe themselves as “conservative” on economic issues. How many of them of think that the rich shouldn’t get tax cuts, and that everyone should have access to affordable health care, yet keep voting GOP, and not for “social conservative” reasons. For a while there, the GOP even succeeded in making “liberal” a dirty word — Dukakis cringed from the accusation. “Liberal” seems to have been rehabilitated somewhat, so the GOP is forced to claim that all Dems are “socialist” or brainwashed by socialists instead.
Of course, in some ways this goes back to the problem you mention of a fractious coalition. Because it’s not just ideological differences, it’s psychological differences. People on the left aren’t followers, and they pride themselves on their independence of thought and purity of action. Unfortunately, that’s a really shitty set of attributes when it comes to succeeding in electoral politics, at least in an American-style system.
Right-of-center voters will say things like “well, I don’t like the way Trump behaves. And I don’t like the tax cuts for the rich. And he probably should have done a better job on COVID. But I like [his trade policy, his judges, whatever], so I’m going to ignore all those other things and vote for him.”
Left-of-center voters tend to say things like “well, I support most of Biden’s platform, and of course he’s far better than Trump. But I don’t like that Biden supports salmon farming [I’m just picking an example, have no idea whether he does], which is bad for the environment. Yes, Trump is much worse on the environment, but I shouldn’t have to choose between the lesser of two evils! I’ll probably just not vote.”
It circles back to the same thing I said about Dukakis: if you want to be in the game, you play by the rules. If you care about public policy, you don’t get anywhere by refusing to vote until your demands are met, because the demands of non-voters don’t count for much. Look at religious conservatives: they’ve been grumbling for decades that they don’t get enough in exchange for their support. Why, it’s been over 40 years, and Roe is still on the books! But they keep showing up and voting for GOP candidates who appoint conservative judges, and whether Roe is specifically overruled or not, abortion rights are going bye-bye.