Party Hardy

Karl Rove was not yet a celebrity in 1997 when he told me the following story. In December 1969, during his freshman year in college, his father left his mother; and, shortly thereafter, his mother largely withdrew from his life. She "packed up the car, had the house on the market, and moved to Reno and said good luck," Rove recalled. After that, he was on his own. Rove put himself through two years at the University of Utah, working part time, earning a partial scholarship, and living in a makeshift bedroom under the attic eaves of his fraternity house. His father sent support checks, but his mother kept them, never telling her son. "My mother was one of these people who really thought often of what it was that she wanted in life, and not necessarily what was good or right for her family," Rove said. "And that was just her way. She never grew up. She could never think long term. She was always in the moment." When he was 21, Rove discovered that his father was not, in fact, his biological father and that he was the offspring of an earlier relationship. His real father had disappeared, and the man he knew as his father had adopted him. (Years later, he would track down his biological father, who refused to acknowledge that Karl was his son.) When Rove was in his mid- 20s, his mother would call to borrow money. Occasionally, she sent him packages with magazines from his childhood or old, broken toys. "It was like she was trying desperately to sort of keep this connection," he recalled. Finally, in 1981, his mother "drove out to the desert north of Reno and filled the car with carbon monoxide, and then left all of her children a letter saying, don't blame yourselves for this." It was, Rove said, "the classic fuck-you gesture."The story of Rove's dysfunctional family tells a lot about the Republican Party machinery he would later help to perfect. Unlike baby-boomers, who smoked dope, protested the war, and lived with a succession of girlfriends before becoming middle-age liberals, Rove understood the longing of many Americans for a traditional nuclear family and a sense of social order. He grasped the values crisis brought on by the sociocultural revolution of the '60s and '70s because he himself had lived its worst consequences. And--like previous Republican strategists, including Kevin Phillips, Pat Buchanan, Charlie Black, and Lee Atwater--he realized that these sentiments, however crass they sounded to the ears of liberals, held appeal to many voters and could therefore be harnessed to his party's advantage. At a moment when Democrats appear once again to be ascendant, they would do well to remember that the political majority Rove and his predecessors constructed was meant to withstand difficult moments like this one. In recent decades, the GOP has survived setback after setback--the Goldwater debacle, Watergate, the Iran-Contra scandal, the government shutdowns of 1995 and 1996, the failed bid to oust Bill Clinton from office, the loss of the popular vote in the 2000 election--and, on each occasion, has emerged stronger than before. Watergate may be particularly instructive as a historical parallel. In the scandal's aftermath, 1974 became a banner year for liberals: Democrats gained 49 House seats and added four Senate seats for a commanding 60-vote majority. Two years later, when Jimmy Carter won the White House, Democrats appeared to have solidified control of the country. Everyone knows what happened next. Today, the philosophical and practical infrastructure on which the GOP constructed its majority remains as sturdy as it was in 1974--perhaps, thanks to Rove, even sturdier--and there is little reason to believe Democrats are in a better position to reestablish credibility with the electorate than they were three decades ago. Democrats may win back the House or the Senate this year, but, even if they do, the majority that Karl Rove helped to construct remains formidable. Whatever happens this November, no one should be fooled: The Democrats are still in deep trouble. In late 2000, even as the result of the presidential election was still being contested in court, George W. Bush's chief pollster Matt Dowd was writing a memo for Rove that would reach a surprising conclusion. Based on a detailed examination of poll data from the previous two decades, Dowd's memo argued that the percentage of swing voters had shrunk to a tiny fraction of the electorate. Most self-described "independent" voters "are independent in name only," Dowd told me in an interview describing his memo. "Seventy-five percent of independents vote straight ticket" for one party or the other. Once such independents are reclassified as Democrats or Republicans, a key trend emerges: Between 1980 and 2000, the percentage of true swing voters fell from a very substantial 24 percent of the electorate to just 6 percent. In other words, the center was literally disappearing. Which meant that, instead of having every incentive to govern as "a uniter, not a divider," Bush now had every reason to govern via polarization. This ran counter to Rove's previous thinking. In 2000, he had dismissed the tactic of running on divisive issues like patriotism, crime, and welfare as "an old paradigm." And Bush had followed his advice by explicitly reaching out to the center-left. For instance, during the campaign, he held a press conference with a dozen gay Republicans and sharply criticized the GOP Congress for a plan to save money by slowing distribution of tax credits for the working poor. But Dowd's memo changed all that. For Rove and the president he served, soon it would be out with the new GOP and in with the old. Indeed, until they briefly abandoned it during the 2000 campaign, Republicans had used polarization as a political strategy for more than a generation--repeatedly developing themes that created coherence among angry constituencies on the right. The strategy may have been cynical but, by and large, it worked. "There are twice as many angry conservatives in this country as there are angry liberals," Democratic direct-mail specialist Hal Malchow is quoted as saying in America's Right Turn. "Liberals, by their very nature, don't get as angry as conservatives do." One of the earliest pioneers of this strategy was George Wallace. His 1963 gubernatorial inauguration address is best remembered for the line "segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." But, in retrospect, the most striking element of the speech is the number of sentiments that have since become integral to Republican rhetoric. For instance: "[G]overnments do not produce wealth; people produce wealth--free people." And: "[T]hough we may give lip service to the Almighty, in reality, government has become our god." And: "[T]he strong, simple faith and sane reasoning of our Founding Fathers has long since been forgotten, as the so-called progressives tell us that our Constitution was written for `horse and buggy' days. So were the Ten Commandments." Wallace wasn't simply using race to rile his constituents; he was also using a coarse but effective mix of religious sentiment and anti-elitism. The backgrounds of many of the GOP strategists who would inherit and refine Wallace's divisive tactics were very different from those of their Democratic counterparts, many of whom were the children of wealthy coastal elites. Just as Rove's troubled family life gave him insight into the longing of many Americans for stability, the childhoods of other GOP strategists allowed them to instinctively grasp the liabilities of the left. Perhaps the two most famous examples were products of the segregated South, Charlie Black and Lee Atwater. Raised in North Carolina, Black grew up amidst, in his words, "a general feeling of resistance or rebellion among white Southerners" to the civil rights policies of Lyndon B. Johnson. Two decades later, while serving as a consultant to Phil Gramm in his 1984 Senate race against Democrat Lloyd Doggett, Black recognized the potential of homosexuality as a means of smearing a Southern candidate. "Doggett got the endorsement of the big gay PAC in San Antonio," Black explained. "That wasn't unusual, but then we got onto the fact that the gays had a male strip show at some bar and Doggett takes that money." Atwater, who grew up in South Carolina, first came to prominence in that state's 1978 Senate race between Democrat Pug Ravenel and Republican Strom Thurmond. Ravenel had attended a fund-raiser in Manhattan where he reportedly bragged that, if elected, he would act like a senator from New York. For Atwater, the subsequent attack ad must have practically written itself. "We need Strom Thurmond," the commercial said, "instead of a third senator from New York." It was the central achievement of Wallace, Black, and Atwater to link all these themes--elitism, religion, race, sexuality--together with a range of economic and social issues in order to assemble an overarching message. Indeed, because they so successfully conflated the various characteristics of liberalism into a single image over time, GOP strategists are now able to use any one issue--affirmative action, gay marriage, flag burning--to effectively raise them all. From this perspective, taxes are used to finance welfare programs that encourage family dissolution. Blacks and immigrants are deeply affected by such government policies, but, in the Republican view, no family is immune. Lax law enforcement, no-fault divorce, sex education, and pornography together foster fragile families and out-of-wedlock pregnancy, which, in turn, drive crime, drug abuse, and urban and suburban chaos. In the eyes of the cultural right, the sexual revolution, the women's rights revolution, and the blurring of gender roles--as well as abortion and the so-called gay agenda--all merge to usurp the status of those who were traditionally dominant, to upend authority, including paternal authority, and to corrode the lives of children and orderly, decent communities. All of this is abetted by an activist judicial system that promotes secularism and enables the emergence of an increasingly deregulated sphere for immoral private action. To liberals, all of this may sound like a laughable caricature of their political philosophy. But, to conservatives, it has long been a reliable formula for victory--and it still is. Witness Bush's effective use of issues like gay marriage and judicial activism to energize his base en route to victory in the 2004 campaign. Four years after he wrote his memo, Matt Dowd was vindicated at the polls. While Republicans were busy pursuing this strategy over the last several decades, Democrats were busy playing right into their hands. First, the party became too closely identified in the public's perception with elites--even though many Republican leaders also have sizeable bank accounts. Consider the most prominent Democratic politicians and power brokers of recent years: Nancy Pelosi (daughter and sister of Baltimore mayors, net worth $14 million); Harold Ickes (son of FDR's secretary of the interior, Sidwell Friends, Stanford, Columbia Law); Howard Dean (Park Avenue, St. George's, Yale); George Soros (Hungarian currency speculator, net worth $7.2 billion); Ellen Malcolm of Emily's List (heiress to the IBM fortune); Jane Fonda (record- breaking contributor to a liberal nonprofit in 2000 with a gift of $11.7 million); Michael Dukakis (son of a Harvard Medical School graduate, Swarthmore, Harvard Law); John Kerry (St. Paul's, Yale, Skull & Bones, net worth nearly $167 million); Al Gore (St. Albans, Harvard, son of a U.S. senator); Hillary Clinton (former first lady, Wellesley, Yale Law, now worth $10 million). Many Democrats--and writers such as Thomas Frank--have called for the party to reconnect with the white, working-class, male voters it has lost over the decades. The problem with this call to populism is that the party's most influential wing is not populist; it is elitist--affluent, welleducated, urban, indifferent (or hostile) to organized religion, and, on the controversial social issues of abortion and gay marriage, well to the left of the general public. The values of this elite tend to prevail in party debates and in the crafting of Democratic platforms. Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union--and himself an Ivy League graduate--recently said that the perception of Democrats as "Volvo-driving, latte-drinking, Chardonnay-sipping, Northeast, Harvard- and Yale-educated liberals" isn't a perception at all, but rather "the reality. That is who people see as leading the Democratic Party. There's no authenticity; they don't look like them. People are not voting against their interests; they're looking for someone to represent their interests." The policy gaps between this agenda-setting elite and the rest of the country are wide. Last year, the Pew Research Center found that 90 percent of liberals--who, as a group, tend to be one of the wealthiest and most educated of Pew's nine voter categories--believe that "relying too much on military force to defeat terrorism creates hatred that leads to more terrorism," compared with 51 percent of the general population. Likely as a result, Democrats continue to suffer from a perception that they are soft on national security. While the Bush administration's performance in Iraq has contributed to a decline in confidence in the GOP's handling of military affairs, it has not encouraged voters to trust Democrats on security policy: Recent polls show voters continue to believe Republicans do a better job on that front. It is no surprise, then, that Democrats performed well in the 1992, 1996, and 2000 presidential elections--that is, during the brief interregnum between the end of the cold war and September 11. And it isn't just national security that separates liberals from the rest of the United States. According to Pew, 88 percent of liberals are worried that the government is too involved in moral issues, compared with 51 percent of the electorate. On the whole, they are also less likely than other voters to own a gun or attend religious services. The selection of such Democratic presidential candidates as McGovern, Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry reflects the power of this wing of the party. These candidates have been decisively rejected by the white, working class that Democratic populists hope to win back: In 2004, Kerry lost to Bush among white voters with annual household incomes of $30,000 to $75,000 by a landslide margin of 22 percentage points, according to a report by the progressive strategy group Third Way. In addition to being seen as the party of elites, Democrats are now widely understood to be the party of minorities and women. Starting in the '60s, Democrats were closely identified with civil rights and feminist issues--to their enormous credit but also to their long-term strategic detriment. Those who had been marginalized by the traditional social order--women, blacks, Latino immigrants, men who did not want to serve in the military, and, later, gays--became important Democratic constituencies. Americans whose sense of identity had once been peripheral to politics were granted special status in the party through rule changes adopted after the internecine warfare of the 1968 Chicago convention. Race has been a central dividing line between the parties--though, these days, it is invoked subtly in politics when it is invoked at all--ever since the 1964 election pitting Lyndon Johnson, the leading advocate of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, against Barry Goldwater, who opposed the law. Today, minorities--blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans--make up 46 percent of the Democratic Party. The dividing line based on gender has been less noticed, in part because it is more complex and less glaring in the poll numbers; but it is there nevertheless. Democrats have become the leading advocates of the feminist agenda, from abortion rights to affirmative action, while taking the same side as most women on issues with a significant opinion gender gap, including taxes, social safety-net questions, military spending, foreign intervention, and health care. Democrats have become majority female, 55.1 to 44.9, according to National Election Studies data. White men now make up just 28.8 percent of the party. All this has led to a profound realignment in U.S. politics. Once characterized mainly by the economic split of the Great Depression--a split that played to the Democrats' advantage for the better part of a generation-- the parties now divide differently. Put simply, the Democratic Party has become the political arm of the subdominant, while the GOP is home to the dominant groups in American life. These demographic differences help explain some key temperamental distinctions between the two parties. Conservatives are generally more habituated than liberals to top-down command structures in the institutions they value most--the corporation, the church, the military, and the family. They are comfortable and familiar with the process of winning, whether it is crushing a competitor, converting souls, or engaging in actual battle. They are accustomed to assuming the dominant role with all that entails. They have fewer qualms about inflicting serious damage on an adversary. They are willing to suffer losses in order to achieve larger victory. And they are more aggressive and more determined to impose their will. The right is also willing to defer gratification in order to get what it wants. At recent GOP conventions, Christian conservatives have ceded centrality to multicultural displays featuring blacks and Latinos and to prime-time floor speeches by such pro-choice Republicans as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rudy Giuliani. In 2001, the business community showed similar discipline in accepting deferral of a corporate tax cut bill until later in Bush's first term. By contrast, many on the left are intensely hostile to hierarchy and to compromising their principles on behalf of victory. Feminists long overestimated the degree of public support for a hard line on abortion, while civil rights activists long underestimated the queasiness of many Americans with the concept of affirmative action. Even today, no one in the Democratic Party seems able to prevent polarizing figures from showing up at inopportune moments, as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton did recently at Ned Lamont's victory speech in Connecticut. In many ways, the problem is intrinsic to the way the party is organized: Because so many Democratic constituencies are mobilized on the basis of racial and sexual identity, there is little willingness to compromise, since compromise requires what is perceived as a renunciation of the self. Many of the temperamental differences between left and right are reflected in the differing ways conservative and liberal donors have sought to influence politics. Consider the Heritage Foundation, created in the early '70s with backing from Joseph Coors and Richard Scaife. In 1974, the Republican Party was crushed in the wake of Richard Nixon's forced resignation. In 1976, the GOP lost the White House. But Coors and Scaife stuck with Heritage and were joined by ideological sympathizers. By the time Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, Heritage had become the premier think tank on the right, and it continues to influence government policy today. Contrast that to the short-sighted behavior of the Democratic donors--led by financier George Soros and insurance magnate Peter Lewis--who started a group called America Coming Together (ACT) in 2003. Their goal was to create a permanent institution, with headquarters in every battleground state, that would turn out Democratic voters. When ACT and its sister organization, the Media Fund, failed to produce a Democratic presidential victory, Soros and Lewis pulled the plug, forcing the closure of both ACT and the Media Fund and effectively writing off $200 million as a failed gamble. Referring to Soros and Lewis, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chair Rahm Emanuel last month lamented to the New York Daily News: "In the 2004 election there were some very active players who, as far as I can tell, have now decided they're neither going to be involved in the field, advertising or anything. ... Do you know where they are?" The temperamental shortcomings of the Democratic Party stem, in many ways, from its history of achievement. The culture wars continue to powerfully animate national politics in large part because the left has been so successful at winning them. In extraordinarily short order, racial discrimination has been outlawed; abortion and contraception--including, now, the morning-after pill-- have been legalized; sexual harassment has been barred from the workplace; the labor force participation of mothers has soared, reaching 78 percent for those with teenage children; many corporations and local governments, as well as some states, offer health coverage and other benefits to gay and lesbian partners; prime-time television portrays a sexually liberated nation; high schools hand out condoms; diversity is the norm in public school textbooks; the faculties of elite colleges are overwhelmingly liberal; and the military draft has been eliminated. In other words, in the culture and the workplace, the left's core constituencies have largely won. As a result, for a decade or more, their goal has mostly been to consolidate gains rather than to break significant new ground. Conservatives, on the other hand, are losing the culture wars, and they know it. This has only made them fight harder--and, ironically, it has strengthened the political party to which they belong. One other temperamental consideration bears mentioning: The Republican Party is the party of risk at a time when risk, managed adroitly, is an accepted fact of life for most Americans. The democratization of debt; innovations in banking that led to new mortgage instruments and high home-ownership levels; the mutual fund; the discount brokerage house--all have made risk and entrepreneurship a more essential part of the American psyche than ever before. Defined pension plans have been replaced with contribution plans and 401k programs; and, with these changes, the Republican goal of a huge investor class has been realized. Meanwhile, the old mechanisms of mitigating risk--trade unions and paternalistic corporations--are in decline. Indeed, the pervasiveness of risk in today's economy has made many Americans feel it is safer to look out for yourself and your kin than to place your fate in the hands of a politically controlled collective. Risk is now, for better or worse, a central feature of American life--for managers, entrepreneurs, professionals, and workers. Both substantively and stylistically, Republicans speak to this prevailing mood in a way that Democrats do not. The problems of the Democratic Party are largely structural and, therefore, do not lend themselves to facile fixes. Indeed, over the last ten years, the biggest threat to GOP domination hasn't come from Democrats but rather from Republicans themselves. With the government shutdowns of 1995 and 1996 and the vote to impeach Bill Clinton in 1998, Republicans reached too far. Still, none of these momentary lapses derailed the GOP's long-term project of building an enduring majority. And so, while the Iraq war may someday be viewed as a political overreach of sorts, it seems unlikely that it will lead to a fundamental realignment of the electoral landscape. To be sure, there are plenty of unknowns that could bring about such a realignment: the approaching retirement of baby-boomers, the growing ranks of Latino voters, another terrorist attack, a serious economic decline. But, unless Democrats are rescued by a major trend or an unforeseen event, they will probably be making Karl Rove look good for many years to come.

By thomas b. edsall