Political Hermeneutics

Populists will win in 2010

In the upcoming 2010 elections, the candidate with an authentic populist appeal will win.

Why? 

After two years of Obama, voters will be disillusioned with top-down governing and liberal elitism and will be looking horizontally – not “up” -- to candidates that understand their lives and values. The 2010 election, then, will mirror the midterm election of 1994.  During this election, Newt Gingrich promised voters that he’d try to enact ten legislative changes, the “Contract with America.”  His appeal was populist.

The upcoming election in 2010 will also mirror the presidential election of 1976 when Jimmy Carter made his famous evangelical, Southern and “awe shucks” appeal to ordinary voters.  

Both 1994 and 1976 offer instructive hindsight for Republican candidates in 2010.

If populism is so popular, you ask, why did Barack Obama win?  After all, ordinary voters never thought Barack Obama was a populist, yet he won.  His appeal was Hollywoodish.  Almost sexy.  To voters, he was the quintessential elitist – an Ivy-trained lawyer, both urbane and urban.  His demeanor was calm, controlled and reasonable delivered with a smooth, baratone voice.  Voters knew Obama was elitist and voted for him anyway. At that time, voters wanted to be led.

But voters never want to be ruled.  

Obama miscalculated -- he rules, not leads, and he can't quite cover up his disdain for ordinary voters. Obama’s elitism has had its brief appeal to ordinary voters. Though voters can be fooled, they aren’t fools. They won't fall for Obama's elitism again. 

Part of the problem is that Obama is a pretender. He's not truly elite and it shows. Voters seem to be doubting his elite status, wondering if he's really all he seemed to be during the campaign. Authenticity, then, is key, here. If the economy continues to tank, his elite status will be jeapordized for elites, more than populists, are judged on results, not promises. This seems to be happening.  Slowly.  Obama’s schtick is losing appeal among independent and centrist voters. To them, he’s not believable. He’s not “better” than they are. Or, wiser. And, to make it worse, he’s looking more like an incompetent demagogue than a well-educated, progressive leader.

The other problem, which is a bit more serious, is that elitist candidates rarely win for good reason -- elitism rubs against the grain of egalitarian values held by most Americans.  Obama got away with elitism because of his minority status.  He played up his African-American heritage precisely because it nullified his elitism. He can only play this card once, however.  Once elected, he'll have a track record of accomplishments and failures to which opponents can point. 

For these reasons, by 2010, Obama-style elitism will have run its course. By then, voters will be looking for candidates who won’t gut their 401k and the value of their savings. They’ll want someone who understands their need for cheap gas, pickup trucks, 30-year mortgages and predictable food prices. They'll want competence and authenticity.

And they’ll vote for change.  Change they can believe in.

This voter “remorse” will be expressed in populist terms. For populists, by definition, respect the values and aspirations of ordinary people … unlike Obama.  They strive for a grassroots, participatory democracy in which ordinary people have the power to order and structure their own lives … unlike Obama.  Populists have a gut-level suspicion of elitists and believe they can order their own lives better than elitists can order their lives for them.  Thus, they’ll reject Obama and his underexperienced, overeducated staff. 

True populists are deeply moved, to the point of awe, by how ordinary people collectively order their lives in families, small communities and NGOs (non-governmental organizations).  This is why populist movements in the mid-1970s emerged from church-based, “civil societies;” a web of like-thinking “little platoons” of government-wary, religious collectivities.  Together, churches and synagogues comprise the biggest NGO in the United States.  This remains true today.

In contemporary American political history, populism is followed by elitism ... elitism by populism, in a multi-year cycle. In 1976, Carter won by appealing to populists. At that time, his appeal seemed authentic to most voters. After eight years of President’s Nixon and Ford – Nixon’s economic views are similar to Obama’s, interestingly – Carter intuitively shunned the elitist we-know-what’s-good-for-the-economy approach of his predecessors. In an interview in U.S. News and World Report during his first campaign, Carter said, “… my political support, my advice and my concern come directly from the people themselves, not from powerful intermediaries or representatives of special interest groups.”  Carter’s populism, then, was a carefully crafted commonality, a way of saying to the voters that he, too, was middle class, hard working, ordinary and equally uncomfortable with the behavior and values of elitists.

We know, in hindsight, that Carter’s populism was elitism in drag. But at the time, Carter seemed authentic. When he ruled as an elitist, he was defeated in 1980 by true populist, Ronald Reagan. 

Reagan governed as a populist, or tried to. His anecdotes were working class. Ordinary Americans easily identified with his baseball and small town stories. Reagan didn’t talk about eating arugula but backyard barbeques. He rode a horse and lived on a ranch. To many, he seemed grandfatherly and comfortable with power, not egotistical or overreaching. In short, Reagan was congenial and likeable; a true populist.

He was also ordinary writ large. People could understand and identify with him without envy or disdain. And Reagan, to his credit, genuinely liked the ordinary people who loved him.  His populism was based on mutual trust.

Obama can’t and won’t appeal to Americans like Reagan.  He’s just too petty, insecure and power-hungry. He's too elitist, not elite. He’s humorless, unlikeable and arrogant. For this reason, centrist and Independent voters – the swing vote – will increasingly view Obama as both out-of-touch and incompetent and vote for populists in the upcoming mid-term election.

Obama’s personal popularity is below that of President George Bush at a comparable time in his presidency and the popularity of many of his policies is net-negative.  Though wannabe elitists, particularly those in the MSM, treat Obama as a demi-god, ordinary Americans aren’t listening to them, exclusively.  They have other sources for news such as narrowcasted channels on television and the Internet.  The days of “mass” indoctrination are over.  

Obama timed his election well, for he’ll be the last media-created president. He won't be the last elitist, but he'll be the last president put into office by fellow elitists in the MSM.

The next president will be a populist.  And the upcoming mid-term election will favor populists, in either party.

 

  

Reflections on Notre Dame – Why Obama Spoke

President Obama’s recent speech at Notre Dame was a rare strategic blunder.  Until Notre Dame, Mr. Obama had been able to skillfully avoid a confrontation with Catholic conservatives who opposed his vote for partial birth abortion and embryonic stem cell research.  During his campaign, the MSM willingly portrayed Obama as a thoughtful liberal Protestant (UCC) sympathetic to Roman Catholics of a similar, liberal bent. At Notre Dame, however, this calculated strategy was unmasked.  In what Mr. Obama called “a little controversy,” Catholic voters were exposed to an argument over Roman Catholic theological liberalism as well as to a heated discussion over liberal policy goals that Obama wanted to downplay, if not conceal.

Republicans and Democrats both claim the Roman Catholic vote. Both are wrong.  For American Roman Catholics do not vote as a bloc but split their vote almost evenly between Republican and Democratic candidates. In this split, Democrats get secularist and liberal Catholic voters; Republicans get traditional, church-attending Catholics. Thus, Democrats are making inroads only if  “Roman Catholic voter” is loosly defined. 

If one’s political goal is the vote of salient Catholics – casting the net narrowly -- Republicans win.  If the goal is to get the vote of cultural Catholics by casting the net broadly to catch CINOs (Catholics In Name Only) along with practicing Catholics -- Democrats win.  In terms of numbers, though, they're both pulling in about the same catch.  Whether this proves to be true in the future is anyone's guess.

I'll go out on a limb and predict that today’s “lightly religious” Catholics are tomorrow’s secularists.  If this proves to be true, "lightly religious Catholics" are the trailing edge of the Catholic vote.  They'll disappear into the growing bloc secular voters who are predominantly Democratic.  In the near future, then, what remains of the Catholic vote will be increasingly Republican, like the evangelical Protestant vote is today.  But the size of that bloc wil be smaller ... much smaller.  

In the 2008 election, a plurality of Catholics voted for Mr. Obama – 54 percent.  As a group, Catholics voted like typical American voters.  In a Quinnipiac poll taken the week before Mr. Obama’s speech, 70 percent of Catholics who attended mass infrequently supported Notre Dame’s decision to invite the president; in contrast, frequent church-goers were much less likely to agree that Mr Obama was an appropriate choice for a commencement speaker.  

Roman Catholic beliefs cluster around two opposing poles. Traditionalist Catholics are pro-life, liturgy-loving, priest-obeying (male only), mass-attending Christians who revere the Pope and try to obey church pronouncements.  In 2004, these cultural conservatives voted three to one for President Bush against Roman Catholic John Kerry, for example while secular Catholics voted two to one for Mr. Kerry against incumbent President Bush.  The nearly 400,000 people who signed an online petition against the invitation to speak at Notre Dame mainly came from this traditional cohort.  They are Republican Catholics.

Theological liberals are Catholics eager to “rethink the canon.” To these left-Catholics, Christian belief is merely a social or intellectual "construct" which must be re-construed to accommodate “contemporary realities." Politically, then, it makes sense that liberal Catholics are predominantly pro-choice, tolerant if not supportive of gay marriage, and believe women, gays and married couples can be priests.  These Catholics vote Democratic. They're Obama's Catholics.  Their vote mirrors that of secularists.

What pollsters don't often discuss is that the number of progressive Catholics in the pews is quite small, less than 20 percent of the total, and shrinking.  They're not active in the churches.  On Sundays, they're on the golf course or catching up on chores -- not in church.  In contrast, traditionalist Catholics are growing in both number and influence within the church, albeit slowly. Traditionalists have clout because they show up.  On any given Sunday, if you count those actually sitting in pews, you will count 19 percent liberal Catholics and 63 percent traditionalist Catholics Traditionalism, then, is the face of salient, active Roman Catholics. These are the Catholics who take Catholicism seriously. And it was from this cohort that Obama's recent speech at Notre Dame was vehemently opposed.

As an Arizonan, I wonder what sort of impact the Notre Dame speech will have, if any, on our local Roman Catholics. Metrics are hard to find. About 40 percent of Catholics in America are Hispanic and I would assume the percentage of Hispanic Catholics in the Southwest and Arizona is much higher. Are these Hispanics traditionalist or secularized Catholics?  How seriously do they take their faith?  In other words, will salient Hispanic Catholics follow the broader American trend toward Republican Party ID?

Some will.  In 2004, one-third of Hispanic Catholics told pollsters they were "born again," a phrase often synonymous with a traditional or conservative belief system. Fully 53 percent of Hispanic/Latino Catholics voted for Methodist George Bush in 2004; another 47 percent for John Kerry, the Roman Catholic, Democratic challenger. Republicans campaigned on social issues among these Catholic voters -- against gay/plural marriage and unfettered abortion. Kerry, in contrast, spoke mostly about health and education, issues that pundits said were salient within this cohort.  Pundits, again, were wrong.  With a socially conservative style and substance, Republicans made gains among Hispanic Catholics.  But, again, many Hispanic Catholics are quickly secularizing, following the trends established by Roman Catholic Americans.   

This suggests that social issues, at least among Hispanic Catholic voters, will sharply demarcate the left from salient Catholics.  If there are enough salient Catholics remaining to make an electoral difference is a question for which I have no answer.  But among those of faith, social issues do count. And they count in the Republican column.

Attending mass regularly has become a proxy for Republican ID.  In 2000, for instance, Bush won 56 percent of Catholics who attended religious services every week -- Gore won 41 percent.  This is significant because the election in 2000 was evenly split between the parties, unlike subsequent elections.  Please note, though, that Catholics who attended mass occasionally gave Gore 51 percent of their vote.  Thus, there is a strong correlation between Catholic salience and Republican ID. 

This is why, four years later, Mr. Obama could not win the majority of Catholic voters who both attended church regularly and maintained a salient faith.  This explains the anger within traditional Catholicism toward inviting Mr. Obama to speak at Notre Dame.  And this is why Obama lost ground with Catholics, at least those of a salient faith --  church attenders.

I predict this to be the pattern from this point forward -- in national elections, Catholic voters with a more salient faith who attend church regularly will increasingly vote Republican.  The secular or those in the process of secularing will vote Democratic.  As time progresses, the Republican Party will increasingly appeal to the more religious -- Christian and Jew -- as the Democratic Party becomes the party of seculariists.  

 

Why I am a Republican

Perhaps this will explain why a woman raised in a lefty family in California is now Republican.  For what its worth ...

I grew up in Palo Alto/Los Altos Hills in the 1960s and attended public school well into the 1970s.  A few memories.

I remember four school trips to the tertiary sewage plant where we watched poop and paper swirl around in giant vats as an environmentalist droned about saving the planet.  This was science.

I remember pulling tires out of the bay for a biology class.

I remember grabbing oil-covered birds and wiping them clean for health class.  Perhaps, though, this was during the Sunday School program at the Presbyterian Church that my parents inexplicably attended for one, odd year.  I can’t recall.

I remember catching my French teacher boinking the boy’s coach in the woods behind the school, my lesbian gym teacher watching us undress with dilated pupils, my social studies teacher arrested during the protests, my math teacher standing on her desk, foaming at the corners of her mouth and (inadvertently?) revealing her underpants during a diatribe against Nixon.

 I remember drugs in every third, or so, locker and smoky parties sanctioned by the school that made my throat raw for days. 

 I remember volunteering at the front office and looking at the charts of students that were in an accessible file drawer.  They had asked me to file a couple charts.  IQs and standardized test information were written on the front on each chart. Apparently this personal information wasn't considered worthy of keeping in a back office.

I remember neighborhood “wife swaps” with disgust.  We would meet under a designated tree to discuss where our moms and dads were bedding that night.   Of course, they were back home in the wee hours, pretending to us that nothing happened.

I remember the gut-wrenching fear that overtook us when we learned that one of our parents was driving toward Reno.  That meant divorce.  Or skiing.  We were never sure.

I remember “New English.”  I had never heard of a spelling test until I visited relatives in New York.   I learned grammar in college when I learned ancient Greek as a language.  I never learned grammar in school.

I remember watching twenty, or so, Eager Allan Poe movies during English class segment on poetry.  I never read his works.

I remember “New Math.”   As a tenth-grader we finally moved back east and I discovered that my math knowledge was years behind that of my peers.   But I was great at sets and subsets, intersections and unions.  I couldn’t identify, though, a negative number or reduce a fraction … with a 4.0 GPA.

I remember playing Yahtzee every day during sixth grade instead of doing math. Yahtzee was a math game, you see, and considered important for learning math skills.

In grade school, I remember feeling very pressured, by my teachers and some peers, to wear MIA bracelets, peace symbols and other such attire.  I told them that I didn’t like to wear “stuff” that got in the way during kickball.  For some time, this line worked.

I remember watching My Three Sons and Father Knows Best and pining for a family like the ones on television.  They didn’t have a hippy-dippy, psychiatrist mother and nerdy, blinkered physicist father.  Television parents had a neat home with linear furniture – my family had modern, curvilinear furniture.   As an adult, I still associate heavy, sunken brown couches with happy families.  Television parents had sons that knew when they were doing wrong and eventually got caught.  Television families were so cool.  My family was more like Bewitched! 

Just so you know, I was saved from this background by reading.  Books saved me.  I read incessantly.  And covertly. I read everything from junk to classics.  Eventually,  after MUCH struggle and many tears, I earned an Ivy League doctorate.  I have always voted Republican.  I’ve been married once.  Home school the kids. 

 The furniture is quite modern, though.  And curvilinear.

Arizona's Educational Unfairness

Today I registered my child to be homeschooled.  After driving from the Carefree area to a government office on Central and Indian School, the government worker handled my request efficiently and quickly.  Nice.  

I didn't know that my child had to be registered, in fact, I first heard about registering my child at a coffee meeting a few days ago, when another woman casually mentioned that registering her child in Arizona was so much easier than in California.  My ears perked, "...registering?"

I've had my children in public schools (my daughter graduated from an AZ public school), charter schools, private schools and home schools.  Different educational settings fit my children's needs at different points of their lives.  Right now, my youngest needs to be challenged more than what our local public, charter or private schools can offer him.  Specifically, my little guy is brilliant in math and computer which is why he's about to take computer courses at SCCC, even though he is of middle-school age.  He'll do well.

It is simply a travesty that our state government does not support ALL children in all educational environments but rather only some children in some educational environments.  True fairness dictates that all children, irrespective of the sort of schooling that fits him or her best, should have our governmental support.  Fairness dictates that children be treated equally.  

It is unfair that the government gives public school children almost double the per-student funding as charter school pupils, and NOTHING to private and home schooled kids.  Nada.  Zilch.  It is unfair that the government singles out for support only the children that fit in their preferred educational settings.  It is unfair that my child has to take classes at my expense because my government doesn't care for his future.

Doesn't Arizona have an interest in ALL of its children, not merely the ones who happen to fit into charter and public schools?

I asked the woman at the government office how many children are homeschooled in Arizona.  She said she didn't know.  Of course this was untrue, for she knew, but didn't want to talk about it.  I wonder why?  While I was waiting, her receptionist, on the phone, rattled off the "fact" that there are 10,250 registered homeschooled children in Maricopa county.  I quickly jotted down that number.

Back to the coffee conversation with local women, for a moment.  Surprisingly, all of the women at this meeting were either considering or already homeschooling.  Cave Creek schools, though they work well for some, aren't working for their kids.  These parents need other options and are looking at tutoring and homeschooling to meet their kid's needs.  (This isn't a criticism of CC schools which serve some kids very well.  It is merely the observation that other kids are not served well in CC schools and need to be educated elsewhere.)

Interestingly, not one of the women currently homeschooling had registered their children, except the woman from statist California.  They either didn't know about it, or didn't feel they needed to raise attention to the fact that their child was homeschooled.  

Later, I spoke with a young family who belonged to a large homeschool group who told me there were more than 1700 families, not individual children, on their email list.  Only about a third are registered, she said.  I had a confirmation of this fact at a neighbor's house, today.  She, too, homeschools.  She's from California and have registered.  And her children, who have special needs, have been ignored by Scottsdale School district.  She finally gave up in disgust.  But she also told me that most homeschooled families in Arizona do not bother to register their children.  Interesting, huh?

We can probably assume, then, that there are 25,000 to 30,000 kids who are homeschooled in Maricopa county, not 10,000 as the receptionist said.  And this may understate the actual numbers by half.  If, in 2000, the public school enrollment was about 500,000, then one in 20 kids in Maricopa county have been deemed too unimportant to fund with tax dollars. The government wants these kids to fit into their schools.  But they don't.  And won't. So rather than supporting the sort of educational experiences that best fits the child, they're writing off these children as insignificant and unworthy of tax support.

This is wrong.  Morally wrong.  

We need to do something about it.

Email me.

Which way shall Republicans go?

I'm thinking through this here, online, so this post won't be coherent or orderly, but will emerge as my thoughts emerge ...haphazardly.  I just read an article about Rubio challenging Crist for the Florida US Senate seat.  Rubio is a clean-cut, Cuban-American.  He is young, articulate and fluent in spanish.  He's also very conservative.  

New Republican leaders are emerging, aren't they?  Rubio is one of the new, conservative faces.  What interests me, and is the subject of this posting, is the degree of conservatism among the new leaders compared to the old, such as Charlie Crist, the other contender for the same Florida Senate seat.

A logical tension exists between conservatives who lean libertarian and those who lean "paleo."  In most circumstances, this tension is kept under wraps.  Libertarian conservatives (conlibs) tend toward live-and-let-live attitudes on social issues.  Abortion doesn't usually move them.  Ditto for cap punishment, early notification, embroyo research, etc.  They are more than economic conservatives, however, and the MSM is wrong for pegging them as ONLY wanting laissez faire economics.  They don't.  They want the government out of daily life and daily life is far bigger than their job or pocketbook.  They want a restoration of property rights.  They want, hopefully, school choice.  Some want drug legalization, not so much to use drugs as to eliminate the culture of drug-caused crime in the inner city.  

Conpaleos, in contrast, seem to want the government to reflect the values of the majority.  At times, this is articulated as remaining faithful to the constitution as originally interpreted or intended (there is a difference).  So rather than backing away from making social legislation, conpaleos want the law to enshrine basic values which include opposing same-sex marriage, abortion and stem cell research.  These are basic life values which at an earlier time in our nation's history would not have been debated, but rather assumed.

With the loss of consensus, or at least the loss of a dominant and diluted ethical Protestantism, it has been difficult to point to values about which we can mostly agree.  Abortion is a case in point.  So are most social issues.  One wonders if the nation needs some time to digest its differences brought on, in a small part, by rapid immigration.  This is an argument for border closure, but only among conservatives of either stripe for whom moral values are a concern.

The Republican Party is the nation writ small.  It holds within it the tension between conpaleos and conlibs, or the tension between those who want to affirm what is left of our shared values and those who have given up on shared values and just want to be left alone.  I have no solutions for this division, but am only pointing it out.  Interestingly, in a way, the two flanks of the Republican party have arrived at similar policy positions -- sans abortion and other touchy social issues -- but from different starting points.  Libertarians reside within the Republican Party because the Democratic Party has renounced individualism as well as individual liberty.   Democrats are statists -- libertarians are anti-statist.  The conpaleos take a common-sense approach to statism, acknowledging its existence and trying to morph it into a force for good.

As an aside, I believe the tea partiers are libertarian, not conpaleos.  But this topic is for another posting ...

Thankfully, today is cooler.  Go outside, okay?  

Kristen