This morning, Thomas Frank wrote, We Are Such Losers. In it, he made an argument that liberal voters need to get past the idea of post-partisanship. I don’t think the argument is that solid. For one thing, are we liberals really attracted to milquetoasts like Carter and Obama? I don’t think so. Rather, I think it is the funders who like these kinds of candidates because it is a good way to convinced the voters to pick a moderate (or even conservative) candidate.
One of the most exasperating things about the coverage of politics on television is the tendency to pair a flame-throwing conservatives with a mild-mannered “liberal.” When people at Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) complain, the justification is always the same: there just aren’t any passionate liberals. Of course this is patently false. There are no passionate moderates (almost by definition), and since news shows insist upon putting moderates on as “liberals,” it isn’t a surprise that they can’t find any who are passionate.
If there is a problem with the liberal voter, it is that we have internalized the decades-long conservative attacks on liberalism. And this is a kind of curse on our more moderate brethren. But notice that the Democratic primary voters chose Obama over Clinton — because he was seen as more liberal. The fact that he wasn’t hardly matters. The only thing that really separated those two was the individual mandate in healthcare policy. And once in office, Obama collapsed on that issue (because he had to).
But Frank’s comparison of Obama and Carter is basically correct. It is a different comparison than the Republican comparison that we heard so much during the 2012 election. To conservatives, Carter is just a dirty world. Comparing Obama to him was just their way of calling Obama “doody pants.” Carter is an insult because he lost to Reagan and that is all the comparison that they need. But it’s strange how Bush the Elder does not occupy the same space, given that he too lost to the supposed Democratic savior Bill Clinton.
There is a comparison to be made here. I suspect that conservatives would claim that Bush was more liberal than Reagan, so Democrats are not inclined to vilify him. While that’s not even true, Carter was far more conservative than any Democratic president before him for almost half a century. Thomas Frank noted this:
I’ve been writing for a long time that Carter was pretty much the first New Democrat. When it came to economic matters, he was very conservative. And this was ultimately his own undoing. But this is the undoing of all the recent Democratic presidents. The only reason Clinton still has a good reputation is that he was president during an economic boom. But in none of these cases — Carter, Clinton, Obama — did the presidents’ conservative economic policies help the economy, much less the American worker.
The main thing is that Frank is right: being idealistic is not the same as being liberal. In fact, what we see is the that the kind of “above the fray,” ambiguous idealism of Carter and Obama go along with a kind of economic conservatism that has been as effective in destroying the American middle class as the Republicans have. (Clinton at least was an outspoken neoliberal.) The lesson is clear: when we vote for someone who won’t take a side, we can be sure that he won’t be on our side.
