It's over. Finally. Thank God. No more pesky people knocking on my door asking me if I know where I vote (right across the street, thanks. I can see my polling place from my house!) No more robo-calls, no more ads on television... our long, national root canal has finally come to an end.
In that spirit, I'm going to write two of these things- one examining how President Obama won last night and two pondering what it all might mean in the big picture. After I'm done I am taking the rest of the month off from politics of all kinds to focus on my novel and you know, other stuff.
So, how do I think this happened? Well, after the first debate, the first thought that ran through my head was that this was going to be exactly like 2004. In 2004, Bush underperformed at the first debate and people got very, very excited. Bush salvaged enough in the 2nd and 3rd debates to keep the race close going in to the final weekend but in the end, it didn't matter. Less-than-popular incumbent with a mess on his hands won re-election.
Now, President Obama's margins were quite a bit wider than that- but I looked askance at the fact that after spending all summer complaining that the polls were skewed or wrong, as soon as numbers started trending towards Mittens, Conservatives immediately insisted that these numbers were significant and indicated a trend and blah blah blah... if Mittens was going to become President last night, we would have seen indications early on. Pennsylvania would have been too close to call. New Hampshire would have been too close to call. Florida would have flipped early for Mittens and by a decent margin. When none of that broke his way, the writing was more or less on the wall.
But in another parallel to 2004, I think the real deciding factors in the race came months ago. In '04, whether we want to admit it or not, the Massachusetts Gay Marriage Decision combined with then San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome deciding to issue marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples in direct contravention of California state law proved to be significant motivating factors for getting evangelical and social conservative voters to the polls. I remember pulling into the Hy-Vee parking lot around 2PM that Election Day and NPR was saying that early exit polls were showing that values voters/social issues were high priorities for the electorate. I called it for Dubya right then and there (nobody heard me, because I was alone in the car) and I was right.
When you analyze 2008, I think a couple of things are going to stand out. First is the immigration issue. The Republican Party now has a huge problem with immigration- I can't state this enough. While people may not favor a blanket amnesty*, people do favor a path to citizenship of some kind and with the Arizona Immigration law being such a nationally polarizing issue, the Republican position (either the laughable self-deportation or rounding 'em up and throwing 'em back across the border) just didn't fly with Latino voters or voters in general for that matter.
The other big issue was contraception. I glanced at a right-wing post-mortem last night that proclaimed that 'Obama's campaign to scare women worked.' Well, it wasn't just his campaign and it wasn't about scaring women. While as right-wing commentators were quick to point out on the radio this morning the pro-life/pro-choice split is about 50-50 now, abortion is one thing, contraception is quite another. In a very real sense, I think Rick Santorum and Rush Limbaugh might have lost Mittens this election. By going after birth control, Santorum pushed the pro-life/pro-choice debate away from just abortion where the Republicans have some somewhat reasonable ground to stand on (parental notification and partial birth) to an extremist position where people were suddenly worried that they wouldn't be able to get birth control or IVF. That proved to be a bridge to far for voters, I think.
Limbaugh didn't help matters with the Sandra Fluke thing. While his point may have been valid (Feminists can't spend two decades asking the government to get out of their vaginas and then expect the government to pay for their birth control- don't argue, it's technically true even if he was a giant toolbag about it.) It only served to paint the Republicans as being scary extremists on social issues and Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock and the whole dust up over the word 'vagina' in the Michigan state legislature probably didn't help either.
Ultimately, I think those two issues helped stitch President Obama's 2008 coalition together enough to preserve his firewall in the Midwest and win re-election. While Republicans might be crying foul about how the President went hard negative in an attempt to demonize Mittens, the fact the race was as close as it was indicates to me that a lot of those attacks didn't stick. What probably did cost Mittens was his views on the auto bailout in Ohio and GOP pushes for restrictive voter IDs laws undoubtedly pushed turnout- especially in the African-American community higher where the President needed it most.
While you have to laugh that we've just been through the most expensive election in our history only to end up with the status quo we started with, I think Conservative hopes in the wake of the Citizens United decision took a big hit, as right wing super PACs spent obscene amounts of money only to come up very, very short. That in and of itself is a victory for the American people and I'm now confirmed in my belief that the American people are basically centrist but the right formula of 'socially liberal, fiscally conservative' will get you success more often than not electorally. More on what that means in Part II.
*In general, I don't favor amnesty. My family went through the long, painful proctological painful process of wrestling with the INS to do it the right way- nobody gave us amnesty. But getting citizenship legally? It should be FREE and EASY. Right now it's anything but.
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