At best, I find I can only half-agree with Mr. Greenberg in his critical analysis of Barack Obama’s high-toned style. In many ways, he seems to bewail the weakness of style over substance. I cannot disagree with that complaint but I think it misses the point of what has really made or broken Presidential candidates, at least in more recent election, which has been the triumph of simplicity over subtlety.
I think Greenberg is exactly correct in stressing the inherent weakness of Democratic candidates in playing off the separate interests of the various (special) interest groups that make up their more diverse constituencies. Yet Republicans have dominated Presidential elections since Ronald Reagan not only by building upon their smaller base but also by appealing to many moderates, independents, and even conservative Democrats.
They have not done so, for the most part, by promising different things to different people but rather by their success at universalizing a few basic themes and hammering at them consistently. They did not sell tax breaks to the affluent while attempting to skirt the issue with blue-collar voters. Instead, they insisted that tax breaks were a positive for upper, middle, and lower class voters.
This is why so many voters feel they naturally understand where Republican Presidential candidates stand, whereas they express first bewilderment and later frustration by the ongoing attempts of Democratic Presidential candidates to first explain and later clarify and still later re-clarify where they stand on specific issues. The Dems get so dredged down in voluminous detail that they never create a broad image – something even the most ignorant and apathetic voters can recognize and point at in a polling booth.
Obama’s problem is not that his high-level talk is too naïve or theoretical but that it clashes when he attempts, in traditional Democratic fashion, to contrast it with his manifestos of policy specifics for every conceivable subject. He needs to grab hold of no more than three or four issues, boil them down to single sentences – along with his solutions for them – and then drive home those points over and over again in his speeches. If he would make that adjustment, then he will complement high-level, common good populism of his tone rather than chafing against it.
Where I disagree with Greenberg altogether is his definition of the optimistic Mugwump as the perennial loser of Presidential politics, à la Adlai Stevenson. Since when, as he claims, did elite populism vanish under FDR and the New Deal? Roosevelt was the heir of two American dynasties of wealth and power. He was certainly the champion of the common man but his peers were bluebloods.
Likewise, Adlai Stevenson was not doomed to failure because he was high-minded but because he came across as all intellect and no gut. This was particularly damaging when he was forced to twice run against a popular war hero like Eisenhower. Obama does not suffer from any such snobbery.
Also, keep in mind that Americans had won World War II under Roosevelt only to be plunged back into the Korean War by his successor Truman for the same reasons (i.e. keep the world “safe for democracy”) with far less obvious success. Eisenhower’s choice of Republican conservatism – both Parties courted him as their nominee in 1952 – promised the country the return to isolationism it craved. Stevenson posed a threat of more (idealistic) conflict.
Eisenhower won by promising to “go to Korea” not as a general leading the troops to victory but as a head of state to negotiate whatever it would take to bring the troops home. That sounds awfully familiar to what would distinguish Obama, far more so than Hillary Clinton, over any of the likely Republican nominees this year.
Time is always of the essence. Less than a decade after Eisenhower’s fulfilled promises to return the U.S. to sleepy normalcy, John Kennedy fired up the nation again in no small part by promising to make America step up and take its place as a leader and shining beacon of hope among the nations. That idealism was what helped lead us to engage in yet another long, painful, and unsatisfactorily concluded war in Vietnam.
And Greenberg seems to forget the biggest Mugwump of modern times. Ronald Reagan had his pet theories (e.g. supply-side economics) and specific goals (e.g. much like JFK, the destruction of the threat of Soviet communism). Yet the thing that endeared him to so many while causing his critics to curse him as coated with Teflon was his consistent optimism about the greatness of America and its continued bright future.
Reagan obviously did not always practiced what he preached in terms of high moral standards for democracy and less intrusive government (e.g. remember Iran-Contra?). So the difference between winners and losers in the race for President seems to me to be not so much between those who appreciate the subtle complexities of real life versus high-minded exhortation. Instead, it is more between those who can keep that complexity out of their campaigning in order to provide a simple and consistent message versus those who cannot.
I might also observe at this point that the most successful Mugwumps have not been those who cause us to gaze at them in star struck admiration but rather who continually challenge and reassure us about our greatness as a nation and a people.
Republicans excel at this approach. They worry about making their actions jive with their rhetoric
after they are elected, which when you come down to it is the ultimate in pragmatism. That does not mean Obama’s style is guaranteed to ensure a victory over the forces of Bush next November but it does suggest to me that he has the best chance of going toe-to-toe with the GOP challenger, whoever that turns out to be, in this department.
