‘I’ve come back to Iowa one more time to ask for your
vote,’ said President Obama at an emotional ‘last ever’ campaign meeting.
‘Because this is where our movement for change began, right here. Right here.’
And his eyes briefly moistened. The nostalgia was doubtless sincere, and the
address correct, but it was misleading to describe his 2012 election campaign
as a continuation of his earlier ‘movement for change’. In reality, it has been
a smoothly ruthless operation to distract attention from a record that has been
disappointingly bereft of change. He triumphed over himself as much as over the
hapless Mitt Romney.
Until it produced a glossy
economic leaflet so that the President could wave it as evidence that, like
Romney, he too had a ‘plan’, the Obama campaign had concentrated on blaming
George W. Bush for America’s continuing troubles. It denounced Romney as a
vulture capitalist murderously hostile to ordinary people, and promised to
protect women against the GOP’s supposed plan to abolish both contraception and
abortion. Both sides ran relentlessly negative adverts but, as the result
showed, the Democrats did it better. Obama will be President for another four
years.
To win in circumstances that
seemed ripe for his defeat is a remarkable achievement — but the victory can
scarcely be described as glorious. The President almost tied with Romney (whom
he reportedly despises) in the popular vote. The loss of Senate seats had
little to do with his coattails but was largely due to the individual follies
or bad luck of Republican candidates. Republicans retained control of the House
and now control 30 governorships, the highest number since 2000. The President
will have to deal with a hostile half of Congress in an atmosphere poisoned by
the extraordinarily ruthless partisanship of this ‘post-partisan’. And in one
vital particular, the campaign almost foundered.
Back in 2008, when Obama was
beginning his movement for change in Iowa, he gave an interview to the Reno Gazette-Journal,
in which he declared that ‘Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a
way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not… He put
us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.’ The
implication that a future President Obama would succeed where Clinton had
failed was clear. But how did Obama propose to change that trajectory?
As it happens, the trajectory
has been changing of its own accord, thanks to what William Frey of the
Brookings Institution refers to as the Democrats’ best friend: demography.
America is ‘browning’, as Frey puts it, as a result of high immigration levels
from Latin America and Asia and the fact that an older white population is
having fewer children than immigrants and their children. (If talk of
‘browning’ and ‘white decline’ makes you uneasy, please relax. It’s perfectly
respectable in American politics, provided you don’t suggest that there’s
anything wrong with such trends.)
A glance at the CNN exit polls
shows why this matters. Romney had a 20-point lead among white voters, but
among ethnic minorities his defeat was emphatic. Obama won by 44 points among
Latinos, 47 points among Asians and 87 points among African-Americans. A
Republican party that relies upon white votes is a Republican party that ought
to be anxious about its future. That is not to endorse the immediate response
of most commentators that ‘comprehensive’ immigration reform is the obvious
solution to the party’s problems. The final tipping point will not happen for
some decades, but the Census Bureau has pointed to one intermediate point: for
the first time, whites represented a minority of all births (49.6 per
cent).These trends were forecast as early as 1997, in a National Review article
called ‘The Emerging Democratic Majority’ — a theme and a title that were later
adopted by Democrats John Judis and Ruy Teixeira for an influential 2002 book.
Several commentators predicted that some time in the first decade of this
century the Republicans would lose the natural majority Reagan had created for
them. The old model would suddenly stop working. That arguably happened when
Obama was first elected, but the trends have accelerated since then and a
natural Democratic majority has almost emerged.
It isn’t, of course, that
simple. Although whites are declining as a percentage of the population, they
will remain for some time the big enchilada electorally — 72 per cent of voters
according to exit polls. A third of Hispanics in America are under 18 and can’t
vote until 2016 at the earliest. The electoral overwhelming of the white
majority may not have the effect that simple extrapolation suggests. Most
Hispanics are white. Intermarriage is creating mixed and non-racial identities
that further confuse ethnic categories. One effect could be an electorate that
votes less and less along ethnic lines.
It was a bold decision for the
Obama campaign to pitch a radical social appeal to ethnic minorities, young
people and single women — without worrying that the religious right or other
groups might be offended. This, in effect, risked losing the 2012 election with
a campaign designed for 2020. But the gamble was vindicated on election night
when the exit polls showed these targeted groups voting disproportionately for
the President.
Romney and Republicans faced
an equally tricky decision. If their support among minorities was low and even
falling, then they had to compensate by getting a larger share of the white
vote — especially the white working-class vote which is alienated from the Democrats
and (everywhere in the English-speaking world) moving from left to right. A
back-of-envelope calculation suggested that Romney needed rather more than 60
per cent of whites to give him an overall victory.
Appealing to these votes was
always going to be a hard task for Romney. As a venture capitalist and the head
of Bain Capital, he was exactly the wrong sort of Republican to win over
blue-collar workers. His Mormon temperance and personal stiffness early on
scarcely helped. And his opposition to Obama’s bailout of General Motors,
though principled, threatened the economic interests of the very workers he was
trying to win over.
Even if Romney could have
overcome these personal drawbacks, he and all other Republicans confronted a
more intangible but still formidable obstacle. Making specifically ethnic
appeals to Hispanic, black or Asian constituencies is an everyday event in
American politics and entirely respectable; appealing to whites as an ethnic
group is not. He might have criticised affirmative action quotas. He might,
indeed, have called for immigration restrictions, and flirted with doing so in
the primaries. But both such appeals might have distressed the Midwest suburban
voters who were coming over to the GOP. So Romney contented himself with making
a general appeal to all Americans on rescuing the economy from Obama’s failed
policies.
Polls showed that whites were
breaking for Romney so decisively that Bill Clinton was summoned to help Obama
prevent the last-minute defection of previously safe Democratic strongholds
such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. In the final hectic days of the
campaign, a tired and hoarse but still vigorous ex-president criss-crossed what
had suddenly become three or four ‘swing’ states on the east coast and in the
Midwest. It was an old-fashioned street hustings climax to a campaign more
often fought with television ads and social media.
It worked. Romney got only 59
per cent of the white vote and, accordingly, he lost narrowly. Clinton gave the
kiss of life to Obama’s ailing ambition. The President phoned to thank him
immediately after Romney’s concession, which must have been a bittersweet
occasion for Clinton.
What now? The trajectory of
American politics towards a natural Democratic majority will continue to be
strengthened by the election. America now looks like a less naturally
conservative country, more a centre-left one. Between them, Clinton and Obama
have helped demography along. As these trends gain traction, however, they will
provoke and aggravate a new clash in American politics.
The coming majority implies a
different set of political priorities for the US government. A younger, poorer,
less self-reliant electorate, rooted mainly in minority communities, is likely
to demand a larger welfare state, greater regulation, more unionisation, higher
government spending and higher taxes, initially ‘on the rich’. These demands
will run counter to the interests of older Americans of all races, who are
currently the main beneficiaries of high spending and low taxes. And the claims
of both will inevitably be noticed by the watchful interests of the international
investing community and America’s creditors such as China.
An irresistible political
force is about to meet an immovable economic object — on the edge of a
vertiginous fiscal cliff.
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