(CONNECTICUT) — Shortly before the election, Politico ran a story that drew the ire of some in the liberal opinion press. The piece looked back at 2012 and tried to divine lessons for future winners. If Mitt Romney won, the authors said, Republicans would have to face the looming crisis of being a nearly all-white and all-male political party. If President Barack Obama won re-election, he’d face a House Caucus that is more liberal than he is, and thus more unyielding to any “Grand Bargain” in which social insurance programs are threatened.
The problem, as far as Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall was concerned, wasn’t the Politico’s assertion that Obama would have to govern while watching his left flank. That’s debatable. The problem, Marshall said, was the implication that votes cast by Obama supporters were somehow less significant. Here’s the passage in question:
If President Barack Obama wins, he will be the popular choice of Hispanics, African-Americans, single women and highly educated urban whites. That’s what the polling has consistently shown in the final days of the campaign. It looks more likely than not that he will lose independents, and it’s possible he will get a lower percentage of white voters than George W. Bush got of Hispanic voters in 2000.
A broad mandate this is not.
For Marshall, there’s something perniciously racist about this. Why can’t the president win a mandate from a diverse coalition of Americans? The inference is that Obama’s legitimacy as president is weakened if he doesn’t win a plurality of white votes, and the converse: that non-white votes are somehow “second rate.” As Marshall said, with sarcasm: “Obama [is] winning but not with the best votes. I mean really, if you can’t win with a broad cross-section of white people, can you really be said to represent the country? Really.”
We all want stuff
Marshall’s critique accurately describes a subset of American conservatism to which no Democratic president has even been legitimate. Before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, for instance, radical isolationists accused FDR of wanting to go to war in the name of One World Jewry, and said Roosevelt was a secret Jew. “Rosenfeld,” they called him. As Arthur Goldwag might say, the politics of white nationalism are the same as they ever were.
But on Election Day, Marshall’s critique turned out to be prescient. Race was going to be the central theme in the debate over the president’s mandate across the political spectrum. Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly started it all after he was asked about Obama’s imminent victory. “It’s not a traditional America anymore, and there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama.”
“Stuff” echoes a view among some Republicans that divides the world between takers and makers. Half of the U.S. works hard, plays by the rules, strives to succeed. The other half doesn’t. They are parasites living off “entitlements.” This is a very old script that has been playing in the minds of hardline Republicans since the 1980s. The only thing missing is a bit part for the Welfare Queen. What’s new is that the welfare queens and the takers are not just blacks anymore. They include Hispanics and women (all of them, I guess). O’Reilly said:
“The white establishment is now the minority. The voters … feel this economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff. You’re gonna see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama. Overwhelming black vote for President Obama. And women will probably break President Obama’s way. People feel that they are entitled to things — and which candidate … is going to give them things?”
Believing your own rhetoric
O’Reilly got a lot of flack for this but he was merely reflecting the worldview of a kind of voter on whom Republican candidates, including Mitt Romney, have historically relied. Romney made that clear when he said 47 percent of the American population would support Obama. For this reason, he had to drill deep into the Republican base, and to do that, he created mendacious ads that accused Obama of sending out welfare checks with no strings attached. Another ad distorted the president’s statement — the famous “you didn’t build that” — to lambaste him in the name of all the makers who do all the hard work.
When the “47 percent” video emerged, many on the political left believed this was a glimpse at the real Mitt Romney. But that view was undermined by a simple fact: that Romney shifted his message to suit whatever audience he was speaking to. Moreover, his assertion, that half of us don’t pay income tax and therefore half feel ourselves entitled to government largesse, was just wrong. Sure, the elderly, the poor, the sick and disabled don’t pay income taxes, but that’s because they don’t have incomes. And by the way, they pay taxes. Federal revenues come from many sources, not just income taxes.
In a column for MintPress, I expressed no small amount of wonder.
“A successful campaign knows what the truth is even if it chooses to work around it. If you start believing the rhetoric, you run the risk of running into the truth. … After seeing the video, I was struck by the possibility that a candidate for president has based his campaign on an ideological fiction. … This isn’t what someone says when he commands rhetoric. This is what someone says when the rhetoric commands him. … Romney appears to have drunk its suicidal Kool-Aid.”
Well, it turns out I was more right than I knew. In a call to donors, Romney blamed his loss on Obama’s ability to buy votes with major “gifts.” To blacks and Hispanics, he gave “free” health care. To students, “free” loans. To women, free condoms. (No, I’m not kidding.)
The president’s campaign,” [Romney] said, “focused on giving targeted groups a big gift — so he made a big effort on small things.
An election about class
Because the GOP has historically been the party of big business, it has been vulnerable to economic populism. The very wealthy — here I’m talking about millionaires and up — are, after all, a minority to which nothing is more threatening than a unified bloc of Americans who self-identify as a class that is opposed to the tyrannies of a wealthy elite. So when the Democratic Party lost the Solid South over civil rights, it was the gift that kept on giving. Since Nixon, Republicans have harnessed the power of white supremacy to wedge apart voters who might otherwise join forces in the pursuit of shared economic interests.
Lee Atwater, the inventor of “the Southern Strategy,” once said Karl Marx was right, the real issues are economic. That’s why Republicans need to send out coded messages. Why allow working-class whites to join working-class blacks (or now, working-class Hispanics) to subvert the elite when you can divide and conquer them with nativist hatreds?
That didn’t work in 2012, because Romney embodied the wealthy elite while Obama ran as a populist fighting for ordinary Americans who just want a fair shake. Indeed, the president defied history. Since Clinton, Democrats have dodged populism. They generally run as centrists to avoid any whiff of class warfare. Yet no other issue, not abortion, not immigration, not the gays, not war, not gun rights — nothing else was as important as the economy to all voters. This election was defined by material interests, just as the capitalist Atwater and the communist Marx had predicted. Everything else was illusory.
Thus it has always been. But in 2012, politics finally caught up with material reality.
A mandate defined by class
All of which is to say Obama’s mandate is not defined solely by race, though that is indeed quickly becoming the conventional wisdom. Josh Marshall rightly tears apart the Politico article for echoing the view that some votes (the white ones) are more important than others (the non-white ones). But even as he exposes the implicit racism of that implication, he reinforces the larger assumption — that Obama’s mandate is predicated on race.
The truth is that Obama’s mandate is defined by class at least as much as race.
Fifty-seven percent of all voters making less than $50,000 a year chose Obama. Make that 63 percent for those making less than $30,000. As the Times put it, “Some of the president’s firmest support came from low-income groups.” Obama also won a majority of voters who have no college experience (51 percent) or some (49 percent). Among voters with advanced degrees, Obama won almost every state, ultimately with a 13 point margin of victory. And in states like Ohio, where the lion’s share of the electorate is white (79 percent in the Buckeye State), Obama won more than a third of those voters (41 percent). That’s no small thing, especially when the median wage in Ohio (half make more; half less) is $45,395.
The irony is that Bill O’Reilly was right! The white establishment is the minority, if you define “establishment” as the property-owning college-educated white suburbanites. If they were the majority, Romney might right now be preparing for his first 100 days.
But they are not, because the country is becoming more racially diverse, but also because — and this is a point that gets nowhere near the attention it deserves — there are fewer and fewer people of any race able to work their way into the middle class. That’s what Obama ran on. That’s what voters reacted to. And for the first time in decades, race-baiting Republicans failed to keep working-class whites from joining a growing and racially diverse coalition united in the pursuit of economic justice. In this way, O’Reilly was dead wrong.
Fairness like this is America at its traditional best.