When Barack Obama won the presidential race in 2008 and his Democratic colleagues increased their advantages in the U.S. House and Senate, some pundits predicted a major realignment of American politics. Two years later, the picture looks much different. Michael Barone, senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner, top political analyst for Fox News, and co-author of The Almanac of American Politics recently discussed the changing political landscape with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)
Kokai: Two years ago, when the president had just won, he was president-elect at this point and told everyone that hope and change had arrived. People were excited. Did anyone expect we’d be where we are today?
Barone: I don’t think very many people expected to be where we are today, certainly not that crowd of whatever it was, several hundred thousand enthusiastic people in Grant Park in Chicago. [It was] quite a wonderful demonstration of support and post-electoral joy and celebration of America. And you had the political philosopher James Carville predicting that we were in for 40 years of Democratic Party dominance. Well, it turned out not to last as long as 40 weeks, because by August 2009 you had voters on the generic ballot question … pollsters asked people, which party’s candidate for the House of Representatives would you vote for? They started preferring Republicans to Democrats, and that’s an historical anomaly. The question tends to underpredict Republican actual electoral performance. So basically people were kind of soured on the Obama Democrats 40 weeks after the celebration of Grant Park.
I think what’s happened is fairly simple: The Obama Democrats came into office [with the] president winning a higher percentage of the vote than any Democratic nominee in history except for Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, [and] Lyndon Johnson. … The Obama Democrats came to office, came to power with the assumption that economic distress would make Americans more likely to support or at least be amenable to big government programs, and that assumption has turned out to be wrong. I would’ve argued based on my reading of history that it was wrong, that this idea has been peddled by the New Deal historians. I don’t think it’s even an accurate or at least a full accounting of what went on in the 1930s, but we’ve had the closest thing we can get to a controlled experiment in American politics. People basically don’t believe in these big-government programs.
Now, it’s not utterly clear that they’re going to believe in what the Republicans may be offering if they get congressional majorities or if they get the White House and congressional majorities in 2012. I think we’re in a period of what I call open-field politics, when political loyalties are low, political voting behavior is volatile, rapidly changing, issue-focused changes, and as a result you see wild swings in partisan performance. We had a period from 1995 to 2005 — a period I call trench warfare politics — very little change in partisan voting behavior. Since 2005 we’ve seen lots of change in partisan voting behavior. [It] favored the Democrats in 2006 and 2008, favored the Republicans in 2009, and seems pretty clearly to be favoring them in 2010, with 2011-12 still, in my view, question marks.
Kokai: While some were saying that the election of Barack Obama and the Democrats’ success in 2006 and 2008 marked a major change, a shift back toward the left, there were others who said, “No, people just got tired of the Republicans not living up to what they said they were going to do.” Do you think that what has happened over the past couple years has refocused conservatives and the people who want Republicans to act a certain way?
Barone: Yeah, I think we’ve seen a couple of carom shots here, if we can adapt the language of pocket billiards — pool — to political conflicts. I think the rejection of the Republicans in the 2006 and 2008 cycles was a rejection more on grounds of competence than on grounds of ideology. Many Democrats disagreed with that at the time and proceeded to support these big-government programs. Those in turn have been rejected by a majority of American voters, but what’s really interesting is that we have seen an inrush into political activity of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of our fellow citizens, [in a] widely decentralized, spontaneous manner. It’s an inrush that’s symbolized but not limited to the Tea Party movement.
We’ve seen these people invoking the language, the arguments, of the Founding Fathers — even the garb of the Founding Fathers on occasion — and recalling America’s historic past and our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It’s interesting speaking to the John Locke Foundation, who of course talked about the right to life, liberty, and property and whose language in that regard was adapted by Thomas Jefferson and the other drafters of the Declaration of Independence when they talked of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — and by the framers of the Constitution when in the Bill of Rights they wrote the Fifth Amendment. We have a right not to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.
So Americans have gone back to the founding documents. We’ve had new people involved in politics. On balance, while this Tea Party movement and other such movements say they’re bipartisan, most of their energy and focus has gone into the Republican Party. They’ve given the Republicans a lot more energy, enthusiasm, and ideas. Those are assets to the Republican Party. There is also a certain amount of liability to the Republican Party. Any time you have an inrush of hundreds of thousands or millions of people into politics, you get a certain number of wackos and weirdos who are part of the group, and they can be a liability to a party.
So we saw something like this with the peace and anti-war movements of the late 1960s/early 1970s, which still has had its influence on the Democratic Party today. I think we’re seeing something that is likely to have lasting influence quite possibly for a couple decades to come in the Republican Party and in our politics generally.
Kokai: Do you see the possibility that if Republicans don’t live up to what the Tea Party folks want them to do, we could be seeing some sort of split, maybe for the first time in 150 years or so, a viable third party?
Barone: Well, I think we’re in a period of what I call open-field politics, and many things are possible. We had a similar period in 1991-95, and we saw three impossible things happen, which were the election of a Democratic president — we’d been told the Republicans had a lock on the presidency — the election of a Republican Congress — we were told that the Democrats had a lock on Congress — and we had two independent or third-party candidates leading in polls for president of the United States, Ross Perot in spring 1992 and Colin Powell in fall 1995. I think that we could see similar movements here and in many different directions.