RALEIGH – I’ve talked to many conservatives in the past few weeks about their preferences in the race for the 2008 presidential nomination.
The Democratic one, I mean.
With an unpopular Republican incumbent and a majority of Americans expressing dismay with the direction of the country, the political moment seems better suited to donkeys than elephants. That doesn’t mean John McCain can’t win in November. International events, momentous gaffes, and Democratic infighting could all conspire to give McCain an opening. But as of right now, the odds are that Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States.
And in my experience, most conservatives prefer Obama, recently rated most liberal-voting member of the Senate.
How can this be? Most Republican partisans believe that McCain would have an easier time defeating Clinton. The Clintons are a force of nature, by which I mean destructive hurricanes rather than soaring rainbows, and half the country would start off the general election detesting Hillary. For McCain to criticize Obama’s record, experience, and agenda, on the other hand, will be difficult to do forcefully without inviting spurious but toxic charges of roughing up the black guy.
These two sets, Republican partisans and conservatives, overlap but aren’t equivalent. Most conservatives enter public life not to achieve power for its own sake but to advance ideas and values they hold dear. Losing an election is not the same as losing a cause. And the kind of American politics that conservatives envision does not lack for committed, principled liberals with whom to spar. What it would lack, or at least minimize, are the likes of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
A core conservative conviction is that we should all play by the rules, whether the rules speak to discipline in our schools, safety and order in our neighborhoods, morality and decorum in our personal relationships, or the division of power in our polities. Of course, we all fall short of the ideal on occasion. But the Clintons often don’t seem to recognize the existence of the ideal in the first place.
Set aside the ethical squalor that was the Clinton administration and just consider what’s happening right now with the delegate counts. Like it or not, the Democratic National Committee chose to create a system that discouraged large states from encroaching on the sole authority of four small states – Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina – to hold caucuses and primaries in January. Officials in Michigan and Florida decided to move their primaries, anyway, knowing that their delegate counts would be slashed. Clinton chose to compete in both states, knowing that. Obama chose not to compete in either state, knowing that.
Now, with Obama slightly ahead and Clinton scrambling to put together a new scenario for victory, her campaign is reportedly making plans to challenge the DNC penalty and seat a full count of Michigan and Florida delegates. This is exactly why you don’t change the rules of any contest once it’s underway – we have no idea how Michigan and Florida would have truly voted had the rules been different.
Which is, of course, why conservatives so passionately opposed Al Gore’s attempts to change the vote-counting rules in Florida after the fact, and resented the subsequent years of obloquy aimed at a president who barely won the electoral vote while losing the popular vote. Same problem: we have no idea what the vote totals would have been in 2000 had Bush and Gore been campaigning for the popular vote (the GOP would have worked harder to turn out its voters in large blue states such as California and New York, for example). The key is to know what the rule is ahead of time. With the Clintons, the definition of “is” seems always in flux.
Another conservative value is the possibility of persuasion. As I said, conservatives tend to be driven by ideas, not interest-group or identity politics. They espouse and argue for ideas because they believe it is quite possible to persuade others to agree with them. That may sound odd for me to say, but many politicians and political experts belittle persuasion and believe that politics is simply about race, sex, class, and acculturation. Voter preferences are predetermined, leaving only questions of mechanism and motivation to settle elections. They get this notion from Marx, whether they realize it or not.
Many of the conservatives I know harbor hope that, unlike Hillary Clinton’s views, Barack Obama’s aren’t set it stone. They notice that a couple of Obama’s economic advisors are market-friendly, that he has effectively argued against her proposed federal mandate for individual purchase of health insurance, and that his rhetoric on trade policy isn’t as strident as hers. There’s an irony, here: while conservatives recoiled from Bill Clinton’s personal behavior, they did see him defend free trade and change his mind on welfare reform and investment taxes. They doubt whether Hillary is persuadable on much of anything important.
Finally, conservatives see glimmers of hope in Obama’s unwillingness to settle for simplistic racial categories and wallow in grievance politics. Perhaps theirs is a forlorn hope, but surely that’s better than a foregone conclusion.
So don’t be surprised when you see or hear conservatives rooting for Obama. They have good reasons to, reasons that appeal to both the head and heart. Plus, there’s the delicious prospect of ushering the Clintons out of our collective lives for a good, long while.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.