Has the Republican Party’s strategy of obstruction during the Obama years really been that shrewd?
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An interesting debate emerged yesterday between New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait and Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein. After Chait wrote a piece calling Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, “more strategically shrewd” than his predecessors. As Chait sees it, McConnell’s shrewd strategy has been to keep his caucus in lockstep opposition to anything Democrats would be willing to compromise over in order to grind the legislative process to a halt, as well as prevent the Democrats from being able to claim any bipartisan victories:
This dynamic — that voters do not follow the details of legislating, but form crude heuristic judgments based on the two parties’ ability to agree — is the essential strategic premise that has guided Republicans since 2009. Mitch McConnell has, astonishingly, explained this strategy openly on at least two occasions. “It was absolutely critical that everybody be together because if the proponents of the bill were able to say it was bipartisan, it tended to convey to the public that this is O.K., they must have figured it out,” he told the New York Times in 2010.
It’s an interesting theory, but as Jonathan Bernstein points out in a pair of posts, this rests on two big assumptions, “The first is that voters have some sort of intermediate-level understanding of what happens in Washington…” That is to say they pay attention enough be grumpy there aren’t more bipartisan compromises and blame it on the Democrats, but not enough to know that the Republicans refusal to compromise is the main culprit.
Do voters really think like that? Well some might, but probably not that many. Instead most voters are strong partisans who will side with the talking points that their party sticks to while the rest tend not to pay much attention to things like the finer points of the legislative process at all. Those folks might get mad and vote against the president’s party if the economy is in recession, but they won’t be voting based on failed tax reform compromises.
Bernstein then points out what I would consider the bigger flaw in Chait’s argument, that politics is really just about winning election:
Elections are important, but politics is also about who-gets-what—policy outcomes. There is a clear downside to McConnell-type rejection of compromise only because compromise legitimates the majority and its policies: Such rejectionism destroys any bargaining leverage the minority might have.
In other words the McConnell rejection strategy meant that important legislation passed in the Obama era would lack a bipartisan shine, but Republicans would have almost no influence on what it would look like in the end. Had Republicans cooperated with Democrats on say health care reform they could had kept out birth control coverage or kept subsidies at a lower level or made any number of aspects of the end product more to their liking. Instead the opted for unified opposition, which meant the finished product of Obamacare came right out of the center part of Democratic Party. As David Frum pointed out back in 2010, “This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.”
But shouldn’t this lack of influence be worth it in terms of electoral advantage? In Chait’s analysis it at least could be, but recent history doesn’t exactly bear this out. The structural factors in 2010 were heavily weighted against the Democrats: there was a struggling economy, a mid-term election, and unified control of government which all weigh heavily against any incumbent party in the White House. And furthermore since 2012 resulted in Obama being easily re-elected, isn’t McConnell’s whole project to keep Obama to one term a dismal failure?
It is quite possible that a Republican Party willing to work with President Obama would still have still seen big gains in 2010 while also being able to make the big reforms of 2009-2010 more to their liking. Which would mean that McConnell’s “shrewd” strategy was a Pyrrhic Victory at best, and quite possibly a major blunder.
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Dump Republicans and Democrats. Go Libertarian and check out http://www.ncc-1776.org and http://www.afr.org for some real alternatives.
Wes, I just ordered a bumper sticker …. “Not a Republican, Not a Democrat, I’m an American and I Want My Country Back”
There should be one that says, “I Don’t Confuse My Country With The Idiots Who Run It.”
Who knows, someone may grab that for a bumper sticker …
“Instead most voters are strong partisans who will side with the talking points that their party sticks to….” I assume you mean “most voters who are affiliated with the party.” Most voters, and at record numbers, are actually independents with very little party affiliation. Fair or not, dissatisfaction is an enormous vote-getter. A lot of people are dissatisfied with all sorts of things in America and are looking for people to blame. Obama and the Democrats are a natural target, whether they deserve so much blame or not. Doesn’t EVERY opposition party depend on blaming the incumbent party for everything… Read more »
You are right that lots of people call themselves independents these days, but most of those people lean towards one party or the other in terms of how they vote, as in, “I’m an independent, but I’d never vote for a Democrat!” (Yes I’ve heard that from people while door knocking.) This is one of the big reasons why we don’t have landslide presidential elections much anymore like we use to. Basically we are pretty close to a 50/50 nation. As to “Doesn’t EVERY opposition party depend on blaming the incumbent party for everything that’s wrong?” Yeah basically, the thing… Read more »