Barack Obama’s speech last night was not, to my ears, the greatest political oration since Henry V’s Crispin Day speech (as Harold put it) – in many respects, it was a comfortably familiar Democratic speech, and all the better for that. What was remarkable about it was how much political ground it was able to cover and to claim, and to put it all together without contradiction. Within one speech, there was:
- Steady middle-class quasi-populism: “end the tax breaks for companies that ship our jobs overseas and put a middle-class tax cut into the pockets of working Americans.”
- "Wine-Track” high-mindedness: “The time has come for a president…who won’t just tell you what you want to hear, but what you need to know.”
- A long paean to organizing worthy of Paul Wellstone’s refrain, “Work like hell and organize!”: “In the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.”
- And, woven through it, the appeal to national unity and reaching out to independents and Republicans.
And it was entirely coherent because the story he was telling was about the construction of a coalition, from the base up. At one point, instead of contrasting divisiveness with “unity,” his usual formula, he promised “to end the political strategy that’s been all about division, and instead make it about addition.”
And that’s where the huge turnout matters. The Democratic coalition is an expanding one; the Republican coalition a shrinking one. As a coalition shrinks, it becomes a more concentrated version of itself – more conservative, more insular, more unappealing to the majority. As a coalition expands, by addition, to claim the center, it has to hold onto its core values but the language and tone has to be one that can accommodate and reach those who have been abandoned by the shrinking coalition on the other side. “Making it about addition” is the story of that process.
And in that sense, it is not such a bad thing that the nomination process begins in Iowa and New Hampshire, two states that have been at the center of the additive, expansive coalition that is the Democratic Party today. Iowa gained 70,000 new registered Democrats in the last four years; New Hampshire 45,000. (The high turnout was an extension of that process of expansion.) And in each state, Democrats gained two congressional seats. Yet each state voted for Bush once in the previous two elections. In the political sense, they are entirely representative of the moment.
When one party pursues a base-mobilization strategy, and it seems to succeed for a period of time, it’s tempting to think, as it has been for many netroots activists, that that’s the strategy that works. But in fact, if one party pursues a narrowing strategy, the opportunity arises to pursue an expansive, additive strategy. Obama has described it perfectly – it’s not a matter of bringing everyone together in the middle, but of reaching out confidently from a base of solid ideals, to reach people who share those ideals, or could share those ideals, even if they don’t fully share the party identification.
--Mark Schmitt
