They'll spin you right round, baby, right round. After last night's decisive refutation of the GOP's governing philosophy, the punditocracy is assuring us that the electorate delivered a strong message favoring … conservatism?
They'll spin you right round, baby, right round. After last night's decisive refutation of the GOP's governing philosophy, the punditocracy is assuring us that the electorate delivered a strong message favoring … conservatism?
A week ago, The New York Times kicked off the spin by suggesting that wins by Heath Shuler and other so-called centrist Democrats “could come at a political price, which may include tensions in the party between its new centrists and its more liberal political base.” And last night, Larry Kudlow deployed it. “Look at blue dog conservative Dem victories,” wrote Kudlow, “and look at Northeast liberal GOP defeats. The changeover in the House may well be a conservative victory, not a liberal one.”
That's one way to explode “the myth of the rational voter” -- suggest that when they mean to elect conservatives, they vote Democratic. Give the right its due, though; that's a smart response. By immediately spinning the election as an affirmation of conservative values, they gave Democrats already seeking a way to prove their lack of liberalism an easy out. (Rahm Emanuel, bless his ruthless little heart, has already promised to lock liberals out of the halls of power. With leaders like these, Democrats hardly need opponents.)
But the conservative election meme is a myth. Hard-right ballot initiatives, from the abortion ban in South Dakota to the gay marriage ban in Arizona, went down to defeat. It's the first time that's happened to an anti-gay marriage ballot initiative. Meanwhile, the stem cell initiative in Missouri passed.
More tellingly, every Democrat elected supports raising the minimum wage. They all support stem cell research. Only nine describe themselves as pro-life. And the most conservative Democrats, mainly those running in the South, largely went down to defeat. In Tennessee, Harold Ford, whose campaign focused on his church-going ways and conservative values, lost. Jim Webb is up by a few thousand votes. Meanwhile, unabashed progressives like Sherrod Brown, Ben Cardin, Sheldon Whitehouse, and former socialist Bernie Sanders cruised to victory. As Tom Schaller has noted, the flip-rate in the South was a meager five percent. The real transformations came in the liberal Northeast, where a slew of not-quite-left-enough Republicans were felled by a phalanx of progressive candidates, and the Rust Belt, where economic populists took out a series of traditional conservatives.
So from whence comes the spin? As is often the case, the press has simply become infatuated with a single candidate and blown his appeal into some sort of definitional philosophy. This year's lucky posterboy is Heath Shuler, running in North Carolina's 11th. Shuler's a pro-life, God-fearing, family-loving, former Redskins quarterback who won't publicly commit himself to voting for Nancy Pelosi as speaker. But is Shuler actually … conservative?
On social issues, sure. But on economics, Shuler is a full-throated populist. A bit later today, he'll be joining arch-liberal Sherrod Brown and the United Steelworkers to give a press conference on how he turned opposition to NAFTA into a winning campaign issue. That's a much leftier, and these days, rarer position than opposition to abortion. Shuler's attacking the elite consensus and center-right mainstream on economics, and we're supposed to buy that as conservative?
Maybe the oddest element of this election is the recalibration of the ideological spectrum. Economic leftism -- distinct even from economic liberalism -- didn't get anyone tagged as too liberal. Indeed, such opinions were entirely ignored, replaced by a focus on whether the candidate in question professed belief in God and faith in fetuses. Given that a Democratic Congress isn't likely to bring too many anti-abortion or gay marriage bills to the floor, they'll have precious little opportunity to exercise their social conservatism. Their economic beliefs, however, will get much more play in a Congress aching to, at long last, turn its attention to health care, jobs, inequality, corporate regulation, and all the other domestic issues Democrats so love to address.
In fact, the right may have painted itself into a corner here. They sought to limit Democratic movement by forcing them to embrace the label of conservatism. But by defining it solely on cultural grounds and naming populists like Shuler as the so-called “Good Democrats,” they've shifted the acceptable center on the economic issues likely to occupy the Congress sharply to the left. Someone should've told them: If you spin yourself far enough right, eventually you end up on the left.
Ezra Klein is a Prospect Writing Fellow.
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