The Empty Center of American Politics Descends on New Hampshire

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Charles Krupa/AP Photo

Tulsi Gabbard may be positioning herself to run as an independent candidate one year from now, which could conceivably help Donald Trump cling to his office.

MANCHESTER, NEW HAMPSHIRE – One of the pleasures of New Hampshire is the sheer density of its politics as its presidential primary draws near, particularly this year with sixteen candidates still in the running. The state is so small, with most of its voters clustered in its Southern third, that it’s actually hard to visit without running smack into some campaign event, whether you knew it was happening or not.

So it was for me yesterday, as I checked into my hotel and discovered that the Problem Solver Convention, put on by the forlornly bipartisan group No Labels, was unfolding in one of the ballrooms. The event featured Maine Senator Susan Collins, who next year will have to explain to her state’s voters how voting to confirm both Brett Kavanaugh and Neal Gorsuch won’t diminish reproductive freedoms. It featured four Democratic House members from the party’s small center-right, and four Republicans from districts (three in the Northeast) that historically elected Republican moderates and now are saddled with them.

Mainly, though, it featured the most marginal of presidential candidates—those in no position to turn down an invitation to address roughly seven hundred New Hampshire voters, regardless of whether their own politics actually occupy the vanishing center of American politics.

Joe Biden wasn’t among the cattle call, which was unfortunate for all involved, since the most attendees seemed considerably older than the former veep (truly, the room was a sea of white hair), and most likely harbored fond memories of Eisenhower the Good. The candidates who did attend were Democrats John Delaney and Marianne Williamson, Republican Bill Weld, and Democrat-Maybe-Going-Independent Tulsi Gabbard.

For their part, both Delaney and Weld do plunk themselves down, more or less, between the two parties’ mainstreams; Gabbard and Williamson, not so much, and I can only suspect how much this pained such No Labels leaders as Joe Lieberman (who must abhor Gabbard’s anti-interventionism in every fiber of his being) and Bill Galston. For such paladins of the once-powerful third way, who had provided intellectual heft for the Clinton administration (that’s Galston), or who had killed the public option in Obamacare (that’s Lieberman), having to present Gabbard and Williamson to the somewhat bewildered seniors must have been a distasteful task.

Not that the candidates didn’t try to connect with the crowd. Williamson stressed the theme of common American identity, which seemed both strategically smart in general and particularly attuned to the audience. However—well, see for yourselves:

 “You’re not just black, you’re also an American!” she declared. “You’re not just gay, you’re also an American! You’re not just trans, you’re also an American! You’re not just Jewish, you’re also an American.”

The crowd—basically, octogenarian white Christians—was not stirred (and perhaps wondered if either she or they had strayed into the wrong room).

Alone among the candidates who came, Gabbard matters. Not because she’s a factor in the Democratic race, but because she may be positioning herself to run as an independent candidate one year from now, which could conceivably help Donald Trump cling to his office. Endeavoring to create distance between her fellow Democrats and herself, she bemoaned that as a Democrat she “had to choose one side” even as she took her oath of office to uphold the Constitution. If taking that oath didn’t sufficiently establish her nonpartisan bona fides, she also mentioned how often she’d recited the pledge of allegiance.

Sensing that her opposition to U.S. military interventions might not go down well with this audience, Gabbard alluded to them only briefly in her prepared remarks. But that stance will surely be the basis of her independent candidacy should she end up running against both Trump and, say, Pete Buttigieg, with whom she tangled in the last televised debate.

For which reason, when her speech was done and she met with the press, I asked her how she’d differentiate her views on foreign and military policy from those of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, whose record and positions against the longstanding militarization of U.S. foreign policy are well established (though they don’t share Gabbard’s enthusiasm for Indian President Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalism). “You’ve got to look at the details of what they’re advocating for,” she said, but “there are two very specific things that set me apart from the rest of the candidates who are running for president.” Those, she said, were her concern to prevent nuclear war—for which reason she’d meet with Russian President Putin and Chinese President Xi—and her belief that we need to stop playing the role of the world’s policeman.

What I take this to mean is that if the Democrats nominate Sanders or Warren, that might well take the breeze from the sails of a Gabbard independent candidacy. For Democrats concerned about their eventual nominee’s electability, and who remember Ralph Nader circa 2000, this is not a negligible consideration.

Gabbard’s presentation aside, the primary takeaway from No Labels’ Problem Solver Convention is that the pols who did appear on the stage could list few if any policies on which they actually agreed. Asked about infrastructure, the House members noted that they supported more but disagreed as to how to fund it. What they did mention, repeatedly, was their interactions. They talk to each other. They like each other. Gabbard told how she’d delivered Macadamia Nut Toffee (cooked up by her mother) to all of her 434 House colleagues.

At a time when the Democratic base wants to take on the plutocrats that have misshaped our economy, and the Republicans have become a cult for a bigoted president with authoritarian tendencies, the quest for middle ground in American politics recalls nothing so much as the Constitutional Union Party of 1860.

Unwilling to side with Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans, who sought to keep slavery from expanding into the Western territories, and the two wings of the Democrats, who wanted either to preserve or expand slavery, the Constitutional Unionists came together from the depleted ranks of two extinct political parties—the Whigs and the Know-Nothings—and put forth a ticket committed to taking no position on slavery at all, which had been the very reason those old parties had become extinct. Like the No Labelistas of today, they didn’t grasp that the nation was finally grappling with the fundamental question of its identity, and that retreating into a past when the nation was able to elide that question had ceased to be an option.

As I said, New Hampshire is distinguished by the density of its politics, and it was a particularly dense gathering that I encountered here yesterday.