There's an Update on Security for Biden's Gaza Port and a New 'Peacekeeping...
Biden Blows Off Respects for Murdered New York City Police Officer
New York City Councilwoman Gets Ratioed Into Oblivion Over One Question
Federal Court Makes Major Ruling on Ballot Verification in Pennsylvania
Sam Bankman-Fried Sentenced in Massive Crypto Fraud Case
‘No Tampons, No Peace!’: Panic at Vanderbilt University Sit-In As Protestors Realize It...
Charlotte Radio Host Speaks Out About His Interview With KJP That Made Headlines
Trump, Biden Will Both Be in New York on Thursday...but for Very Different...
Who Will Replace Mike Gallagher? Poll Shows It's Pro-Trump Alex Bruesewitz’s 'Race to...
Flashback: Two Cycles After Running on Gore's Ticket, Lieberman Endorses McCain at GOP...
Here's When Impeachment Articles Against Mayorkas Will Be Presented to the Senate
Tennessee Music Venue to Host ‘Trans Day Of Vengeance’ Event One Year After...
There Was Very Little Pete Buttigieg Was Able to Tell Us About Bridge...
An Illegal Alien Encouraged Others to Invade American Homes. Here's What Happened Next.
Time for Another Bizarre, Easily-Disprovable Lie From Joe Biden
OPINION

Campaign 2012 in a Nutshell: Wrong Ideas Vs. No Ideas

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

Charlotte, N.C. -- Going by the conventional rules of American politics, the Democratic Convention this week was an unmitigated disaster. And, going by the same rules, GOP convention was a disaster, too. So, either the rules of American politics have fundamentally changed, or at least one of the parties is taking an enormous gamble.

Advertisement

Since the Nixon years, the GOP has enjoyed a marked advantage over the Democrats at the presidential level. Cultural issues -- race, religion, abortion, patriotism -- have worked to the Republicans' advantage. Until Barack Obama's election in 2008, no Democrat has won the presidency without aggressively adapting to that fact.

Jimmy Carter, a Southern evangelical, defeated a very moderate Vice President Gerald Ford at a moment when the GOP was still reeling from the Watergate scandal and Ford's pardon of Nixon. Still, it's easy to forget that Carter was the choice of what would come to be known as the "Christian Right" (historian Steven Hayward reminds me that Carter got a lavishly generous reception on the fledgling "700 Club").

At the beginning of the general election campaign, Ford was behind 33 points and by the end had very nearly caught up with Carter. Had Carter not cast himself as a pious Southern veteran, small business owner, and conservative-leaning Democrat (opposed to busing, muddled on abortion), or if the GOP had not nominated such a liberal candidate so closely tied to the Nixon presidency, it's quite possible the Republicans would have won in 1976.

Since then, any Democrat who tried to run as an unapologetic liberal, particularly on cultural issues, lost. In 1992, the Democrats seemed to have figured that out. They nominated Bill Clinton, a pro-death penalty Southerner who wanted abortion to be "safe, legal and rare" and who campaigned against the "something for nothing" welfare state politics of his own party. He picked fights -- often symbolic, occasionally substantive -- with the left to prove he was a centrist.

Advertisement

Thanks to a host of complex reasons, many of them having to do with George W. Bush's mixed political legacy, the Democrats no longer feel the need to play Clintonian games. They yanked the "rare" language out of the abortion plank of the platform, supporting instead abortion on demand. Indeed, a layman watching the speeches from abortion activists, and more importantly the reactions of the delegates, would conclude that the ancestral party of the Free Silver movement had morphed into the free abortion movement. It's a remarkable shift given that the electorate is more pro-life today than it was when Bill Clinton ran in 1992.

On the symbolism front, in what even leading Democrats admit was a spectacular display of self-inflicted stupidity, they managed to scrub any mention of God from the Democratic platform. They also removed support for Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. When they realized how grievously idiotic these unforced errors were, they tried to fix them by amending the document. The result was an ugly moment where the delegates voted three times against, in effect, God and Jerusalem, until the chairman of the convention, L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa simply steamrolled his own party like some Politburo bully.

Advertisement

It's an unspoken rule of politics that you're in a bad place when you're renouncing God on TV -- three times! Even Peter stayed away from the cameras when he renounced Jesus.

Meanwhile, the Republicans seem to have become Dukakified. It was Michael Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, who insisted that the election should be entirely about "competence, not ideology." Romney has avoided saying that in so many words, but it's certainly how he's campaigning. After running to the right in the primaries and boldly picking Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate, Romney bizarrely seems to have retreated to an ideological and even intellectual crouch.

Though he doesn't say it explicitly, the tone and tenor of Romney's convention speech suggested that Obama failed because didn't have the right resume, not because he has the wrong ideas. Stuart Stevens, Romney's top strategist, has dismayed many on the right by operating according to the theory that Romney mustn't do anything to offend the delicate sensibilities of some statistical abstraction of a female voter in the Ohio suburbs. Listening to the Romney speech, you'd have no idea he picked a principled, fearless and brilliant conservative lightning rod as a running mate.

Advertisement

If Stevens' theory of the election is right, then the GOP convention was brilliantly executed. But that is a huge gamble -- as huge as Obama's bet that Americans have moved left. Right now, however, it looks too much like a contest between people with the wrong ideas against people without any.

Join the conversation as a VIP Member

Recommended

Trending on Townhall Videos