Gingrich supporters in South Carolina (Photo by Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos/New York Magazine)
This photo from a Jonathan Chait article in New York Magazine captures a central truth of the Republican race: it’s been a real downer. Newt Gingrich may describe himself as “cheerful,” but the Newtser is far from a happy warrior. In fact, the entire Republican field is in a funk. Debates are BYOR — bring your own raincloud. Of course, for every angry audience shot, you could probably dig up a photo of gleeful kids crowding around Ellis the Elephant. But there is truth to this meme of negativity. Not only is it a contrast to Obama’s 2008 campaign, which packed stadiums with excited fans and spawned spontaneous YouTube love letters to the candidate, but it is a contrast to Obama’s 2012 campaign. The president may be looking for a new slogan — “hope” is still on the menu, but an incumbent can’t exactly call for “change” — but he is still pushing the theme of a brighter future. Columnists have compared his most recent push to Reagan’s Morning in America; the Republican candidates, on the other hand, see not sunshine but gathering storm clouds on the horizon.
Ellis the Elephant and Callista Gingrich (Photo by CNN)
There is an element of necessity in the Republican rhetoric. The job of any challenger is to tear down the incumbent, while the sitting president is charged with defining his record in the most positive terms possible. Even Obama, in 2008, positioned himself in opposition to George W. Bush; if Obama was the country’s great hope, Bush was the war-monger who had driven hope into the ground. If you’re trying to convince voters to change horses midstream (or, as it was cleverly recast in one of the left’s few messaging victories, to change horsemen in mid-apocalypse), you’d better argue not only that the horse is too small but that the stream is too deep and swift for the beast in question. Beyond demonizing the opponent himself, the opponent’s entire record — and thus the state of the country — must be tagged as a failure. The GOP’s problem is that it has crossed the line from criticizing the “Obama economy” to painting the entire nation as a gloomy, dismal place.
Will all the negativism stir up the base and drive turnout in November, or will sad-sack voters be saddled with seasonal affective disorder? (Or perhaps it’s election-season affective disorder.) The constant barrage of negativity also threatens to cast a pall on the candidates themselves. It’s no surprise that the (literal) mud thrown in attack ads can splatter even the candidate doing the attacking, but even a general aura of negativity can be a reputation-ruiner. Project gloom long enough and you will be known as the gloomy candidate, as Rick Santorum has been described. “Dismal,” “righteous” and “finger-wagging” are other words often applied to the former senator, though he is hardly the only member of the Eeyore brigade. As Steven Pearlstein writes at the Washington Post, “If all you did was to listen to Republican presidential candidates . . . you would surely be under the impression that the country was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, businesses were barely getting by under the weight of excessive taxation and regulation, and most of the middle class was standing in bread lines.”
The angry resentment on the faces in the New York Magazine photo cannot be solely attributed to standard campaign negativity, however. The downfall of western civilization is not an inherently uplifting topic, but it is one that half the Republican field — Santorum and Gingrich — feels compelled to address. Both men genuinely believe that America is on the edge of a precipice; as Gingrich says, the current “danger to America is greater than anything I dreamed possible after we won the Cold War and the Soviet Union disappeared in December 1991.” A website set up by Winning Our Future, the super PAC supporting Gingrich, announces that “Super Tuesday could absolutely mean Life or Death to America as we know and love it!” Santorum is equally convinced that America’s fate hangs on the results of the 2012 election, though he speaks less of a slide toward socialism than a future straight out of the Book of Revelation. “Satan is attacking the great institutions of America,” he told students at Ave Maria University in 2008. Gingrich may warn against President Obama’s “Kenyan, anti-colonial” radicalism, but no one can beat the Devil himself. Presumably, Beelzebub is working his dark arts through HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, as the administration’s policy on birth control is part of an agenda that is “systematically trying to crush the traditional Judeo-Christian values of America.” If I thought the country was literally going to hell in a handbasket, I would probably be depressed too. Even after George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection, liberals might have joked about moving to Canada, but I can’t remember anyone seriously claiming that the president was ushering in the End of Days. Despite the frequency with which the Republican candidates invoke “American exceptionalism” and promise to “restore America’s greatness,” they have remarkably little faith in the nation and its institutions to survive four more years of Obama. Santorum plainly states that re-electing the president will be “the beginning of the end of freedom in America.” It raises the question: If a country can be destroyed by a middle-aged community organizer from Chicago, was it really that great to begin with?
The candidates’ embrace of the dour and the grim is partly a political calculation — the worse the incumbent looks, the more appealing even a middling challenger appears — but especially in Santorum’s case, it reveals almost a fetish for the apocalyptic. David Brooks, who is no bleeding-heart liberal himself, sums it up perfectly when he writes that the former senator “has a tropism for the tragic”:
The odd thing is that Santorum seems to be enjoying all this. That’s in part because he has a tropism for the tragic. Most of us look past bad events. We want life to look like our photo albums — a bunch of happy faces, editing out all the bad times. But Santorum seems to dwell on misfortune — the enemies the country faces, the depravity closing in on us, the unfair criticism hurled against him, the terrible things that have happened. When the campaign goes into its fallen state, he has the pleasure of seeing his tragic worldview confirmed.
I get the feeling that the people who attend Santorum rallies are big fans of Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series, perhaps the sort of folks who welcome the Tribulation because it signifies the second coming of Christ. The worse the situation gets here on earth, the closer we are drawing to the End of Days — which, if you’re among the chosen, may not be such a bad thing. When the sheep and goats are separated on Judgment Day, you can bet the sheep will be wearing schadenfreude-filled smirks. And when the Obama administration plays into day-of-reckoning prophecies by waging “war on religion,” I suspect Santorum’s public rage disguises a private feeling of vindication: Finally, the evils of the godless left are being exposed.
Less clear is whether Newt Gingrich buys into this Biblical worldview. Certainly the candidate is convinced that his background as a “historian” entitles him to speechify on the Judeo-Christian foundations of America, but Gingrich is also the consummate politician. His campaign is driven by rage, and he surges in the polls when he inveighs against the “media elite” or the “Washington establishment.” If Santorum’s base is angry at the secularization of America, Gingrich’s base is angry at . . . everything. His talent is in channeling that anger, and he engages a more passionate section of the electorate than the cool, businesslike Mitt Romney, whose negativity on the stump is mostly confined to the exigencies of the “Obama economy.” When Romney attempts to emote, the furthest he gets is declaring that “If Barack Obama is reelected, Iran will have a nuclear weapon.” Hand Santorum or Gingrich the same briefing book, and you’ll get a disquisition on electro-magnetic pulses or the imminent dangers to cities like Cleveland. The most Romney can promise is this lukewarm prediction, delivered on Super Tuesday in Boston: “But, on November 6th, we will stand united, not only having won an election, but having saved a future.” Woo. Save that future — but don’t win the future, because that line, depending on who you ask, belongs to either Gingrich or Obama.
The sourness of the Republican race is the polar opposite of the increasingly upbeat attitude coming from the White House. As the man with whom the buck has stopped for the last four years, Obama has a vested interest in cultivating a positive atmosphere; the more positive voters feel, the more likely they will be to endorse the status quo. The unemployment rate has happily obliged, dropping from 8.6 to 8.3 percent in February, and public sentiment has followed:
In an Associated Press-GfK poll last month, 48 percent said they approved of how Obama was handling the economy, up 9 points from December. And 30 percent of Americans described the economy as “good” – a 15-point jump from December and the highest level since the AP-GfK poll first asked the question in 2009.
As his re-election campaign has ramped up, Obama has adopted a pugilistic yet hopeful stance, managing to criticize his rivals while keeping the emphasis on broader themes of “fairness” (what conservatives call class warfare) and “an economy built to last.” He speaks less of the catastrophe that awaits a Republican win in November and more of his own plans for a second term. Washington Post columnist Matt Miller writes that, “last week, the president’s rousing defense of his auto bailout marked the return of the ‘happy warrior’ persona that gives political leaders their greatest appeal, and which Obama too often lacks.” Of course, Obama has the advantage of running unopposed for the Democratic nomination. He has remained largely above the fray, holding his fire until the general election and rarely mentioning his potential challengers by name. This is a luxury not afforded to Romney and company, who have been forced to lace into each other with venom typically reserved for their liberal opponents. The danger of such attacks — Barbara Bush has called this year “the worst campaign I’ve ever seen in my life” — is that they leave the eventual nominee saddled with a record of denouncing aspects of the standard Republican platform. (One wonders whether Barbara Bush, in declaring this year’s campaign “the worst,” is forgetting the Willie Horton ad her husband’s backers ran against Michael Dukakis in 1988.)
Instead of focusing on the perceived shortcomings of the liberal worldview, Gingrich is forced to smear private equity as “vulture capitalism” and Santorum is obliged to dismantle the parts of the Speaker’s legacy — the 1994 takeover of the House, welfare reform — still surrounded by a rosy conservative glow. Arguing over the finer points of conservatism when they could be delivering broader rebuttal of big government, the candidates have revealed chinks in the GOP armor that Obama will surely exploit in the general election. When Obama wants to accuse his opponent of selling out the middle class, he need only cue up video of Rick Santorum going after Mitt Romney. When it’s time to debate health care, Romney’s assertion to Gingrich that “the individual mandate was your idea” will come back to haunt Newt. Forced to argue that their opponents are unelectable, the candidates inadvertently sow doubts that will haunt the party’s standard-bearer in November. In a post-Super Tuesday speech in Alabama, Gingrich declared that “we are staying in this race because I believe it’s going to be impossible for a moderate to win the general election.” Democrats will be all too happy to quote him on that once the Romney-Obama battle heats up. The electorate’s response to all the negativity has been predictable. The percent of Republican voters who view the candidates unfavorably has spiked, and the Times reports that, in an “NBC/Journal survey, four in 10 Americans say the primary process has given them a less favorable impression of the party, with only 12 percent indicating that the season has given them a better impression.”
Despite such internecine warfare, GOP stalwarts are convinced that the party will eventually coalesce around the nominee, whomever it may be. Bob McDonnell, the Republican governor of Virginia, maintained that “I’d love for this to be over sooner rather later so we can focus on the president’s record. But however long it takes, the desire to replace President Obama will motivate conservatives and libertarians in such a significant way.” This sentiment, though widely echoed among the Republican elite, is less of a sure thing than McDonnell might hope. Anti-Obama rage is surely a motivator for conservatives, and it will certainly drive Tea Party types to the polls, but how potent a force is it among those who don’t see the president as the anti-Christ? No less a dyed-in-the-wool conservative than Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel makes the following observation:
A senior campaign aide airily dismissed Mr. Romney’s Super Tuesday weaknesses, noting: “The areas we didn’t do as well in are rural and they are more anti-Obama.” Meaning, who else are these guys going to vote for come November?
How about: no one. They could stay home.
Anger worked for the GOP in 2010, when Tea Party fervor crested in an anti-incumbent wave that swept Democrats and insufficiently conservative Republicans out of Congress. And the party’s disparate factions could still unite behind the eventual candidate, as Super Tuesday interviews by the New York Times suggest. Reporter Kim Severson describes voters as “unanimous on one point . . . They wanted a candidate who could defeat President Obama.” Tina Kreimer, a Georgia Republican, is quoted as vowing, “I’d pick the geese in the parking lot before I’d pick Obama.” However, though Republican representatives in states like Ohio have lost primaries to challengers from the right, in 2012 the Tea Party fire is burning at a lower grade. Elections in a country split down the middle are decided by turnout; will anger be enough to bring out occasional or first-time voters? Obama won in 2008 by mobilizing segments of the population — minorities and young people — that were not even registered the year before, and his campaign apparatus is rightfully legendary. New York Times columnist Charles Blow is bullish on Obama’s chances, writing that “[t]he elections will boil down to a duel between anger and optimism, and in general elections optimism wins. Energy wins. Vision wins.” Real Clear Politics, a slightly more neutral source (Blow is uber-liberal even by the Times’ standards), offers a telling distinction between Republican and Democratic supporters:
The bulk of Tea Party activity in 2010 was inspired by intense anger at government; it rose up out of negativity. But each of the Obama volunteers RCP interviewed for this story insisted that they are fueled by a positive message. They had nothing to say about Romney or any of the other Republicans, just that they were focused on supporting the president.
To some extent, Romney is aware of this positivity gap. Unidentified aides tell the Times that he “has become too mired in the nuts and bolts of how to win the nomination rather than offering an inspiring argument for why he should.” Indeed, “inspiring” is not the word I would choose to describe Romney, who waxes about trees being the right height and whose most rousing line on the stump is that “real change is finally on the way.” Of course, insisting that declining unemployment is a mirage, or that the uptick in consumer optimism is misplaced, is not exactly the way to rev up a crowd.
Obama campaigns in Michigan in 2012: Still cheerier than Gingrich's crowd (Getty Images)
Even Obama cannot match the enthusiasm stoked by his 2008 campaign. There is truth to his acknowledgement that he is older and grayer, no longer the blank-slate candidate of hope and change. (If you’re looking for confirmation that the bloom is off the rose, note that Shepard Fairey of Obama-poster fame just pleaded guilty to charges stemming from his “borrowing” of an AP photo.) Obama spoke to stadiums full of people in 2008; crowds like that are not dime-a-dozen in 2012. But this picture, of an Obama rally this year in Michigan, nevertheless makes the case that, compared to the Gingrich crowd in the New York photo, the Democratic Party is still the place to be.
. . . So Well Read. . . 