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We usually have to wait until after the Democrats emerge victorious at the polls for the Beltway finger-waggers to begin warning them not to be too ambitious, not to do too much, not to actually follow through on the proposals they presented to the voters. But this year, it's starting early: Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, penned a 3,300-word cover story warning that, as the subtitle says, "America remains a center-right nation -- a fact that a President Obama would forget at his peril." Because, God forbid, a progressive candidate who wins an election should actually keep the promises he made to the American people.
It's an interesting contrast to what happens when Republicans win. While Democratic victories are seen as signifying nothing about the electorate's fundamental beliefs, Republican victories are inevitably described as revealing profound sea changes in American ideology. When the GOP took over both houses of Congress in 1994, The New York Times wrote the next day, "[T]he country has unmistakably moved to the right." The Washington Post agreed, saying, "The huge Republican gains also marked a clear shift to the right in the country."
And after Election Day 2004, the Times intoned, "[I]t is impossible to read President Bush's re-election with larger Republican majorities in both houses of Congress as anything other than the clearest confirmation yet that this is a center-right country -- divided yes, but with an undisputed majority united behind his leadership." The article was headlined, "An Electoral Affirmation of Shared Values." The Los Angeles Times agreed that the election proved voters "don't believe that the Democrats share their values." Chris Matthews wondered, "Can the Democrats ever connect with the country's cultural majority?"
Yet we heard nothing of the sort from elite media outlets in 2006, when Democrats retook both houses of Congress -- no grand proclamations that the country had moved left, no ruminations on whether conservatism was an electorally bankrupt ideology. Instead, the news media focused on a few conservative Democratic candidates who won seats in Republican areas, despite the fact that they were far outnumbered by the new Democratic members who held traditionally progressive positions.
In other words, when Republicans win, we're told that Democrats need to move to the center, because the country is too conservative for them. When Democrats win, on the other hand, we're told that... Democrats need to move to the center. Their victory must have been some kind of accident -- it couldn't have been because the public actually agreed with what they want to do.
So what kind of evidence does Meacham offer for his oh-so-familiar thesis? First off, he says, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton didn't accomplish everything they wanted to. Interesting -- but last time I checked, liberal programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Clinton's expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit remain pretty popular. And remind me how George Bush's 2005 attempt to privatize Social Security -- a longstanding conservative goal -- went.
Then Meacham gives us the oft-noted fact that when asked by pollsters, more people will call themselves "conservative" than "liberal." The problem with this is that people who know a lot about politics -- like journalists -- assume that ordinary people have the same interpretation of those terms as political junkies have. But the truth, as nearly a half-century of political science research has made clear, is that a significant portion of the public has little or no idea of what these terms mean in the political world. A third of the public can't even tell you which of the two major parties is the "conservative" one.
See more stories tagged with: newsweek, jon meachem
Paul Waldman is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America. His next book, Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn From Conservative Success, will be released in the spring.
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