THE AUH20 TRAP:

The 'Safety' Trap: Democrats followed the party's center-seeking presidential hopefuls into an ideological no-man's land. (Rick Perlstein, November 11, 2002, Mother Jones)

Consider recent history, and a single conclusion becomes increasingly clear: It is the queer politics of the presidential selection process that may have gotten the Democrats into Tuesday's mess.

Succeeding in presidential politics is not, except on the most elementary level, a question of getting on the majority side of the polls. There are all sorts of elections a successful candidate has to surmount. There is the money election, in which donors vote with dollars -- which explains why a Democratic politician will shy from populist economic positions even if those positions score like gangbusters in the polls. And then there's another, far more mysterious, election; an election more in the ancient, Calvinist sense of the word, the process by which the Almighty chooses souls for eternal grace. Call it the pundit primary; it is the process by which presidential contenders get anointed by the journalistic elite as "serious" contenders, months before the first primary even takes place. It is this election that John Edwards and all the other hopefuls are engaged in now. Follow the polls to a muscular progressivism? Take on the President on a matter of "national security"? The punditry gang'll cut candidates off at the knees before they even get started.

Mr. Perlstein wrote a terrific book about Barry Goldwater and the resurgence of conservatism in America, but one wonders if maybe he learned a bad lesson from it. He’s right that the Democrats’ pursuit of the presidency is antithetical to the kind of leftist politics he favors, but seemingly quite wrong about whether Democrat fortunes will be revived if they embrace that leftism. It’s true that before the GOP could return to real power it had to return to its conservative roots, but it’s also the case that statist liberalism was a failure. So, in 1980, when Ronald Reagan said the same things as Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater had said, he won not so much because of who he was or what he said, though they both mattered, but because the other side was so obviously wrong. But it’s important to note, this was 50 years after Republicans first said that the New Deal Democrats were making a mistake.
Posted by Orrin Judd at November 29, 2002 1:26 PM