The American Elections of 2012

Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier, Steven E. Schier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415807104
• eBook ISBN: 9781136332692
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The 2012 American elections were highly competitive, with the unusually close partisan balance making the elections an opportunity for each of the two major parties. This book assembles leading political scientists and political journalists to explain the 2012 election results and their implications for America's future.

In addition to assessing election results, the book examines the consequences of the large ambitions of the Obama presidency and the political and policy risks entailed in the pursuit of those ambitions. It also explores Congressional elections and policymaking since 2008, and how they affected election results in 2012. The book promises a more coherent focus than that evident in similar edited works, achieved through a limited number of chapters and clear definition of chapter content.

1 Obama’s Coalition

How the President Customized His Campaign and Cobbled Together His Majority

John F. Harris and James Hohmann

As the 2012 presidential election got underway, the answers to two large questions at the center of American politics were shrouded in uncertainty. Or perhaps a more precise way of putting it is that plenty of commentators and strategists—sitting at diverse places on the political spectrum, citing an abundance of evidence and theories—were plenty certain of their answers, but no solid consensus had emerged that seemed especially convincing to fair-minded people who did not have a strong personal or political stake in the argument. By the end of the 2012 election, President Barack Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney—narrow in many of the most pivotal swing states but emphatic in its broad national reach—had started to provide some insight on two tantalizing questions.

The first question was, who is Barack Obama? Well into his first term, the 44th president remained an ideologically opaque figure. No one could doubt that he was a man of clear progressive instincts with ambitious goals for expanding and reforming the role of government in American life. But he had steadfastly resisted allowing himself to be defined with more precision. Was he a descendant of the “Third Way” school of politicians, like Bill Clinton in the United States or Tony Blair in the United Kingdom, both of whom saw their task as modernizing progressive parties and moderating the more liberal impulses of party activists and special interests? Or was he trying to place himself in the same lineage of presidents with more epic ideological aims—a latter-day Franklin Delano Roosevelt? At different moments and in different moods, Obama sent opposite signals. When pressed to reconcile these contradictions, he and his advisors would simply reject the premise of the inquiry, saying Obama was not interested in ideology but regarded himself solely as a “pragmatist.” But this was a singularly unsatisfying answer. Pragmatic to what ends? Pragmatism is equivalent to aimlessness unless it is harnessed to a coherent vision of governance—of articulated problems and proposed remedies. What’s more, the most successful pragmatists in the modern presidency—including centrist Bill Clinton and ideologue Ronald Reagan—had, by the time they sought reelection, also revealed much about the theory of their situation. That is, it was clear what they regarded as the central elements of their coalition, and they had established signature strategies and techniques for advancing their policy goals.

Obama, by contrast, by the beginning of 2012, had not established anything that could be called “Obamaism”—neither a clear ideological program nor a distinctive political style. In one sense it was odd that a president who had presided over some $800 billion of federal spending—“the New New Deal,” as journalist Michael Grunwald has called it—and also passed an overhaul and expansion of the federal government’s role in health care could be ideologically undefined (Grunwald 2012, 121). But so it was. On the right, Obama inspired paroxysms of rage from people who believed he had revealed himself as a leftist of unrestrained ambition. Among liberals, Obama was often viewed with disappointment—someone who had embraced more continuity than reversal of Bush-Cheney on national security policy and who on domestic policy was too timid and accommodating toward the GOP opposition. How could both critiques be true?

And yet in part because of Obama’s discomfort with articulating his political philosophy—with finding clear and compelling language to harness his specific programs to a larger argument about the proper role of government—this murkiness flourished, perhaps even in Obama’s own mind. On the big questions, he seemed to still be improvising, finding his opportunities in the moment. In fairness to him, an improvisational style was an understandable response to a political environment that remained uncommonly fluid.

And so there was the other great question hanging over 2012 at the outset: where lies the center of American politics? And the natural follow-up to that question: on what trajectory is that center moving? The 2012 election occurred following three consecutive disruptive elections. In 2006, Democrats dethroned a 12-year Republican majority in the House of Representatives. In 2008, Obama made history by becoming the nation’s first African American president, in the process consolidating Democratic control of the House and ending eight years of Republican control of the executive branch. In 2010, Republicans reversed the tide by reclaiming control of the House and putting sharp limits on Obama’s power. Indeed, the two years after the 2010 midterms were a legislative dead zone in which Obama had no power to pass large initiatives and during which he and House Speaker John Boehner failed to craft a “grand bargain” on fiscal issues. With the 2008 election pointing in one direction about the course of the country and the 2010 pointing the opposite way, it seemed reasonable to expect that 2012 might help settle the question.

The 2012 election did in fact do its job. We now have a much clearer picture of Obama the politician and also a more confident basis for understanding the character of the American electorate in a presidential context.

Who is Barack Obama? The evidence, not merely from the election but from the totality of his first term, including the critical post-election transition to a second term during which this chapter has been written, suggests we should think of him as a what-the-market-will-bear interest-group liberal.

The American electorate, meanwhile, seems to have shifted leftward—not dramatically, it seems, but decisively—in a fashion that forces us to rethink longstanding assumptions. For a generation, the most successful national leaders have tended to think of the United States as a center-right nation. For Democrats such as Bill Clinton, that meant practicing defensive politics. He believed he could push a progressive agenda most effectively by taking advantage of a contradiction: Americans liked conservative rhetoric, promoting small and modest government, but were steadfast in liking many specific big-government programs such as Social Security and Medicare and other programs aimed at education and the environment. Conservatives such as George W. Bush faced opposite circumstances. He could take the rhetorical offensive on such issues as support of traditional social values and a robust national security, so long as he steered clear of programmatic extremism— epitomized by his failed 2005 proposal to partially privatize Social Security.

The 2012 election results do not suggest that the country has moved dramatically leftward on questions about the size of government—good thing, too, given that there is hardly the money to fund such a vision. But it is equally clear that it would be hard for any Republican, much less Mitt Romney, to get elected by promising even in nonspecific terms to dramatically reduce the size of government. More broadly, Obama won reelection by going on both the rhetorical and substantive offensive in ways that Bill Clinton, who proclaimed in 1996 that “the era of big government is over,” never felt that he could do. No one in 2004, when George W. Bush boosted his turnout operation with targeted appeals to social conservatives, could have imagined that eight years later it would be Democrats who would be willing to talk publicly about their support for same-sex marriage, and it would be Republicans who would just as soon avoid the subject. Even the Obama of 2008, when he clung to Bill Clinton’s “safe, legal, and rare” formulation about abortion rights and generally tried to reduce the profile of this issue, would have been surprised to learn that four years later he would give starring roles to leaders of the abortion rights movement. The leaders of Planned Parenthood and NARAL/Pro-Choice America both had prime-time slots at the Democratic National Convention and played prominent surrogate roles in the general election. Democrats plainly did not feel that they were on the defensive on these or numerous other issues. By contrast, the high point of Romney’s general election campaign, his strong performance in the first presidential debate in Denver, came when he sounded most like a Republican version of Bill Clinton—practicing a defensive-minded politics of reassurance, separating himself tonally and even substantively from traditional Republican politics, and presenting himself as a non-ideological creature of the center.

So what do we mean when we describe Obama as a what-the-market-will-bear liberal? An explanation of what the 44th president is not may help sharpen the definition.

He is not, first of all, a great national uniter. This was, of course, the promise of Obama the first time he sprang into national notice, with his famous keynote address to the Democratic National Convention at Boston in 2004. He made an appeal then to purge national politics of what he described as needless malice and blind partisanship, in favor of a new politics that sought sensible common ground and rejected classifying people as belonging to “red America” and “blue America.” This was all the premise of his 2008 campaign—that his unique personal story and commitment to a new synthesis would transcend Washington’s stale divisions and create new governing coalitions. What became of this original vision—whether it was thwarted by intransigent and vindictive Republicans or was never more than rhetorical mush in the first instance—is an imponderable. Our own instinct is that Obama was sincere in his promise, but naïve, lacking a deep understanding of Washington and how he might realistically achieve the promise. In any event, by 2012, the notion of winning on a unity message was long gone. To the contrary, Obama, like George W. Bush and his Karl Rove–run campaign of 2004, was more than willing to win by dividing the country on terms favorable to him.

Obama was also not running as a great national educator. That is, he did not view the 2012 campaign as an occasion to attempt systematically to move the electorate to some position where it did not already reside. For instance, Obama believes that climate change presents a mortal threat to the planet. But his efforts early in his first term to promote a policy remedy, with a “cap-and-trade” plan for greenhouse gases, were thwarted in large measure because of the skepticism of moderate Democrats. In 2012, Obama accepted political realities—rather than attempt to change realities through the power of presidential suasion—and rarely talked about climate change, especially in manufacturing-heavy swing states such as Ohio.

Obama is also not a Bill Clinton New Democrat. An irony here is that Clinton in 2012 did more than any other Obama surrogate, by far, to energize Democrats on behalf of the president’s reelection. One can speculate that his reasons may have been at least as much about advancing Hillary Rodham Clinton’s interests as about personal affection for Obama. Still, Clinton likes to be needed and likes being asked for help—and he gave it enthusiastically and effectively. Obama, who doesn’t especially like asking for help, needed it badly enough to ask. The days of 2008, when Obama aides privately would speak almost as disdainfully of Clinton and his alleged brand of “small-ball politics” as they would speak of Bush and Cheney, were long gone. Significantly, however, Clinton’s 2012 appeals for Obama were made on the strength of his personal appeal. They did not flow from a 1990s-era ideological message. During two elections and two terms, the essence of Clinton’s “New Democrat” or “Third Way” appeal was that the party must shed the image that it was merely the sum of its constituencies and special interests. Indeed, Clinton was even willing to disappoint those constituencies and special interests—as with the 1996 signing of welfare reform—in support of the national interest. Clinton sought to move the Democratic conversation away from special-interest rights and entitlements and toward the notion of using government to create opportunity, in exchange for government beneficiaries embracing more responsibility.

Within the constraints of what he could not or would not do, Obama clearly remained an ambitious president—and thus our conclusion that he is a what-the-market-will-bear liberal. That is, he is not an ideological exotic— the evidence suggests he is a fairly conventional urban liberal, as befits his Illinois background representing urban constituents. He will promote the most vigorous interpretation of what a traditional urban liberal would support, consistent with what he thinks he can achieve within acceptable political costs. If he concludes the cost is imprudently high, he will move on to other items without great remorse. No doubt Obama has always supported same-sex marriage; he even told a local Chicago newspaper this was his position as early as the mid-1990s (Weinger 2012). Later, he insisted implausibly that this position was inaccurate, attributing the confusion to staff error. But as president, he maintained that he opposed same-sex marriage, until 2012 when a shift in public opinion allowed him to state a more forthright view, even as he continued to maintain this was a state issue. There is no doubt that Obama’s views on global warming are sincere as well, but there’s also little doubt that he will continue to keep his distance from this issue until the political costs of embracing it decline. One sees this same calculus at work in Obama’s negotiations with House Speaker John Boehner over a fiscal grand bargain. What does Obama want? He wants tax rates to rise as high as he can reasonably get them in the current political environment. Yet he clearly also does not view the matter as a theological question—he’ll get the best deal he can and move on. There is nothing novel about a president practicing political caution and the art of compromise. But Obama’s penchant for making these traits the essence of his strategy—rather than tools of his strategy—is a distinctive signature.

If Clinton wanted the Democratic Party to stand for more than the sum of its parts, Obama in 2012 took on Republicans with a different message: our parts are bigger than your parts. That is, there are more people in Democratic-leaning constituency groups and special interests who benefit from having Democrats in power than there are Republican-leaning interests who fear the costs of having Democrats in power. To an extent he had not in 2008, Obama explicitly appealed to women, African Americans, Latinos, LGBT citizens, and young voters. He repeatedly used the power of the presidency to strengthen his hand with these five Democratic constituencies, knowing they would be critical to the coalition that would win him a second term. Obama saw his 2012 task not as transcending Democratic special interests but as unabashedly mobilizing them to maximum effect.

From this belief flowed a strategy with two related prongs: defining Mitt Romney in ways that would be singularly unappealing to these interests and constituencies and using technology and targeted messages to ensure that these people turned out in high numbers to back a second term. Notably not among these prongs was a clear, detailed, or memorable statement of what he hoped to achieve in a second term. It was not the most inspirational campaign, as evidenced by both lower overall turnout than 2008 and a lower percentage of the total vote for Obama (Liptak 2012). But the campaign was admirably effective, as a president facing reelection with an unemployment rate of nearly 8 percent and approval ratings that barely reached 50 percent marched his way to a second term. Republicans, who after their 2010 gains were expecting to dislodge this history-making president, instead went to battle with a weak candidate with a weak message and a weak organization. They were left in something akin to the position of the Michael Dukakis character from a Saturday Night Live skit in 1988; the Dukakis character paused during a presidential debate, looked incredulously into the camera, and said, “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.” But lose the Republicans did. What’s more, their 2012 defeat signaled the likelihood of more de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• 1. Obama’s Coalition: How the President Customized His Campaign and Cobbled Together His Majority
• 2. The Campaign and the Media
• 3. Fighting Off Challengers: The 2012 Nomination of Mitt Romney
• 4. The General Election Campaign
• 5. Congressional Elections 2012
• 6. The Effect of the 2012 Elections on Party Polarization
• 7. Campaign Finance in the 2012 Election
• 8. Public Opinion and the Presidential Election
• 9. Religion in the 2012 Election
• 10. The Reaffirmation of the Post– Cold War Electoral Order: The Meaning of the 2012 Election