Presidential Campaigning 101 - Polarize and Conquer

A few years ago I wrote this post, breaking down how the Republican Party had gone from a seemingly insurmountable advantage to trailing Democrats everywhere. It's hard to believe it's been three years since I wrote that post, but we've learned a few things since that point. We've seen more and more rapid turnover in Washington, a natural product of an environment that is so negative and divisive. The great mystery of the US congress has always been clearly articulated in approval ratings. If you ask the general American citizen if they approve of the job congress is doing, they will say "no" (well, at least 80% of them). If, however, you ask them if they approve of the job their representative is doing, they typically say yes. Recently, this has shifted a bit more, and we are seeing larger swaths of incumbents losing primaries, and being forced out of office.

I could go on forever about the advantages of term limits in Congress, as well as the need to have fresh blood, but the problem with the current environment is that what we are seeing, time and again in these elections, is not the American people voting to stop the gridlock. On the contrary, every time they vote out at Dick Lugar (a good man who was, admittedly, a relic who probably needed to retire gracefully anyway) the voters are replacing one person with a more extreme version of that person. As the saying goes, you get what you pay for, and in this case the American people are paying for extremist blowhards, and will get more intense gridlock as a result.

And that takes me back to my original point, about my post on the GOP three years ago. In it, I said this regarding the strategy of George W Bush's "brain," Karl Rove:

"Rove's political strategies, detailed well in many places, basically came down to one thing: polarize the electorate. For team Bush this meant using as many red herrings as possible. Rove believed that if they made the election about the right issues they could mobilize the Religious Right, boosting the number of guaranteed Republican voters. To that end, Rove used any issue the Right would fall in behind, most successfully gay marriage and abortion. The 2004 election showed the success of this strategy, as eleven states passed amendments codifying marriage as being between a man and a woman. The conservative turn out in these states helped Bush out, particularly in Ohio, a state thought to be 2004's version of Florida."

Does any of this sound familiar? It should: in this primary season we've already seen Roe V Wade continue to come under fire, courtesy of Rick Santorum, and now we see the gay marriage topic rear its' head yet again. Couple this with Mitt Romney's recent push to convince the American people that he is actually running against Jimmy Carter, and you'll see what the strategy is: set up a straw man, knock it down, and hope the American people buy it. McCain failed to effectively run a polarizing campaign, and in the minds of many GOP big shots this was his fatal error. The Democrats are by no means innocent in this, but the GOP does have a history of taking issues on, making them the issue, then not doing anything with them after winning office. Bush won re-election in 2004 vowing to overturn Roe V Wade and to pass a Gay Marriage Amendment to the Constitution. Setting aside whether these issues are truly worth being the issue the government is focusing on (you know, along side world peace, global warming, and infrastructural investments), I'm sure you've noticed that Roe V Wade is still in place, and a Gay Marriage Amendment isn't.

The GOP is the best at polarizing the base, getting the religious right to turn out in droves to vote against the godless liberals, and then not following through with their promises. At the present time it appears that Mitt Romney is going to try to run a campaign closer to those that Rove oversaw and further from the campaign McCain ran. That makes sense from a win at all costs standpoint, but it will serve to only further polarize Washington, which continues to dig this country into a hole we can only hope to get out of. Until the electorate decides they won't reward politicians for polarizing issues they have no intention, or logical way, to deal with, this isn't going to get any better. It really is our fault: we complain about the gridlock and say that nobody in Washington knows how to lead, but then we reward the candidate that takes the more extreme positions. At the end of the day both Romney and Obama will scramble back to the middle in an attempt sway moderate voters. Whichever candidate can appease the base most without alienating the middle of the country will be President a year from now. Think about that, and tell me that this is a logical way to govern a country.