Category | Op Ed

What do they want?

Published on February 19, 2008 by The Sentinel

    As we move further into the Presidential primary season profound
rifts are manifesting themselves in both political parties that don’t
bode well for their future or for the General Election in November.

    Both the Democratic and Republican parties are
comprised of a variety of segments or interest groups that help to not
only drive policy issues, but more importantly, turn out the vote on
Election Day.  Alienate a key constituency and you may lose the
election if those voters stay home.  The tensions between these
various constituencies this year is more pronounced than in past
elections and as a result many political pundits and columnists have
had a difficult time trying to make sense of things.  That
inability to analyze these groups betrays how clueless these pundits
really are.

    Take the phenomenon of Governor Huckabee as an
example.  Most political pundits are frustrated in trying to
understand, let alone explain, why Governor Huckabee is still
running.  Their exasperation demonstrates how little grasp the
chattering classes have of many segments of American society.  If
they took the time to actually get to meet and know evangelicals and
fundamentalists (there is a difference, not that you’d know it from
reading most columnists) they might better understand why Governor
Huckabee is still running for President.  He isn’t running to
become Vice-President; if he wanted that job he would have dropped out
and endorsed Senator McCain.  Huckabee isn’t so ignorant at math
that he can’t figure out there’s almost no way he can win enough
delegates.  He isn’t running out of vanity or pride or to position
himself for 2012 or 2016.  And so these pundits are totally
stymied in trying to figure out what it is Huckabee wants. 

    Well let me clue you in on what Huckabee
wants.  He wants what virtually all evangelicals and
fundamentalists want from the Republican Party: to be taken serious and
treated with respect.  When Reagan put together the Conservative
Coalition in 1980 it comprised of fiscal conservatives, social
conservatives (including evangelicals and fundamentalists), and
national security conservatives.  The theory was they all had much
in common and would work together to advance each other’s issues. 
But something funny happened in the past 25 plus years; social
conservatives got little of what they wanted from the Republican
leadership aside from lip service to their concerns and their
agenda.  To quote the movie “Network” social conservatives are mad
as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore.  Huckabee is a
former state chief executive with an impressive résumé unlike Pat
Robertson in 1988, the theocrat with no political experience. 
Huckabee’s winning a number of state primaries and caucuses speaks to
the fact that his message resonates with voters and the message is more
important than the messenger.  But for Republicans the three major
candidates represented the splintering of Reagan’s Conservative
Coalition with social conservatives flocking to Huckabee, fiscal
conservatives to Romney, and national security conservatives to
McCain.  Huckabee is looking to be a voice in the Republican Party
for those social conservatives who want the party to get serious about
advancing their public policy concerns.  They are tired of being
taken for granted and receiving empty promises; they want substantive
action.  If McCain falters in the General Election then Huckabee
is an obvious choice for 2012, but as Huckabee points out, it isn’t
about him personally, it is about the people who are voting for him,
their beliefs and their values.  I’ll say it again; it is the
message that is important, not the messenger.

    The Democrats are also starting to see cracks in
their “Big Tent” coalition as both Senators Obama and Clinton appeal to
certain segments of the party and yet there is no universal appeal by
either.  Commentators have loved to talk about how Clinton appeals
to specific groups and demographics while Obama appeals to other groups
and demographics.  As a result the Democrats are now as splintered
into factions as the Republican Party is.  Worse still, the
delegate count between Clinton and Obama is so close that it appears
likely neither will have on outright claim on the nomination short of
one landing a knockout blow.  If that happens then the Democratic
nomination could be decided not by voters in the primaries and
caucuses, but by Super-Delegates, party leaders and elected
officials.  These Super-Delegates were created to prevent the
party from embracing the “ideological purity” as it had in the past,
giving them a veto against nominating someone who could never win the
General Election, like Senator McGovern in 1972, Vice-President Mondale
in 1984, and Governor Dukakis in 1988.  If these Super-Delegates
decide the nominee will those voters who turned out for Clinton and
Obama accept the result?  Is it possible they may lash out at some
of those Super-Delegates at the ballot box in November?  Can
either win the votes of those constituencies that failed to support
them in the primary?

    The 2008 General Election was already shaping up to
be a watershed event.  It is clear from the primaries and caucuses
thus far that voters are completely dissatisfied with status quo
politics and that does not bode well for any incumbents this
fall.  While both Democrats and Republicans will attempt to
present party unity at their conventions this fall the fractures that
have developed in both are all too obvious.  The results from the
General Election this fall will likely lead to both parties reassessing
which direction they will go in the future as an older generation of
political leaders retires and a new one takes over.  In the end
what we all want is not to be taken for granted; we want our voices
heard.