America’s Leftward Tilt?
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/03/americas-leftward-tilt/
The reality is that our government hasn’t become this dysfunctional because the parties are so “polarized.” It’s because there is only one pole in American politics today, and its magnetic field is so powerful that it has drawn both parties in the same direction — rightward. And it is in that same direction that the magnetic field of contemporary American politics is likely to pull the stories the two parties tell after the election — and the policies the winner pursues.
The data, however, suggest just the opposite — that both candidates have benefited in the general election every time they have taken a left turn. President Obama was in deep political trouble 15 months ago when he cut the closest thing he could to a “grand bargain” with House Speaker John A. Boehner to slash the federal budget by trillions, and he did nothing for his popularity nine months earlier when he extended the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy. Not until he began talking like a populist did he begin picking up steam in the polls. Indeed, one of the most powerful messages the Democrats chose not to use in the 2010 midterm elections — which would have supported a policy that was extremely popular then and remains as popular now — was a simple message on taxes I tested nationally, which won in every region and with every demographic, including Tea Partyers: “In tough times like these, millionaires ought to be giving to charity, not getting it.” Once that position (and other populist appeals) became central to Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign, the election looked like it would be a rout.
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SO what underlies this powerful pull to the right? Many factors, but two stand out. The first is campaign money. When Americans saw the scope of the savings and loan scandal in the 1980s, which today seems like just a bad day on the unregulated derivatives market, Ronald Reagan’s attorney general, Edwin Meese III, put nearly a thousand bankers behind bars. In contrast, Mr. Obama’s attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., can’t seem to smell the stench of a fraud that cost millions of people their jobs or homes.
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Then came the conservative movement that ushered in Reagan, whose ideology has dominated our political discourse ever since, even after its proven failure. If Nixon and Bill Clinton were the last gasps of Roosevelt’s breath, then Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama and perhaps Mr. Romney may well be the last gasps of Reagan’s. If the centrifugal pull of the 2012 election is likely to be to the right, is there any potential counterweight?
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