“It’s the economy, stupid.”
Truer political words were never spoken. James Carville and George Stephanopoulos made that phrase famous during Bill Clinton’s 1992 run for president, but it matters as much today as it did twenty years ago.
The economy is the only issue on voters’ minds. More than six in ten Floridians, South Carolinians, and New Hampshirites told exit pollsters that the economy was the most important issue to them. Every national poll conducted over the past three years has shown something very similar.
You would have to be a real dummy—and given that you have bought this book you obviously are not—to miss that the 2012 election will be decided by the state of the economy.
The politics of the economy are fascinating to behold. All of politics is a struggle between reality and perception, and no place is that yin/yang more apparent than when it comes to how voters feel about the economy. The perception that things are getting better leads people to create an economic reality to fit that optimism; they buy a car, or a house, or a mobile home—best of both worlds!—which in turn makes the economy grow. All you need to do is look at the last three years to know that the inverse is also true. If people feel bad about where the country’s fiscal future is headed, they hold on to their money—Scrooge McDuck style. But we digress …
If the economy is sucking up every ounce of oxygen in the political room—bad (and extended!) metaphor alert—then what other issues are being suffocated? What would we—and the candidates—be talking about if they weren’t talking about the economy all the damn time?
In honor of SportsCenter—aka the show that Mrs. Fix demands be turned off when I am watching it straight through for the second consecutive hour—we give you the Not Top Ten Issues of 2012.
There are eleven million people here illegally. Everyone knows that the option pushed by most Republicans—round them all up and send them home—is both logistically impossible and, perhaps more importantly, ridiculously expensive. Mitt Romney’s suggestion in a January debate that the solution was self-deportation, which is exactly what it sounds like, is equally laughable. “OK, if you are here illegally, please step forward. Thanks. Terrific.”
Hispanics, who make up the fastest-growing minority community in the country, are, not surprisingly, somewhat put off by the Republicans’ “get ’em all out, now” approach to the issue. In the 2008 election, Barack Obama beat John McCain, a senator from a border state who had made a genuine effort to lead his party toward the middle on immigration, 67 percent to 33 percent.
That sparked an “uh-oh” moment for smart Republicans across the country, who readily admit that if they allow Hispanics to become a reliably Democratic constituency for the foreseeable future, their future as a majority party is, in a word, over. You, of course, wouldn’t know it by watching the Republican primary race earlier this year where the candidates—with the somewhat odd exceptions of Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry—fell all over themselves to run to the (far) right on the issue.
So heated did the rhetoric grow over immigration that Jeb Bush, the paterfamilias of sorts within the modern-day GOP, called for caution—warning that the candidates’ “tone” could cost them in swing states this November. A sampling of those swing states proves Bush’s point: New Mexico (46 percent Hispanic by population), Arizona (29.6 percent), Nevada (26.5 percent), Florida (22.5 percent), and Colorado (20.7 percent). Add up just those five states and you get fifty-nine electoral votes, more than one-quarter of the total a presidential candidate needs to win in November.
The math is bad news for Republicans. But Democrats won’t/don’t talk much about immigration either. Why? Because they need white voters—particularly in states like Arizona, Florida, and Colorado—to go their way in the fall, and they know that many whites hate the idea of granting citizenship to any—any—person here illegally. Need proof? In Barack Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address, which totaled more than 6,000 words, a total of 195 were dedicated—in whole or part—to the issue of immigration. Overlooked? Yes. Unbelievably important to the future of both parties? Yes.
The signal achievement—in terms of major policy accomplishments—of President Obama’s first term in office was passage of the Affordable Care Act, a broad overhaul of the way in which health care is delivered in this country. And yet, in his 2012 State of the Union address, President Obama mentioned health care a total of 0 times. Yes, zero. As in none. Nada. Zilch. Zippy.
That silence is a sign that Obama and his senior strategy team have given up on winning politically on health care, a major shift from the days after the bill’s passage in March 2010, when they pledged that the law would be a net positive for the president as he sought a second term.
What the White House underestimated was how badly they had lost the message war over health care to Republicans. A look at monthly tracking polls sponsored by the Kaiser Family Foundation tells the story of the law. For the better part of the last eighteen months, public opinion has barely moved—with roughly 40 percent of people supportive of the law and 44 percent (or so) disapproving. Nothing—not word that the Supreme Court would rule on the constitutionality of the individual mandate, not implementation of a variety of seemingly popular provisions—impacts those numbers in any statistically significant way. Public opinion is absolutely set as it relates to the health care law, and set in such a way that it does little good for President Obama to trumpet it on the campaign trail.
Expect him to mention the bill in front of Democratic audiences occasionally as he seeks to prove that he did the hard things that progressives wanted despite significant Republican opposition. Independent and swing voters are far less receptive to that message, however, and that’s who Obama needs to win over heading into November. And so, mum will be the word on health care.
To listen to President Obama’s 2012 State of the Union speech, you might think that education reform was going to be a major focus for him in the year leading up to the November election. He mentioned education on thirteen separate occasions in the address and rolled out a series of proposals, including a call for states to mandate that kids stay in high school until they graduate or, at a minimum, turn eighteen.
That makes for a nice line in a speech, but you won’t find a single political person who believes there will be any real movement on education reforms between now and November. The last major overhaul of the education system—the No Child Left Behind Act—came more than a decade ago and, despite passing both chambers of Congress with overwhelming support, has now become mired in a largely partisan debate over the efficacy of its means testing and the broader philosophical questions of how involved the federal government should be in education.
Talking about education in politics is smart because no matter a voter’s party affiliation, he/she is generally in favor of spending more money on educating our kids. But in this economic climate, spending any more federal money is simply a nonstarter for either Obama or Romney.
There’s no doubt there will be plenty of talk about the need to reduce the country’s debt—$15 trillion and growing—but little in the way of specifics about how that could actually happen.
If the way Congress “resolved” the debt ceiling fight in the summer of 2011 is any indication, we won’t hear much of anything in the way of solutions on debt matters. After spending months and months debating whether to raise the borrowing limit on the nation’s credit card, Congress pulled a classic kick-the-can-down-the-road move by creating a so-called super committee that would make the tough cuts to begin reducing the deficit by the end of 2011. Or not. With the super committee members appointed by the Democratic and Republican leadership in the House and Senate, the panel was doomed from the start. (Why would any party leader appoint people to a super committee who they had reason to believe might cut a deal with the other side that could have major long-term political implications? It was just never going to happen.)
Elections are, at least on the policy front, telling people what they want to hear—“No new taxes,” “It’s morning in America,” etc.—not speaking hard truths about the perilous economic position our government has put us in. Running on a “we are going to need to raise taxes and cut services” platform has about the same chance of success as me beating LeBron James in a game of one-on-one. That’s why Obama and Romney will talk around the debt rather than about it.
The public focuses on the future of American energy when gas prices go up. But as soon as prices regulate to whatever the new normal is, the issue disappears from view.
Though very few politicians are talking about it, there’s actually good news on the energy front; domestic oil output is the highest it has been since the early 2000s, and the country is producing natural gas like gangbusters. Those developments have led to a reversal of America’s seemingly ever-growing dependence on foreign sources to meet our energy needs; roughly 81 percent of those needs were met by domestic sources through the first ten months of 2011, according to a survey conducted by Bloomberg News.
Still, the wild fluctuations in gas prices—a gallon of gas costs you more than $4 in some parts of the country this spring—speaks to how depending on crude oil from a region as unstable as the Middle East is a shaky policy going forward.
President Obama is doing all he can to link energy policy to economic policy, announcing in his 2012 State of the Union address his plan to expand natural gas drilling from shale deposits—an effort he says will create as many as 600,000 jobs. But the American public has yet to really make the link between energy and the economy in their own collective mind, ensuring that this is a back-burner—see what we did there?—issue in November.
At a time when the United States remains committed—at varying levels—to ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, when the prospect of a nuclear Iran seems more real than ever before, and when the rise of China threatens our supremacy as the lone world superpower, the American public offers a collective shoulder shrug when it comes to foreign policy.
Take the state of South Carolina, for example. Its large military population should make it a place where the discussion of how and when our troops should be used in foreign lands would be particularly relevant. And yet, when the Republican presidential primary swept through the state in mid-January, no foreign policy issue even made it into the top four voter concerns. (Sixty-three percent of people said the economy was the most important issue facing the country, while another 22 percent named the budget deficit.)
Or the candidacy of former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, who returned from a stint as the U.S. ambassador to China to run for president in 2012. Huntsman premised his candidacy on his unique ability to understand America’s role in the world because he had—in his own words—seen our country from “10,000 miles” away. The Republican electorate didn’t care at all, focusing far more on Huntsman’s work for the Obama administration and his moderate tone on the stump. His campaign failed to launch in New Hampshire and he dropped out of the race soon afterward, endorsing Romney.
(I still remember well a trip I took to give a handful of speeches in Europe after the 2008 election. The first question always asked of me was what the average American voter thought of Europe. Overcoming worries about offending my hosts, I would tell them bluntly, “The average American doesn’t think of Europe. At all.” Sad but true.)
The simple reality of American politics is that even in the best of economic times at home, most voters don’t know or care about foreign policy. That goes double—or more—when economic times are, as they are now, tough. With people worried about making their mortgage payments, affording their kids’ education, and making tomorrow better than today, what is happening in Syria, the Middle East, or just about anywhere else doesn’t matter a whit to people.
To the extent foreign policy will play any role at all in the fall election, it will be in terms of a discussion of when American troops need to come home from Afghanistan. Polling conducted in the spring of 2012 suggests that as many as seven in ten Americans oppose the war in Afghanistan, while majorities said we should bring our troops home regardless of whether the Afghanis can protect themselves. Even so, barring some huge flare-up in the country, that feels like a subsidiary issue—at most.
The truth of the matter is that the challenges posed by Iran, the Middle East, and various other hot spots around the world could well be front-burner issues for whoever wins the White House this fall. But you won’t know it by watching the two men campaign for that job.
Ask anyone with even a passing interest in politics about whether there is too much money flowing through the system and you’ll almost certainly be greeted with a resounding “Yes!” After all, one of the biggest stories of the 2012 election is and will continue to be the spending of super PACS, new fund-raising vehicles that allow a single wealthy individual—or a posse of wealthy individuals—to fund ads bringing down or lifting up a candidate.
But, for all the foul-crying regarding the amount of cashola washing around the political system, the simple fact is that, while the average person may say they care about changing the way campaigns are financed, they simply don’t vote on the issue.
Go back to the 2000 Senate campaign between former Goldman Sachs executive Jon Corzine and Representative Bob Franks. Corzine spent upwards of $60 million of his own money on the race, while Franks, not gifted with extraordinary wealth, raised and spent about $6 million. In an attempt to level the playing field, Franks focused the entirety of his campaign on the idea that Corzine was trying to buy a Senate seat and was using his personal money to cover up his thin political résumé. Franks’s problem? Corzine’s money bought him lots—and lots—of TV ads across the state of New Jersey, ads that drowned out the message Franks was trying to send. Corzine won—and went on to be elected governor of New Jersey five years later by spending another $43 million of his own cash. (Money doesn’t buy you love, though. Corzine was ousted in his 2009 reelection race by Chris Christie.)
There are myriad other examples of this phenomenon. President Obama breaking his promise to accept public financing in the 2008 general election because he knew he could raise drastically more money on his own is one. And all of them point to an undeniable political fact: voters say they care about campaign finance reform, but virtually no one votes on it. Given that, politicians tend not to talk about it unless prompted—and that is very likely to be the case as the campaign for president wears on.
Both President Obama and Mitt Romney will decry the influence of outside groups in the 2012 election, but neither will do anything meaningful to prevent money from being spent by these groups to savage their opponent because they know there will be little (or no) price to pay from voters.
The attempted assassination of former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in January 2011 shocked the nation and the world. Giffords had been in the process of holding an event in her Tucson-area district when a deranged gunman approached her, shot her in the head, and went on to murder six other people, including a nine-year-old girl, a federal judge, and Giffords’s director of community outreach. President Obama traveled to Arizona for a memorial service to honor Giffords and the victims and delivered one of the best—and most moving—speeches of his presidency. In that address he declared: “Already we’ve seen a national conversation commence, not only about the motivations behind these killings, but about everything from the merits of gun safety laws to the adequacy of our mental health systems.”
And yet, no major changes in gun control laws were made. It’s a familiar pattern. In the wake of mass shootings—Columbine and Virginia Tech jump to mind—there is a hue and cry from some circles that the country must do a better job at regulating who can buy guns. Some measures are proposed and approved, but they tend to be things that nibble at the margins of gun control rather than genuinely change the game on gun ownership. Why? That’s a harder question to answer.
There’s been very little polling done on gun issues in recent years—a testament to how far it’s fallen off the political radar—but what is out there suggests that people generally favor more strict guns laws. A Time magazine poll in June 2011 showed 51 percent of people favored stricter gun laws, while 39 percent said gun laws in the country should be left alone and 7 percent said they should be made less strict.
The reluctance among politicians to push for more strictures on your right to bear arms then isn’t born of public disdain for the idea. Rather, it has to do with the power of the gun lobby and the concern many Democrats have that pushing for strong gun laws allows Republicans to paint them as out-of-touch urbanites with little understanding of the middle of the country.
On the first point, the National Rifle Association (NRA) is among the best-organized lobbying groups in Washington. The NRA keeps a close eye on attempts to impinge on gun rights anywhere in the country and is not afraid to use its lobbying might to make very clear to wavering politicians the dangers of crossing it.
On the second, Democrats have, over the past decade, walked back much of their gun control rhetoric as they have worked to remake the party’s image among rural voters in swing states. Fearful of being tagged with the “liberal” label, Democratic politicians—particularly in the South and Midwest—have walked away from talking about gun control in anything but the broadest of terms. Democrats are also mindful of the losses they incurred in the 1994 election, defeats blamed, at least in part, on the passage of the Assault Weapons Ban, which then president Bill Clinton had pushed through Congress earlier that year. (It is not by accident that when the Assault Weapons Ban came up for re-authorization in 2004, Congress did not give it.)
President Obama promised action on guns in the wake of the Giffords shooting. No such action has come. And moving on gun control between now and November would amount to a kamikaze mission—not something successful politicians are in the habit of embarking on.
America is now eleven years removed from the attacks of September 11, 2001. While anxiety still lingers within the body politic about the possibility of another attack in the United States, the political potency of the issue seems to have faded.
Both President Obama and Mitt Romney will talk about the importance of keeping Americans safe from the threat of terrorism. And Obama will almost certainly use his authorization of a mission that killed Osama bin Laden to bolster his national security credentials.
But in an odd way, the death of bin Laden—not to mention the killings of a variety of other top al Qaeda lieutenants in the last few years—has made the issue of terrorism feel less relevant, less real to the average person. With the face of terrorism for most Americans now dead, it’s no longer the sort of top-of-mind issue it was even in the 2008 campaign, although, even in that race, the political power of terrorism had already begun to fade somewhat. Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani premised the entirety of his presidential bid in 2008 on the role he played during the attacks. Voters weren’t moved; Giuliani didn’t win a single state before dropping from the contest.
Terrorism hovers—and likely always will hover—like a dark cloud on the horizon of most Americans’ consciousness. But that dark cloud is far away at the moment, so far off it seems to be almost totally out of sight.