Every four years, Americans hold a presidential election. Somebody wins, and somebody loses. That’s life. But 2008 was an anomaly. The election of Senator Barack Obama is part of something far bigger than four or even eight years in the White House. Since 2004, Americans have been witnessing—and participating in—the emergence of a Democratic majority that will last not four but forty years.
American presidential politics is generally not a back-and-forth enterprise. There are eras in which one party dominates. Today, a Democratic majority is emerging, and it’s my hypothesis, one I share with a great many others, that this majority will guarantee the Democrats remain in power for the next forty years.
That sounds like a radical proposition. In reality, it is a proposition borne out by history. Stock pickers look at stock trends. Bettors check the horses. Here we’re going to look at the history books. Time for some basic civics. Look at the years from 1896 to 1932, then 1932 to 1968, Eisenhower,* then 1968 to 2008. (Okay, that includes Clinton and half a Carter term.) So now we’re at 2008, and we’re two years into a congressional sea change and just embarking on the first term of an Obama-Biden administration.
The waning Republican majority grew out of a reaction to the 1960s, and race played a big part of it. (I don’t want to hear otherwise, it did—take it from a boy who grew up in Louisiana.) Go back and read Kevin Phillips’s The Emerging Republican Majority if you need to do so.
Now the reaction to the 1960s is in its last throes. The Republican majority has always been based upon whites and, in particular, white males. They have to shift. The bulwark of Republican electoral strength is disappearing. Republicans are now a regional party heavily dependent upon disappearing demographics. Nearly half of all Republican-held seats in Congress are in the South. Not to open old wounds, Zell Miller had the right title and the wrong party: A National Party No More.
Republicans feel the importance of the white male vote slipping away. Just listen to Pat Buchanan. They’re absolutely offended at the attack on the white male and his decline in society. They’ve got a point. I’ve been a white man for some years and can’t tell you what it’s like just walking down the street. Not to be shrill about it, but I’m sick of never seeing white men in any positions of power.
The Democratic majority started to emerge in 2004. That was the thirty-six-year point. Now it’s 2008, and it’s time for the beginning of a forty-year period of Democratic dominance. The definitive victory of President Obama this year—which included Indiana, North Carolina, Nevada, New Mexico, and a variety of previously “purple” states—and the sheer tide of electoral votes and congressional seats Democrats won this year should silence even the most reality-averse of critics. From the sheer incompetence of the Bush administration to the poisoning of the Republican Party brand among Americans to the demographic disadvantage conservatives face, all signs suggest that 2008 will be the first of many victories for the Democrats. This isn’t to say Democrats will win every election for the next forty years. In eras of party dominance, parties will still lose elections, both congressional and a periodic presidential.
I keep a running list of the moments that toppled the Republican majority. It’s quite possible the point at which this age ended was when the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court seemed on the verge of tears when he had to make Exxon pay. Another contender, an event that happened that spring, was the day that Bush’s liaison to religious groups resigned from the administration for multiple acts of egregious plagiarism. I’d also nominate the February 2008 date when the public found out that ExxonMobil was earning record profits while Americans were paying record-high gas prices. As consumers were paying $4 a gallon last year, putting off vacations, and changing their spending habits to adjust to rising gas prices, Exxon made $12 billion in a single quarter, more than any company in U.S. history—until that point. In December 2008, Exxon reported third-quarter profits of nearly $15 billion, dwarfing their previous two record-setting quarters.1
Not even John McCain could save the GOP. The Republicans nominated John McCain despite themselves. Let’s give John McCain his due. McCain really is a patriot. Watch the footage of him from the POW camp in Hanoi. I cried. McCain had a chance to leave the prison camp early, and he refused to do it. McCain is a man of remarkable courage, and I have no reason to think he’s not deeply patriotic. (Sarah Palin is another story.)
Of the contenders for the Republican nomination, McCain may have been the furthest from being a Bush Republican per se, if not the maverick he claimed. But McCain’s campaign was doomed from the start. The obvious is sometimes the real answer. Someone asked Ray Charles, “What’s the worst part about being blind?” He somewhat famously responded, “Not being able to see.”
In 2008, candidates for the Republican presidential nomination faced two truisms. The first was that no one could get the Republican nomination by being anti-Bush. The second was that no candidate who was close to George W. Bush could win the general election. McCain got caught in between. McCain didn’t help matters by his Hail Marys to the far right, the most memorable of which was a previously little-known first-term governor from the state of Alaska.
The question McCain repeatedly failed to answer was this: Does he understand what’s going on in the world around him? In a newly diverse, newly Democratic political landscape, McCain was violently out of touch, clinging to a set of policies and ideas that, not unlike the senator, are well past their prime. Republicans never let go of their low-wage, no-regulation economic platform, even floating as a possible secretary of the Treasury Phil Gramm, architect of the deregulation of the banking and lending industry, as the politics Gramm put into place set the stock markets tumbling around Americans’ ears.
It’s a new world. For example, the economic crisis last summer and the bailout marked the end of unregulated markets. Everyone in the world knows that the little boys and girls in Wall Street here at home and the brokers and traders around the world can’t stick to playing in their own sandboxes. They’re too greedy. It’d be fine if these racketeers just lost their money, but there are others involved. I’m all for intervening where Wall Street’s right to make or lose money begins to infringe on the public’s right to survive—and, news flash, so is everyone else.
If the traders and bankers want to go invest in Pets.com, I don’t care. If they want to buy IPO Microsoft, that’s fine. If it’s Pets.com, you lose all your money; if it’s Microsoft, you’re a gazillionaire. That’s not really the public’s business. But when you interject yourself in, let’s say, the subprime market, you send a bunch of people out to sell to—to put it mildly—a bunch of uninformed people, a product that you know full well they can’t pay for in the end. That causes bank failures and a real estate bust, because, remember, when the house is foreclosed on, it affects everyone else’s mortgage in the neighborhood.
The Democratic Party in American politics is stronger than ever before. Obama created a new party. He brought new people in all across the country, and in 2008 those new people were donating, registering, and voting alongside the existing base of Democratic voters. I’ll take a moment to note here that the revitalization of the Democratic Party has occurred despite, not because of, Howard Dean’s disastrous tenure as DNC chair. He was not simply unsuccessful but incompetent, particularly in the case of the 2006 midterm elections. I said then and I’ll say again that Dean’s leadership was “Rumsfeldian in its incompetence.”2
Beyond the polling and electoral victories signaling the emergence of a new Democratic majority (and painfully obvious public sentiment), there’s the fund-raising. Money doesn’t lie. Let’s take a trip back to the primaries. In February 2008, McCain was the Republican nominee already, and he’d won every election in a month while Hillary was on the decline and hadn’t won a primary in a month. Yet Hillary was able to raise three times as much money as McCain—it was just $11.6 million for McCain3 to $35.8 million for Hillary.4
The best fiscal evidence of the widespread appetite for change is the fact that Obama blew all fund-raising records out of the water. For a historical comparison, Obama had raised $80.2 million by September 2007 while still more than half a year from being the nominee. John Kerry didn’t hit $82.6 million until March 2004. By the end of the election, Obama had raised more than $770.4 million.5
Something big is happening here. Much of the credit goes to Barack Obama, but there’s a second benefactor we Democrats can look to these days. Only one person can be said to be responsible for the sinking of the Republican Party—yes, of course—George Bush.
This is the story of the decline of the Republican Party and the rise of the Democratic majority, Cajun-style.
Ten Reasons Republicans Should Be Worried
Let me back up. Republicans shouldn’t be worried. They should be in agony. They should be throwing up. Republicans better get a better policy on prescription drugs and quickly: they’re going to need a lot more Prozac.
The Republican brand is the worst political party brand in history. They’re just pathetic at this point. The demographic foundations of the Republican Party are crumbling, and they’re being held accountable, very rightly so, for having started a massively expensive and disastrous war and creating an economic catastrophe.