The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Know Who Else Had Five-Year Plans?
“Obama: We Need Five More Years”–headline, Politico.com, May 24
It’s Always in the Last Place You Look
“Baseballs, Rocks, Another Gator Found in Belly of Hilton Head 13-Footer”–headline, Island Packet (Hilton Head, S.C.), May 23
The Ultimate Dark Horse
Nobody ran for president in 1988. No, we haven’t forgotten George Bush and Michael Dukakis, or even Bob Dole, Al Gore, Ron Paul and the other also-rans. “The ‘Nobody for President’ campaign came to the White House” on Election Day, Reuters reported:
The signs sprouting in the crowd were a little different from the usual campaign fare: “Nobody is Perfect,” “Nobody Cares About the Homeless,” and “Nobody Bakes Better Apple Pie than Mom.”
Bumper stickers were selling out fast. “U.S. Out of North America: Nobody for President in 1988” appeared to be the most popular.
“Unfortunately . . . Nobody will get over 50 percent of the votes,” said Hugh “Wavy Gravy” Romney, who once ran his pig, Pegasus, for president on the Yippie ticket. “I say unfortunately because we’re trying to use humor to get ‘None of the Above’ on the ballot across the country.”
We know what you’re thinking. No, Mr. Gravy is not related to Mitt Romney or Meat Loaf.
Nobody is challenging Barack Obama in the Democratic primaries this year–and is doing surprisingly well. One of the reasons some commentators thought Obama would be a shoo-in for re-election is that like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, he drew no serious primary opposition as an incumbent president. By contrast, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Bush père were challenged by Reagan, Ted Kennedy and Pat Buchanan respectively. Lyndon Johnson abandoned his 1968 re-election bid after Eugene McCarthy’s surprisingly strong showing in New Hampshire and Robert F. Kennedy’s late entry.
The theory goes that presidents lose re-election when they have a strong primary opponent and win when they don’t. This requires treating Buchanan as a “serious” opponent, even though he didn’t win a single primary in 1992 and his best showing, in New Hampshire, was 37%.
Writing at RealClearPolitics, the delightfully named Sean Trende reformulates the rule and carries it back a century: “There are only seven sitting presidents who have ever received less than 60 percent of the vote in any primary: Taft in ’12; Coolidge, ’24; Hoover, ’32; LBJ, ’68; Ford ’76; Carter, ’80; and Bush ’92. All of these presidents, with the exception of Coolidge, were not re-elected.” One of Coolidge’s challengers, Robert LaFollette, ran a third-party challenge. He ended up with 16.5% of the nationwide popular vote and carried his home state, Wisconsin.
Actually, there’s an eighth sitting president who received less than 60% in a primary–in more than one, in fact. That would be Obama in ’12, who, as Trende points out, received just 58.4% in Arkansas, 57.9% in Kentucky, 57.1% in Oklahoma and 59.4% in West Virginia. In Kentucky, his main opponent was “Uncommitted,” another name for Nobody.
If the Trende trend is predictive–admittedly, a big if–Obama is much likelier than not to lose in November. “I think we can reasonably begin to view this as a sort of organic primary challenge to Obama,” Trende writes. “Obama’s not likely to lose any states outright in the primaries; think of this more like Buchanan’s run against George H.W. Bush in 1992.”
That reminded us of an op-ed we wrote last September for The Wall Street Journal. Two men of the left, Ralph Nader and Cornel West, were trying to drum up support for a symbolic primary challenge to the president. Their idea was to assemble “a slate of six candidates,” each “a field in which Obama has never clearly staked a progressive claim or where he has drifted toward the corporatist right.”
The goal would not be to unseat the president but to push him further to the left. We thought this had a chance of developing into a Buchananesque challenge. In the event, Obama lurched left without being pushed, or perhaps in response to the Nader-West nudge. The primary effort quickly fizzled.
Or did it? We now have seen Obama held under 60% by a slate of three candidates–antiabortion extremist Randall Terry, federal prison inmate Keith Judd and Tennessee lawyer John Wolfe–not to mention Nobody. Unlike the recently re-elected presidents, Obama does not have the full support of his party.
To be sure, it is not the left that is abandoning Obama but white working-class voters, a demographic group that has been moving toward the Republicans, and in a region that swung toward the GOP in 2008 in opposition to the nationwide trend. The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza observes that Obama’s poor showings in these states “have drawn a collective eyeroll from Democrats–and many others who closely follow national politics–who ascribe the underperformance by the incumbent to a very simple thing: racism.”
Cillizza acknowledges that this theory is “almost entirely unprovable,” but Slate’s Dave Weigel doesn’t. He cites exit-poll data from 2008 that found whites in Kentucky and West Virginia who answered in the affirmative when asked “Was race of candidate important to you?” went overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton, and more strongly than those who answered in the negative. Weigel’s conclusion: “Long before they knew anything about how Obama would govern, or whether he’d make War on Coal, a sizable number of Appalachian whites grabbed anonymous exit poll forms and confirmed that they would vote against the guy because they didn’t like his skin color.”
Weigel’s conclusion is uncharitable and unwarranted, even a little bit racist. Does it apply in reverse–that is, would one say of blacks who voted for Obama and said the race of the candidate was important “confirmed that they would vote against the gal because they don’t like her skin color”? Of course not. “Race” denotes much more than skin color, and “important” can mean something other than a crude aversion. (We developed this argument more fully in 2008, after the Pennsylvania primary.)
When commentators were looking ahead to this year’s election, they almost always assumed–correctly, as it turned out–that no serious politician would challenge Obama for the Democratic nomination. The usual explanation for this assumption was that a challenge to the first black president would tear apart the party’s coalition by pitting black Democrats against mostly white left-wing progressives. (See this December 2010 column describing the tensions between blacks and progs [progressives, also know as liberals].)
By all accounts, progs and blacks are sticking with Obama. Yet the primaries in Arkansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma and West Virginia suggest that Obama is dividing his party anyway. No, he doesn’t need any of those states to win, and he didn’t carry them in 2008. But four states Obama did carry “have substantial populations in areas geographically and culturally similar to these ‘problem areas’: southwestern Pennsylvania, western Virginia and North Carolina, and southeastern Ohio.” If Obama loses those four states plus Florida–about which more in the next item–he is a one-term president.
And while lefty pols and pundits may take some comfort in attacking these Democratic voters as “racist,” that doesn’t seem a promising way of persuading them to vote for Obama–or to return to the party in future elections.
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