Why the GOP Couldn't Win in 2008
Today, Laura Ingraham posed an important question to Donald Rumsfeld on her show: Would Obama be president today if the Iraq war hadn't happened?
Laura Ingraham just posed an important question to Donald Rumsfeld on her radio program.
Would Barack Obama be president today if the Iraq war had not happened?
Rumsfeld demurred, but the answer is clear to me at least: "No he would not. Hillary Clinton would be."
Clinton's early support for the Iraq war wounded her among Democratic primary voters. She might nonetheless have survived a challenge from an anti-war candidate who seemed extreme or unpresidential (ie, Howard Dean, Russell Feingold). She was lethally vulnerable to a plausible alternative, and in 2008, Barack Obama looked plausible.
But the victory of the Democratic nominee (whoever that might have been) over the Republican nominee (ditto) was all but inevitable in 2008. It is very, very important that Republicans recognize this fact, and the reasons for it.
Fundamental fact: the typical American worker took home less pay in 2007 than in the year 2000.
Take-home pay stagnated even before the financial crisis and recession. And - the political scientists tell us - the performance of take-home pay is the single most important forecaster of election results.
Republicans do not accept this information. They think of 2008 as a near-thing, susceptible to "what ifs?" What if the financial crisis had hit a month later? What if the party had nominated a further-right conservative than John McCain? What if there had been no Iraq war? Answer: lose, lose, lose. The only way that George W. Bush could have handed off to a successor as Ronald Reagan did (and as a plurality of voters intended that Bill Clinton would) would have been to do what Reagan and Clinton did: preside over a long spell of economic improvement for most people. He didn't, and so his party lost.
Republicans flinch from this observation, because it leads to the unwelcome question: What went wrong with GOP economic policy in 2002-2007?
Republicans have an ideological answer ready in hand: we spent too much. But that answer leads to more questions: where should we have spent less? Once the question gets specific, again Republicans get uncomfortable - because after all, we are pledged to spend more than the Democrats on the largest domestic social program, Medicare.
More urgently: Republicans seldom explain how exactly domestic overspending led to stagnating personal incomes. What's the mechanism, as a matter of economics rather than ideology? It's very difficult to see. And if the cause of income stagnation was not rising federal spending, then again the thinking becomes very uncomfortable.
Ingraham's question remains a searching one. But so far, the search too often returns empty.