Nixon Is My Windmill Part 1

Jason, it looks like you may be right. McCain may in fact win in November. Up until Pennsylvania, I have been thinking that it is going to be an Obama landslide. And it may still end up that way. In a normal year it would be another Reagan-Mondale election, but this time with the roles reversed. All of the pieces are in place. But my analysis is obviously lacking.

Pennsylvania came in with a 9 point win for Clinton, which is within expectations for the primary. The margin looked like it would be a 6-9% win for her. If it was 5% or lower, then Obama would have won the expectations game. Since it has been reported as double digits, and the media doesn’t do corrections, this makes Hillary the winner of the expectations game. It doesn’t do anything to the math, and the math will eventually doom the Clinton campaign. But not before Obama is crippled going into the election.

I have not read events correctly. Bittergate should have played to Obama but it was a wash. The events last week leading up to the Pennsylvania primary have troubled me. The ABC debate last week was so horrible that I was sure there would be a bounce from it.(add from Martin)

But instead of the bounce for Obama, it actually played as a bounce for Clinton. There is no other way to read the results that makes sense. The Southern Strategy is alive and well. Exit polling gave her a five point win. She won by 10. The campaigns can’t come out and say it, so I will. This discrepancy between what people told pollsters and what they voted points to hidden racism. People voted for Clinton, but told others that they had voted for Obama.

The one strength that I had come to rely on with Obama was that he seemed to have a grip on how to deal with smear. Dumb as rocks attacks just don’t work on him. I thought his high-road responses to the Wright sermons and Bittergate were the answer to the Southern Strategy. Obviously I am wrong.

Now I gotta clarify a bit. Three weeks ago she was polling over 20% better than Obama in PA. And she burned up a lot of capital along the way. Her negatives rose, and she took a dive in national polling. And what she got for it was a stop to the bleeding in Pennsylvania.

For the general election we can rely on the fact that Obama is an excellent campaigner, McCain isn’t, and a national election won’t allow for such a focused burn on one state. Obama brings a lot of states into play, and the Republicans can’t defend them all while going on the offensive. The national math still strongly favors Obama in the general.

But that doesn’t excuse my miscall of PA. I do not have a good read. It’s time to go back to the drawing board. If I want to understand what is happening here I gotta go back to the basics on this one. Retrace steps. Find out what went wrong in my analysis.

Politics is simply the game of Power. Gaining control, and all it represents, is the only goal of politics. The rules of this game vary depending on the specific circumstances of the individual politician. This is because politics is an ever-changing mix of personal control and of delegated responsibility. The delegated responsibility is due to the fact that politicians are merely proxies for established interests. Every political battle is a proxy fight. In this regard then the goals of the individual politician and the goals of the role can either be in variance or in accord with each other.

When the goals of the individual politician are in variance with the goals of the politician’s role political capital must be spent. This can be seen in the 2008 presidential election and Hillary Clinton’s embrace of the Republican right wing. The institutional goals of a Democratic nominee for president demand that she has already lost and must fade away for the good of the party. That is what losing candidates have to do. It is an institutional goal in the Democratic party for their candidates to act in this way. Clinton, however, is not doing that. Instead, she is embracing her individual goal of achieving the role of president, or the lesser goal of denying that role to Obama. In order to do this she is spending vast amounts of accumulated political capital.

Whether she is a failed proxy will be determined in November. Already, we can tell that she is not a successful proxy. She will not be the Democratic nominee. There is no mathematical way for that to happen. And there is no plausible non-mathematical route to the nomination for her at this point.

But she can yet be a successful proxy, in that she can kneecap Obama enough so that he loses in the general to McCain. For she represents the establishment of the Democratic party. Obama represents a potential new fundraising model for the Democratic party. If he wins, then many current power brokers in the Democratic party lose their hold on the money. Obama represents, at least partially in the area of fundraising, the internet Kossaks at the gate.

As Pennsylvania is showing, Obama faces the three-headed hydra of Clinton, McCain, and the MSM, whose interests lay against him. I had thought that I understood the game that was being played. But the Pennsylvania primary is confusing me. The bump for Obama that I expected has not materialized in the polling and I want to know why.

My analysis is incomplete at best, dead wrong at worst. There is more. It’s a time for first principles and the context that only history brings. And, as with everything else rotten in the state of American politics, it all revolves around Nixon. In particular, the combination of Straussian elitism, the abandonment of Breton Woods, and the Southern Strategy that he brought to the table.

If the practice of politics is the Sausage Works then policy is the Sausage. There is a reason why politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, almost always make Neo-Conservative sausage these days. This is Nixon’s doing. Reagan mainstreamed Neo-Conservatism, and Bush 43 cemented Neo-Conservatism as the new middle, but the structure rests on Nixon.

Prior to the Neo-Conservative Era, we were living in the Liberal Era. The fundamental core of the New Deal was demand spreading. “Demand spreading means, all other things being equal, it is better that more people have some money, than some people having more money. Social Security is based on this principle as is the liberal theory of government starting with FDR. FDR ran both as Governor of New York and for the Presidency under the theory that demand was misallocated, and that people outside of the centers of economic activity needed to be able to afford goods. Universalization of electricity and phone service were undertaken under this theory, as were the various subsidy programs.”

FDR’s greatness as the savior of capitalism and the American Way rests on the compact that the New Deal represented. The strength of the New Deal lies in the fact that the Neo-Conservative Era was never able to dismantle the pillars of it. The modern state was born with FDR, and all that Nixon was able to do was behead it. This will become clear.

This is gonna be kinda sprawling all over. We’ve got the global economic system, the rise of Freak Show politics, the marriage of the Dixiecrats and John Birchers with the libertarians, and Straussian evil to consider. Now that signs are pointing to an end of the Neo-Conservative era, maybe I can start to get some ideas about what comes next. This is gonna take time and multiple posts.

I am aware that conducting my analysis with the central thesis being that Richard Nixon was evil and the cause of all of our problems may seem over the top. Surely there are better targets? People a bit more recent? People a bit more culpable? Nope. That’s my thesis and I’m sticking to it. Nixon is my windmill, and I’ll tilt any damn way I please, thank you very much.