In full-blown panic about an almost certain loss at the polls, conservatives are now trying to win the post-election narrative - they're trying to claim that, despite the election results, the country is still conservative. The new watchword for conservatives is "center-right nation" - as in Jon Meacham's absurd piece in Newsweek which claimed that despite what looks like a wholesale rejection of conservatism at the polls on Tuesday, "America remains a center-right nation". David Sirota has been doing yoeman's work beating back this meme, dedicating his column to Obama's FDR-style mandate, and running a Center-Right Nation Watch at OpenLeft.
The notion of this county as a center-right one, despite what the polls may say on Tuesday, appears to be an important part of the conservative post-election narrative. It will be bolstered by exit polls which show something like 28-33% of the electorate identifying as "conservative", and 17-22% of the electorate identifying as "liberal", with the rest of the electorate identifying as "moderate". According to the Roper archive of exit polls, ideological self-identification numbers have been hovering in that range since 1976, so if the numbers are substantially different than that on Tuesday, then we know that there's been genuine ideological movement. Even what looks like a near-loss to conservatives - say, a 26-24% conservative-to-liberal self-identification gap - would actually be a huge victory for progressives. Failing that kind of self-identification parity, progressives usually argue that we are a nation of "operational progressives", never mind the labels we give ourselves. That is, that on many issues - especially economic issues - polls show that most people support the progressives point of view. Campaign for America's Future and Media Matters made this argument most recently with an exhaustive review of recent polling in June 2007.
From the point of view of Election Night and the week following it, though, I think it's better not to bicker and parse over numbers in this way. We are almost certain to lose that game, since the simple numbers (the ideological self-identification numbers) are least in our favor. Instead, I think the best approach is to promote the Democratic base as the new center of politics.
The basic idea is simple: promote the Democratic base, its enthusiastic support for Obama, and its incredible electoral power. Point to Obama's repeated record-smashing small-dollar fundraising numbers. Point to the historic crowds Obama has drawn in swing states like Missouri and Colorado in the last couple of weeks. Point to the untold numbers of zany pro-Obama videos flooding YouTube. Point to the unprecedented Obama ground game, and the dramatic turnaround in early voting, which is emphatically pro-Democratic this year, as compared to an even split with Republicans in 2004.
I've actually chosen these nuggets of evidence fairly carefully, and the common themes among them are: 1) they've already been reported by traditional media in the recent past; and 2) the Obama campaign is, itself, quite likely to refer to some of these nuggets in its post-election messaging. In other words, these are the nuggets that are most likely to allow us to "close the triangle" on the post-election narrative. The point is that we should amplify these elements of pre-existing conventional wisdom.
While this isn't exactly a logical counterpoint to the notion that this is a center-right nation, the argument is powerful for its evocation of striking imagery. In some way or another, many voters have already seen the proof of the progressive base supporting Obama - the footage of large Obama crowds, the Obama Girl videos, the long lines of early voters, the thirty-minute ad made possible by millions of donors, and even the incessant door-knockers bearing literature. In addition to being powerful imagery, and imagery capable of closing the triangle on the post-election narrative, a great deal of this imagery "feels" historic, in that it is nothing like what many people have seen before; it matches the theme of an historic election. If that image of an exuberant, powerful, massive progressive base is indelibly linked to the election results, conservatives will have no chance with the "center-right nation" canard.
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