Yeah that's a good point but 2008 was a particularly emotional election as well.
Well, my ideas about that have to do with the generational cycle of history and the theory of turnings. Roughly every 20 years, we enter a new national mood, as a new generation starts coming of age. There are four of these "turnings," repeating in a fixed order, and four generation types, likewise. 2008 was a watershed year, the beginning of a Crisis turning. Previous starts to Crisis turnings in U.S. history have been 1929, 1860, and 1773. Look at what followed each of those years for an idea of what I'm talking about. One of the things that changes when we make a turning change is electoral patterns.
You can walk this back through recent history. Prior to the Crisis we were in what's called an Unraveling. That started in 1984, year of Reagan's reelection, and ended in 2008. 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 were all Unraveling elections and exhibited a different pattern, not so real-world focused. We were deferring our big problems instead of dealing with them and the voters didn't want to be confronted with reality. Now, they want something done.
Before that was an Awakening era, 1964 to 1984, and before that a High era, 1946-1964, and before that we're in World War II and another Crisis.
What I'm saying as regards elections is that you shouldn't assume that the next few election cycles will behave like they did in the Unraveling, because they surely won't.
I strongly disagree. Go back and look at the polls in 2008 right before the election. McCain had pulled ahead and was trending toward a strong win. Immediately after the market crashed McCain's numbers completely tanked.
The market crashing was the start of the Crisis, just as the stock market crash in 1929 was, or Lincoln's election in 1860, or the Boston Tea Party in 1773. It's a pretty sharp divider. Before, still Unraveling; after, Crisis. But we're still in Crisis now and will be next year and until the late 2020s. That by no means makes Obama a shoe-in, but it does mean there will be very little tolerance for blither-blather on the part of the voters. Which may help or hurt Obama depending on both him and his opponent (whoever that ends up being).
And don't forget, taking a strong position does not necessarily mean you are being divisive. If either candidate from either side goes into the last leg of this election pounding an extremist point of view designed to rally the ultra-progressives or the evangelicals...he's fucked. The middle will reject them completely and elections are won and lost slightly right or slightly left of center.
Hmm. The problem there is that "the middle" or independent voters are a myth, and also, due to the effect of corporate corruption, the national center on economic issues is to the left of the Democratic Party center of gravity. (Not on social issues, but on economic ones it is.) So w/r/t Obama, although may not the Republican candidate, a move sharply to the left is what's needed.
A lot of people misunderstand what happened in 2010. The Village narrative is that the Democrats overreached to the left and lost the independents, but that's not true. First off, there hardly are any true independents. Almost all voters who call themselves "independent" vote consistently for either the Republican or Democratic Party, just like those who use the party labels. You can call these Democrat Indies and Republican Indies. They're just like Democrats and Republicans in how they vote, but for whatever reason they resist calling themselves that.
I'm an independent (technically), but hardly a moderate.
So what matters is not swings back and forth between the tiny number of true independents that really do swing-vote, which do exist but only in small and usually insignificant numbers. What matters is whether the Dem Indies and the Rep Indies go to the polls or stay home, and the same factors drive that as whether the Dems and Reps do.
What happened in 2009-2010 is that Obama and the Democrats in Congress UNDER-reached. It was really the worst of all worlds, because they moved the government just enough to the left to make hard-core conservatives think the sky was falling without going nearly far enough to satisfy the people who voted them into office. So Republicans and Rep Indies were highly motivated to vote in 2010, while Democrats and Dem Indies stayed home. (In fact, there was an actual organized MOVEMENT on the left in 2010 to stay home and "send a message" to the Democrats. I kid you not. Dumb? Yes. But real.)
If Obama wants to lock up next year's election, he can, but I have my doubts that he will. Here's what he needs to do.
1) Keep up the class warfare talk, and actually take action as much as possible (hard with Congress the way it is, of course).
2) FIRE TIMOTHY GEITHNER! There is probably no single step he could take that would be better than this. Replacing Bernanke at the Fed would be good, too, but Geithner especially needs his walking papers.
3) Refuse to take any more money from Wall Street. Say and do things to really piss off bankers. The madder they are at him the better, politically.
4) Keep his promise to end the Iraq war.
If he does all these things and if the economy continues to improve, he can't lose. I doubt he will do all of them, which means he can lose. But he doesn't have to.
Classic.
