WHAT YOU GET WHEN YOU SEEM TO HATE YOUR OWN LIBERALISM

You get this:

A Gallup Poll finds a statistically significant increase since last year in the percentage of Americans who describe the Democratic Party's views as being "too liberal," from 39% to 46%. This is the largest percentage saying so since November 1994, after the party's losses in that year's midterm elections.




You can probably recite the conventional-wisdom explanation for this, but here it is anyway:

The increasing perception of the Democrats as too far left comes as President Obama and the Democrats in Congress have expanded the government's role in the economy to address the economic problems facing the country. Additionally, the government is working toward major healthcare reform legislation and strengthening environmental regulations.

Is that what's going on? Yeah, sure, to some extent. Some voters have internalized these tea party/Glenn Beck/Rush Limbaugh talking points.

But the missed opportunity here -- it was missed by Bill Clinton, too -- has been to restore the liberal brand. Ronald Reagan restored the conservative brand in the 1980s -- he was right-wing and proud of it -- and ever since, no matter which party has been on the ascent, far more people are willing to call themselves "conservative" than "liberal." ("Moderate" sometimes tops both.)

I backed Bill Clinton in the 1992 primaries, even though he wasn't the true progressive in the race, because he had a silver tongue and he was talking about things like reviving the sluggish economy with infrastructure spending, and I thought he might just be the guy who could put forward a political narrative that was different from the dominant Reagan narrative -- one that described affirmative government as wholesome and American, a way to improve the country, put ordinary citizens to work, and strike a better balance between the elites and the average people who (in a phrase Clinton liked to use) "work hard and play by the rules." But Clinton got attacked and retreated -- from anything that even vaguely smacked of the New Deal and from any attempt to say liberalism is American. Many of his policies were centrist, and yet Republicans still attacked him as a liberal monster.

Barack Obama is repeating the same mistakes. We knew he would, given his rhetoric about "post-partisanship," but he's had to use government a lot more than anyone expected at the outset of the 2008 campaign, on top of the big things (health care reform, energy legislation) he's made into priorities, and he seems to have had no plan for how to respond to charges that this is the biggest "big government" moment since the (now-despised) Great Society. Like Bill Clinton, he compromises with moderates and conservatives -- and seems surprised when he's still damned as an uber-leftist. But one thing he absolutely won't do is say, "Yeah, this policy is liberal. So was FDR."

I'd regret the outcome of the '08 Democratic primaries if I thought Hillary Clinton would have been any less timid. But I think she'd have been very much the same as Obama, and very much like her husband.

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The only bright spot in the Gallup poll is that the percentage of Americans who think the Republican Party is "about right" is at its lowest point in nearly twenty years, while "too conservative" is on the rise (as is, bizarrely, "too liberal"):



What do Americans want? The c.w. is partly correct, I think -- they seem (the "Republicans are too liberal" crowd excepted) to want all the services government provides, and some it doesn't yet provide, but they don't want to pay the necessary taxes. (And they don't want rich people to pay them either.) On the other hand, they don't like Bush/Cheney-style wingnuttery -- the jingoistic warmongering, the McCarthyism, the moralizing, the rejection of science, and so on.

What they want, I guess, is a socially moderate Republican like Arnold Schwarzenegger -- except that California elected Schwarzenegger and now seems to despise him.

Related is a post from Tom Hilton, about a San Francisco Chronicle article about Modoc County, the most Republican county in California. Surprise: it "gets more state taxpayer dollars than all but one of California's 58 counties," all while electing tax-bashers. (The counties that vote for non-tax-bashers actually pay the most tax.) But the good people of Modoc County don't believe any serious cuts need to be made in genuinely necessary services to deal with the state's fiscal crisis -- just cut a little fat and everything will be fine. Besides, they insist they're self-sufficient -- oh, except they'd prefer the health care and education funding to stay as it is.

Ain't that America?