| What you seem to be saying is that the left currently controls the middle ground.
I do not accept that the "apoliticals" who can be persuaded to vote liberal one year and conservative the next represent any sort of "middle." It is not that they hold positions midway between ideological liberals and conservatives, it is that they hold no positions at all along that scale. For the most part, they do not think about politics, or indeed about public policy issues, in those terms. If they vote for any particular policy initiative it will be by accident. When I say that these people "get all excited about singing birds and happy rainbows," I mean that they will vote for a candidate who promises them Morning in America and A Shining City on a Hill even if he's the most conservative candidate since Barry Goldwater. They don't care about liberal and conservative. They want Morning, and they want Shining Cities. You want to win? Give it to them. Do not assume that I am denigrating these people by describing the way they vote as being emotional and symbol-driven. The vision thing is an important component of leadership ability. If you can't get people to see the Shining City on the Hill, you cannot get them to slog through mud to get there. So in fact these "apoliticals" have an important role to play in screening for this quality in would-be leaders. Faced with two visionless technocrats (Bush-41 vs. Dukakis, for example), these folks don't know what to do. But they'll pick a Reagan over a Carter, or a Clinton over George HW every time. Bush understands this, in a way his father did not. It's all wrapped up in "the vision thing." Putting humans on Mars is a visionary proposal. It's bold, it's pioneering, it's the American Spirit of Adventure. The rockets and the robots are just mechanical details. What Bush is selling is The Future. It is true that the people who respond to such things are subject to being manipulated into voting for slogans and pretty-boys. That is a risk of having them participate at all. But without them, we would get more Gray Davis types -- the visionless hacks who keep their nose clean and stay out of trouble, mostly by not doing anything. Politics is full of them. They can even seem effective in quiet and peaceful times, but they are absolutely the wrong thing to have in office if up-pops-the-devil. The "vision voters" offer some protection against that happening. The left did not so much "control" these voters during the 40 years that the Democrats held the House of Representatives, so much as they did a better job of understanding how to appeal to them. You cannot sell these people ideology. You cannot "persuade" them to adopt good, conservative principles. That is not how their heads work. They respond emotionally to slogans and symbol manipulation. Note again that this does not make them liberals, for they will as eagerly support a Ronald Reagan as a Lyndon Johnson. In fact, I'll bet there are millions of people whom the press would call "middle of-the-road" (that I would call "apolitical") who voted for both Reagan and Clinton, and don't see anything the least bit weird about that. My point is that if you try to appeal to these people with grinchy-sounding eat-your-spinach rhetoric about fiscal discipline, they will vote for the other guy every time. We know that because throughout the Bob Michel era in the House, that's exactly what happened. The Democrats successfully positioned themselves as the party of generosity and compassion, while positioning the hapless Republicans as cold-blooded Scrooges... a position the Republicans cheerfully accepted because they interpreted it to mean "fiscally prudent." The result was 40 years of Democratic rule, the Great Society social programs, Eco-nuts with badges, and federal funding of Marxist feminism. It would be wonderful if we could have neither Great Society programs conducting animal husbandry experiments on poor people, nor socialized medical insurance buying medicine for the elderly. But we know from 40 years of Democratic rule that that outcome is not one of the possible choices. What will happen instead is that the apolitical vision-seekers will vote in the guy who offers an End To Poverty, or some other wonderful thing. You have to offer an alternate vision, or you'll lose, because there are people out there who select on "visionary leadership" and nothing else. This is reality. It's how The Lord wants it to be. Accept it, and ask the real-world question, "OK, now what?" |
I would not use the word "control," and I would not use the term "middle ground."