Team Romney White-Vote Push: ‘This Is the Last Time Anyone Will Try to Do This’
May I have this dance?
A Republican strategist said something interesting and revealing
on Friday, though it largely escaped attention in the howling gusts of
punditry over Mitt Romney’s birth certificate crack and a potential
convention-altering hurricane. The subject was a Ron Brownstein story
outlining the demographic hit rates each party requires to win in
November. To squeak out a majority, Mitt Romney probably needs to win at
least 61 percent of the white vote — a figure exceeding what George
H.W. Bush commanded
over Michael Dukakis in 1988. The Republican strategist told
Brownstein, “This is the last time anyone will try to do this” — “this”
being a near total reliance on white votes to win a presidential
election.
I wrote a long story
last February arguing that the Republican Party had grown intensely
conscious of both the inescapable gravity of the long-term relative
decline of the white population, and the short-term window of
opportunity opened for the party by the economic crisis. I think we’re
continuing to see the GOP operate under an integrated political and
policy strategy constructed on this premise. This is their last, best
chance to win an election in the party’s current demographic and
ideological form. Future generations of GOP politicians will have to
appeal to nonwhite voters who hold far more liberal views about the role of government than does the party’s current base.
The “2012 or never” hypothesis helps explain why a series of
Republican candidates, first in the House and most recently at the
presidential candidate level, have taken the politically risky step of
openly declaring themselves for Paul Ryan’s radical blueprint. Romney’s
campaign has been floating word of late
that it sees a potential presidency as following the mold of James K.
Polk — fulfilling dramatic policy change, and leaving after a single
term. “Multiple senior Romney advisers assured me that they had had
conversations with the candidate in which he conveyed a depth of
conviction about the need to try to enact something like Ryan’s
controversial budget and entitlement reforms,” reports the Huffington
Post’s Jonathan Ward. “Romney, they said, was willing to count the cost
politically in order to achieve it.” David Leonhardt
floats a similar sketch, plausibly outlining how Romney could transform
the shape of American government by using a Senate procedure that
circumvents the filibuster to quickly lock in large regressive tax cuts
and repeal of health insurance subsidies to tens of millions of
Americans.
Blowing up the welfare state and affecting the largest upward
redistribution of wealth in American history is a politically tricky
project (hence Romney's belief that he may need to forego a second
term). Hence the Romney campaign's clear plan to suture off its slowly
declining but still potent base. Romney’s political-policy theme is an
unmistakable appeal to identity politics. On Medicare, Romney is putting
himself forward as the candidate who will outspend Obama, at
least when it comes to benefits for people 55 years old and up. Romney
will restore the $700 billion in Medicare budget cuts imposed by Obama
to its rightful owners — people who are currently old.
He will cut subsidies to the non-elderly people who would get insurance through Obamacare — a program that, Romney’s ads remind
older voters, is “NOT FOR YOU.” Romney’s repeated ads on welfare,
blaring the brazen lie that Obama has repealed the welfare work
requirement, hammer home the same theme. The purpose is to portray Obama
as diverting resources from us to them.
In their heart of hearts, Romney and Ryan would probably prefer a
more sweeping, across-the-board assault on the welfare state. But the
immense popularity of the largest, middle-class social insurance
programs like Medicare and Social Security force them into the
divide-and-conquer gambit. They can promise to hold their
disproportionately old, white base harmless and impose the entire brunt
of their ambitious downsizing of government on young, poor, and
disproportionately nonwhite Democratic constituencies.
There’s no moral or policy rationale for Romney’s proposal to
increase social safety net spending on current retirees while cutting
Pell Grants, Medicaid, children’s health insurance, and food stamps to shreds.
The nonwhite share of the electorate is increasing fast enough that the
political math of this sort of gambit will grow completely impossible —
there will simply be, from the right-wing perspective, too many of them
and not enough us. But there may be just enough us to pull out one more
win, and thus the Republican determination to make such a win as
consequential as possible.
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