I was listening to Bill Moyers’ show, Bill Moyers’ Journal, on a podcast as I ran this morning and was struck by something that Glenn Loury said. Loury, a professor of social sciences and economics at Brown University, was talking about the impact of race on the election when he pointed out that many of the ugliest moments in this campaign are likely to have a life “after the election.” Ads — like one distorting Barack Obama’s position on immigration — are “going to echo and resonate after the election.”
Should Obama win, now you have a president of the United States who a lot of people think is illegitimate as a person who consorts with murderers, as a person who’s sympathetic to terrorists. It’s de-legitimating of the president of the United States. It’s poisoning the well in a certain way.
You do what you have to do to win an election. But then after the election the person has to govern. And now what has been said about that person continues to echo in the minds of citizens. And I’m worried that in this case the suggestion that Obama is somehow going to get in the White House and, you know, sell out the country will hurt all of us should he win and need to govern.
It’s a legitimate concern.
Consider this Republican Trust PAC ad designed to recast Obama into a dangerous stereotype, which has been running since last week:
The group also has run ads distorting Obama’s position on immigration and has called Obama — through a letter from Scott Wheeler, the organization’s executive director — “one of the most radical political figures ever to be nominated by a major party” who “promises to change America forever.”
Basically, if Obama does win, he will have to contend with the fallout from this kind of attack — same as Bill Clinton had to refight the 1960s during his administration. Clinton, of course, embodied his decade in some ways but was really a different kind of Democrat. But the constant attack from the right had its desired effect, hamstringing Clinton and leaving him far less effective than he otherwise might have been.
I know that we have this romantic memory of the ’90s now, but the reality is that the Clinton years were anything but a respite from conservative rule. I would argue, in fact, that his biggest accomplishments — the “end of welfare as we know it,” a crime bill that expanded the federal use of the death penalty — used to be the kind of policies we expected from moderate Republicans.
Obama, too, is a different kind of Democrat — as I’ve written, his liberal and pragmatic instincts seem to be in constant battle, and how he governs will depend a great deal on which side of his political nature is most emboldened. I’d like to think that a strong liberal push would convince him to reinvigorate the government and to abandon what has been called Clinton’s cautious incrementalism. But the kinds of attacks that have been leveled as this campaign draws to a close raise the question, as Loury says, that we will have a president who lacks legitimacy among some large subset of the population, even if he manages to wrack up a large electoral majority.
So while hope appears to be in the air, it must be tempered by an understanding that the last two years have just been a prelude to the difficult work that will follow.
