Three and Two

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 25 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I’ve written since 1997. Enjoy.

Everyone who is analyzing this general election race is missing the point. (Picture from Bexar County, Texas Democrats.)

The point isn’t who wins. Barack Obama is going to win.

The point is the margin.

What the Obama people are looking for is a margin of three and two. That’s 60% of the vote. That’s a landslide.

Three-and-two is a foreign concept to political reporters, and to most voters. The last time we saw it was in 1964. Lyndon Johnson got the 3. Barry Goldwater got the 2. The result was the Great Society. Before that you have to go back another three decades to 1932. FDR 3, Hoover 2. That coalition held firm for 6 years, and the result was the New Deal.

To get to three-and-two you need a broad, deep consensus, one which will extend all the way down the ticket. The opposition must be made to seem out-of-bounds, irrelevant. By tieing himself so closely to George W. Bush, John McCain is giving America its chance. He is Hooverizing himself.

A three and two Presidential election brings with it a 60 vote Senate majority and a two-thirds majority in the House. It brings with it new tensions, as factions  contend within the party in power for the ear of the President, or threaten to bolt if they don’t get their way.

Three and two is indeed a magic moment, a moment of momentous and far-reaching, permanent change. But what about the two?

The last two landslides offer completely different models for what happens to the two.

In the Goldwater case, the Republican Party held firm, Vietnam overwhelmed the War on Poverty, and within a single term we had a new thesis, the Nixon Thesis, which has governed from that time to this. Should Obama achieve a three and two, this is the only example that will be in the memory of living men, and likely the only one brought up. But we should ask ourselves, is there a common thesis the two are standing behind, or is it simply opposition? Goldwater stood for something. Is there something called McCainism?

But the Roosevelt case, that brought with it its own thesis, a new set of myths and values, assumptions I call the Roosevelt Thesis of Unity. It was a new electoral coalition, the New Deal Coalition, which held in one form or another for a generation.

Roosevelt created the New Deal by making deep inroads within that era’s Republican coalition, gradually removing its progressive wing, the Theodore Roosevelt crowd which was internationalist, conservationist, urban, and willing to regulate markets with anti-trust laws. The only way back, eventually, came from rejecting all that, starting with Joe McCarthy, who was Nixon’s blogfather, then by cloaking that hate inside an anti-thesis, in Eisenhower’s good nature, which accepted the New Deal’s premises but sought only to moderate them. Only Movement Conservatism — Cold War militarism, social rejectionism, Gilded Age fascism — would create a new era of real power.

The key questions for 2008 are whether Obama can build this three and two majority, then who stays with the two and who goes with the three.

There are indications that many evangelical voters have soured on the heat of social issues and want the light of global concern. There are indications that some in business are moving back toward the T.R. premises, toward acceptance of financial and business regulation as low-cost crime control. There are indications that many libertarians are just giving up, throwing their lot into Nader-like protest, taking a "pox on both their houses" attitude, withdrawing from the electoral field. The neo-conservatives, they have been discredited by the lies of Iraq. They are the falling tide, the dieing of the light.

But there will still be a two. The Republican opposition will be stiffer than ever, and it’s that stiffness which requires a three and two majority. There will still be economic royalists like Larry Kudlow. There will still be neo-cons like Joe Lieberman. There will still be religious haters like James Dobson, and closet racists, and Lou Dobbs. Most will be white males of middle-and-upper incomes, very dangerous people.

Hopefully, as in the 1930s, we can learn to laugh at such people. It’s ridicule which is our greatest weapon. Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart are the Frank Capras of our time.

It’s to isolate Republicans in the two further that Obama has lately been moving to the right. His meetings with figures like Sam Nunn, his contribution to Blue Dogs like John Barrow, these are signals that he wants a broad consensus coalition. In response, some in the Netroots are screaming bloody murder, they are threatening to bolt, and that (for Obama) is good. The louder the left screams at President Obama, the less legitimate the extreme claims of the Right become.

So don’t look at the horserace. Don’t worry about the 270. Remember that the key to real action is consensus, it’s a broad coalition in which decisions, once taken, really stick.

Become part of the three. Build the three. That’s the change you can really believe in.