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Townhall...
America the
Conservative?
By Steve Chapman
If you want proof that America is a conservative country, Ronald Reagan
provides it. Once seen as a reactionary nincompoop, he’s probably the
most respected president of the last 50 years. Highways and buildings
bear his name. Republicans compete to see who can lavish the most
praise on him.
It’s not really surprising that Barack Obama has paid tribute to Reagan
on the approach of his centennial today. What’s surprising is that
Obama did it in the 2008 presidential campaign -- during the Democratic
primaries.
That devious tactic may help explain how this alleged socialist fooled
Americans into electing him president. Fortunately, in conservative
eyes, the nation repudiated Obama in November, giving the GOP control
of the House of Representatives and putting a stop to the
administration’s more ambitious plans.
Now it’s just a matter of waiting for the order of nature to reassert
itself. That can be expected to happen in January 2013 -- since, as
Dick Cheney asserts, Obama’s liberal record dooms him to a single term.
It’s certainly true that the national mood feels pretty conservative
right now, with the tea party ascendant, health care reform in legal
jeopardy and the GOP controlling more state legislatures than at any
time since 1928. But that mood may not be all it’s cracked up to be.
In the first place, despite high unemployment and record deficits,
Obama is not particularly unpopular. In the latest Gallup poll, 48
percent of Americans approve of his performance. At this point in his
presidency, Reagan had an approval rating of 35 percent.
Consider how presidential elections have been going. Democrats have won
three of the last five. In 2004, John Kerry, the Republicans’ very
image of the out-of-touch liberal elitist, got 48 percent of the vote.
Al Gore, whom they detest even more, won the popular vote in 2000.
George W. Bush, the only Republican to win a presidential election in
the last 20 years, left office with the worst approval rating (22
percent) of any outgoing president since Gallup began doing these
surveys in the 1930s. Reagan’s final approval rating, it’s true, was 68
percent. But so was Bill Clinton’s.
All this is a puzzle, since the number of people who call themselves
conservatives is double the number of liberals. But Henry Olsen,
director of the National Research Initiative at the conservative
American Enterprise Institute, says that lopsided ratio misleads.
About one-third of Americans say they fall in the middle of the road.
But “a very large portion of the people who tell pollsters they are
‘moderates’ are in fact loyal, partisan Democrats who view their own
party as representing moderate views,” writes Olsen in the journal
National Affairs. “These voters are clearly not open to persuasion by
the right or center-right, and they constitute a hidden ‘liberal’
component of the electorate that traditional poll questions tend to
overlook.”
Not only that, but when people say they are conservative, they don’t
mean they subscribe to the philosophical tenets of the intellectual
right. This is particularly true of white, working-class voters, whom
Olsen credits for the Republican House sweep.
As a rule, they don’t like taxes or deficits, but they value public
schools and Social Security. They resent welfare dependency but want a
government safety net.
These are common sentiments. Even after the GOP surge in November,
Americans are not itching to dismantle big government. Hoover
Institution pollster Douglas Rivers reports that in 15 of 16 areas of
federal spending, most people want spending to stay the same or
increase. The only program they would cut is foreign aid -- which is 1
percent of the budget.
The temptation of any political party is to interpret any impressive
triumph as an enduring affirmation of its ideology. Democrats did it
after their 2008 triumph, with the left-of-center magazine The New
Republic running an article titled, “America the Liberal.”
But Obama won more because of the lousy economy than his worldview --
which, as it happens, was also true of Reagan in 1980. Since taking
office, Obama has been forcefully reminded that America is much less
liberal than his party imagined.
So humility is in order among Republicans. “They have not been restored
to their natural ruling place by a grateful people,” writes Olsen.
“They have been turned to by an angry people who harbor as many doubts
about conservatives as they do about liberals.”
A conservative nation? Sort of. Until it’s not.
Read it at Townhall
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