The brash challenger had some moments last night, but overall it seemed to me that the presumptive next president did what he needed to do to take the country a step or two closer to the first Romney Administration. Since this campaign is still pre-mortem, it may be a bit early to write the post-mortem analysis, but no matter who wins I think it is not too early to conclude that at least a couple of longstanding truisms of American politics (or at least what many true believers believe to be true) are no longer true.
1. We are a centrist nation, perhaps a slightly center-right nation, that will never elect a president who strays too far from the major-media-defined mainstream. WRONG. Obama’s election does not disprove this truism, since he ran as a no blue state/no red state post-racial unifier, but the fact that he is so close to winning re-election despite his four years of government expanding, excessive, redistributionist spending at home and a shrinking (some would say shirking) foreign policy based in large part on retreat from the very idea of American exceptionalism does. [ADDED: Not to mention the fact that the mainstream media keeps eroding the left bank, constantly moving the “mainstream” to just a hairline to the right of the Democratic left, no matter how far left it drifts.] The fact that today’s Democratic Party proved itself not only able but giddily eager to follow such a left wing Pied Piper demonstrates that American liberalism is no longer the bulwark protecting us from socialism (or if you’re a socialist, keeping us from socialism) that it has been in the past.
2. Republicans win only when they nominate ideological conservatives who energize the base. WRONG. This is not really a truism of American politics but of a prominent, perhaps dominant, conservative view of American politics, and the fact that Romney is so close to being elected doesn’t necessarily disprove it — even though he did not come out of the conservative base, Obama is widely seen by conservatives as so bad that any breathing Republican would energize the base this year — but it at least calls that conservative conventional wisdom into question. A “real” conservative would have bashed Obama last night on Benghazi and other issues. Romney didn’t, annoying conservatives, and may well have gotten himself elected by refusing to be confrontational.
3. The most “likable” candidate always wins. WRONG. Or maybe not. First, it’s not clear yet who’s going to win, but this truism has been called into question, or at least appears problematical this year, because of some underlying factors. I have found it surprising — even inexplicable — that at least up to mid-October Obama has consistently been winning the “likability” contest. It’s not that I don’t like him, though I don’t; it just doesn’t seem to me that other people really like him either. Both Reagan and Clinton (Bill, not Hil) were likable pols — warm, friendly, outgoing. Even their most determined opponents liked them. Who, other than perhaps Michele (when she’s not on vacation, or perhaps especially when she’s on vacation), actually likes Barack Obama? His acolytes adore him, but do they like him? (See Rich Lowry’s superb “The Adoration Bubble” this morning on National Review.) How can someone so obviously cool and aloof, someone who has no clearly evident close friends, someone who seems to have no family ties beyond his wife and daughters (remember when he described his grandmother, who raised him, as “a typical white person”?), be seen as so “likable” by so many people? Beats me. Since, however, Romney so far has also not warmed the cockles of the national heart, this year it’s quite likely that “likability” will come in third in a two-way race.
