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Rick Perry enters the presidential race today, bringing the list of announced Republican candidates to 10, with five more expected soon. There are any number of ways you could organize this unwieldy field in order to understand it, but it may be most useful to divide it into two kinds of GOP contenders: the pre-Obama candidates, and the Obama-era candidates.
Perry straddles those two groups (we’ll get to him in a moment), but this division plays out in ways that are more complicated than simply more conservative versus less conservative. The truth is that the policy differences between the candidates are minimal. What defines those who came to national prominence since 2008 is the fact that they positioned themselves within a Republican Party that defines itself by its opposition to Barack Obama.
Yes, today’s GOP is even more conservative in policy terms than it was a decade ago, but it’s also characterized by an intense partisanship that often places standing up to the other side (and to Obama in particular) as a higher value than actually accomplishing conservative goals. A pre-Obama politician like Jeb Bush may have advantages that make his road to the nomination clearer than an Obama-era politician like Ted Cruz. But he’ll have to spend much of his time explaining himself and reassuring primary voters that he can adopt a sufficiently Obama-era — i.e., anti-Obama — posture.
Let’s look at it another way. Governors often have an advantage because they’re seen as leaders who have records they can point to. In the past, the fact that governors sometimes have to make pragmatic compromises and work with the other side to keep their state running hasn’t been disqualifying. But if there’s a prototypical Obama-era Republican governor, it’s Scott Walker, who has essentially acted like a tea party Republican in office. He has not only advanced conservative policies, he has waged total war on his state’s Democrats and their constituencies, seeking to destroy labor unions and not bothering to seek Democratic votes.
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And that’s what today’s Republicans (and to a lesser extent on their side, today’s Democrats) are looking for. As political scientists Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster argue in this new article, American voters increasingly find their identity in “negative partisanship” — not their loyalty to their party of choice, but their dislike for the other party. As this graph shows, particularly since 2000, people’s sentiment toward the other party has been growing colder and colder:Add in the particular antipathy Republican voters have for Barack Obama — which, of course, has been stoked and encouraged by Republican politicians — and any Republican who reached office in the last six years knows he or she has to make a great show of despising and opposing Obama to retain the support of the Republican base. It doesn’t come quite as naturally to those like Bush or John Kasich who reached prominence in the pre-Obama era.
That doesn’t mean a Republican can’t overcome his pre-Obama tendencies if he has them. But it does mean he’ll have to put more energy into fashioning an Obama-era identity for himself and apologizing for his pre-Obama ways, as Mitt Romney did four years ago.
As for Rick Perry, we might think of him as someone who was an Obama-era Republican before Obama. He took office in 2001 when George W. Bush became president, at a time when the last Texas Democrats were going into hiding. With little opposition to fight against, he went about happily pursuing a conservative agenda without having to make any compromises. But after 2008, he wholeheartedly embraced the tea party movement and its venomous hatred of Obama, even suggesting at one point that Texas might consider seceding from the United States if Washington kept insisting on making laws and regulations (though he allowed that “We’ve got a great union. There is absolutely no reason to dissolve it”).
Perry has almost nothing to apologize to Republican voters for (with the exception of some disturbing compassion for undocumented immigrant children, something he makes up for with lots of lectern-pounding on border security), which puts him in the same place as Obama-era candidates like Walker, Cruz, or Marco Rubio (who also has one heresy to deal with, also immigration-related). For the moment he’s languishing in the low single digits, which might or might not change; memories of his ham-handed 2012 run are still strong.
But every candidate, whether they’re in front or behind, is going to find their candidacy defined by how they position themselves in relation to Barack Obama, and whether Republican voters accept that positioning or not.
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Friday, June 19, 2015
