The new emerging pundit story seems to be that 2012 is like 2004, and, as a result, Democrats had better watch out.
The parallels are pretty clear. In 2004, the Democratic candidate for President was a wealthy, apparently out-of-touch man with roots in Massachusetts drawn from the middle of the party, promoted as a consensus candidate who, while uninspiring, could at least win. In 2012, the Republican candidate for President was a wealthy, apparently out-of-touch man with roots in Massachusetts who, while uninspiring, had fought a long primary battle and shown he could win there. Each of them went into the evening of election day with evidence that he was winning in Ohio; each of them woke up the next morning having lost it, and with it, the election. In each case, the party went into a feeding frenzy after the loss.
If the past is prologue, and if history at least rhymes, the Republican party will bounce back from this crushing defeat and win control of the Senate in the next off-year election. In 2016, the party will nominate a clever, ambitious centrist who will defeat Jeb Bush after a long and bitter primary campaign. Despite evidence to the contrary, this centrist will be seen as a moderate extremist and will sweep the purple states with coattails a mile long, and build a Republican supermajority in the Senate which will lead to a period of unquestioned Republican dominance in government.
I can't see the future, but I suggest that if the Republican party is in for a rude surprise if it hangs its hopes on that narrative. Yes, John Kerry and Mitt Romney both spent time in Massachusetts, and both sought and won electoral office there. Yes, both men were wealthy, and both appeared out-of-touch. After that, though, the analogy breaks down, and breaks down badly.
Follow me across the socialist firetruckstick to find out why.
First, and most importantly, the Democratic Party had been moving towards the center since 1980, when Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan. In 1984, Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro ran as liberals and lost. In 1988, Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen ran as "competent Democrats" and lost. That was also the year in which Jesse Jackson ran most effectively, and wound up giving a brilliant speech about how "his people took the early bus". It was also the year of the infamous Willie Horton ad. In 1992, Bill Clinton ran as a "New Democrat", winning on the strength of an economic slow down, a bizarre third-party candidate, and an appeal to 'centrism'. In 1996, Clinton ran again, and was reelected. In 2000, Al Gore and Joe Lieberman ran together, as centrist Democrats, and lost to George W. Bush.
We've already reviewed 2004, 2008, and 2012.
Notice the pattern here: the Democratic Party has never been a truly left-wing (e.g. democratic socialist) party, but after the shellackings of the Nixon and Reagan elections, the party moved quite considerably towards the center. Jesse Jackson, a moderate left wing figure, was considered well outside the mainstream in 1988. Clinton had his "Sistah Souljah" moment, which was meant to mark him as a "new kind of (white) Dem," not beholden to Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition. By doing this, he largely inoculated himself against the kinds of ads Lee Atwater had used, so effectively, against Dukakis four years earlier. During the Kerrey run, people in the party supported ideas like charter schools, which are explicitly anti-union.
The Democrats in 2004 were a party of the American center, not of the left. We'd spent twenty years rethinking and challenging our core beliefs, trying to reshape them into a form in which they'd be palatable to the mainstream. We were helped by the incredible megalomania of the Cheney-Bush Republicans, but we'd moderated a lot.
The Republicans in 2012 have not done that. Their populist mainstream is the Tea Party, home of "Get a life, morans" and "Keep the government out of my Medicare". Unlike Dukakis and Clinton, the major Republican candidates of 2012 did not attempt to marginalize their radicals, but instead embraced them, trying to run hard to the right to garner their votes. They have not moderated at all over the previous decade, instead marching ever more tightly to the drumbeat dictated by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.
The Republican Party is not a chastened party which has refought its battles and rethought its beliefs, but rather an extremist party still in the flush of the religious fervor of self-righteousness. That is how 2012 is most unlike 2004. The Republicans haven't clean up their act; indeed, many of them don't even believe that it needs to be cleaned up.
The Democratic Party is not perfect, and someday will be marginalized, whether because the Republicans regain office or because the Democratic party schisms. But for right now, although we can't give up the fight or slack off, I'm not worried about an Obama-like figure arising in the Republican Party in the next four, or even fourteen, years.