The latest era of class-conflict politics is mild by historic standards. Obama, GOP fight the class war

There was nothing especially subtle about the way Barack Obama played the politics of class resentment against Mitt Romney in 2012.

“My opponent,” Obama brayed in Virginia Beach last fall, “thinks that someone who makes $20 million a year, like him, should pay a lower [tax] rate than a cop or a teacher who makes $50,000.”


And there was nothing especially mysterious about the reason: Class warfare works.

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That fundamental reality of the Obama years — that the president won a second term in large part because he gave new life to an old brand of class-based politics — continues to echo six months later as the dominant factor shaping American politics this spring, as the parties slog through the latest fiscal fight.

Both parties are in the midst of intense and far-reaching debates about how to respond.

Among Republicans, alarmed by the long-term implications of Obama’s victory, there is an argument over whether a new era of politics driven by economic grievance requires only a change of messaging and a less ripe-for-caricature messenger than Romney — or a much more fundamental rethinking of its policy agenda.

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Among Democrats there is division over whether Obama is squandering his victory by embracing in his new budget the idea that popular entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare must be trimmed to make them more affordable. Many liberals believe that this stance represents a surrender, in politics and substance alike, in what is their side’s most potent class-conflict weapon.

But to Obama loyalists, Democrats must act now to preserve their hallowed New Deal and Great Society accomplishments so they’re not emasculated later under a Republican president.

“The most persuasive case for reforming Medicare is saving Medicare,” said Obama strategist David Axelrod. “You don’t want to see the Big Bad Wolf making those decisions.”

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Other Democrats fret that Republicans outfoxed Obama on entitlements. “He wants to look like a centrist and all he did was let them make him own it,” said Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), co-chairman of the House Progressive Caucus. “It’s terrible politics.”

For Obama, this spring’s fights over class represent both a political challenge and a definitional moment. His most consistent argument — that higher taxes on the well-to-do are the essential element in preserving popular government benefits to the middle-class and poor — is in tension with his most consistent promise, that his presidency will break Washington gridlock and elevate problem-solving over ideological purity.

The latest era of class-conflict politics is mild by historic standards. On his most combative day, Obama never denounces “malefactors of great wealth,” in Theodore Roosevelt’s phrase, or boasted, as Franklin D. Roosevelt did, that the “economic royalists” are “unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.”

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On the other hand, Obama’s dependence on class-based politics shows how far the country has moved from the politics of a generation ago. In Bill Clinton’s presidency, he and centrist political advisers like the pollster Mark Penn concluded that any appeal that smacked of class warfare was a loser for Democrats. Their belief was that even most swing voters who weren’t rich wanted to be, or at least didn’t resent those who were, and wanted Democrats to preach a message of unity and bipartisan progress.

In the ’80s and ’90s, class-warfare politics was typically employed effectively by conservatives — not on economic issues but on cultural ones. People like Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich warned middle-class voters that liberal elites wanted to impose their values on abortion, diversity and gun control on an unwilling country.

In the Obama era, the calculation has changed — in part because his electoral coalition of reliable Democrats is now considerably larger than the traditional GOP base coalition. Of his main constituencies — including African-Americans and Hispanics, unionized workers and socially tolerant suburban women — nearly all are receptive to the argument that the interests of the rich are at odds with their own interests. Yet Democrats could pay a political price from these very constituencies if they don’t ultimately address the financing of programs their voters rely on for a decent quality of life.

But if the Democratic day of reckoning on class politics is still in the future, Republicans are feeling the pinch now.

The numbers from a post-election national survey by longtime GOP pollster Whit Ayres are still stamped in his memory.

“We had Obama beating Romney by 11 percentage points on the question of who would do more to help the middle class,” said Ayres. “And that was absolutely critical. Demographics don’t explain our losses in Ohio, Wisconsin and Iowa. What explains those losses is that Republicans were not deemed to be the party of the middle class.”

Obama’s relentless attacks on Romney for favoring the wealthy and the Republican’s privileged background and rich-guy demeanor have left many in the party convinced they can’t nominate another legacy candidate.

The GOP can shield itself from class-based attacks, this thinking goes, with a combination of biography and aspirational politics. In other words, nominate an up-by-the-bootstraps candidate who can personally testify to the wonder of the American Dream.

But there’s a simmering debate among Republicans over whether changing the packaging is enough. Some in the party believe merely nominating an immigrants’ son like Florida Sen. Marco Rubio isn’t sufficient and that the GOP must present new policies appealing to voters of modest and moderate means. Of course, replacing the messenger or tweaking the message is always easier in politics than confronting hard decisions about the substance behind the message itself.

Conservative thinker and writer Pete Wehner, who worked in President George W. Bush’s White House, compared the situation to the West Wing conversations he participated in when the Iraq war turned unpopular.

“We didn’t have a messaging problem, we had a ‘facts on the ground problem,’” said Wehner. “And now Republicans have a ‘facts on the ground problem’ in addition to a messaging problem.”

But Stuart Stevens, Romney’s top strategist in the last campaign, counters that voters are more than willing to change their minds about a party in an era of celebrity politics.

“I don’t think that definition, ‘party of the rich,’ is any way irreparable,” said Stevens. “It’s something the party should be mindful of, but it’s something that history has shown can easily be changed. From Michael Dukakis to Bill Clinton, it’s clear we’re a very personality-driven country.”

Stevens, reminded of Clinton’s centrist-oriented campaign in 1992, dismissed the changes as “cosmetic” and said Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” amounted to a similarly effective tonal change following a loss.

Added Stevens of two potential 2016 aspirants: “I don’t think Chris Christie has a class problem, I don’t think Bobby Jindal has a class problem.”

Democrats, unsurprisingly, believe their counterparts are deluding themselves about their underlying problem.

“You can bathe Republican economics in a cloak of biography, but when people look inside they’re still going to find the same objectionable policy,” said Axelrod, adding: “You can’t cast yourself as a tribune of the middle class and support policies that shift the burden from the middle class to the wealthy. Look, the [Paul] Ryan budget is not a middle-class budget.”

Matt Bennett, a top official at the Democratic group Third Way, recalled his own personal experience with using a candidate’s personal story to mend a party.

“It sounds very hauntingly familiar,” said Bennett. “It’s what Democrats thought we could do in national security in 2004 — Lt. [John] Kerry reporting for duty and all that. I even moved my ass to Little Rock to work for Gen. [Wesley] Clark thinking the biography of our candidate would fix our problems. It isn’t enough.”

Will Marshall, head of the centrist Democratic think tank Progressive Policy Institute, said the GOP would suffer until it made tough decisions on policy in much the same way Democrats did in the 1980s.

“Republicans are at the first stage of the ‘politics of evasion,’ where you pin defeats on everything but your outlook and agenda,” said Marshall, referencing the title of the searing self-indictment penned by a pair of Democratic moderates the year after the party’s third consecutive White House loss in 1988. “It’s always the candidate, the media, the tactics or our people weren’t excited.”

Ayres also found similarities between the GOP’s class problems now and Democrats’ class problems a generation ago.

“Whichever party is the voice of the middle class ends up winning presidential elections,” said Ayres. “When Republicans were winning five of six presidential elections we were the voice of the middle class and Democrats were the voice of special interests and minorities. And just as Reagan pinned the tag of special interests and minorities on Democrats, Obama pinned on us the party of the rich this time. And then we did what Democrats did in the 1980s — we played into the caricature.”

Ayres recalled holding focus groups with Republicans of modest means who complained that “the Romneys didn’t have any intuitive understanding of the enormous struggles they were facing.

“These are people who need the $80 to $100 you get to spend two hours at a focus group,” said the pollster. “I remember one woman saying [of Ann Romney’s line]: ‘We struggled so hard we had to cash in some of our stock shares — how am I supposed to relate to that?’”

Republican reformers say it’s imperative that the party have a fresh message that directly addresses the challenges faced by Americans who would benefit little from a change in capital gains rates.

“When it comes to dealing with the problems associated with class, Republicans are still in the early process figuring out that we need solutions,” said conservative think tanker and writer Ben Domenech.

Domenech, in an essay last month for RealClearPolitics, lamented how much the post-election GOP soul-searching has focused on issues driven by party elites and the GOP’s emerging libertarian wing like immigration, gay rights and national security instead of core economic matters.

“What is most troubling about the clashes on the right at the moment is not their ferocity or their insignificance, but rather how little they have to do with the issues Americans actually care about,” he wrote.

Domenech has floated the idea of fashioning an agenda on taxes, health care, education and the cost of living for the rising numbers of stay-at-home parents who work from their homes and face a tangle of bureaucratic challenges for doing so.

Brad Todd, a GOP consultant who recently penned an op-ed for POLITICO calling for his party to stop nominating legacy presidential candidates, said in addition to biographical changes, Republicans have to sever themselves from big money interests.

“We have to make it clear that we are not the party of Wall Street,” said Todd, a close adviser to Jindal, the Louisiana governor.

Asked how to do so on policy, Todd suggested the carried-interest tax break that hedge funders and private equity mavens enjoy would be an obvious target as part of a major tax reform bill.

“There will be some fissures in the typical Republican coalition if we do tax reform,” Todd predicted.

If Republicans face an immediate challenge and divide on class, Democrats face a complicated problem of their own on the issue.

As the furious reaction on the left to Obama’s budget proposal last week demonstrated, there’s intense opposition among liberals to making any significant cutbacks to cherished safety net programs. Beyond support for the principles behind Medicare and Social Security, there’s also an unambiguous political rationale behind not wanting to play a part in altering entitlements: Doing so would make it harder for Democrats to convince voters it’s only the GOP that wants to trim the popular programs.

Ellison said he and other progressives would take steps next year to detach themselves politically from any bipartisan effort to trim entitlements.

“If anybody tries to cut seniors, seniors will know that the Progressive Caucus stood opposed to it,” he pledged.

Axelrod acknowledged the opposition in his party’s own ranks and was blunt about what he thinks partly explains opponents’ motivation.

“There’s no doubt that there are some members of Congress who see Medicare and Social Security as a club with which to pound the opposition, and they would just as soon have the issue than address long-term problems with the programs,” said Axelrod.

What many centrist Democrats worry about is the party’s congressional wing delaying reforms in order to hang on to the issue, only to be ultimately blamed when benefits are cut deeply or taxes are significantly raised. In other words, they fret they’ll suffer politically with the broad middle of the country by having to do to the programs what they warn Republicans are attempting to do now.

“People have this nagging sense that something is deeply broken with Medicare and it needs to be fixed,” said Bennett. “But there is reluctance on the part of congressional Democrats to go along with something big on fiscal issues.”

Added Marshall: “We can’t keep pretending loading taxes on the rich is going to fill the funding gap on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.”

Republicans are skeptical Democrats will deal with entitlements in a significant way anytime soon and forfeit their favorite tactic.

“Dems view entitlements as a weapon the same way Charlton Heston viewed his guns: when you pry it from my cold dead hand,” cracked Claremont McKenna professor and former Republican operative John Pitney.

Ultimately, both parties will have to confront tough decisions on class politics because of the changing views of younger Americans.

“The dominant ideology of the country is becoming libertarianism, both economic and cultural,” said Georgetown University history professor Michael Kazin. “And that’s something that leaves out many people who are in the working class. It’s a big problem for both parties.”