Coding The Strategy

Sunday morning I was watching CNN and Wolf Blitzer was doing the usual crossfire-esque talking heads bit with James Carville and Ed Rollins.  The topic was Blagojevich's ridiculous but ballsy move to appoint a new Senator for Illinois despite being on the verge of impeachment, and the man who was appointed, Roland Burris.

Now normally since Carville is the Democratic strategist and Rollins is the Republican strategist, you'd expect that Carville would be defending whatever the Democrat in question has done and Rollins would be condemning it.  But the twist of course is that Blagojevich is too sleazy for anyone to agree with, so the positions were more: Carville saying Blagojevich's decisions are suspect and Rollins trying to find a way to make Democrats look bad by tying them closer to Blagojevich.

So this all goes as expected until at one point when asked whether the Senate has the authority to block a Blagojevich appointee, Rollins says:

"Well, they certainly can attempt, procedurally, to do it. I think it's idiotic to try and do this. I think Burris will be a good Democrat senator. He's been elected, statewide, four times, including the job of attorney general. The governor does have the power, whether we like it or not. He's not been impeached. He's not been indicted yet. And he's not been convicted. We do believe in due process. 

So, for Harry Reid to make phone calls and recommend that African-American congressmen don't be appointed, and that someone else should, I think, is very foolish on his part, and to draw this thing out when they have all these other problems."

The part that sticks out is that last bit - Rollins chooses his words to imply that the Senate Democrats don't want Burris seated, not because he was appointed by Blagojevich, but because he's black.

Now that quote above is from the CNN transcript, and to his credit I don't remember it that way - I remember Rollins saying "and recommend that an African-American congressman not be appointed" so it was more vague, but at the time it struck me anyway as odd that he brought Burris' race into the conversation.

Carville jumped on this right away and says:

I wasn't aware Senator Reid's made phone calls urging him not to appoint an African-American. 

But maybe -- I wasn't aware of that. What he said was, was they were not going to seat, and 50 other Democrats said it also, that they were not going to seat anybody that Governor Blagojevich appointed because there are very, very serious allegations that he had said that he wanted something in return for the seat.

It's kind of hard to pin down, but this exchange immediately got me thinking, because something about this is definitely my pet peeve in political newscasting and in politics in general.  It's very similar to when anyone says "Well I just don't think the American people want..."  Because inevitably what they say next is designed to misinform the audience with some untrue or twisted characterization of the subject in question.

Here Rollins was throwing a shockingly bold hail mary hoping that he could paint Harry Reid as racist, and I think it's indicative of where conservatives are these days in terms of strategy.

Paul Krugman's January 1st column, "Bigger than Bush" really gets to the heart of this concept, and I think the Rollins exchange above is just the latest incarnation of Republican "coding" strategy.  Krugman lays out the Republican strategy of the past 28 years as one of exchanging overt racism for policies that are just code for that same racism, because you can't be overtly racist anymore.  Krugman isn't making this stuff up - as he quotes Lee Atwater, the famous Republican strategist, who said (I edit out the n-word here):

You start out in 1954 by saying "n---er, n---er, n---er." By 1968 you can't say "n---er" - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff.  You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me - because obviously sitting around saying "we want to cut this" is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "n---er, n---er.

That's Lee Atwater talking there - the guy who passed his mantle to Karl Rove.  The father of current Republican strategy.  Seen through that lens, Republican strategy of the past 28 years does indeed make a lot of sense, as does the utter implosion of the Republican brand during this past election cycle.  How can you use coded racism when you're running against a black man who steps up to the podium and directly addresses it?  The failure of the Republicans during this last cycle is a failure of coding both because it became so abstract that Republicans themselves didn't get it and because Obama so deftly blew apart the code with, of all things, straight-talk.

I think the Ed Rollins exchange shows that he's pretty well locked into the Atwater-style coded politics.  After all, he's an old guy and he's been at this a while - I'd be surprised to see him using any new tricks.  Likewise I think Sarah Palin rose to power in Alaska on the old-school coded strategy, but hers was more focused on abortion than on race.  Rick Warren dodges the question of whether banning gay marriage is fair by falling back on states' rights.

"States' rights", once code for anti-voting rights politics, now also covers abortion politics and gay marriage. But how long will coding work for abortion and gay marriage?  These were once discrete and private topics that people didn't really discuss - but in the next few years gay marriage is going to be right at the forefront, and I don't think coded bigotry is going to work for the Republicans on it.

On top of which, liberals are becoming more bold with their arguments.  Jon Stewart made a killer case for gay marriage when he had Mike Huckabee on the Daily Show, and Huckabee's claims that opposing gay marriage doesn't make him a homophobe are weak at best, and he totally fails to come up with any substantial argument against it.  Oh also, Huckabee uses my pet peeve:

If we change the definition then we really do have to change it to accomodate all lifestyles. I mean we'd have to say to the guy in West Texas who had 27 wives  'that's okay'. And I'm not sure that I hear a lot of people arguing that that's a great idea.

Man, that really annoys me.

Anyway, I think we're well into a new era in political strategy where Democrats have largely figured out how to beat the Republican strategy of coding by boldly confronting the issues.  It doesn't hurt that the economic disaster has blown apart Republican claims of being the more fiscally responsible party, but the real long term political change is the failure of coding as a winning strategy.

Like I said, Ed Rollins is an old guy.  Sooner or later some young conservative hotshot is going to come up with a new strategy, and we'll see how that plays out.  But for now I think you're going to see people like Mike Huckabee increasingly fall by the wayside as their old-school coding fails to connect with voters.  Which I guess is another way of saying "I don't think the American people want it."