Dear John,
First, I feel I should do my part to serve Slate’s news function by saying that Democrats remain poised to take control of the House (maybe by a lot) and still have to figure out how to win two of three seats in Tennessee, Virginia, and Missouri to take the Senate.
The Senate playing field and dynamics remain pretty stable, although Republicans are still hoping to either save another of their four other endangered incumbents (in Montana, say, or Rhode Island) or flip a Democratic seat (in New Jersey or Maryland). But if control of the Senate is going to be in play, Democrats need to hold those incumbents and beat Republicans in those two GOP-held seats, plus Pennsylvania and Ohio.
The House is more confusing. The field of Democratic targets of opportunity continues to expand, with Republicans being forced to defend more than 50 seats—a number far larger than most people thought possible only a few months ago. These newly competitive seats are in blue places, such as New York, and red places, such as Idaho and Wyoming. Democrats have no more than four seats to defend, and probably just one or two.
As for your inbox and the anger that spews on the radio and the Internet: I think you and I are in intellectual concert on these issues, but I think we part on how big a problem it is.
Do I phrase everything perfectly in all that I write or say? I do not. There might even be parts of The Way To Win in which we did not smooth every edge and express ourselves with crystal-clear precision. What is absurd and troubling about the anger on the right and the left is that these people seize on whatever wisp of a phrase they wish in a wider discussion and twist it to their own purposes.
There are two areas of questions that interest me the most right now, one backward-looking and one forward. First, were people this angry before they had the New Media to express themselves to like-minded souls, or has the technology somehow egged them on? As we point out in the book (and George F. Will quotes in his column this week):
When the current President Bush completes his full second term, it will be the first time since James Madison and James Monroe almost two hundred years ago that back-to-back presidents both served all eight years of two elected terms. Put another way, two of the most divisive figures in this country’s history will have commanded the White House for sixteen consecutive years.
And it is not a normal 16 years. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are extraordinarily polarizing figures, but it seems clear that the explosion of new media and the rise of the freak show in which extreme voices are now at the center of our politics and political media have interacted with the governing styles of 42 and 43 to make matters worse. We wrote some of this history in The Way To Win, but I think it really deserves more study.
As the Kerry episode this week demonstrates, the freak show right now benefits Republicans and conservatives more than Democrats and liberals. Going forward, I wonder if any serious candidate for president in 2008 would make an attempt to defuse the freak show and try to drain some of the anger out of our current politics. In the book, we say it is unlikely. I think that even more now than before.
The two major party front-runners—John McCain and Hillary Clinton—have both been heavily burned by the freak show and do not much like it. But they both have shown an obvious determination to use it to their political advantage and seem to think that rallying the base and destroying opponents using the methods that George W. Bush and Karl Rove have perfected is the only way to win in America today. I do not see them or their political advisers trying to figure out how to change the environment—only to master it. Some of the second-tier candidates—most notably John Edwards—appear to be searching for a different way forward, but I can’t imagine at this point that that is the more likely path to victory.
You don’t sound like a Boy Scout when you talk about how the Old Media dinosaurs can survive with “discipline and self-confidence.” Rather, you sound like someone in (sorry) denial about what it will take to address the current economic and ideological environment.
The reason that I am simultaneously on our book tour and my own personal listening tour of the complaints of both the right and the left is that I want to understand the intellectual arguments of both sides about what is wrong with our product and how we can make it better for our customers. The problem I find is that most of their “arguments” are ad hominem attacks. In their world, liking both Karl Rove and Bill Clinton is impossible—it just doesn’t compute.
I want a more optimistic and hopeful America. I want America to be on the right track. The freak show is not the answer. Help me solve it.
You raised no questions, but here are some for you:
1. Are you and the Post’s other top political journalists working both days this weekend?
2. Do you think the president thinks it is possible that Nancy Pelosi will become speaker?
3. When do the big brains at the Post think we will know who will control the House?
Cheers,
Mark
