Will Democrats try to sell Hillary as more a "real Republican" than Trump?

With the polls currently indicating a likely Hillary Clinton win in the Presidential election, the question of what kind of mandate she will claim and how the Democratic Party will take advantage (or fail to do so) given indications that Clinton will have a strong margin of victory.

Paul Krugman (even-the-hardcore-Hillary-supporter Paul Krugman!) made the following set of Twitter entries on 08/08/2016, which he called "A short (?) Twitterstorm on Trump and his predecessors."

1. I'm hearing some people claim that given how bad DJT [Donald J. Trump] is, some of us were too hard on Bush and Romney -- that we should have saved our ire
2. This is actually quite silly as a practical claim about politics -- do you really think that Trump supporters care what NYT [New York Times] opinion says?
3. But more to the point, it misses the story. What people like me and Norm Ornstein were trying to tell you was about a GOP breaking bad
4. Bush, who was dishonest in an unprecedented way -- including misleading us into war -- and Romney, who followed his lead, were harbingers
5. Trumpian awfulness is basically a continuation of the process -- it's a vindication of these warnings, not a sign that we were too harsh
6. And looking forward, it's important not to let Trump move the Overton window. "Better than Trump" will not be OK in future candidates.

Faced with the possibility of a strong electoral margin, the Democrats have two basic approaches. The "safe" and conventional approach would be to try to win as many Republican votes as possible by emphasizing how off-the-tracks Trump is and by talking tough on national security and fiscal discipline. Conventional Democratic neoliberalism and, yes, militarism, in other words.

The other would be to use the lead to present issues in a Democratic framework. The dominant approach in the Democratic Party since 1992 has been to frame issues in Republican terms and present themselves as more sensible and better able to achieve them than Republicans. And as a result, the Overton Window has moved further and further to the right.

Krugman is obviously concerned that the former approach will dominated the Presidential campaign. In other words, instead of using the chance to say, Donald Trump is what the Republican Party really looks like, to instead try to say, Trump isn't a real Republican and so Republicans should vote for Hillary because she's more like a real Republican than Trump.

I share Krugman's concern.

Thomas Frank on Obama and the Overton window

Thomas Frank's article "Compromising Positions" in the print edition of Harper's Sept 2012 covers much the same ground he does in the interview in Salon I discussed earlier.

Frank's conclusion in "Compromising Positions" has a bitter edge:

As I watched this upside-down unrest emerge [rightwing Tea Party populism], I used to wonder how long it would take Obama to switch on his inner FDR and start grappling with the nation's problems the way they obviously needed to be grappled with. The years passed, and I finally realized that this was never going to happen. Then a different possibility started to dawn on me: Maybe a second New Deal is precisely what Obama was here to prevent. Maybe that was the hope all along.

But Frank is accurate in the results he describes here:

He [Obama] came to the White House amid circumstances similar to those of 1933, but proceeded to rule like Herbert Hoover. Today the banks are as big as ever, and he has done precious little about it. The regulatory system is falling apart, and he is too ideologically demure to tell us why. Organized labor is crumbling, and he has done almost nothing to help it recover. Meanwhile, the people who told us that finance was king, that the "new economy" changed all the rules, that we didn't really need a strong supervisory state - those people are still riding high, still making their pronouncements from the heights of the op-ed page and the executive branch.[my emphasis]

As that paragraph illustrates, Frank does give more attention to the (neoliberal) ideological aspects of the Obama Administration than his Salon interview showed.

He also gives this descriptions of how the Republicans have exploited Obama's centrist obsession to drive the so-caled Overton window far to the right:

Let's not overlook centrism's perennial promise: that it is the only way to reach the coveted swing voter, who resides, per D.C. superstition, in the very middle of the political spectrum. That committing yourself heart and soul to a bipartisan approach might allow an opposing party to completely reconfigure the political spectrum is not, as far as I know, a part of accepted poli-sci game theory.

And yet that is exactly what has happened over the past four years. When the president said and did all the things I have listed here, he no doubt thought he was reaching across the aisle, as the expression goes. Everyone could see that he had adopted many of the other party's positions, that he was using their rhetoric, that he was showing respect for their values and bowing to their household gods.

Back in the Clinton years, such moves were hailed as a kind of advanced political judo, throwing Republicans off balance. This time, though, the skills are all on the
other side. Republicans have grasped that if the contest is not about issues but the relative position of the two parties, then they are free to move ever rightward, dragging the center with them, always keeping it a few inches away from the president's anxious, conciliatory grasp. [my emphasis in bold]

The great flaw in that linear image of the swing voter on a right-to-left continuum was illustrated dramatically in the debt-ceiling disaster in 2011, when polls showed that Obama's repeated, desperate attempts to compromise with intransigent Republicans damaged him most among independents, the very group that the centrist posturing was supposed to attract.

Speaking of the "Overton window", the Right Wing Watch website of the People for the American Way (PFAW) points out that this particular concept was generated and promoted by a conservative think tank, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Michigan:

The Mackinac Center for Policy Research focuses on advancing government privatization and espousing conservative fiscal policies. The group actively advocates school vouchers and the privatization of the University of Michigan. The Center publishes the Michigan Education Report in support of its policies. In promoting other limited-government, free-market economic principles, the group advocates measures such as privatizing Amtrak and prisons facilities and eliminating government subsidies for arts and culture initiatives. The Center is also anti-union, having pursued initiatives to limit union political spending and attacked mandatory union membership policies. Additionally, the Center's President, Lawrence Reed runs a "think-tank school" on establishing and effectively maintaining state-level conservative think-tanks.

In the last few years, the center has received grants from: Sarah Scaife Foundation, Roe Foundation, Ruth and Lovett Peters Foundation, Rodney Fund, Orville D. and Ruth A. Merillat Foundation, JM Foundation, Earhart Foundation, Charles G. Koch Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, Dick and Betsy Devos Foundation and Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama, overton window