By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, July 03, 2015
Ben Wattenberg died this week at the age of 81.
He gave me my first job in Washington, as his research
assistant at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. (I
returned to AEI as a fellow a few years ago, my office just a few doors down
from where Ben used to work.)
Ben was one of the last star pundits of what might be
called the Old Order, before cable news and the Internet transformed the
landscape. When everyone was rushing to CNN to shout at each other on
Crossfire, he launched a PBS show called “Think Tank” that aimed at high-minded
conversation above the din. (I produced the show for several years.)
He had a remarkable career. A speechwriter for LBJ, Ben
became a self-trained demographer. In 1970, he wrote The Real Majority with
Richard Scammon, the former head of the Census Bureau. It was a data-driven
analysis of the American electorate — the first to marry demographic data with
public polling data. The impact of The Real Majority was enormous. The
Washington Post said it was the “most influential study of the American
electorate ever published.”
The impact was huge, but not what Ben intended. The
Democratic party was in the throes of McGovernism, an eggheady,
quasi-isolationist, movement-oriented liberalism that many voters took for
thinly veiled anti-Americanism.
Meanwhile, a savvy aide named Pat Buchanan gave the book
to Richard Nixon, who was looking to build his own movement out of what he
called “the silent majority.” Nixon loved it. “We should aim our strategy
primarily at disaffected Democrats, at blue-collar workers, and at
working-class ethnics,” Nixon said. “We should set out to capture the vote of
the 47-year-old Dayton housewife.”
That housewife was a statistical fiction, a composite
created by Wattenberg and Scammon. The typical American voter was “a
47-year-old housewife from the outskirts of Dayton, Ohio, whose husband is a
machinist” and whose brother-in-law is a cop. (Take note: Even nearly a
half-century ago, Ohio was still an electoral lynchpin.) Contrary to the
rhetoric of the Democrats and their intellectual supporters, the majority of
Americans were in fact “unyoung, unpoor, and unblack.” They were instead
“middle-aged, middle-class, and middle-minded.”
“Will it sell to the Dayton housewife?” became the new
“Will it play in Peoria?” for political consultants. TV host Dick Cavett even
found an actual Dayton housewife to interview as if she were an oracle of the
age.
The real majority, Wattenberg and Scammon argued, broke
to the right on “social issues” — a now-ubiquitous term coined by the authors —
which covered the waterfront of non-economic issues from law-and-order and
drugs to student revolts and cultural malaise. They cited polls from 1969
showing that 94 percent of Americans wanted universities to come down harder on
student protests, 84 percent were against the legalization of pot, and 84
percent were in favor of stricter obscenity laws. By nearly a 2–1 margin,
Americans wanted the next Supreme Court vacancy filled by a conservative (49
percent to 27 percent).
Democrats ignored it all. They thought economic populism
could hold the old Democratic coalition together, while cultural leftism would
bring in ever more young and minority voters.
Nixon won reelection by a landslide, carrying 49 states,
with 52 percent of voters under 30. Only Ronald Reagan, who followed a similar
(though not identical) electoral strategy, matched Nixon’s success.
Jimmy Carter won in 1976 by running as a somewhat
culturally conservative Democrat from the South (and aided enormously by the
Watergate hangover). In 1992, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, a member of the
centrist Democratic Leadership Council (the heir to the Coalition for a
Democratic Majority, co-founded by Wattenberg), ran as a “different kind of
Democrat.” He was pro–welfare reform, pro–death penalty, and at least claimed
to be hawkish on defense. Ben endorsed Clinton in 1992 but not in 1996.
Ben’s death is an end of an era for me personally, but it
also marks the end of an era for the Democrats. There are virtually no
prominent Wattenbergian Democrats anymore. But that’s in large part because the
world of the Dayton housewife is no more. Bill Clinton’s wife isn’t running
like Bill Clinton. She sees no advantage in trying to win the old silent
majority or the swing voters who used to decide presidential elections. A
changing culture, evolving technology, and Barack Obama’s elections seem to have
convinced her that McGovern was simply ahead of his time. For Ben’s sake, and
the country’s, I hope she’s wrong.
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