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Y! MyWebCOMMENTARY
Martin Gottlieb: 'Change' battles show victory of predictor's logic
Friday, September 12, 2008
I know you're tired of hearing about "change" in the political realm. When everybody's claiming to represent change and everybody's commenting on change, everybody sounds the same. But here's the thing:
In 1952, Adlai Stevenson was in much the same position as John McCain today. He was the nominee of the party that held the presidency, but he was not the incumbent, and the incumbent was decidedly unpopular.
The Democrats had held the presidency for 20 years, but were enmeshed in scandal and an uninspiring war, Korea. And they were just seeming old hat.
So nominee Stevenson had to run away from President Harry Truman, had to represent himself as an agent of "change," just as John McCain is running away from President George W. Bush. That's obvious, right?
Except that Stevenson didn't do that. (You can see his convention speech at
www.americanrhetoric.com. It's a short speech.)
Stevenson insisted that "change for the sake of change" has no merit. Try
to picture McCain saying that.
And, as for the Democratic scandals, all Stevenson said was that there was no reason to believe that the party couldn't put its own house in order "without (its) neighbor having to burn it down."
So much for change.
But Stevenson lost big, which leads to the question, how did we get here?
As some will know, this column months ago — before anybody knew who the Democratic nominee would be — bought into the prediction that the Democrats will win the popular vote. That was based on a system that made the same prediction in favor of the Republicans in 2004 at the beginning of that supposedly seesaw year.
The system — invented by Allan Lichtman — will be wrong someday, but it arguably has never been wrong before. Its adherents certainly do not change their minds on the basis of polls two months before an election.
What needs to be said now is that the Lichtman logic has won. The strategy of both parties is built around it entirely. (His work wasn't around in 1952.)
The Lichtman prediction system considers 13 factors. (It's laid out on the blog at DaytonDailyNews.com/campaignsdontcount. For background, go to the earliest posts.)
It boils down to one point, pretty much: History shows conclusively that when things are going badly enough for the country and the government, the presidency will change parties.
Independent voters will decide that the status quo in government isn't good enough and will demand, yes, change.
It's all about change. So if you're Barack Obama, you present yourself as the change option. And if you're John McCain, you do everything you can to separate yourself from the incumbent, to say the party is starting out new and that those old people in Washington better look out.
His strategy is by the book — the modern book that recognizes that election outcomes aren't about liberal and conservative, but incumbent party and challenger.
It so happens that McCain is better positioned than any other Republican to present himself as a change agent, because he has, in fact, had his fights with the old crowd. He is grossly exaggerating that part of his record, of course, but exaggeration is all around.
Some people will say that the Republican politicos didn't need Allan Lichtman to tell them that McCain should run away from Bush. Bush is unpopular; end of story.
But Adlai Stevenson was a pretty smart guy, and he was surrounded by the best political people of his time. And yet he didn't arrive at the "change" formula. Neither did Hubert Humphrey in a similar situation in 1968.
Somebody had to lay out how things actually work. Lichtman's work is familiar to the politicos; it has influenced others to whom they listen.
If McCain is able to win by fuzzing up the question of who represents change, Lichtman will have been proven wrong about one race, but only because he has proved right about the dynamic at work in our elections.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News. He may be reached at 225-2288 or by e-mail at mgottlieb@DaytonDailyNews.com.
