CD07: The day that conventional wisdom failed

by: Eric B.

Mon May 19, 2008 at 10:28:41 AM EDT

A majority of Americans think things suck, and think things are going to get even suckier before they get better.  With a devaluing dollar that is helping to drive up the costs of fuel and food, and with health care increasingly out of reach for regular people -- all painted on a canvass of a continued housing crisis -- they happen to be right.  Come November, things are going to be god awful in this country, which especially means in this state.

I see Susan J. Demas has listed the 7th as a "lean incumbent" district. Her reasoning is based largely on name recognition, which Mark Schauer doesn't have, and also the fact that Tim Walberg is the incumbent.

This is undeniably smart thinking, because you can point to history for supporting evidence.  Better name recognition plus incumbency usually equal victory.  Demas also gives Walberg the nod because he has better chances in the district's counties, and the fact that while the trends favor Democrats, those are still at work.

Why, ultimately, do I think she's wrong?  Well, because polls can tell you what people think today, but that's irrelevant.  You have to look forward to what you think things will be like in November, and what frame of mind voters will be in then.  You cannot poll pre-emptively.  That is, say to someone, "Suppose you lose your job, and your wife can't get medicine for her cancer treatments, and the bank takes away your truck but you don't care because gasoline costs $20 a gallon, plus a raccoon went through your trash and spread melon rinds and coffee grounds all over the front yard ... what do you plan to do in the voting booth, huh, huh, tough guy?"

The first component of our exercise in projection is assuming that things are going to suck mightily come November.  I've seen this premise thrown out here and there, and have yet to see anyone say, "Well, things may actually be pretty good in the fall."  Let us assume, then, that gasoline continues to get more expensive over the summer (I heard rumors that the local gendarmes are bracing for $7 a gallon, but we're all hicks up here ... what do we know?), and that the approach taken by President Breaks Everything he Touches to monetary policy, as has been typical during his tenure of wise and careful stewardship of the nation's resources, prompts the dollar to continue falling in value to the point where it becomes inexpensive enough that your average workaday hobo can afford to use a $100 bill to light his Cuban cigars.  Food, energy, health care, etc... ... by now we know the drill.

We already know that the president's approval ratings are at their lowest level ever.  What should depress Republicans is that these are probably the highest the president will see until the end of his presidency.  The problem for the GOP is that the president simply refuses to shut up and go away.  He still insists on going on television and saying things.  Each time he does, it hurts their party.  That is especially the case if he goes on television and says incredibly stupid things, like that giving up golf is a good way of showing solidarity with families whose members he's killed in Iraq.  By the way, like many things from his presidency, this simply appears to be one of those things he does.  If I were a Democratic strategist, I would simply buy 30 seconds of air time and show a picture of George Bush.  This might also work as a marketing strategy if you owned a store that sold televisions or specialized in removing things like boots and hammers from television screens.

The little-kept secret is that the approval ratings for Congress aren't  much better.  And, why should it be?  We elected a Democratic Congress two years ago, and it hasn't done shit.  The problem is that it isn't Democratic Congresscritters who are being punished for this, it's Republicans.

A confluence of forces is coming together that includes an unpopular Republican president, an unpopular war, a widespread sense that the country's on the wrong track and rising costs for food, gasoline and health care. Though Democrats have shared power since they took over Congress in the 2006 election, they have yet to share much of the blame.

The political environment is such that voters remain pessimistic about the direction of the country and the Republican Party in general," said (Oklahoma Rep. Tom) Cole, who serves as chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Heh.  Indeed.

It is my sincere hope that to counter this, Tim Walberg takes to the churches of his district and tells people that Mark Schauer is a baby-killing socialist.  I imagine that as Election Day nears and the polls are suggesting a very close race, he might even throws in that Schauer likes homos.  I suspect that this will be the thing he does because the Republican Party has come to specialize in capitalizing off wedge issues.

But those people he addresses will leave, say, the Spring Arbor Free Methodist Church and get into their cars.  Then, while chewing over the fact that perhaps Mark Schauer likes gays but hates babies, these same Free Methodists will drive home for lunch rather than the Cracker Barrel for a nice ham steak, because gas is $4.50 a gallon and the ham steak jumped from $6 to $9, and if he buys lunch for everyone, he'll have to take out a second mortgage on his house (the lender for which is already calling him wondering why the name Mork from Ork appeared in the signature line for his last payment check rather than the name of the account holder and why it's postdated to the year 2525 ... if man is still alive).

This will not be a good year for wedge issues, and I've seen nothing from Tim Walberg to suggest that he possesses the creativity or smarts to come up with something better, which would be to simply steal Mark Schauer's campaign platform (which gives him a stupid/evil ratio of about 97/3).

There would be problems with that, the biggest of which is that it would require a flip-flop in Walberg's fundamentals.  People are not interested in hearing about the evils of Head Start or an expanded G.I. Bill.  They want to know what's being done to help them, which means using a tool (government) that Walberg's entire voting record says that he is not interested in applying.  On the other hand, when people are introduced to Mark Schauer, their impressions will be shaped by his campaign to improve health care and, you know, generally use government to help people.  This reflects a general shift in the nation's mood, where denouncing government is simply not going to be taken seriously, and away from Tim Walberg and towards Mark Schauer.

There are indeed wide swaths of the district in which Schauer's message will not play well, like the southern tier of counties, and large swaths of Jackson County (like the hillbilly district up in Rives Junction/Tompkins Center, where they may additionally suspect other things about him because he doesn't spend his day smashing his head against cinderblocks), but those are not densely populated.  (Then again, maybe I'm prejudiced because I went to high school with this guy.)

Normally, I'm a pessimistic fellow.  Circumstances would say that the presidency would be a lock this year, but there is clearly enough institutional incompetence in the Democratic Party that this race is not yet sewn up.  This is also the case for the Michigan Democratic Party, which has yet to identify and field a candidate to replace Cliff Taylor on the State Supreme Court (the longer this goes on, the more it will appear that the state Dems are less interested in supporting someone and more interested in opposing someone else, which will not lead to success).

But, circumstances have not aligned themselves in a way that suggest that anything other than that by year's end, Tim Walberg will be planning to return to the pulpit, where he can denounce abortion and government on someone's dime other than taxpayers.  His positives (incumbency, name recognition) and his strengths (campaigning by name calling and demogoguery) are this year minimal and perhaps even negatives; and that his negatives (he's incompetent; and his ideas are dumb, outdated, and proven failures) are substantial.  He's also terrible at raising money, which means he won't be able to run television ads calling Mark Schauer a homo-loving, baby-killing socialist. He'll have to do that in person and face-to-face, which is a far less efficent way to smear your opponent.  Meanwhile, his challenger has money and a message that will play well come November.  He also has a shifting national mood, favorable changes in the district's demographics, and the fact that the incumbent is out-of-step with the district.  In short, this race currently favors the challenger ... not the incumbent.