The second response I want to make to President Obama’s Cleveland speech from last week (the first response is here) is this: Regardless of your political goals, in order to use your vote to influence politicians, you should reject the electoral frame that President Obama articulated in Cleveland… And the one Mitt Romney proposed the same day in Cincinnati.
President Obama said, “[t]his election is about our economic future… What’s holding us back is a stalemate in Washington between two fundamentally different views of which direction America should take. And this election is your chance to break that stalemate.” For the most part, Obama pushed a “forward not backward” message, ignoring his own administration’s policies to focus on the philosophical differences that he alleges distinguish his “economic vision” from Mitt Romney’s (which he compares to George W. Bush’s).
On the same day, Mitt Romney also gave a speech in which he tried “to ensure the race is a referendum” on President Obama’s policies. Romney said, “He’s been president for three and a half years, and talk is cheap… And if you want to see the results of his economic policies, look around Ohio, look around the country.” In this frame, Romney wants the people of Ohio to vote for change if this administration has failed to help turn the economy and their fortunes around.
Together, the candidates are asking voters to either (a) ignore the President’s policies and re-elect him because, as a Democrat, he is more likely, in theory, to pursue fair policies; or (b) ignore policy specifics and vote the President out of office because you know his policies have not meaningfully helped you or those around you. This either/or proposition could only exist in a system in which voters have (or believe they have) only two options. Accepting it as a voter negates your greatest power to sway politicians.
Choice (a) effectively permits zero accountability of a President in office. The Democratic Party is largely perceived as existing to the left of the Republican Party, in part due to the perceived differences in the two parties’ economic philosophies. For most voters, the perceived relative position of the Democratic Party will remain to the left of the Republican Party regardless of what “economic vision” President Obama (or some other Democratic President) actually pursues. For a President who has pursued and continues to pursue elitist economic policies, this frame effectively appeals to the “progressive” values of the base while giving them no opportunity to hold him accountable for his actions.
Choice (b) appears to be all about accountability, but effective voting requires looking forward as well as back. According to the Duke University Democratic Accountability and Linkages Project, citizens hold politicians accountable “if they cast their vote in favor of candidates and parties contingent upon their past political actions in elected office and their credible commitments to future actions after (re)election,” (emphasis added). While in one sense turning the November election into a referendum on President Obama’s own policies holds him accountable, replacing him with a candidate whose own policies are similar but probably worse does not hold the Democratic and Republican Parties accountable for pursuing elitist economic policies in bipartisan fashion over the last 40 years or so (sorry to keep re-using this link, but I think it is a simple and telling piece of evidence). And voters who specifically desire both to hold President Obama accountable and vote for a candidate who will fight inequality (or some other progressive economic value) cannot do both under the two party mentality advocated by both candidates.
In the abstract, a person would immediately realize one should evaluate a President by his actions. If his actions are unsatisfactory and inconsistent with his campaign promises, one would reasonably look for an alternative that better suits him/her.
In the United States, most voters do not accept this. As a result, wealth and income inequality are growing, the banks “own” Congress, and the country, overall, moves to the right. Elitist economic policies are bipartisan, as are government secrecy and deception, and the wars on whistleblowers, civil liberties, drugs, and “terrorists.” Accepting the Obama-Romney frame equates to accepting these policies. The most (only?) realistic way to stop these policies is to stop voting for them.
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