Any
Biden effort to ‘reach out’ to conservatives is doomed
Opinion by
Columnist
Dec. 8, 2020 at 2:42 p.m. CST
President-elect Joe
Biden is not giving up on reaching out to the people who didn’t vote for him,
even as most of them seem to believe he’s at the head of a plot to steal the
election — and a significant portion believe he’s part of a global conspiracy
of satanic, pedophile, cannibal, sex-traffickers.
Biden is determined,
though, just as so many Democrats were before him. And like them, he’ll
probably fail.
Bloomberg’s Jennifer
Jacobs reports that the Biden White House will
be making a particular point of reaching out:
The Biden
administration plans to create a position to find common ground with
conservatives, said Louisiana Congressman Cedric Richmond, a senior adviser and
director of the Office of Public Engagement for the president-elect.
“Right now I’m trying
to set up the office and I’m actually looking at establishing a position that
reaches out to conservatives — because it’s about moving forward. We cannot
stay where we are,” Richmond said during the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council
on Monday night.
It’s possible that
Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-La.) is just throwing around ideas, and in the end,
there won’t be a Conservative Outreach Czar in the Biden White House. But
there’s no doubt that Biden will govern, as he said many times, as the president
of all Americans, not just those who supported him.
It’s the right thing
to do (and what we assumed all presidents would do, until Donald Trump). He’ll
be supporting policies that he believes are good for the whole country, not
just the places in the country that supported him. Unlike Trump, he won’t be
doing any “victory tours” of just the states he won. But
it won’t help.
This is a
never-ending obsession with Democrats. How can we get conservatives to like us
more? Is there some special strategy we can deploy, or argument we can make,
that will open their hearts and minds to what we have to say?
You may have noticed
that Republicans — who have now lost the popular vote in seven of the last
eight presidential elections — never bother to ask themselves how they might
reach out to liberals. They appoint no people to carry out this task; they
publish no essays in their journals about how to go about it; they hold no
think-tank forums to explore the problem and consider solutions. They’d much
rather dream up new voter suppression schemes to make it more difficult for
liberals to cast their ballots.
It’s reinforced by a
media double standard: Reporters seldom bother to ask Republicans what they’re
doing to reach out to the other side, because everyone knows the answer is
“nothing.” That’s despite the fact that in our lifetimes we’ve never seen a
president more contemptuous of people who didn’t vote for him than Trump, and
he just lost reelection by 7 million votes. You might think it’s a problem the
GOP could benefit from considering.
And Republicans are
allowed to show utter contempt for liberals and the places they live, while
heaven help a Democrat who says anything disrespectful about red states or
small towns.
Yet, we constantly
scratch our chins wondering why Democrats fail to get more support from
conservative white voters, especially in rural areas. Is it their policy choices?
The fact that they nominate too many candidates from the Northeast? Are they
not showing sufficient “respect”? Should they offer more praise to country
music, pickup trucks and other rural conservative cultural markers? Would that
do the trick?
The answer, of
course, is no.
The truth is that
Democrats reach out constantly. They hold forums to show they understand and
care about rural issues. They support policies to give people in conservative
states better health care and better education and more economic opportunities.
They come
up with plans to boost rural America. It doesn’t penetrate.
Why is that? The
first reason is simply that conservatives are, well, conservative. We live in a
time of party polarization and ideological coherence, which means the two
parties have profoundly different perspectives and policy agendas. As much as
dishonest politicians insist we need to stop all the bickering and find
solutions, Washington is full of solutions and bickering is not the problem.
It’s that conservatives and liberals have incompatible ideas about what we
should do, about taxes, government spending, health care, climate change and
almost everything else.
The second reason is
that conservatives’ ideas about liberals are created and sustained by an
extremely effective propaganda machine. You simply cannot overstate the
influence Fox News, conservative talk radio and the rest of the right-wing
media universe has over the way conservatives view liberals.
It’s a billion-dollar
megaphone blasting in conservatives’ ears every day around the clock, telling
them that liberals are arrogant, condescending, immoral, hypocritical, snakes
who hate them and everything they stand for, who spend their days plotting the
destruction of America and God and all that is good about the world. The idea
that a staffer or two in the White House might make an impact on that is
ridiculous.
But Biden and
Richmond should go ahead and try if they want. I’m sure that part of their
theory — as it was for Barack Obama before them — is that even if your reaching
out doesn’t accomplish much in the way of tangible benefits, at the very least
it’s good to be seen reaching out, so you can say you tried in
good faith.
That and five bucks
will get you a nonfat soy latte at one of those high-falutin’ cafes liberals
have so many of in their decadent, crime-ridden cities. But it won’t get you
much else.
