How the Democrats can lose

Paul Starr:

Until recently, like most liberals, I was convinced that 2008 was going to be a Democratic year. While Republicans have been listless and divided, Democrats have been passionate and enthusiastic about their candidates for president. An unpopular war, a sinking economy, a general sense of conservative exhaustion: All pointed toward a Democratic triumph in November. A lot of conservatives had come to grudgingly agree and were preparing to spend four years in political rehab.

But after the first rounds of caucuses and primaries, the prospects don't look so rosy for the Democrats or so bleak for the Republicans. The presidential race now looks like a tossup -- perhaps even with a Republican edge. If Democrats don't stay smart, tough-minded and realistic, we could blow it yet again.

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But the major reason I see trouble ahead for the Democrats is that voting patterns so far, as well as rumbling tensions over race and gender, suggest serious vulnerabilities in both of the Democratic front-runners that McCain (or another rival) could exploit. Most pundits assume it's the Republicans who have the weak field, but the leading Democrats -- both attractive and impressive people -- carry dangerous downsides of their own.

Sen. Barack Obama appeals strongly to affluent whites and minorities -- the old John Lindsay coalition -- but he seems to lose working-class whites. Moreover, if the pollsters turn out to have been wrong in predicting the outcome in New Hampshire in part because of the "Bradley effect" -- that is, the polling tendency to overestimate the number of votes a black candidate will win because some bigoted whites refuse to speak to pollsters or claim to be undecided -- then Democrats may also be deceiving themselves about the Illinois senator's chances in the general election. National surveys that show Obama beating various Republicans may be overstating his potential share of the vote.

For her part, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has done better at appealing to lower- and middle-income whites, especially women. But her loss to Obama among male voters in New Hampshire suggests that just as race may block Obama's path to the presidency, so gender may obstruct hers. That's hardly a surprise, of course. But Democrats have been so excited about the prospect of a historical breakthrough that many of them seem to forget that plenty of voters are still swayed by old prejudices.

The very qualities in Obama that progressive Democrats and independents find thrilling -- the sheer power of his oratory and physical presence -- may stir an unspoken anxiety and panic among other voters who fear the kind of change that Obama would bring. Likewise, Clinton's strength is also a source of uneasiness. Throughout her career, she has stirred an irrational hatred that is not primarily of her own making. To much of the public, when she is tough, she seems unwomanly and therefore inhuman; when she is soft, she seems unfit to be commander in chief. It's the old double bind that women have always faced in acquiring power, but wishing it weren't so won't make the dilemma vanish.

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Conservative women do not have the problem he attributes to Hillary Clinton. Margaret Thatcher is a good example.

What he and most Democrats overlook is their vulnerability on the war in Iraq. There is a reason why John McCain is a leading vote getter among those who are unhappy with the war. It is because many are unhappy because they want to win. Democrats seem to think that those who went from 70 percent favoring our actions in Iraq to the same number disapproving it all of a sudden joined MoveOn in wanting to lose, when in fact many wanted to fight it more effectively and that is what McCain' candidacy represents.

There is also so the fact that in their desperation for defeat in Iraq the Democrats have ignored the success of the counterinsurgency strategy they opposed and they have no valid explanation for our success. So far both Obama and Clinton have put forward laughable explanations that Democrats may ignore but the swing voters are unlikely to.

The war will be an issue in this election and it will not favor the Democrats.