Charlie Cook: GOP's Core Value Is "Competence"
October 10, 2007 -- 12:00 PM EST // //
One of the more bizarre facets of a lot of our political analysis today is how arbitrary it often is. The basic assumptions underlying much of it often seem like they were invented out of nothing, or were settled on in some sort of Secret Society of Punditry mountaintop meeting.
Here, for instance, is Charlie Cook, one of the most respected of nonpartisan analysists, weighing in with a piece arguing that the GOP is now seen by voters as incompetent and thus faces an uphill struggle in 2008. That's all fine. But then he hits us with this:
If one was to say what the core value is for each party, it might be compassion for Democrats and competence for Republicans. Democrats are expected to really care about people, and Republicans are supposed to be able to manage things well. When a party strays from its core value, it is in trouble. Republicans learned this from Hurricane Katrina, the war in Iraq, federal budget deficits and runaway spending.I'm going to politely disagree with this. Where does this idea that the "core value" of the Democratic Party is "compassion" while that of the GOP is "competence" come from, exactly? What is it based on? Do voters generally see the parties this way? Polling has consistently shown for awhile now that the electorate trusts Dems more than Republicans to handle a range of issues. Not all issues, but a lot of them. Is this idea based on the actual performance of the parties? Hardly.
Do Democrats and Republicans themselves see things this way? Plenty of Democrats think of themselves as emphasizing competence; plenty of Republicans will sincerely argue that lots of their party's policies are rooted in compassion. This generalization is just too enormous to have any value at all. Voters expect both parties to be competent. When one of them flops on this score, the voters get pissed off, as they are at the GOP right now. Indeed, the public is pretty ticked at the Dems, too, for not showing the competence to end this stinking war.
The reason this matters is that this really is the sort of key assumption that underlies and informs much of our political analysis. In this case, the assumption is best described as the "soft-hard" dichotomy. The idea here is that the Dems' emphasis on the "soft" quality of compassion -- i.e., the idea that government should try to make people's lives better -- is somehow incompatible with more "hard-headed" qualities possessed by the GOP that better suit them to "competent" governance.
This dichotomy is a false one -- compassion and competence are not mutually exclusive in any way. Yet as arbitrary as constructs like these are, they really drive much of our political analysis today. No idea how to change that.
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