It has resurfaced because in the last year or two, the most violent of crimes - homicide - has resurfaced. Violent crime in America rose sharply all through the 1960s and 1970s when it began to recede, as it did from the early ‘90s to two years ago, crime all but disappeared as a political issue. To be blunt, his positions on crime and welfare, as well as his stern repudiation of the provocative words of a Black rapper named Sister Souljah, were signals - or perhaps dog whistles - that he was prepared to push back against what we would now call the “woke” wing of his own party.Ĭall it cynical, but what Clinton understood was a root reality of politics: “Culture trumps policy.” A six-point program to make schools better and college more affordable will mean very little if voters believe their neighborhoods are unsafe and while demagogues will eagerly feed such fears, they will motivate voters only if there is an underlying reality to them. Clinton had a Rotary Club cliché for his strategy: “Voters won’t care how much you know unless they know how much you care.” It was Clinton who promised to “end welfare as we know it.” And his “blue wall” wasn’t a passel of declining industrial states, but the ranks of uniformed cops who stood behind him as he pledged support for the death penalty.

Only when Bill Clinton directly repudiated his party’s orthodoxy on crime and welfare did the political tide turn. Sometime in the ’80s, I sat with House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt as he explained to a roomful of journalists that once voters understood what Democrats were going to do about the high cost of college, health care and housing, electoral success would naturally follow. These issues helped win Republicans the presidency in five out of six presidential contests from 1968 to 1988 only the post-Watergate fallout took Jimmy Carter to a narrow electoral win in 1976.Īll through this period, Democrats were arguing that the public, by large measures, preferred their actual policies - their approaches to education, health care, taxes. The backlash to civil rights pulled the South away from the Democratic Party in the mid-’60s crime, welfare, campus and urban violence eroded white working-class loyalties. In the broadest sense, “cultural” matters have been challenging and bedeviling Democrats for well over half a century. One of their most powerful political assets is alive and well: the power of cultural issues over policies. And that suggests the real lesson for Republicans on Tuesday.

Virginia governor race ad wars