The election is the culmination of a gradual shift in public opinion, the meaning of which eludes many analysts, writes ROBERT KAISERin Washington
THE ELECTION of 2008 is history, but the battle over what it meant has just begun. Conservative analysts have insisted that although the Democrats achieved a sweeping victory, it does not indicate a fundamental change.
"America is still a centre-right country," as John Boehner, the House Republican leader, insisted soon after the votes were counted.
Liberals call that argument nonsense. The election, wrote John Judis in the New Republic, heralds the arrival of "America the liberal", provided the Democrats play their strong new hand effectively. This election was "the culmination of a Democratic realignment that began in the 1990s, was delayed by September 11th, and resumed with the 2006 election".
The notion of a centre-right America took hold in the quarter-century after Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 and was entrenched up to election day.
Newsweekmagazine splashed on its last pre-election cover that the country remains "America the Conservative".
The election results, the exit polls and the polling since election day all provide evidence for the liberals' refutation of this conventional wisdom, but the argument is complicated by the fact that it is conducted by ideological commentators and concerns a country that has never been very ideological.
"There's no indication that ideology drove this election," said Andrew Kohut, a dean of American pollsters. "It was driven by discontent with the status quo," a pollster's interpretation of the venerable slogan: "Throw the bums out!"
The argument is further complicated by dubious terminology. What does "centre-right" or "liberal" mean to ordinary citizens?
The National Election Pool exit poll of 17,836 randomly selected voters, conducted by Edison-Mitofsky, shows how shaky the jargon of political analysis can be.
Twenty-two per cent of those polled identified themselves as "liberal," 34 per cent as "conservative," 44 per cent as "moderate." Such numbers are cited by proponents of the "centre-right country" argument.
One in five of the self-styled conservatives though voted for Barack Obama and one in 10 liberals voted for John McCain. The moderates were overwhelmingly for Obama, by 60 per cent to 39 per cent. Those self-identifications obviously meant different things to different people.
Samuel Popkin, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego, says voters' definitions of political terms are not rigid. "The Beltway notion and the people's notion is very different."
Whatever the appropriate label, substantial majorities of the voters of 2008 want the war in Iraq to end. Large majorities favour affordable health insurance, a fairer distribution of wealth and income and higher taxes on the rich.
They want to preserve traditional pension arrangements. They want more effective government regulation of the financial sector.
However flashes of instinctive caution or conservatism are common. The same poll offered another choice: "I'm more worried that we will fail to make the investments we need to create jobs and strengthen the economy" or, "I'm more worried that we will go too far in increasing government spending and will end up raising taxes to pay for it." Voters split 48 per cent to 48 per cent.
Popkin has a formulation that resolves the inconsistency: "We are centre-left on social issues and environment, and centre-right on fiscal issues." Yet huge deficits have been run up over the last three decades and are about to be added to substantially - another inconsistency.
In one respect, the future is already coming into view - in the attitudes of the Millennial Generation, voters younger than 30. This group was completely out of step with its elders. They voted overwhelmingly for Obama, by 66 per cent to 32 per cent.
They are much more likely to call themselves Democrats (45 per cent do) than does the population as a whole (39 per cent). Only among the young do self-identified liberals outnumber conservatives (32 per cent to 26 per cent). By contrast, among voters 65 and older, conservatives outnumber liberals 40 per cent to 17 per cent.
The outpouring of support for Obama and the Democrats from young voters was consistent with long-standing trends in public opinion. They could be found in the annual survey by the University of California at Los Angeles graduate school of education, a poll of more than 270,000 first-year students.
In the 2007 survey, three-quarters of the students said the United States needed "a national health care plan . . . to cover everybody's medical costs". Nearly 57 per cent favoured legalised abortion.
Six in 10 said they thought "wealthy people should pay a larger share of taxes than they do now". Two-thirds said they believed "same-sex couples should have the right to legal marital status" and 80 per cent said "the federal government is not doing enough to control environmental pollution".
These students may be more liberal than their contemporaries not in college, but these findings suggest that the November 4th results are part of a broader phenomenon. The difference goes beyond attitudes. Sixty-two per cent of voters age 18 to 29 identify themselves as white, while 18 per cent are black and 14 per cent Hispanic. In 2000, 74 per cent of young voters were white.
Judis of the New Republicand Ruy Teixeira of the Centre for American Progress have argued for years that changing attitudes of young voters and Hispanics, coupled with increasingly Democratic voting patterns among professionals, was producing an "emerging Democratic majority".
Judis noted in his post-election analysis that the stage is set for a realignment of American politics that could last many years. - ( Los Angeles Times-Washington Postservice)