WaPo Thinks if You Knew What You Wanted, You’d Want Lindsey Graham

Lindsey Graham, whom the Washington Post calls “The most interesting presidential candidate you’re not paying any attention to.” (photo: Rainier Ehrhardt/AP)

Washington Post political writer Chris Cillizza thinks you’re not giving Lindsey Graham an even break.

In a column (6/10/15)  headlined “The Most Interesting Presidential Candidate You’re Not Paying Any Attention To,” Cillizza bemoans the fact that “Graham is an asterisk—or close to it—in polling in every early state (except for his home state of South Carolina) and nationally.” Graham, he writes, is “generally regarded as a cause candidate, with that cause being to represent the most hawkish views on foreign policy and national security against attacks by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.”

Cillizza suggests that’s unfair to Graham, who often uses one of corporate media’s most favorite words—”bipartisanship”:

But if you stop and actually listen to some of what Graham is saying—particularly on the subject of bipartisanship—you realize that he’s one of the most interesting candidates in the field and one of the few who can genuinely sell himself as a change agent.

What is it, exactly, that we’re supposed to listen to Graham saying? Cillizza quotes him telling an audience what he said to a young voter about Social Security:

When I talked to that young guy there, I said, you’re going to have to work a little longer, pal. If I’m president, I’m going to ask you to work a little bit longer. What do people do between 65 and 67, they work two years longer. Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill showed us what to do.

Graham’s point is that President Reagan and House Speaker O’Neill worked out a bipartisan deal in the 1980s to raise the retirement age, so Democrats should support Graham’s plan to raise the retirement age to 70 so it will be bipartisan too.

Cilizza goes on to quote Graham making some pretty bland and innocuous claims—in favor of “problem-solving” and “working with Democrats,”  and being willing to “do whatever is necessary to defend the nation”—and treats them as groundbreaking revelations of a new kind of politics:

If you believe the American people when they say they want leaders who are willing to work with one another and take positions because they believe in them not because the policies are popular, it’s hard for me to imagine a better message than that paragraph from Graham above.

But here’s the thing: People don’t like the idea of raising the retirement age. (They’d like it even less if it was accurately described as a cut in benefits, which is what people are actually proposing when they talk about “raising the retirement age”—see Extra!, 12/12.)  When ABC and the Washington Post (3/10-13/11) asked people about raising the retirement age from 67 to 68, 57 percent were against it. When AP/CNBC (11/18-22/10) asked about raising it to 69, 64 percent were opposed and only 28 percent in favor.

Chris Cillizza (cc photo: Miller Center/Wikimedia)

To Beltway reporters, who are trained to focus on process, it makes sense to support a policy just because it’s billed as bipartisan—or, in the case of Graham’s Social Security cuts, something that aspires to bipartisanship. But regular people don’t like policies that they see as harming their interests simply because politicians from both parties advocate them, and they certainly don’t like policies that hurt them because a politician says he’s hoping that members of another party will join in the hurting.

Cillizza’s other example of Graham’s bipartisanship—actually, his only example, since Graham only wishes his proposal to cut Social Security were bipartisan—is Graham’s support for immigration reform that would give unauthorized immigrants some potential way to get citizenship. This actually is a pretty popular policy–when a CBS/New York Times poll (4/30/15-5/3/15) asked what should be done about “illegal immigrants,” 57 percent said they should be allowed to stay and apply for citizenship, while only 29 percent said that they should be required to leave. (Eleven percent said they should be allowed to stay but not apply for citizenship.)

That’s among all US adults, though, and the voters who are making Graham an “asterisk” are Republicans–and their views on immigration are decidedly different. Asked by CNN/ORC (2/12-15/15) to choose between “developing a plan that would allow illegal immigrants who have jobs to become legal U.S. residents” and “developing a plan for stopping the flow of illegal immigrants into the U.S. and for deporting those already here,” 76 percent of Republicans went with stopping/deporting. Again, people who oppose immigration reform are unlikely to switch to supporting it just because they see people from another party supporting it.

Cillizza concludes his column with a challenge: Are we as a country wise enough to vote for Lindsey Graham? Or as he puts it:

To me, though, Graham’s candidacy is a sort of campaign thought experiment: What if politics produced a candidate that had lots and lots of what the public said it wanted but in a somewhat unlikely package (a Southern-drawling lifetime politician) and without the buzz and fanfare that surrounds the so-called “top tier”?

Could a candidate like that possibly hope to break through?

It isn’t clear that Graham is really offering “lots and lots of what the public said it wanted,” though. The Republican public hasn’t said it wants immigration reform. And the public at large hasn’t said it wants cuts in Social Security benefits—or “the most hawkish views on foreign policy and national security,” for that matter.

Nor, really, is there much evidence that the public is clamoring for “bipartisanship” in the abstract. When asked by Gallup (5/6-10/15) to name the most important problem facing the US, just 2 percent named “unifying the country”—the closest thing to bipartisanship on the list. By contrast, 33 percent named economic problems, including “economy in general,” “unemployment/jobs,” “gap between rich and poor,” etc. When the CBS/New York Times poll (1/11-15/09) asked people what they most wanted from a newly elected Barack Obama, 2 percent said “bring bipartisanship.”

I expect “bipartisanship” would poll much higher if you polled among Beltway reporters. Unfortunately for Lindsey Graham, Beltway reporters don’t get that many votes.

Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org.

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