Asked repeatedly to offer a hopeful word about politics today to a gathering of self-professed political junkies, Ken Rudin, National Public Radio’s political editor, shook his head for a full 30 seconds. The normally cheerful Rudin, who came to Syracuse on May 31 as a guest of Oswego’s NPR station WRVO-FM 89.9/90.3, finally told the crowd before him at Syracuse Stage, “I find myself more optimistic when talking about the past.”
Rudin, who describes himself as a guy from a small town in New York state (the Bronx, where they consider Yonkers to be upstate), revels in the past. He dazzled his audience with his recall of obscure congressional races, vice presidential wannabes, and the names of governors from states few of us have visited. He asked local and national political trivia questions (Who was the mayor of Syracuse who ran for U.S. Senate?) and displayed a small sample of his collection of more than 70,000 campaign buttons.
But what his audience, a mostly older crowd of 150 who paid to see Rudin and to support WRVO, really wanted was his take on the future. In this they were disappointed. Rudin would not pick a winner in this year’s presidential race, unlike his host on stage, Grant Reeher, professor of political science and director of the Campbell Public Affairs Institute at Syracuse University, who eagerly climbed out on a limb by predicting an Obama re-election.
Reeher later told the Syracuse New Times that he is impressed with Obama’s campaign organization and also suspects that if the race is close, Obama supporters of many stripes will become energized at the prospect of re-electing the nation’s first African-American president. Reeher called his assessment more of a gut feeling than an analysis, and noted that tough economic news could send the president’s hopes south at any point.
If you’ve heard Rudin’s weekly Wednesday segments on NPR’s Talk of the Nation (the program itself runs weekdays from 2 to 4 p.m.) you’ll know that he bases most of his analysis on comparisons with past races. Having so much background makes him wary of predictions early in the race. He dug into the past and reminded the audience that Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan were dead even just two weeks before Reagan’s convincing 1980 victory. “So much can happen between now and November.”
However, Mitt Romney, Rudin noted, faces at least two obstacles in his quest to become commander-in-chief. “Romney has spent the last year telling voters in primary states that his earlier moderate stances when he was governor of Massachusetts were an aberration. When he ran for Senate against Ted Kennedy in 1994 he was for abortion rights, for civil unions for same sex couples, and he talked about stem cell research—things that don’t go over well with socially conservative Republicans. So he is a fair target for a charge of ‘flip-flopping’ when he tries to move to the center for the general election.”
The second obstacle to a GOP victory is the growing Hispanic vote. “George W. Bush did so well in part because of Latino voters,” Rudin maintained. Given the Republican stance on immigration this year (Romney supports Arizona’s new anti-immigrant law) and nasty comments about immigrants by Romney surrogates, Rudin noted, “The Hispanic vote will be tough for Republicans. They will have to do better with Hispanics to win. I’m not talking about California, because the Republicans are not going to win there, but in states like New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada—they could make the difference.”
And do those small states matter? “They sure do, just ask President Gore,” he said to audience laughter.
Obama, Rudin predicted, will inspire and energize the base of a party during the campaign, but this time it will be the Republican base and their hopes for change that he rallies. If Romney can make this a referendum on Obama’s stewardship of the economy, the Republican could emerge victorious. But the growing number of Latino voters—who selected Bush in record numbers in 2000 and 2004 but are not happy with the Republicans this year, could work against him. States to watch: Ohio, Florida and maybe next-door neighbor Pennsylvania, said Rudin.
Rudin spends his days traveling the country, and keeps an eye on every one of the nation’s 435 congressional races. Mostly what he hears is voter antipathy toward Washington. “There is so much dissatisfaction with both parties,” he reported. “The logical option, you would think, would be a third party, but when given the option the people don’t go for it.”
In the audience sat Green Party candidate in the 25th Congressional District seat Ursula Rozum. When asked by The New Times if she expected to see her opponents at the event, Rozum replied: “They are probably off somewhere raising money.”
Reeher asked his guest to handicap the race between Democrat Dan Maffei, Republican incumbent Ann Marie Buerkle and Rozum, and the response was disappointingly vague and generic. “This district is historically Republican,” said Rubin, “but Ann Marie Buerkle is far more conservative than most people, even most Republicans, in this area.” He called Buerkle the most vulnerable Republican in the New York delegation, but didn’t comment on her chances of beating Maffei, whom he described as “not the most effective campaigner, but he is good at raising money.”
Nationally, Rudin does not expect the Democrats to wrest control of the House from the Republicans this fall, a feat that would require a net gain of 25 seats. He thinks the Democrats will hold on to the Senate, but it will be hard for them to earn a filibuster-proof majority of 60.
On that topic he did offer one policy prescription. The logjam in the Senate might ease a bit, he mused, if the threat of a filibuster that has now become the norm were replaced by a return to the actual filibuster. “Years ago when a party wanted to block a bill they had to actually stand in the well of the Senate and keep talking. Now all they do is say ‘we’re going to filibuster’ and everything stops.”
There he goes again: talking about the past. In truth he finds the present political moment depressing. “After 9/11 we were all going to be united. That lasted about 15 minutes. When {retired Rep.} Gabby Giffords got shot in that horrible shooting in Tucson, suddenly you had Democrats and Republicans sitting together, and that lasted all of five minutes. The problem isn’t that people are calling names. Name-calling has been going on for a long time. But now they don’t even talk to one another. People can watch MSNBC and Fox and be told exactly what they want to hear, and don’t listen to anyone else.”
About the media, he believes that people are better informed today than ever, and he takes some pride in NPR’s contribution to that (Rudin worked for ABC earlier in his career). “Do I think that 90 percent of the people who work at NPR voted for Obama? I do. But what is most important is what we put on the air. We try not to play the ideological games that Fox and MSNBC do.”
So what would he like to see happen in our political system? “I want fair representation, I want the media to do a good job, and I want the candidates not to act like adolescents, arguing like kids in a schoolyard over who started it.”
And that mayor who ran for the U.S. Senate? The Golden Greek, of course, Lee Alexander. (That one was a little too easy.)
