Conservative political analyst William Kristol spoke about current trends in American politics at Claremont McKenna’s Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum Oct. 13.

The talk, entitled “The Future of American Politics: Obama, the Tea Party, and the 2010 and 2012 Elections,” was Kristol’s eighth at CMC.

Kristol, who edits the news magazine the Weekly Standard and has worked for Republican politicians such as Vice President Dan Quayle, acknowledged his affiliation with the GOP and predicted major gains for his party in both the Senate and House of Representatives in the Nov. 2 midterm elections.

He estimated that Republicans have an 80 percent chance of controlling the House and a 50 percent chance of controlling the Senate after the November elections. Both legislative bodies currently have Democratic majorities.

Kristol said Americans have been living in a “dangerous and unstable” era since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. This new era, Kristol said, will keep uncertainty in foreign policy at levels unseen for several decades before 9/11.

“We’re not going back to a sort of Cold War situation with relative stability,” he said.

Kristol cited radical Islam’s “fight to take over the Middle East and kill a lot of people outside the Middle East” as one of the main issues likely to keep foreign policy makers—and ordinary Americans—on their toes for years to come.

Meanwhile, Kristol said, the economic downturn has caused sudden shifts in public opinion about how the government should handle the economy. Neither party, he added, has developed an economic narrative compelling enough to keep voters convinced in the long term.

Most recently, many voters have turned against President Barack Obama’s program of stimulus spending, Kristol said.

“People are more scared of government than they are right now of Citibank,” he said.

This fear, along with the current political volatility, has led to the rise of the conservative Tea Party, a grassroots movement to stop what it sees as Obama’s wasteful government spending and social liberalism, Kristol said.

“It’s pretty amazing that they’ve had the staying power and oomph that they’ve had,” he said.

Kristol added that the Tea Party movement is “extremely peaceful, extremely civil,” contrary to the way some liberals portray it. He assured his audience that Tea Party protesters are not about to “storm Pomona” and “stone all the liberal comp. lit professors.”

“It’s pretty unusual in American history to have such uncertainty in foreign policy and such uncertainty in domestic policy,” he said. “A lot of the old ways are somewhat discredited and probably deserve to be somewhat discredited.”

Kristol said that this widespread uncertainty has led to a period of volatility in electoral politics, with the 2006 and 2008 elections bringing major gains for the Democrats, while 2010 will likely be a year for the Republicans. For a long period before 2006, Kristol said, the American electorate was reliably center-right and legislative power shifted only slightly from election to election.

The last period in American elections as volatile as the current one was from 1964 to 1980, he added.

In a question-answer session after his speech, Kristol may have let something slip as he was caught off guard while talking about Obama’s health care reform bill, which he predicted that Republicans would not be able to repeal wholesale until “we get an American president.” Kristol corrected himself, saying that he meant “a Republican president.”

Later, Kristol acknowledged the immense power of the Internet to influence voters, even though he said he is usually skeptical of claims about the influence of technology on politics.

“The loss of influence of the mass media is really astonishing,” he said, referring to one consequence of the Internet’s rise.

Kristol also cautioned his fellow Republicans not to think of defeating Obama in 2012 as a foregone conclusion.

“I actually think most of my conservative friends are underestimating Obama,” he said.

He added that the president has surely learned from his biggest political mistake, the economic stimulus package that he signed soon after taking office with almost no Republican support.

On foreign policy, Kristol said, Obama has “not actually gone nearly as doveish as a lot of liberals would like him to,” helping to keep his presidency politically viable.

Julius Taranto PO ’12 was impressed with Kristol’s ability to support his claims with data.

“I thought he had a pretty dazzling command of the statistics and the numbers, assuming he wasn’t making things up,” Taranto said.

He added that he wished Kristol had been more forthcoming about his opinion of “the far right,” especially Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.