First, there's this: we survived Reagan (... well, the country did, anyway), we survived Shrub I, we survived Our Glorious Shrub's first term, and we'll survive a second. We won't enjoy it, but well get through.
And now, the vivisection.
In a forum I frequent, someone asked, "So how can we run a truly liberal democrat and hope to win?" And what I said was this:
A truly liberal Democrat will not win the presidency in the near future. This is not -- and really never was -- a truly liberal country. The only hope the Democrats have is to get a moderate Southern governor to run, and at the moment, there's basically no such thing as a moderate Southern Democrat governor. The chance they need is to have someone that the South looks at and says, "Eh. I can live with him," running against someone that the South looks at and says, "Well ... yuck."
Impressive as that block of red running through the middle of the country is to look at on a map, except for Texas, Arizona and Colorado, it's almost, but not completely, irrelevant electorally, except for providing small numbers and small margins -- except in very close elections. You cannot win in this country without taking something in the South, and even something in the intermountain West, as electorally irrelevant as it is. Clinton, I believe, took Florida, Georgia, Arkansas, maybe a Carolina, and New Mexico.
By traditional Democrat standards, Clinton was in fact a conservative Southern governor. It's just that by then, the party had shifted to the right to try to appeal to a broader base. Clinton broke the solid South -- barely -- because he was moderate enough that some of the states could stand him, and because they detested Bush I, who had bounced from a successful war into a recession. After that, he won because he got credit from bouncing us from a recession into a boom economy.
People are also (already) speculating as well on a ticket with either Hillary Clinton or shooting star Barack Obama on it. Interesting as they are, any Democrat ticket with either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama on it would lose. Any ticket with either of them would lose badly. A Clinton ticket would lose because Republicans would be up in arms shouting "Liberal liberal liberal!" ... and they'd be right. Her own political beliefs seem to be quite a bit more liberal than her husband's, although she's learned well the art of political compromise, finally. Obama's politics and positions would be entirely beside the point; a black politician will not take the South, Midwest or intermountain West any time soon. I've no idea how he would run in California; I suspect he wouldn't do particularly well in Oregon or Washington, either. (And, you know, he's not yet even a first term senator. Personally appealing as he is, he could well be a perfectly dreadful national-level politician; let's give him some time to get a record to look at, shall we?)
I honestly don't quite understand what moral values people were seeing in Bush, aside from his religion. Moral values that say, "Hey, hey, torture's OK!" or moral values that say that lying to the country to get people to do what you want is fine? Seriously, the man's government would appear to be morally as well as fiscally bankrupt. I'm guessing that it was the fact that he wanted a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage; their positions on civil unions were pretty much identical. That, and certainty. Bush may be definitively wrong -- he's definitively wrong quite often -- but he's very determined and certain in his wrongness. Maybe people respond to that. Whatever it was they were seeing, that's what they wanted.
It would also help to have someone with an ounce of charisma. Looking at the last Democrats to take the White House, Clinton and Kennedy had buckets of the stuff; Carter had that certain little twinkle until the office beat him down. Much as I hate to say it, Bush also has some of that -- although I note it's getting beat out of him by the work as well. Kerry ... not really. Edwards has some, yes, but Edwards isn't going to have any platform from which to launch a campaign for the foreseeable future. (And I kind of don't like his political positions anyway. But if that ticket had been reversed, it would have stood a far better chance. I don't think it would have won -- and I kind of suspect Ohio would not have been in doubt for nearly so long -- but it would have done better nationally. Certainly would have done better in Florida, at least.)
As someone else also mentioned in that forum, the block of red, while it looks very impressive on a map, isn't solid. There are shades of red, from hard red conservative to pale pink moderate areas that voted for Bush in highly variable degrees. There are also blue areas within most of the red states, urban areas that nonetheless voted for Kerry. If you looked within a county, no doubt a precinct-level map would show breakdowns of shades of red and blue within most individual counties. It's not as monolithic as it looks. Nonetheless, our country is more conservative than we want to believe.
And then there's this: the country is getting older. Age, in general, brings more conservatism in its wake. There is a very good chance that for the next 40-60 years, until the baby boomers start dying off in quite large numbers, this is just the way the country will think. On the other hand, many good people would like to believe that this is some severe aberration, that the country will wake up and realize what it's doing. And it is true that, eventually, as we get used to life in wartime, people may realize that this is just the way things are; that there is no such thing as safety, and that we can't protect the country by violating every single one of its founding principles.
They may.
In the meantime, sad as it is, it's probably a good thing that Kerry didn't win, given the set of circumstances that attended his loss. An intractably hostile Congress would have been impossible to work with. If he had won Ohio, the Republicans would have said -- as the Democrats said almost nonstop, and with considerably more point this time -- that the country did not want him as president. It wouldn't simply have been the case that more people voted against him than for him; an absolute majority would have voted for the other guy, and watched their votes wiped out. (Although it would have been our last best chance to get the electoral college abolished.)
I will admit, I also feel a certain ... detachment from those I know who are bemoaning the clean sweep of all the antigay constitutional amendments in the 11 states voting for such. First, it is a poisonously bad idea to have a majority voting to grant rights to a disliked minority; it never works. Second, I keep wanting to say to them, "Well, what on earth did you expect?" While I had hopes for Kerry to win the election, I never had the slightest doubt that every single one of those amendments would pass, and pass by huge margins. The only surprise to me in all of that was that Oregon passed its measure by less than a 2-1/3-1 margin, unlike every other state where the issue was being voted.
But then, nobody wants to hear reason the day after a catastrophic loss. Everyone's more into wound-licking, and that's perfectly understandable. Right now, nobody wants to hear, "Yo, people, get a fucking grip."
I do hope people get over this feeling of despair quickly. You can't do anything when you're locked down in despair mode.
Plus, I feel like bitchslapping them all across the country and yelling, "Snap out of it! Get to work on people! Talk to them! Find out what the hell was going on and let's fix this mess next time." To be sure, I'm not sure that this mess can be "fixed" next time. I think we may have polarized too strongly to make things better. (Although it will be interesting to see how people feel when the economy collapses, and that's surely coming.)
And all that said ... if becoming a landed immigrant in Canada weren't so mindnumbingly difficult, and if I could get a job there, I might well be gone. But since it is mindnumbingly difficult, and Canada has quite enough librarians of its own, thanks, my only real choice is to try to make things better here.
Posted by iain at November 03, 2004 03:08 PM
