Because I left town on November 4, I wasn't able to blog my thoughts about the outcome of the election. I thought that I should write down a few things before more time passed. Part of my thinking in this post was influenced by Alexander Barnes Dryer's recent article for The New Republic on the competing explanations for Kerry's loss. If you haven't read Dryer's article yet, then I recommend it to your attention.
As I've mentioned before, I'm a yellow-dog Democrat who has long had little use for the Democratic party. The persistent inability of Democratic presidential candidates to win elections, even though opinion polls routinely show that a majority of voters favors Democrats over Republicans on domestic issues, is truly maddening. If the Democrats could package their concerns properly, and if they could develop a serious attitude on issues involving national security, they would be unbeatable for years to come.
I was never enthusiastic about John Kerry as a presidential candidate, even though in many respects he is an admirable man. Given his wealth and social background, there was never any need for him to lead a serious life. Instead, he volunteered to fight in Vietnam, served heroically, and then returned home and became involved in the anti-war protests. These are all remarkable achievements. He went to law school, worked as a lawyer, and then went into politics. Once again, real achievements. President Bush's life pales in comparison to Senator Kerry's.
Unfortunately, however, Bush was a more effective candidate than Kerry, and Bush & Co. ran a more effective campaign than Kerry & Co. Unlike Bush, who is much admired by his supporters, Kerry doesn't connect well with people, and he never articulated a clear message that succinctly summarized what he wanted to do in office. Only in the last few weeks of the campaign, especially after his speech on Iraq at NYU, did he manage to shift the focus of his campaign onto Bush's failures in office. For some reason — I'll never fathom this — Kerry and his people decided not to use the Boston convention as a venue to attack Bush and his record of overt failure.
The Democratic convention was a disaster, although it didn't appear to be one at the time. If we've learned one thing about the media in the past four years, it's that they can be easily manipulated. (When I speak of the media in what follows, I'm thinking primarily of television and radio outlets that aren't overtly partisan. There are plenty of magazines and newspapers that offer serious political criticism, but their audience is small compared to that for television and radio. Some magazines and newspapers are overtly partisan, whereas others lean left or right. Consequently, they're often dismissed as biased — a favorite Republican rhetorical device — and this charge simply increases the noise and confusion surrounding a campaign.) Republicans have mastered media manipulation, as the Swift Boats saga proves. The media will repeat the basest lies — doing so in the name of objectivity — if they're shouted loudly and long enough.
Op-eds and investigative reporting follow up the initial stenography that favors the liars, and so the lies are eventually exposed for the lies they are, but by then the damage has been done. Doubt has been sown in voters' minds, and so it may be too late for a candidate to recover.
A presidential candidate should never pass up an opportunity to criticize his opponent's record. Bush wasn't about to admit to any mistakes whatsoever, even though he has blundered his way from one mistake to the next throughout his term in office. The media hesitate to make harsh judgments, and thus often end up reporting spin and distortion, rather than simply stating the facts that make up a record of failure.
The media are even more reluctant to call a sitting president a liar unless the evidence — as in the case of President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky — is overwhelmingly against him. Bush proved again and again that he was perfectly willing to lie about his record. Naturally, he did the same thing about Kerry's.
Remember that Kerry started to turn things around in the debates. Why? Because the media had no choice but to report what he was saying and to present Bush's inability to counter the charges that Kerry made against him. The facts won out, however briefly. As a result, Kerry's campaign benefitted.
But this assault on Bush's record should have begun at the convention. It was foolish of Kerry & Co. not to attack Bush as Kerry was later attacked at the Republican convention. The fault lies with Kerry and his advisers, but ultimately, really, with Kerry, since the candidate is supposed to run the show.
The choice of John Edwards as Kerry's running mate seems to have been a poor one. Edwards has a lot of strengths, but he didn't really make much of an impression in the race. He certainly didn't help the ticket to carry his home state of North Carolina. Also, don't forget that Gore didn't carry Tennessee in 2000.
Consequently, I think that Democrats, at least for the near future, should simply give up on the South — except for Florida, of course, which is still in play. Perhaps Dick Gephardt would have been a better choice for the VP slot on the ticket. He would have had more appeal in the Midwest than Edwards.
There has been a lot of talk about the role of values in the campaign. I can't say to what extent Bush benefitted from the anti-gay marriage vote, but he certainly didn't lose votes overall because of it. And since conservative Christians will mostly be in the Republican camp for a long time, Democrats shouldn't go out of their way to appeal to them. They can't be won over anytime soon.
Instead, Democrats should couch their issues in moral terms that appeal to the majority of Americans regardless of their religious affiliation. Blue-collar and white-collar workers don't believe in the free market — they aren't think tank libertarians — they believe in the work ethic. That is, they believe that hard work should be rewarded, that they should be able to raise their families in a decent level of comfort and security. And many of them know that their lives are increasingly filled with risk, what with rising health insurance premiums and sky-high college tuition, among other sources of insecurity.
Democrats should relentlessly point out the ways in which Republican policies expose ordinary Americans to risk and uncertainty of a debilitating sort. Dryer makes a good suggestion that I can only second:
Why being against gay marriage and abortion reflects good values but being for health care and progressive taxation does not remains a mystery to most Democrats. Here's an idea for Democrats: Start framing your issues in moral terms and people will start seeing them as moral issues. [My emphasis - CB.] Ask Bill Clinton for help if you need it.
Democrats shouldn't simply complain about Republican deficits as instances of fiscal irresponsiblity. Instead, they need to expose the deficits for what they are: namely, deferred tax hikes or huge spending cuts in domestic programs. The important issues must be framed — to borrow Dryer's word — in moral terms. Otherwise, they sound like the technocratic, wonky matters that bore most people.
Finally, as regards security, terrorism, and foreign policy, well, this aspect of the Kerry campaign was more or less hopeless. Yes, he said that he would do better than Bush, lead more competently, and the like. And he probably would have. But such rhetoric doesn't much move people.
Here's what I would have said if I had been running, and I would have said it again and again and again:
As commander-in-chief, I pledge to defend the country against any and all enemies who attempt to kill Americans wherever they may be. I pledge to kill anyone who draws down on American soldiers. I pledge to kill anyone who kills American citizens.In my administration the new rule of the international order will be as follows: Anyone who kills Americans is dead meat. The only justice they will receive will be delivered by American soldiers, and that justice will be a bullet through the forehead, and that bullet will be stamped "Made in America."
Memo to Democrats: No one ever lost votes by vowing to kill people who kill Americans.
And if Jacques Chirac said that he didn't like my bellicose language, well, I'd say in response that that's what I call killing two frogs with one stone.
Memo to Democrats: No one ever lost votes by insulting a French politician.
And I'd refuse to speak politely about the U.N., the Third World tyrant's best friend.
Memo to Democrats: No one ever lost votes by expressing contempt for the U.N.
As to the matter of Kerry's loss, naturally, I'm not happy about it. But I never thought that he would have been able to accomplish much, seeing that we knew that the Republicans would retain control of Congress.
But here's the good news. Now that Bush has been re-elected, the Republicans are the undisputed owners of Bush's failures. They own the Iraq issue; they own the deficits issue; they own the entitlements issue; they own the rising health care costs issue; and so on. They can't possibly pin them on the Democrats.
Democrats, if they're smart, can land a serious blow against conservatism in 2008. Conservatism, we should say again and again, stands for fiscal irresponsibility, growing inequality and insecurity, foreign policy failure, lack of government accountability, tax cuts for the rich, and futile culture war that divides the country in a time of war.
The campaign for 2008 has already begun. Democrats just need a good candidate.
But if they pick Hillary Clinton, then I'll just up and resign from the party.
Update: It turns out that I was somewhat too pessimistic about Democratic prospects in the South. See this post — "Ronald Brownstein on Democratic Infighting" — for a slightly rosier view. (Added on January 3, 2005.)
