Month: November 2004

Goalposts

Kevin Drum thinks that if Democrats dial back the liberal hectoring, we will get more votes from Middle Americans who aren’t extremists but who feel that we are too extreme:

They’re the ones who are uncomfortable with homosexuality, but understand that a steadily increasing acceptance of gay rights is probably inevitable. They don’t want to ban abortion, but feel like it’s common sense to require parental notification. And they’re ready to agree that we need to do something about global warming, but that doesn’t mean they take kindly to thinly veiled accusations that they’re personally responsible for it just because they drive an SUV or eat a Big Mac.

I can’t help but point out that the president just ran an entire campaign portraying Massachusetts as being some kind of foreign country so perhaps this cultural discomfort might be laid at the feet of the Republicans as much as the Democrats. I’m not exactly feeling the love from people who insist that Democrats aren’t Americans or that we are all traitors or that we are now “neutered” by this election and should be a lot more docile, like farm animals. That stuff isn’t coming from religious extremists, it’s coming from the mainstream leadership of the Republican party.

I’m not sure who these hectoring liberals are who get under the heartland’s skin with accusations about Big Macs, but I don’t think it was John Kerry. John Kerry didn’t run on disallowing parental notification laws or gay marriage. In fact, he specifically endorsed the former and ruled out the latter. He jettisoned gun control from the debate altogether. He went to church, talked about faith, and from all acounts he really is a sincere Catholic. The party had long since abandoned prison rehabilitation, the death penalty and welfare. Partial birth abortion has been outlawed. I’m not sure where we can go with this global warming issue if people aren’t willing to hear that driving an SUV is contributing to the problem unless we can talk about international agreements, which seems to be out also. Maybe the Dems should just let that one go too.

Be that as it may, the Republicans just won 51% and they say it’s because they don’t like our values, so we have no choice but to recognise that and talk about it. It’s not the first time. This is what the DLC acknowledged back in the 1980’s and changing position on the death penalty and welfare is what helped get Clinton elected (with a big assist from Ross Perot and a painful recession.)

Unfortunately, Clinton never got 50% in either election. And once in office he was tortured endlessly by the GOP, and lost the congress long before Monica bared her thong. He was an effective president anyway and I don’t quarrel with his legacy. His political skills, however, didn’t have as much to do with his ability to attract a majority, which he never did, but rather his ability to survive a constant political assault once in office.

This values debate has shown itself to be extremely useful to the GOP for decades and they are very adept at moving the goalposts when it’s necessary. (Remember, they were the ones who kept saying “you can’t legislate morality” during the civil rights era.) No matter how much we move to the right or adapt our positions on things like parental notification and gay marriage and the rest, there will always be another wedge issue there to exploit and convince the heartland that we liberals are trying to shove our immorality into their lives against their will. And that’s because it isn’t about values at all. It’s about politics. The Republicans have identified themselves as the party of the heartland tribe very effectively by pitting themselves against the enemy tribe —the Democratic liberal elite, as they define it. And they have a very effective machine that spreads that word.

Last time Gore allegedly lost because he was in the pocket of the liberal elites in the cities who want to ban guns. This time Kerry spent half the campaign toting a shotgun and allegedly lost because the liberal elite wants to legalize gay marriage. In years gone by it was gays in the millitary or welfare queens or draft dodgers or bra burners or whatever. It’s always something. Always.

The reason the heartland rejected John Kerry has absolutely nothing to do with what he actually believed or said. He could have adopted George W. Bush’s platform in its entirety and he would have been portrayed and believed to be some kind of an alien being descending upon the heartland like an invader from an enemy land. This has been one of the great successes of a 30 year political realignment that is settling into what can only be seen as a cold civil war. We won’t resolve it by continually trying to adjust piecemeal on values issues. We aren’t winning by doing that any more than we were winning by running on social issues or the nuclear freeze in the 1980’s.

That has been tried. We need a new, more modern approach altogether.

I might suggest that one of the things we begin to do is expose the hypocrisies of the Republican party. These decent, reasonable heartlanders might not be able to see liberals as being decent and reasonable but perhaps they could have their eyes opened by the cosmopolitan decadence of their own political leaders. Sometimes people have to be shaken out of their secure assumptions about their own tribe before they can see the merits of another.

Instead of running lukewarm values campaigns within their frame of social conservatism, perhaps we could run competing values campaigns on all-American libertarian beliefs like “mind your own business” and aim it at government, corporations and religious fanatics alike. Maybe we could shake free some of those western states from their coalition. Talk up the environment as stewardship of the land for hunting and fishing as well as conservation for the future.

But, frankly I believe that the problem will be solved through something much different. The world has changed even if the political bludgeon of values hasn’t. I really think politics has morphed into a post modern epistomological relativism that can only be dealt with through sensation and spectacle, not reason — the subject of many future posts, I imagine.

Update: Here’s an interesting article from the Texas Observer about Lakoff and Luntz that touches on what I wrote in the last paragraph:

As long as liberals and progressives insist that having the facts on their side is all that matters, they are doomed to impotence. The next move for the left in the frame war is to accept that it’s okay to cherry-pick reality as long as it conforms to a frame that’s morally acceptable. According to Lakoff, we already do it every day.

Guest Post

Blog commenter Thumb has decided to make the switch to the Republican Party and he’d like to share with you his reasons. I find them very convincing and I will be joining him. My life’s about to become a whole lot easier:

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

So the people voting for Bush told exit pollers that moral values are their #1 issue.

Because the Republicans are obviously superior in both numbers and cause, and their values oriented agenda should no doubt be a boon to human kind, there’s obviously only one thing left to do at this point. Convert. Therefor, in an act of supreme solidarity to our new national conservative alliance and their emphasis on values, I would just like to say, they’re right. I’m ready to sign up.

But first I need to declare that I too no longer care about losing millions of American jobs. I too no longer care about health care. Or social security. I also no longer care about education. I no longer care what happens to the poor, the elderly or the millions of American children growing up in poverty, despair and hopelessness. I no longer care that the US ranks a lowly 41st in infant mortality. I no longer care that the gap between rich and poor is approaching third world levels. I no longer care that Fortune 500 corporations can avoid paying taxes by opening an offshore mailbox and I no longer care that the working class will be forced pick up the difference. I no longer care that we’ve taken a record fiscal surplus and in three years turned it into the largest debt in the history of our country or that it will be our children, and their children, that will have to pay it back. I also no longer care how many Americans die at the hands of terrorists (as long as they’re dying over there and not here at home) or how many thousands of foreign civilians die in the course of our projecting American global hegemony. I no longer care what the rest of the world thinks of America, as long as they know to fear us. I no longer care about the science of potential medical breakthroughs nor do I care about slowing the spread of AIDS nor whether we have sufficient supplies of safe vaccines. I no longer care that the number of abortions is on the rise (though I’ll pound my chest and pretend that I do) because I no longer care about birth control, sex education or family planning. I no longer care about our environment and whether we’re allowing industries to poison our water, our air and ultimately our food supply, and I no longer care about the consequences of releasing massive amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and its likelihood of accelerating global warming. I no longer care that our Bill of Rights, once enshrined to protect our personal freedoms and liberty, is being stripped down or that our 200 year old Constitutional protections are being traded for a false sense of security.

So what do I share with our new majority as my #1 concern? Values. I care about moral values.

Now that I’ve completed the switch to the other side moral values is all that matters to me. Moral values. Yes sir, I care enough that sufficient numbers of people share these moral values to make sure that we elect politicians that will put these moral values into law (even if it takes rigging the new electronic voting machines) and that those politicians in turn appoint judges guaranteed to ensure that everyone else is forced to live by these same moral values. Now some of you remaining Unbelievers may ask, “But if everything you no longer care about isn’t a moral value, what are your moral values?” Easy. The single most important moral value, overriding all other concerns, is that two people of the same sex are blocked from achieving secular legal recognitions that could in any way be similar to that enjoyed by heterosexual couples. Health and survivor benefits? Forget it. Employment protection? Come on. Inheritance rights? No way. Hospital visitation? Get real. Adoption? GOD FORBID!

You few, final remaining Democrats, moderates, greens and libertarians really need to get onboard the bandwagon. This new stripped down moral value is so easy I don’t know why I didn’t think of this myself earlier. Effortless morality. That’s the ticket. It’s like a gift from God. Now let’s jam it down everyone’s throat.

And God bless the New American Morality.

Schmucks

Matt Yglesias hits the nail on the head:

“I’ve got some serious disagreements with Thomas Frank’s take on this whole phenomenon, but he’s very right to argue in his book and elsewhere that the politics of cultural populism depends crucially on the Republicans never delivering the goods on any of the really big issues. Meanwhile, social conservatives have gotten treated this way for years — decades, really — and while they always complain about it, they always show up when it’s time to vote. I would suggest that insofar as liberals sometimes condescend to these people (which we do) the issue is less a condescending attitude toward religion, than a condescending attitude toward a voting bloc that doesn’t seem capable of figuring out that it’s being scammed no matter how many times it happens”

I’m fine with people’s religion as long as they don’t force me to practice it. Live and let live, I say. I like freedom and that includes freedom of religion. My problem with these people is that they are fools to continually be taken in by a group of rich plutocrats who’ve been running things for quite some time now and who have never substantially delivered anything they’ve promised to the social conservatives. They put on a good show, with lots of razzle dazzle, but they are not sincere. The social conservatives are like greyhounds chasing the mechanical rabbit. And the big money boyz are laughing all the way to the bank. Take pornography, for instance:

What companies are involved? Spencer’s investigators and reports from market research firms indicate that pornography is a $10 billion industry in the US alone, according to Forrester Research of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The largest company is not even known for pornography, but for selling cars. General Motors Corp.’s DirecTV subsidiary sells nearly $200 million a year of pay-per-view sex films, according to industry estimates not disputed by GM.

Other companies involved, including EchoStar Communications, the No.2 satellite provider, AT&T Corp., by offering the HotNetwork service through its cable service, Liberty Media, Marriott International, the Hilton, On Command, LodgeNet Entertainment and News Corp., all have major stakes in pornography, but these stakes are not mentioned in annual reports, except in the vaguest ways. An AT&T executive explains, “How can we? It’s the crazy aunt in the attic. Everyone knows she’s there, but you can’t say anything about it.”

Do the social conservatives know that George W. Bush himself served on the board of a Hollywood production company, run by his best friend Roland Betts? They weren’t making Bambi, they were making movies like The Hitcher, which featured a woman being ripped in two. He made quite a nice little profit from that work (1983 to 1994.) Yet he forgot to mention his connection to the decadent world of Hollywood when he said:

“There needs to be a kind of sense of urgency in our society about the pervasiveness of violence”

It’s hard to respect people who are willing dupes year after year and deliver power to a party that is merely using them for electoral gains and has absolutely no intention of delivering on its promises. There’s just too much money involved in selling the culture that these people find so objectionable. And the ones who are selling it own the Republican party lock stock and falafel.

Like I said. Schmucks.

The New Untermenschen

I’m really enjoying this dialog over at Slate called “Why America Hates Democrats.”

The question answers itself, though, doesn’t it? Democrats obviously aren’t Americans. We are enemies of the state.

You won, Rush, Ann, Sean, Grover, Karl. Congratulations. Democrats are now officially expelled from the body politic. And with a bare 51% majority, too. Wow. That’s a hell of an achievement. Even the liberal Slate agrees with you now. (I’ll be looking forward to the articles that endorse teaching creationism in the schools because it’s a “value” that Americans hold dear .)

The good news is that Rush always said he wanted to keep one of us alive and put us in a museum someplace so that Americans would never forget what we looked like. Maybe we could have an election among ourselves and nominate the best representation of the hated Democrat. I’m pretty sure that they aren’t going to accept 99.9 % of us. In fact, the only one they are likely to accept would be someone who looks like Michael Jackson. Otherwise the person might just be mistaken for a relative or a neighbor and then everyone would get confused.

The question as to why we are hated by Americans is an interesting one that cannot be answered by a bunch of liberals trying to distance themselves from this hated subgroup. if you want the real answer, you’ll ask an real American why he hates democrats. Luckily, right in the LA Times it’s not hard to find the answer:

Christians, in politics as in evangelism, are not against people or the world. But we are against false ideas that hold good people captive. On Tuesday, this nation rejected liberalism, primarily because liberalism has been taken captive by the left. Since 1968, the left has taken millions captive, and we must help those Democrats who truly want to be free to actually break free of this evil ideology.

In the weeks and months to come, we will hear the voices of well-meaning people beseeching the victor to compromise with the vanquished. This would be a mistake. Conservatives must not compromise with the left. Good people holding false ideas are won over only if we defeat what is false with the truth.

The left must be defeated in the realm of ideas, just as it was on Tuesday at the ballot box. The left hates the ballot box and loves its courtrooms, which is why it hopes to continue to advance its agenda through the courts. This must end.

The left bewitches with its potions and elixirs, served daily in its strongholds of academe, Hollywood and old media. It vomits upon the morals, values and traditions we hold sacred: God, family and country. As we learned Tuesday, it is clear the left holds the majority of Americans, the majority of us, in contempt.

Simply, a majority of Americans have rejected John Kerry and John Edwards and the left because they are wrong. They are wrong because there are not two Americas. We are one nation under a God they reject. We remain indivisible despite their attempts to divide Americans through their relentless warfare against class, ethnic and religious unity.

We still believe that liberty and justice is for all. In 1946, there were those on the left who believed the Germans and the Japanese were incapable of democracy and liberty. Today, many doubt democracy can be birthed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Like their forebears, they too will be proved wrong.

The nation has now resoundingly rejected the left and its agenda. We do not want to become European. We do not want to become socialist. We do not want to become secular. We are exceptional. We are unique. And we are the greatest force for good in the world, despite what the left, the terrorists or the United Nations may claim. It is for these reasons that we remain the last great hope in the world for freedom.

We continue to be that shining city set on a hill. And we fully accept the responsibility; we are proud to be the envy of the world.

Die Liberale sind unserer Unglück

Electoral Arithmetic For Dummies

Kevin Drum is sick of this exceedingly STUPID mantra about how the Democrats face terrible arithmetic in the electoral college because of our inability to carry the south. He says:

No kidding. But try this on for size instead:

“Republicans face this terrible arithmetic in the Electoral College where if they don’t carry any of the 13 Northeastern states they need to win two-thirds of everything else,” says Kevin Drum, an expert on simplistic arithmetic at the Washington Monthly.

Note to the media: it was a close election, just like it was four years ago. There were only a dozen swing states, and Republicans had no more chance of winning in California, New York, and Illinois than Democrats did in Georgia, Alabama, and Wyoming. A trivial swing of a hundred thousand votes in half a dozen states and you’d be writing pretentious thumbsuckers about how cultural issues were losing their ability to attract votes for Republicans. So knock it off, OK?

I agree. I think that this arithmetic epitaph is perhaps the most annoying post election spin of all. You can argue about whether “moral values” as a top reason for voting this election means that the country is awash in religious fervor, but you simply cannot spin these numbers as a huge sea change. This was a squeaker only marginally more comfortable for Bush than 2000, not a blow out. Somebody has to win and the GOP machine has pulled it out the last two elections, but it could very easily have gone the other way. Red is redder and blue is bluer, that’s all.

Media Meltdown

I’m starting to get a little bit punchy from lack of sleep these last few days so I don’t have the energy tonight to write anything about this very interesting PressThink post by Jay Rosen about where the press is headed after this election.

I urge you all to read it. This may be where the real action is these next couple of years. It’s likely to be as fundamental to our future as the carnage that Bush is going to wreak.

Ashcroft Likely to Leave AG Post

I heard some woman on ABC saying that this is not what it seems. According to her, the president never wanted Ashcroft but he was forced on him by the religious right. This rumor is being pushed by those in the bush administration who want him out right away before some shit hits the fan (Plame? Kenny Boy?)

Whatever. It occurred to me that if we had a good message machine we would immediately seize upon this to sow divisions between Bush and his newly empowered evangelical base. They love Johnny. Isn’t it a slap in the face that their beloved Bush is pushing him out of office the day after the election?

Divide and conquer, baby. It’s just one of many hardball tactics we must begin to use to break the stranglehold in advance of the 2006 elections. It could be our ’94.

Who Are We?

I noticed that there seems to be a lot of discussion around the left blogosphere about the Democratic party not knowing what it stands for. This has been picked up by Howard Fineman who is busy telling everyone who’ll listen that we stand for nothing. I’m a little bit stunned by this and so is The Poor Man.

Obviously, I have no objection to people coming up with new ideas, but I hardly think this is really a problem of the Democratic Party. It is absolutely clear what the Democrats stood for in this election – a generally conservative set of principles based on sixty-plus years of Democratic and bipartisan American thought and action. Respect for the importance of time-tested international alliances, and for the system for resolving global issues through the UN and other international bodies which has evolved over the last century. A measured approach to dealing with foreign relations, a recognition that there are always many crises to be juggled at once, and a disinclination to overextend or rely on ‘magic bullet’ or utopian solutions. Striking a balance between business and labor which benefits both, and judicious use of the state to resolve problems for which the private sector is poorly suited. Fiscal responsibility. A tolerence of difference, a respect for ability and expertise, and a dedication to the ideals of the woman’s rights, civil rights, and labor movements. An America like the America we grew up in and believed in, only maybe a bit better, which stands for and gains its strengths from these common values which are our heritage.

There you go. In a piece from the primaries some months back, I wrote that any Democrat would run basically on the following platform:

To protect and defend the citizens of the United States.

To preserve the separation of church and state

To safeguard the right to choose.

To provide a decent safety net

To preserve progressive taxation

To protect the environment

To advance civil liberties and civil rights

To govern transparently

To provide opportunity

To promote equality

To advance progress

To preserve the American way of life

I don’t think there is all that much question about what we stand for. However, as The Poor Man points out, that has almost nothing to do with how we are perceived by millions of Americans who tune in the Mighty Wurlitzer for their “news.” There has been a decades long attack on liberalism that has demonized us into a party of stoned slackers and caffeinated porno consumers. (More projection. They don’t call Delay “Hot Tub Tom” for nothing.) This character assasination made it possible for a president to be elected with a totally incoherent set of “values” that could only have been designed by someone cobbling together a governing coalition of deaf, dumb and blind people who cannot read.

They didn’t win the campaign because they have a coherent ideology and we didn’t. Rupert Murdock and Jerry Falwell are not pursuing the same goals. “Democracy” and Ilyiad Allawi do not belong in the same sentence. Radical tax cutting and running wars to the tune of a billion a day is not fiscal responsibility. Bigotry is not compassionate and destroying the safety net we’ve depended on for more than half a century is not conservative.

These people aren’t united by a common ideology or set of values. They are united by a common hatred of Democrats, fueled by a massive propaganda machine. They won this campaign by putting on a trash talking spectacle starring George W. Bush as Commander Codpiece. (Those who wanted to ban gay marriage got in two for the price of one.) The problem is that show biz conservatism has become the default channel for more Americans. It’s about identity, not ideology.

Heartland Values

In the grand tradition of knee jerk analysis, I am hearing all over the television and the blogosphere that we need to reach out to the religious people who voted for George W. Bush in order to win in the future. We must reject our “Hollywood values” and learn to embrace the real, American heartland values that George W. Bush personifies and which won him the election. One Democrat named Dave Strother just said that the Democrats have to purge themselves of the coasts or risk oblivion.

I wish that just once we would recognise when we are being played. The reason Bush won is because he eked out a victory in Ohio, period. That is the only number that matters in this presidential election and it doesn’t represent a gigantic sea change in America. Bush won that small victory in Ohio because an unprecedented number of conservative evangelicals came out to vote. And, the “American Heartland value” that energized them was an amendment to the state constitution that not only defined marriage as between a man and a woman but also barred public institutions, such as universities, from providing health insurance and other benefits to domestic partners.

“This was the issue that delivered Ohio for President Bush,” said Phil Burress, who spearheaded the Issue 1 campaign. “We mailed out 2.5 million bulletins to 17,000 churches. We called 2.9 million homes and identified 850,000 supporters. We called every one of those supporters on Monday and urged them to vote Yes on 1.”

(I guess we now know why they panicked about Mary Cheney, don’t we? )

My question is this. Is there any combination of issues upon which we Democrats could accomodate these people that doesn’t include backing anti-gay measures like that? In other words, as long as the Democratic party believes in equal rights for gay people is there a snowball’s chance in hell that we will be able to tear the religious vote away from the party that doesn’t with outreach to “heartland values?”

I doubt it. In fact, I think that we are talking about a wedge issue that is insurmountable. Civil rights are a fundamental matter of principle, not a position on specific programs or tax cut legislation. And I don’t see any possibility that we will be able to make inroads with people who believe that homosexuality is a sin as a matter of bedrock religious belief. We can field a candidate who runs a campaign like a tent revival, but this is one of those issues that can’t be finessed. As long as we believe in the separation of church and state and back civil rights for gays we are not going to get the conservative Christian vote. We just aren’t.

If gay rights is the deciding factor for the forseeable future, then I think we may lose for a while. But, it won’t be. It’s really not a matter of law as much a matter of society getting used to the idea and it is happening very quickly. Gay marriage wasn’t even on the radar screen ten years ago — until the last couple of years, everybody had been growing used to the idea of civil unions, which even Junior has endorsed. My guess is that they won’t be able to find an anti-gay measure to put on the ballot every election and as a result they won’t be able to repeat this turn-out in the crucial states where they need it. This was a unique combination of Junior’s phony born again image and the gay rights issue converging.

Pinning this election defeat on an alleged lack of “moral values” is short sighted and it plays right into Republican hands. The Republicans consistently use that club to beat us over the head again and again while they fervently watch the Falafel Factor and listen to Rush as he pops little blue babies between attacks on the Democratic party’s hedonism. They only believe in strict moral values when it’s somebody they don’t like. This is political posturing and we are fools to let them use it to marginalize our 50% of the population.

There are competing values in this world and you can’t be all things to all people. The election was won with 130,000 or so conservative evangelical votes in one state. That is decisive enough to declare victory in the election, but it is far too slim a margin to make the sweeping decision that the Democratic party needs to shelve its values of tolerance and civil rights to accomodate certain religious beliefs that are incompatible with them. The religious people are welcome to their beliefs, of course, but it’s something on which we cannot compromise and have any of our own values left. (Oddly, I think that the truly religious people, as opposed to the poseur majority of republicans, might just understand that.)

I maintain that many people simply want a president whose image fits the role of president. Most of them vote on the basis of how the person makes them feel. They may like a little religion talk because it’s code for a certain cultural ID and leadership archetype they feel comfortable with. And they want some personality in their leader, professionally presented as if it’s authentic. Many of them are religious, (and they may have voted to ban gay marriage) but they are not driven to the polls on the conservative values agenda. Their motivation is not issues, although they tend to assign their preferred issues and solutions to their preferred candidate regardless of the reality. What they care about is style. Some of these people voted happily for Reagan, Clinton, Perot and Junior and see nothing remotely inconsistent in that. Those people we can reach with message, presentation and the right candidate.

The truly committed religious right,however, said to be 22 percent of this last electorate, is simply not obtainable. To even contemplate jettisoning our deeply held values to pander to them is useless and immoral.

But, get ready. The media are lazy and love the storyline of the wicked, hedonistic liberals being ignominiously defeated by the righteous salt of the earth Republicans. They are going to flog this until we are all convinced that the entire country is made up of conservative Christian Republicans and the rest of us are a bunch of freaks — even the moderate and liberal Christians. Everyone will agree that the hope of the party is to abandon the coasts (with all their electoral votes, presumably.) But, just because they like a narrative it doesn’t make it true. If we have learned anything over the years I would hope that at least we have learned that.

Reaching Out

Grover Norquist:

Once the minority of House and Senate are comfortable in their minority status, they will have no problem socializing with the Republicans. Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they’ve been fixed, then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful. They don’t go around peeing on the furniture and such.

I was listening to Sean Hannity gloat yesterday as we were driving back from Nevada. His guest was Zell Miller. They both agreed that Democrats were completely out of step with nation and that’s why Bush was given this huge mandate. Dems refused to see that you cannot raise taxes, that you must fight evil abroad where ever you see it and that people have the right to practice their religion anywhere and everywhere they see fit. Perhaps, most egregiously, Democrats didn’t understand that you cannot be vicious and angry and expect the real Americans to sit back and take it.

They were both very hopeful that Democrats would learn civility (or was that servility, I couldn’t tell) and reach across the aisle and behave in a bipartisan manner by adopting the Republican agenda.

I screamed, “fuck you,assholes” into the vast emptiness of the high desert. I don’t think anyone heard me.