November 7, 2004
I did not work for Kerry, though I was hoping he’d win. I’m in politics, and I used that as an excuse—I was already working for the cause, so I didn’t need to also work for Kerry. But the truth is I had no desire to. When Dean was running, I found time to help his campaign; somehow, I didn’t find that same time for Kerry. This despite my intimate knowledge of the stakes involved.
I have been in formal and informal meetings these last few days that inevitably turn into post mortems on the election, and several times I’ve heard people echo my reaction: annoyance at the fact that I ever let myself be OK with Kerry being the candidate. When this whole thing started, Kerry was down near the bottom of my list (just above Gephardt). I made myself see things as positively as I could and hoped his wishy-washy style was tied to his role as a senator—that once he was President he would change gears—but I honestly doubted it. The flip-flopper charge against him started in the Dean campaign and I agreed with every word. Sure it’s hard to have to defend a Senate record, with all the inevitable compromises. But many aren’t as muddled as Kerry’s, and maybe the Senate isn’t the right pool to pull presidents from. Maybe it happens so rarely for a reason. But in the end, I speculated that Kerry might be the Democratic Party’s Gorbachev, the old party machine member who could act as a transitional figure to the new generation. The truth is that right down to the end, through the convention, the debates, his comeback, Kerry never stood for anything. He was the grownup, the smart one, the vet, the not-Bush. That was about the extent of his message.
In the end, Rove’s strategy to counter the Democrat’s anti-war get-out-the-vote efforts with get-out-the-vote work with new evangelical voters helped. Bush’s proposal of an anti-gay constitutional amendment I’m not sure he even agreed with, along with the big target of gay marriage victories at the local and state level, along with hyped-up stem cell and abortion issues, helped excite the base too. But really the thing that excites Fundamentalists most about Bush is that they know he is one of them (as opposed to his father or Reagan, neither of whom was particularly religious.) And signals that Iraq and terrorism were part of a holy war combined with the broader and undeniable reality that despite the fact that the Bush administration got America into the Iraq War and Americans widely believe they’ve botched it and we should get out, they still want Bush to do it. They trust the Republicans more on handling war and domestic security, as they usually do. Add to all that the fact that the economy isn’t that bad. In areas that are not helped by the current trends, there’s been a shift against Bush, but the American economy has yet to face the impact of Bush’s unreal deficits and bungled global affairs.
It will be interesting to see what happens in the next four years and how both parties respond, as Bush keeps taxes down while spending even more, reforms Social Security by cutting benefits, adds two to four conservatives to the Court and promotes Thomas or Scalia to Chief Justice and that Court strikes down Roe, and as his Congress expands and makes permanent the Patriot Act’s police state tactics. When Pat Buchanan said in his endorsement of Bush that the most effective way to repudiate him was to make him live with the consequences of his actions in a second term, he was talking mostly about the war but, for me, he could have been talking about the whole agenda.
My guess is we’ll see our first woman president next. I think when the “security moms” realize what they’ve done, they’re going to want revenge in a big way. Oprah, Hillary, Condoleezza, I don’t know. Or maybe the Left will win the argument, again, that the Democrats need to be bolder, not more moderate, and this time make it all the way to the end of the nomination process. Perhaps Democrats will think, If only we’d picked Dean. How about Dean/Obama in 2008? Or maybe Obama will be ready for the top of the ticket in four years. (More another time about Obama’s exciting packaging of liberal values in terms that some social conservatives will find appealing.)
I do not want the Democrats to be obnoxious; I do not want them to lurch to the Left. I think it’s important to welcome in people who agree on most issues even if they disagree on a few. And I think the country is benefited by big tent parties where such issues get hashed out internally, so there is at least some institutional understanding of the “other” side. But if the lack of enthusiasm for Kerry showed us one thing, if the lack of enthusiasm for Mondale, for Dukakis, for Gore showed us one thing, it’s that people don’t like dull, visionless candidates. Why is it so hard for an exciting, appealing candidate to make it through the Democratic nomination process? We should examine and solve this question before the next election.
When Reagan ran for the Republican nomination in 1976 against Vice President Ford, few took seriously the idea of moving the party far to the right. But after Ford’s bumbling loss to Carter, four years later the Party thought again. Bush can do considerable damage in the next four years, some of which will likely take decades to repair, so I’m sorry Kerry lost. But there is truth in the dialectical idea that by lurching farther to the Right, the Democratic Party will be ready to find a new balance further to the Left than it was prepared to accept this year. (On the other hand, if the Republicans change the Constitution so they can run Schwarzenegger, then we might as well just pack it in now.)
