AKMA’s Random Thoughts

I'm inclined to agree with Britt Blaser that "the big losers in this election will be both parties...."

Four years from now, the Democratic Party will have either pretty much completely reshaped itself, or it will be well down the road to vanishing. Meanwhile, the Republican Party will have started to reap the whirlwind they have been sowing (and, presumably, will continue to sow).

The question is whether our nation's core democratic (small-d!) values can survive in the meantime.

But this was also the year "The Passion of the Christ" made even more millions. I'm struck by the parallels between the outcome of the election, where "morals" are now said to have been the deciding issue, and the turmoil in the Episcopal Church.

My thoughts exactly.

I expected we might lose. I didn't expect I would feel so miserably afraid that I might no longer belong here.

I'm not trying to be overly optomistic or unrealistic (and i recognize my propensity to be both of these things) but this election has not be called yet and Kerry has not yet lost. If Gore had more of a similar resolve he might have been president for the last four years.

George Lakoff has a good response to this. The facts are not what are important - it is how the issues are framed. That the democrats did as well as they did on the issues is amazing. The next step is to learn to frame the issues in a way that resonates with the people. Democrats focus on issues. That won't work.

And, on some level, I would not want a Democrat to have to deal with this horrible mess. The democrats put up a good fight.

So JW, Dems focus on the issues, the substance, but Freepers are the window dressing?

What a brilliant analysis of what happened yesterday.

The fundamental lesson of this election is that the Democratic Party has lost all connection with the social values of red-state America. This, of course, is not news; but the difficulty is in the way that the Democrats have responded to this disconnection.

The Democrats show no respect for social conservatives. They demonize them; they believe that they are stupid, uneducated, and unenlightened; and they make no effort to understand their values and opinions.

The *beginning* of the answer to "under what circumstances can the Democratic party win?" is that the Democrats must begin to treat social conservatives with respect, as worthy opponents. They should banish the words "fundamentalist" and "theocrat" from their polemical vocabulary. And they should even consider welcoming people who are pro-life into their party as full members.

Once, the Democratic Party championed the social and economic interests of the "little guy". Now they treat the "little guy" as an ignorant, obscurantist hick. It's not a good strategy.

I echo the last comments. As a reformed republican political consultant, I can tell you that nothing gave me more glee than to see democratic candidates treat faith issues lightly. People vote on security, the economy and values. If they can find no connection with a candidate and/or a party on values they will find it hard to pull the lever for that candidates.

Well, its something like that. Plenty of conversations with people who say, "yes, George knows nothing about the economy. Yes he made lots of mistakes in Iraq. But he's a strong leader. So I'll vote for him." As far as knowing the issues, if you look at the surveys about political knowledge, most of Republicans still believe that Saddam caused 9/11.

I do think that gay marriage was the deciding issue. But there is no real discussion about why that was an issue in the first place. It is an issue, as Rove knew, that would get evangelicals out. Most people in the midwest are already anxious about jobs. Now the gays are coming! Rove scared the evangelicals to the polls. And when you are scared, you want order. Bush provided order.

Rove knew that George Bush, not his policies, was the trump card. Over and over, that was his schtick. "You know Me. I do what I must."

Two months ago, in a heavily republican district in Minnesota, an elementary school teacher held a mock election. He removed the names and only put the policies, as taken from the candidate's website. The parents and the kids came to the auditorium for the "election" at which point, the names of the candidates were released. Kerry had won by a 10-1 margin. There were catcalls and boos from everyone.

Obviously this is not universal. Some do think we can afford the price of interfering in the rest of the world. Others think that we will completely ban abortion. Others really think that being homosexual is contagious. I have no doubt that people have legitimate fears. But as far as issues go, the Republicans are firmly in the hands of corporate America, giving the religious right scraps of hope. Unless, however, George Bush becomes a big government republican, which might actually be his MO this second term.

John Wilkins writes:

Most people in the midwest are already anxious about jobs

Translation: "It's the economy, stupid." John, your screed is so poorly written and ill-reasoned that I'm not surprised at all that you're still just not getting it. You just put a fine point on what the two commenters above you stated.

The rustbelt of Ohio is a place where people don't actually make things anymore--those things are made in China now. And even so, Kerry could not manage to win Ohio. Outsourcing? Gimmeabreak. There's no evidence that fears over the economy are what drove this election. It was values, not the War, not the economy, and not health care.

Rove scared the evangelicals to the polls

You are mistaken, and shrill now. It was Kerry (and Edwards) who drove evangelicals to the polls. There are a lot of them, you know. Look at that gigantic sea of red, John. You obviously don't see the same thing I do.

Nick Confessore over at The American Prospect is a very smart guy, and he says this:

Gay marriage was one of the keys. Ballot initiatives banning gay marriage passed everywhere they were up for a vote: Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Utah. That includes four swing states, the most crucial of which -- Ohio, where some 50,000 to 100,000 extra voters may have come out for the ballot initiative -- Bush won. Indeed, they were put there by Bush's allies among the religious right in no small part to drive turnout. Elsewhere, the GOP conducted a below-the-radar campaign on gay marriage, linking Kerry and the Democrats to support for same-sex unions. I still believe time is not on the right's side when it comes to this issue. And they may face the kind of backlash that abortion-rights supporters faced in the decades after Roe. But the bottom line is that this issue really helped Bush.

Question: Where were the Democratic wedge issues? Where were the ballot initiatives in Nevada, Oregon, Ohio, and Florida -- home to millions of senior citizens looking down the barrel of the Alzheimer's gun -- legalizing stem-cell research? (California was already in the bag, folks.) What I'm getting at is what appears to be a congenital Democratic inability to think several moves ahead and plant political traps and wedges for the other team, something the Republican Party is very good at doing to Democrats.

I think he's spot on here.

Adamsj, FWIW, I completely agree as far as his comments go. However, Kerry & Edwards did not resonate with the Midwest, the South, and the West. That much is blatantly obvious.

What the DNC needs now is not wedges, but a reappraisal that the old platform of the Left is completely broken and cannot work any longer. Tweaking next time around will not suffice. Bush should have been a sitting duck in this election.

The mandate is this: American retains certain core beliefs repugnant to the 20% of the party on the far left wing which are absolutely nonnegotiable and which will not be surrendered under any circumstances. Until they come to grips with this and field a more moderate candidate with a clearer grasp of what's a stake, I'm not expecting great things from them.

Why do any of you feel like you have some sort of personal interest in the Democratic Party? Who cares what their future and prospects are?

I think the big issue is what is going on in how americans, in general, see politics. This is obviously a much bigger subject than the election, and analysis of who won which state (region, county, whatever) doesn't really tell you a whole lot about that.

I think analyzing the rhetoric of political ads and such is much more telling, a la Jay Rosen.

Hi, Daniel,

If the Republican Party had taken your sort of advice forty years ago, they'd be landfill right now. I will not negotiate away the prinicples in which I believe, any more than they did.

Furthermore, I plan to see my principles prevail. I can do no other.

I named my daughter Quincy (with a father named John Adams, what were her alternatives?) thinking of the great anti-slavery John Quincy Adams, hoping to inspire her to be like him.

I'm not giving up. Sorry to disappoint you.

I suspect most evangelicals are not as conservative as the election results might indicate. While there certainly is a hard-right-wing fringe, most evangelicals, I think (judging from polls and surveys) are very much in the center on most issues (healthcare, jobs, guns, foreign policy, etc.).

But when it comes to issues such as abortion, embryonic stem cell research, and gay marriage, those will trump the other issues every time.

If one believes that abortion is at least akin to murder and that creating human embryos in order to destroy them in the name of research is morally repugnant, then that is going to carry a lot of weight.

Moreover, civil marriage and the government-provided benefits accompanying it are seen by most people as a form of moral approbation, the government supporting something that is intrinsically good and that it has a compelling interest to promote. It is a losing proposition to ask people to accept and give social approval to a lifestyle they find morally ambiguous at best.

And these are important issues even for Democrats. While the Party has not a few white evangelicals, it also has quite large numbers of African-American evangelicals and fairly traditional Roman Catholics. While these latter two groups will often not weigh abortion and other moral issues as heavily as ones of economic justice and the like, very many of them would be thrilled with a Democratic candidate who, nevertheless, doesn't embrace the pro-choice/pro-gay union agendas. In fact, the exit polls suggest that a number of Democrats voted for Bush precisely over these issues, despite profound misgivings.

If the Democrats are going to make gains, then they need to re-think the place of religion in their party and move more to the center on some of these moral issues, for instance, embracing some restrictions on abortion and abandoning any talk of "gay marriage."

Howard Dean was right. He warned the party that they had to be the party 'for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks'.

He was absolutely g*d damn right, and the Democratic Party slammed him for saying it.

Look, I voted for Kerry, but I woudl have voted for a potted plant compared to Bush.

Kerry is a good man, but a lackluster candidate with no fresh ideas or wide appeal.

The Democratic Party needs to re-evaluate their focus to things to matter to every American and can be summarized in one sentence. This year the GOP ran on Guns, Gays, and God and they whooped us. They had no real platform other than that.

Americans choose a new President based on their single issue that matters most. The single issue voters on guns, gays, God, and asskicking in Iraq outnumbered Kerry's support significantly.

What was Kerry's single issue? "I'm not Bush"

We are lucky to have gotten 48% with such a platform.

The red states aren't crazy nut cases, they are just like you and me. Bush gave them something to believe in and Kerry gave us something to hate. Hope triumphs hate...

The single issue voters on guns, gays, God, and asskicking in Iraq

Sounds like four issues there, Michael.

And although I think the rest of your analysis is right-on, no pun intended, I still think the issues were a lot more broad than that, else Bush could not have one. I don't think those four issues really add up to a Bush win. Especially guns and God. It's true that Second Amendment issues are important to Republican voters, and it's obvious from the various State races that almost everyone running on a gun control position lost. The gun control plank in the Dem platform is an absolute toad. Yet, they still enthusiastically discuss it as if it's going to help them. Also, everyone has a God. All of life is inherently religious in nature. The question is what kind of God are we discussing here?

I would also second Joel's comment about evangelical African-Americans and trad Catholics. The Dems have allowed those significant blocs to be marginalised...remember Bob Casey of PA? That has to be corrected in the future for them to be viable. It's a non-negotiable that the Dem attitude about abortion has to change.

It's too bad for your country, and for all of us, that the reality we all face is that it comes down to who plays better chess in order to get the chance to implement their agenda.

All the talk is about who did better with wedge issues, putting initiatives on the ballot to remind people about "values" (whatever they are) and crafting the message that wins, etc. Lots of navel gazing.

I know I'm incredibly naive, but I still don't really get why more people don't see that the "war" was manufactured, and the ongoing "terror" serves the administration very very well, and they like it that way.

Imagine if a big bully, in a schoolyard in NYC, had been one of the bog wheels, if not THE big wheel for quite a while ... ever since Grade 2. And imagine he had been picking on all the brown kids for a number of years, stealing their lunches, extorting money from them in order to buy gas for his car ... they're now in Grade 10.

A couple of years ago, one of the brown kids, who's always been a bit of a smart ass (and used to be a bit of a gofer for the bully in Grade 2) chucked a knife at the bully when the bully was walking around, patrolling his school yard ... got him in the thigh, which caused the bully to have to go to the hospital, get 50 or 60 stitches and a pint of blod, and limp around for a while.

Then, one day the bully, having prepared mentally for quite a while, called out another poor brown kid who lives on the same street as the knife-chucker, and said "I know you have knives in your boots, and I want you to give 'em up, or I'm going to pound the shit out of you". The brown kid says, "but I don't ... ever since Osama chucked one at you, you've had your friends frisk me every day .... last term you said the same thing, and I let your friends frisk me, and they still can ... just please don't tell the kids on the street where I live, or they'll probably come and get me, so I have to keep them wary"

The bully says "well, I don't believe you, even if my buds frisk you every day, so here I come ... thwack, swat, bam, crunch, broken nose, smashed testicles, boots and then pistol to the head, etc."

On the schoolground, all the other grades stand around watching, and the teachers, and the principal, and no one really says anything ... except the odd "oh, that's awful", from those who are squeamish.

Normally, what would happen here is that the other kids, or the teachers, would step in. And if it were really bad, the cops would be called. And if the bully was rabid, and built like the Hulk (probably apropos here), the cops might even use tazers or a tranquilizer gun.

But ... the bully's dad has bought off the cops, so they stand by and watch, too ... and maybe even keep pushing the brown kid back into range of the bully.

Not only that, but it does make it into the papers ... "The Fight That Won't End" ... and the papers endlessly refer to the knife-chucking as the only thing that matters, even tho' the school yard is now surrounded by a 24/7/365 metal-detecting fence

When the brown kid finally dies, if he does, then the bully looks around and says "this is MY schoolyard, and you all know it ... any of you try to say differently and I'll do exactly this to you. I now have your assent, and I will use the fact that you are too scared to try to stop me".

"And not only that, but from now on I'm hiring the teachers, and appointing the principal, and the cops in this neighborhood are my dad's poker buddies.

So, go cheney yourself".

Would you want your kids to go to that school ?

Daniel, you didn't address anything except take my point out of context. Yes, people are anxious about their jobs - and when one is anxious, you go with the person who is portrayed as more ordered. Do you get it? When people are anxious, they want order. Bush represented order. Gay people represent chaos. by threatening our moral values, which give us order. Clear?

Daniel, you agree with Nick Confessore who said, , "the GOP conducted a below-the-radar campaign on gay marriage, linking Kerry and the Democrats to support for same-sex unions." Rove did a masterful job of getting the evangelicals to vote their morality, which is about restricting the freedom to marry.

I'm still waiting for you to address my main point which was that it is the frame of the issue, not the issues [Iraq, health care, the economy], that made people vote. If anything, you agreed. If liberals could have frame their issues better, in a more moral way, they would have succeeded. Instead, they talked about vietnam. Moral values, for the right, is really about homosexuality and abortion. For liberals, it is more about fairness, opportunity, and shared prosperity.