Yesterday, in an overnight post, Andrew Sullivan wrote, President Bush “deserves a fresh start, a chance to prove himself again, and the constructive criticism of those of us who decided to back his opponent. He needs our prayers and our support for the enormous tasks still ahead of him.”
I thought about this when I read it. And, to put it simply, I didn’t agree. What I considered writing was that given the track record he’s compiled and the way he ran this campaign, he’s really owed no fresh start. That would be graciousness at war with reality.
It would be up to the president, I thought of writing, to show concrete signs of a willingness not to govern in the divisive and factional spirit from which he’s governed in the last four years.
And then there’s this from his comments today: “We’ve worked hard and gained many new friends, and the result is now clear — a record voter turnout and a broad, nationwide victory.”
This is the touchstone and the sign. A ‘broad, nationwide victory’? He must be kidding. Our system is majority rule. And 51% is a win. But he’s claiming a mandate.
“A broad, nationwide victory”?
It would almost be comical if it weren’t for the seriousness of what it portends. This election cut the nation in two. A single percentage point over 50% is not broad. A victory that carried no states in the Northeast, close to none in the Industrial midwest is not nationwide, and none on the west coast is not nationwide.
And yet he plans to use this narrow victory as though it were a broad mandate, starting right back with the same strategy that has already come near to tearing this country apart.
Quite right — particularly on second-guessing. See Atrios.
In his commentary today, Marshall Wittman says: “Organization is fine – ideas and message are far superior.”
Lest there be any doubt, I entirely agree. It is simply that I think the two work in tandem and each galvanizes and augments the other.
There’s a lot of talking to done about this, haggling, gnashing of teeth, some shouting too. The point of my earlier discussion wasn’t stand-pat-ism. Improvement is always possible and necessary. And Democrats are still recovering from various social and political developments stretching from the 1960s straight through to the 1990s. It is, simply, also important to distinguish between the present moment and 1984 or 1972, though many would like to portray this in those terms.
Needless to say, we’ll talk much more about this.
As an oft-times critic of her, let me highly recommend Maureen Dowd’s column in this morning’s Times. And we’ll be saying more about ‘reaching out’ to Red State voters.
President Bush says Social Security privatization starts now.
See this earlier post for more on the linguistic funny-business over the term ‘privatization‘.
Memory hole watch: the LA Times has the first interviews with soldiers who watched as looted dragged away those high-grade explosives from the al Qaqaa munitions complex.
After the Massachusetts court decision in favor of gay marriage, I remember writing that though this was good for civil rights, we should not fool ourselves into thinking that it’s anything but bad for the Democratic party. I thought I’d written that in TPM. But when I used the TPM search engine yesterday I couldn’t find it using the obvious keywords. So it’s possible that I wrote it somewhere else or even in a private letter. Who knows …
In any case, over the last 7 or 8 months I think I managed to convince myself that this wasn’t the case, which was obviously wrong.
Let me start by making an important distinction. Recognizing that a certain position cost a lot at the polls is not the same as saying the position should be discarded for political reasons. I know that on the surface it may seem that way. But they’re not the same thing. And it’s foolish to ignore these realities if you’re going to make any headway at coping with them.
As many other have already noted, Rove and Co. cleverly managed to get anti-gay marriage initiatives and referenda on the ballot in a number of key swing states. And that seems to have played an key role in mobilizing ‘peripheral’ evangelical and culturally conservative voters.
Once they were at the polls, of course, they voted for George W. Bush.
Looking back over the week before the campaign I realize that I should have been more attentive to the reports I was picking up from readers about a wave of push-polls or robo-calls on the gay marriage issue — some hitting the issue itself while others dug deeper and insisted that the issue was really whether homosexuality would be ‘taught in schools’ and so forth.
This issue clearly had potency without a phone-call campaign. But that added to it. The decision to get the initiatives on the ballot, followed by a carefully orchestrated campaign of push-polls and the like amounted to a effective campaign pincer movement. And it was one that, to be honest, I think fairly few on the Democratic side even saw coming. Gay marriage — and the whole cluster of issues that surround it — became the sub rosa issue of the campaign.
It may have provided Bush with the crucial turnout boost on the right that allowed him to remain in office.
“I think a large part of the public likes the conservatives’ theme music. Now they will be tested on whether they like the lyrics.”
Take a look at Ed Kilgore’s take on the post-election intra-Democratic party issues at his NewDonkey website. For those of you who don’t know, Ed is the Policy Director of the DLC.