A belated announcement

To those of you who still venture here from time to time even though I haven't posted regularly in months, I say thanks; it was a good run at Bush Wars--over a million page views since we opened up shop in 2003 (thanks in part to co-poster Mark Gisleson, now plying the blogger's trade at Norwegianity)--but now we're shuttering the joint, for the foreseeable future at least.

The spirit of BW lives on, however, and for a change I'll actually be posting items to prove it. In coming days I'll begin posting regularly on the Bush administration and media coverage of same over at Blotter, City Pages' new news-and-links blog. Take a look. It's in a primitive state as yet (read: we're still using the same old Manila blogging software), but before long we'll be sprucing it up; you'll be able to sort posts there by subject and author to get to the news and links you're after.

When the Bush era is done, one of the puzzles left to history will be the seeming ease with which the recklessness and radicalism of the president's fiscal and military endeavors, not to mention his gang's open contempt for democratic forms, gained the assent of tens of millions of Americans. The news apparatus and the putative opposition party will come in for very large dollops of blame, along with the precipitous decline of public schools over the past generation-plus (a thoroughly bipartisan effort: under Clinton, federal education spending as a share of GDP fell 24 percent). More abiding factors such as militarism, racism, and clericalism belong in the equation too. But there is something less obvious afoot in the style and attitude of the Bush brigade's apologists, and right now we're seeing it in our backyards.

As Paul Demko reports this week in City Pages, a California radio host and capo of right-wing bloggery named Hugh Hewitt has declared war on the Star Tribune, pledging his minions to the task of parsing the paper's contents line by subversive line until they've stripped it to its bright red carapace and put the remains on public display. Hewitt's fatwa seeks to rehearse the good fun his pals at the Power Line blog had a couple of months ago in lobbing invective at Strib columnist Nick Coleman. Because this battle was waged on the heels of their receiving Time's blog of the year citation, the spat got more than its share of attention and wound up drawing blood when TCF pulled its ads from the paper. Hardly surprising, then, that it occurred to a compatriot of the Power Line boys to have another go at the paper.

What's at stake here is the difference between the moral universe of the citizen and that of the fan, which is to say between that of the participant and the spectator. For the fan, the only crucible that finally matters is being on the winning side. To ask whether what's being won is worth having, or in one's interest, or whether these victories may set the stage for future calamity, is about as interesting and sensible from the fan's point of view as suggesting that the Vikings really ought to think twice about playing the Packers this year (or, more nonsensically still, that bad things may befall them if they beat the Packers). As for the current censorial tenor of politics chat, the most rudimentary piece of fan etiquette is that the spoils and the bragging rights accrue to winners. Trash talk from losers is not endured in good humor. Failing to shut up after your side has been put down is an outrageous bit of bad manners--or, when it's politics we're talking about, an un-American activity.

The mindset expresses itself in a variety of ways. There's the reader who wrote to me shortly after the invasion of Iraq to ask, So what if Bush lied his way into war? It worked. Or the gleeful contempt with which the epithet "losers" was thrown around after the last election, as if it were the only word they could think of that was worse than "liberal." And the party the Power Line crew is throwing itself tonight at the Center of the American Experiment to mark Dan Rather's forced retirement. Will they rent Stuart Scott from ESPN to lead the room in his trademark winner's jeer, "Boo-YAA!"? Whatever else you may say about Bush/Rove, they certainly didn't conjure this impulse into being.

You see this streak of end-over-means, in-your-face triumphalism playing itself out in the political alliances now coalescing on the right, where anti-tax, government-off-our-backs libertarians are seen to lie down with religious conservatives who want a government at least expansive enough to make sure no one out there is doing anything of which Jesus might disapprove. Or consider the right-wing blogs' dueling weapon of choice, a practice known as "fisking" that consists of reproducing whole stories from other media and yelling at them in hectoring, frequently disjointed asides until the fisk-er either reaches the end of the text or passes out from hyperventilating. It's a performance whose outcome is fixed with a wink from the start, like professional wrestling or, more exactly, like the version of pro wrestling Rush Limbaugh brought to the radio so long ago now: heroes-and-villains political entertainment made in a controlled setting, with lots of ranting rhetorical takedowns and no fretting over questions of equal time or accuracy. It's a show, folks.

After years gone missing from the national stage, the other white America is out for payback and voting Republican

All the post-election blather about the composition of Bush's base proves that Karl Rove and the Bush GOP are right: The entire Democratic party establishment, along with the "serious" news outlets (the broadcast networks, the prestige daily papers), have no idea what's become of the white working class. None. They set it aside momentarily a mere 30 or so years ago and now they can't find it anywhere. Maybe this is why they have tended to give fundamentalist churches all the credit for Bush's victory: The Christian right is the only totemic explanation, so far, of where all the people who live off-radar have gone.

It's also a formidable part of the answer. Two or three years ago I sat at a middle school baseball game and listened to one mom recount her afternoon. Someone else had given rides to the kids who usually came to games with her. "And it was so weird," she said, "coming over here with their gear spread around the van but them gone. It was like the whole crew got raptured!" I didn't get the joke immediately, but everyone around me did. Until then it never occurred to me that the language of end times was a comfortable facet of everyday life for people I encountered regularly. Of course I knew there were evangelicals aplenty in the land, but I thought they were somewhere else, sitting on hard pews in country churches, not in the bleachers at baseball games near my house. What shocked me was to realize how little I knew about my neighbors, or them about me, and how quietly the gulf between us had grown up. Class is culture now, I thought later, and left vs. right in the usual sense has nothing to do with it; it's all about who's on the inside and who's on the outside.

And the most sorely inflamed outsiders in present-day America are the white working class. Over the past generation their lot has been erosion and instability, a state of affairs their country has commemorated by writing them out of the national story. To appreciate the magnitude of this disappearing act, let us try for a sense of proportion in the matter of winners and losers. While the national wealth grew in the '80s and '90s, the gains were passed to the top with a vengeance, so that in the end only about 20 percent of the populace actually made out as well or better from all the heralded expansion. During this time of supposedly boundless triumph, the other 80 percent have seen their real wages stagnate or shrink, with the brief exception of a few years during the late-90s stock market bubble. But since then, computer- and automation-driven productivity gains have only accelerated the thinning of ranks among middle and lower white-collar managers, a longtime redoubt of the white working stiff. The great majority of Americans now 25 to 54 years old are making out less well than their parents, a gulf they seek to bridge by working longer hours at more jobs per household and by taking on impossible levels of consumer debt. Their jobs not only pay less but have been broadly "re-engineered" to involve skills that are more limited and more fungible, and to skirt the necessity of offering employee benefits where possible: the temp-labor racket.

Yet in all this time, the crisis of average working Americans has never become a great political issue, and their image and outlook are no longer part of the American identity beamed back at us through media. Throughout the years of Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton, the country cultivated a boom-time mythology that exalted winners and rewarded them more lavishly than at any time in American history. From Reagan onward, market values routed all others; whatever the logic of maximum accumulation dictated was the way things had to go. When Bill Clinton and the Democrats came to power after 12 years of Republican rule in 1993, they offered the restive masses--lectures about personal responsibility. Eight more years of The New Normal made it seem a natural fact that you were a winner or a nobody, and in either case you were very much on your own. Mass culture followed the changes in political culture; the mundane, the merely life-sized, gave way to the glittering and fabulous. As for those other people--well, what other people? We don't see any other people around here. Thinking about the welfare of others became déclassé, no to mention dangerous to one's own standing.

To be an average, struggling white American in these years has been to feel untethered and neglected, dispossessed from your country's lavish success stories--gains that, according to the old rules of economics and skin caste, you should have been enjoying as well. White working people did not have it as bad as non-white working people, but they felt their marginality much more keenly because they thought they had been promised it would never happen to them. (Left Behind indeed.) As the Bush campaign demonstrated, their sense of exclusion and of betrayal by "the elites" is very top-of-mind these days. While this may sound like a blow-for-blow description of the Christian right, it's bigger than that, and better understood as a class revolt. The chattering classes have failed to notice that the religious fundamentalists are joined by a secular version of similar shape and vehemence, its sensibility honed not in the pulpit but at the sports desk. You can hear it on the radio every day.

Do you realize how much Rush Limbaugh and his progeny have done to reshape the way people think and talk about politics? It's fairly staggering. Limbaugh had two seminal insights; they were not his alone, but he brought them to market. The first was that class resentment simmered in the land, and could be harnessed to the purposes of the right by naming "liberals" as the stifling, oppressive elite in their path. It worked because it conjured images of the usual suspects in white working class dislocation--uppity women, people of other colors or national origins, the highfalutin and out-of-touch in Hollywood and Washington D.C. The second was to change the rules of political chatter so as to give the folks a better show. Limbaugh's forum was not a political talk show in the usual sense; there was no pretense to equal time or to respect for opposing views. Calls were screened meticulously, and Limbaugh did not venture into public to debate others in uncontrolled settings. Though it pretended to be spontaneous, his closed stage was part sporting ring and part theater, or in other words a drama not unlike professional wrestling. His métier was ridicule, the get-outta-here-with-that-nonsense! rhetorical body slam, a style that has come to define most of the radio and TV talk shows that are supposed to embody the urgent debates of the day. In Limbaugh's wake, talking about politics has become a lot more like talking about sports, one consequence being that anything done in the name of winning, or harassing the opponent, tends to become its own justification. (So what if Bush lied to secure the invasion of Iraq? a letter writer scolded me shortly after the war's start--it worked, didn't it?)

But if the secular, talk-radio right is not really synonymous with the Christian conservative crowd, there is one encompassing sentiment they share: that the world has been hijacked from beneath their feet, taken from them contrary to God's plan or the founding fathers' promise (choose one). They intend to take it back, and they are in an exceptionally nasty mood regarding terms of surrender.

"In your re-election," the Rev. Bob Jones wrote to Bush on November 3, "God has graciously granted America--though she doesn't deserve it--a reprieve from the agenda of paganism.... Don't equivocate. Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ." A former major league pitcher turned radio evangelist named Frank Pastore wrote in an LA Times op-ed, "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."

In other words, the appointed villains of the uprising (be they liberals, minions of Satan, or both) face the same Manichean spirit visited on the mass of average working folk for a couple of decades now: You'll be one of us, or nobody at all.

How's the reinvention of the Democrats going so far? A Bush Wars translation guide 

weholdthesetruths.org

1: What is it the Democrats need to do, James Carville?

The purpose of a political party in a democracy is to win elections. We're not doing that well enough. And I think that we can't deny that the problem exists. I think we have to confront the problem. And by and large, our message has been we can manage problems while the Republicans, although they will say we can solve problems, they produce a narrative, we produce a litany.... These guys had a narrative — we're going to protect you from the terrorists in Tikrit and from the homos in Hollywood. That's it. I think we could elect somebody from Beverly Hills if they had some compelling narrative to tell people about what the country is....

The underlying problem here is, there is no call to arms that the Democratic Party is making to the country. We've got to reassess ourselves. We've got to be born again.

Translation: Beats the fuck out of me. Could be we need to talk prettier.

2: Who's going to run the DNC?

An AP dispatch last week named Howard Dean as well as "Govs. Tom Vilsack of Iowa and Mark Warner of Virginia, and former Gov. Roy Barnes of Georgia. Harold Ickes, a New York lawyer who was a White House aide in the Clinton administration and has close ties to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., has a large following, especially in the Clinton wing of the party. Ickes is a passionate advocate and successful fund-raiser, but his Clinton ties might work against him among Democrats backing other candidates. Other names being circulated: Inez Tenenbaum, South Carolina's education superintendent and unsuccessful Senate candidate; and Simon Rosenberg, founder and president of the centrist New Democrat Network."

Incoming Senate Minority Leader Harry "I always would rather dance than fight" Reid has gone on record touting Vilsack, a colorless party hack who, with a little luck, could be another Dick Gephardt someday.

Translation: We gotta find someone who will play ball with the cash clientele. We can't give donors the idea we're going a whole new way here.

3: Where's the silver lining in this latest rout?

According to contributors at DailyKos and other pro-Dem bulletin board sites, it's that some moderate Republicans may jump ship and become Dems. Here's a few excerpts from one such thread:

I will repeat what I have written several times: If you are a moderate Republican, the message is clear. Your party does not want you. But, thanks to the conservative group Concerned Women for America, you no longer have to take my word for it. Their chief counsel has made that abundantly clear.

heck yeah, we want them! incumbents are hard to beat! but more to the point, i think we need to take these seats back to Dem either by changing the candidate's party or by getting our candidate in.

Why wouldn't we want them?  There's nothing inherently evil in fiscal conservatism (see John Kerry's record), it makes sense in a lot of ways, we just happen to disagree.  Heck, even on Kos we've been talking about increased states' rights etc (end red state welfare and all that).  I say, it's good that the moderate of the GOP are starting to see things as they are.  We need to make this more and more about the loonies that are still with Bush, after all this. This is even a good meme, even normal republicans (not neocon/religous wackos) are with us!

I want them too.  I think it's become a matter of semantics - that 'liberal' somehow doesn't equate to 'mainstream'.  The democratic party is mainstream, we just let the pubs frame all the issues in ways that make the it sound like we're on the fringe.

And so on, ad nauseam.

Translation: When the Democrats have absorbed enough alienated Republicans to make themselves resemble even more thoroughly the pre-Bush Republican party, the Democrats will be victorious again--booYAA, Republicans!

So there's your DNC post-election roundup: craven, false, same as it ever was.

Scheuer speaks out; Time highlights Mexico

Last night Michael Scheuer, the CIA bin Laden analyst and anonymous author of Imperial Hubris who resigned from the CIA on Friday, appeared on 60 Minutes. Scheuer said he believes that al Qaeda means to attack the US with nuclear weapons or radiological "dirty bombs," and disclosed that in May 2003 bin Laden obtained a fatwa from a Saudi cleric authorizing the use of nuclear weapons against America. (Scheuer also seems to believe that the bin Laden tape released just before the election may have constituted the convert-to-Islam-or-else warning that many Muslims would expect him to offer non-Muslims before a major attack.)

From CBS's written summary of the 60 Minutes report:

"You've written no one should be surprised when Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda detonate a weapon of mass destruction in the United States," says Kroft. "You believe that's going to happen?"

"I don't believe in inevitability. But I think it's pretty close to being inevitable," says Scheuer.

A nuclear weapon? "A nuclear weapon of some dimension, whether it's actually a nuclear weapon, or a dirty bomb, or some kind of radiological device," says Scheuer. "Yes, I think it's probably a near thing."

What evidence is there that bin Laden's actually working to do this? "He's told us it. Bin Laden is remarkably eager for Americans to know why he doesn't like us, what he intends to do about it and then following up and doing something about it in terms of military actions," says Scheuer. "He's told us that, 'We are going to acquire a weapon of mass destruction, and if we acquire it, we will use it.'"

And this morning Time features a dispatch regarding intelligence reports that al Qaeda may be planning to move WMD or the raw materials for making them through Mexico.

Mind if I borrow this flag?

It's amazing that anyone in the whole wide world takes the talk about Schwarzenegger in '08 seriously. Some do, though, and some journalists dutifully regurgitate it, either because they don't know any better or it's good copy. This is even more fatuous than the establishment Dems' Hillary dreams. Do you honestly think 38 states are going to pass an Arnold amendment to clear a path for the Terminator's first term? Do you think it will even be an unqualified hit in the (nativist, anti-celeb) red states? Enough already. It's more plausible that Dick Cheney will expire in his bunker during the next four years and an animatronic replica will succeed GWB.

The Passion of the Clinton

Aiiiggghh! (hogwild.net)

As if the beaming mugs of triumphal Bushmen were not enough to bear so soon on the heels of the election, now comes the inevitable Hillary talk. The website Readabet.com lists her as the favorite to win the Big House in '08 at 5-1 odds; Rudy Giuliani is second at 15-2.

I rarely give financial advice at Bush Wars, but personally I'd be comfortable betting against her at those odds. Bush on his most unpopular day has not been as polarizing a figure as Hillary Clinton, and she will never occupy the White House. Her insuperable liability is that she excites an arch reaction from cultural conservatives who suppose her to be liberal and uppity, while she is in fact neither and hence cannot call upon the loyalties of any avid backers to counter her opponents' numbers and zeal. (Here's a side bet you should take as well, if you can find it: She would certainly not win the women's vote. Never mind all the working class women who don't like her; she is not even very popular among white middle-class feminists anymore, as the Village Voice reported last year.) Her "base" consists of the most blinkered segment of the Dem intelligentsia, the element that is still bedazzled by Bill or convinced that all the party needs is a star to head its ticket.

I'm not sure any of the above fatally injures her chance of being the nominee, however. Look at the field: John "Cat Got My Tongue" Edwards and the rest. Do you suppose Joe Lieberman sees another big opening?   

The Democrats' mandate: Keep polishing the same turd until it shines

Today's Washington Post reveals that there's a new player in Democratic party circles: Third Way, a dead-in-its-cradle alternative to the Democratic Leadership Council that would replace the bankrupt values of the DLC with--the bankrupt values of the DLC. The story is freighted with such telling constructions as "moderate majority" and "progressive centrists." Is this all eerily familiar somehow? It ought to be. It's the siren song of the Clinton era, right down to the "Third Way" clap-trap, which amounts to a repackaging of the first and only way, which is Republican governance dedicated to building armies and facilitating commerce and accumulation. 

In more consequential news, the Bush family has named its new puppy, a Scottish terrier, Miss Beazley.

The verdict on "values": It's a political advantage to have some

Whitehouse.gov

[Here's a preview of the column that will appear in Wednesday's City Pages (11/10).]

Newsweek reports that John Kerry met his fate last Tuesday with a howl of incomprehension: "I can't believe I'm losing to this idiot." In the days after the election, the same clatter of fury and condescension rang through blog chat boards and pro-Dem websites, and it was directed ultimately not at "this idiot" but by implication at the tens of millions of idiots who voted for him. As the Mirror of London put it, echoing popular European sentiment, "How Can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?"

The tabloid cover bearing that headline has become a smash-hit download in the US as well as the UK. One Floridian member of an email list I receive added this remark by science fiction writer Bruce Sterling to her mail signature: "We live under the Confederacy. We're a podunk bunch of swaggering pious hicks." So great was the indignation that the empty plaints of a few celebrities who groused about leaving the country in 2000 became a popular badge of outrage last week. It took little imagination to see that the would-be émigrés were not fleeing their government so much as their countrymen, the troglodyte fundamentalist horde that imposed this result on them.  Bush Republicans seemed pleased at this: "Americans Flock to Canada's Immigration Web Site," the Drudge Report gloated. And why shouldn't they be pleased? They recognize the growing polarization of the country and they mean to exploit it. No appreciable number of people is really leaving, but if they are made to forswear any attention to or involvement in the whole sordid mess going forward, something similar is accomplished. 

For the opponents of Bushism to vent this way, to think this way, is profoundly dangerous. Also wrong, not just as a matter of principle but as a matter of fact. But it is also consistent with a long line of Democratic apologia whose specialty is blaming the victims of the party's own abdications and failures. To put it another way, it isn't possible to discuss what the voters said last week absent some reckoning with what they were never given the chance to say.

But first a little about what the numbers do say. Turnout, in the end, met extravagant predictions: By the time absentee ballots are processed, nearly 120 million votes will have been tallied, reflecting the largest percentage of voter participation since 1960. The evangelicals have been boasting all week that they carried the election for Bush. They certainly helped--in retrospect, it seems clear that Karl Rove's most consequential move was to ensure that gay marriage became a ballot referendum in so many states, and especially Ohio--but to say they won it is a very large stretch. Oddly enough, the percentage of self-identified Protestants supporting Bush declined by 4 points from 2000 to 2004. According to exit polls, 17.9 percent of voters were white evangelicals who voted for Bush. But that number is almost exactly offset by the percentage of voters who said they came to the polls to cast a vote against Bush (17.5). So it's hard to make the case that religious conservatives all by themselves gave the race to Bush. The fabled "middle" had something to do with it too. 

The website politicaljunkie.org compiled this list of how the president and the Republicans fared with 19 different segments of the population. Bush, you will note, improved his standing in 16 of 19 common demographic categories. I've tagged the ones where Kerry and the Democrats gained share with an asterisk for easy reference:

Bush vote % in 2000/2004

African-Americans:  8/11
Whites:  54/58
Hispanic:  41/44
Married:  53/56
Not Married:  38/40
Union Members:  37/40
* Gays:  25/23
Gun Owners:  61/67
* Protestants:  63/59
Jewish:  19/25
Catholics:  45/52
Republicans:  91/93
Democrats:  10/11
Men:  51/55
Women:  43/48

* 18-29 year olds:  46/45
30-44 year olds: 49/53
45-59 year olds: 49/51
60+:   47/54

"Bush's gay base is eroding," said CP's Paul Demko in a sepulchral croak when he got a look at these numbers. And so it is, along with the Republicans' share of the aforementioned Protestants and of 18-29-year-olds (though barely, and by less than the margin of Bush's improved share among 30-44-year-olds). Otherwise most key demographic markers trended slightly more Republican than in 2000. Of course there are countless ways to parse a pool of numbers this large, and one of the most felicitous for Democrats is to note that first-time voters broke for Kerry 53-46. The trouble is, this merely restates a premise to which everyone assented going in: The election had shaped up to be a referendum on Bush and would be settled in part by the magnitude of the anti-Bush turnout among people who don't usually vote.

Over four in 10 Kerry voters said their ballot was cast not so much for its recipient as against Bush. What to make of this number? From a tactical standpoint, was the Anybody But Bush vote too great or too paltry a portion of Kerry's total for him to succeed? Applied in retrospect this is a trick question, but perhaps a useful one. Certainly we can say that with respect to the campaign Kerry chose to conduct, it was too low. From springtime until "Kerry the closer" finally reared his head in the October debates, scarcely anything memorable--much less rousing--emanated from the Kerry camp. That was basically the plan: Stand back and let Bush be Bush, then move in to claim the spoils. As for building a sustained case against Bush, well--why? He was far too coarse and obvious to make that necessary, wasn't he? Everyone could see what was going on--the Times and the Post were full of dire stories from Iraq!

There is class hauteur in this, but there is also a generation's worth of evidence that something else is in play. The loudest clue is a matter of silence and omission, of all the things Democrats running for president refuse to say even when there is a fairly clear electoral advantage to be had by it. And that gets to this week's most fondled statistic, the values question.

Early in the evening on election night, network anchors noticed that the number one issue to voters was something called "moral values," not jobs and the economy, not terrorism, not Iraq. It remains the most fruitless obsession of pundits in last Tuesday's wake. Dick Meyer, writing at the CBS News website, put the matter into perspective as a bit of poll-craft: "While the nexus of issues boiled into the words 'moral values' certainly were a big factor in this election, it's being exaggerated... partly because the Big Theory conforms with what Republican strategists want you to believe. If the poll had been worded or constructed only slightly differently, moral values would not have been the top issue....

"If, for example, one of the issues on the list was a combined 'terrorism and Iraq,' it would have been the top concern of 34 percent of the electorate and nobody would be talking about moral values. If 'taxes, jobs and the economy' was on the list as one item instead of two, it would have been the topper at 25 percent. If, say, abortion rights, gay marriage and moral values were all on the list separately, the numbers would be very different."

But if "values voters" is mostly just a less inflammatory way of saying "Christian conservatives," the phrase still nudges the conversation in the right direction. Last Wednesday morning Vin Weber stood before a gathering of Republican movers at the Center of the American Experiment and told them the Democrats had lost the election over the values question, and not just the cluster of conservative values everyone was talking about. They had lost, essentially, because they didn't have any values: "The Democrats are going to go through a real soul-searching period," he said. "They'll conclude they lost the election because they didn't have a liberal enough candidate." Weber wasn't sneering at the idea, though some of those present were said to laugh. He was serious.

There's a reason Republicans win more than their share of close elections: They see the composition and the exploitable wishes and prejudices of the possible voter pool much more clearly. The Democrats are by no means in agreement on the point, however. While there are calls for a putsch to depose the party's old guard once and for all, the dominant institutional voice in the party remains the Democratic Leadership Council, spawned in the Clinton era and nurtured by him, whose credo is that no Democrat ever stands so tall as when he or she is outflanking a Republican on the right.

Since the election, DLC chair Al From has been exhorting Democrats to redouble their efforts in this regard: to "do a better job with connecting with those people who go to work every day and play by the rules.... Let's get a message and redefine our party in a way that people will want to vote for us, ... [and] a candidate who eliminates the 'culture gap,' eliminates the 'security gap,' is willing to compete all over this country." In the space of a couple of sentences, that is, From pledges to swallow religious-right values--spitting up, most likely, only a categorical reversal of Roe; continued chipping at access is fine--military budgets (and actions?) in line with the example of Bush, and indeed to run conservative enough to compete in Southern states, places where Kerry scored as little as 37 percent of the vote this year. 

Back to values. I can already hear the protests that the people have spoken, they are mean buggers on the whole, and Democrats have to face reality. Yes, but which reality? It's true that surveys of the American populace as a whole (rarer than you think; the voting pool is where all the money lies for pollsters) indicate that we are a more conservative lot in our social outlook than the federal government has been for the past 40 years or so. But it is also true that these same studies show the people as a whole to be considerably more liberal on economic issues--the things for which they are willing to tax and spend--than the federal governments of the post-Nixon era, Republican and Democrat alike. There is an enormous opening to talk about economic values. 

But I doubt this news will send Al From or any other Democrat back to the drawing board. They already know it, as do Republicans, which is presumably why Vin Weber drew the conclusion he did. Yet the game plan of the DLC is nothing if not unswerving. It involves tinkering on the margins of the voter pool--while making few if any concrete promises, at least to those who are not major donors--and minimizing any substantive differences with Republicans. To say it boils down to hoping that enough voters will feel like a Pepsi on election day to turn the result would be oversimplifying, but not by much. (Ironically, the Democrats are so deaf to popular concern that they neglected two issues in which they could have legitimately claimed a difference attractive to many voters: the privacy rights of Americans, aka the domestic war on terror, and the future of the court system.)

This us-too gambit has really not worked so well, especially if one is honest and admits that the "Clinton era" would never have been but for two factors beyond the Democrats' control: the unique wild card presented by Ross Perot in 1992, and later the incredible public meanness and arrogance of the Gingrich gang, which took the heat off a White House then on the skids in public approval.

Why? The answer is not hard to grasp, though so far it has remained absolutely unthinkable to a dwindling but still large number of what you might call the party's emotional loyalists, the lifers who agonize every four years about bringing the party back to its roots. The answer is, Follow the money. The primary object of the Democratic party's efforts is not to win elections, or to secure a future base, or for that matter to secure any base at all. They would like to do all those things, of course, but the first order of business is to build and maintain a party responsive to its cash clients, the donor base, and to work at putting a popular face on the real narrowness of their interests.

As New York Times tax writer and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David Cay Johnston said at a Minneapolis luncheon recently, both parties' core policies are dictated by a class of political donors that constitutes about 1/100th of a percent of the US population, Democrats scarcely less than Republicans. The Republicans are already the public face of this group's political interests; the GOP owns the brand, as it were, and to compound the Democrats' troubles, Republicans also do a better job selling it to the working class. The problem of modern electioneering is mainly one of marketing, and the game will continue to tilt Republican until a political party emerges from the wreckage of the DNC, likely as not bearing the name Democrats but somewhat more dedicated to wooing--and earning--voters as compared to dollars. I'm not holding my breath, but don't let me stop you.  

Molly Priesmeyer contributed reporting to this story.

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Once upon a time, persecuted Christians were fed to lions. Now, apparently, the Christians are feeling so flush with power that they're accosting the lions.