November 2004

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Meet the New Dems

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.

Posted by Steve Perry at November 17, 2004 10:56 AM

 

CIA Analyst on al Qaeda: Next Time, Nukes?

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.

Posted by Steve Perry at November 15, 2004 9:24 AM

 

Equal Time: The GOP Sucker Bet

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.

Posted by Steve Perry at November 14, 2004 9:31 AM

 

The Sucker Bet for '08: Hillary

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?   

Posted by Steve Perry at November 12, 2004 8:56 AM

 

Oh, No: The "Third Way" Again

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.

Posted by Steve Perry at November 11, 2004 9:55 AM

 

Don't Blame the Voters

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.

Posted by Steve Perry at November 8, 2004 5:04 PM

 

The Post-Election Story of the Year,
So Far

WKMG-TV, Orlando, Florida--

Man Survives Jump Into Lion's Den

46-Year-Old Reportedly Trying To Convert Lions To Christianity

Read the story.

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. 

Posted by Steve Perry at November 4, 2004 10:58 AM

 

Four More Years

I've been writing for the past couple of days at City Pages' election blog. I'll have a post-mortem column posted here in the next day or so.

Posted by Steve Perry at November 4, 2004 10:10 AM

 

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