[Peace-discuss] Republicans Gain Shattering Victory; Who to Blame This Time?

Wed Nov 3 22:03:57 CST 2004

To supplement  the Schadenfreude in the analysis of Cockburn and St. 
Clair, I recommend the comments on ZNet (http://www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm) 
by Justin Podur ("the Morning After") and Doug Ireland ("Why Kerry 
Lost").

mkb

On Nov 3, 2004, at 3:38 PM, Phil Stinard wrote:

> Late-breaking article from Counterpunch:
>
> Democrats in End Time
> Republicans Gain Shattering Victory; Who to Blame This Time?
>
> By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
> and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
>
> The crusade that George Bush called for in 2001 against terrorism from 
> abroad came to fruition yesterday in a more homely context as 
> Christians flocked to the polls in stronger numbers than in 2000 to 
> battle against such manifestations of post-modernity as gay marriage.
>
> There are many reasons for what is an overwhelming Republican victory 
> across the board. They range from the disastrous choice of John 
> Edwards as Kerry's running mate to delusions about the potency of 
> electronic organizing (that should have been demolished after Howard 
> Dean's implosion last spring), to the fatal deficiencies of Kerry 
> himself.
>
> The strategy of the Democratic Party as formulated by DNC chairman 
> Terry McAuliffe amounted to belief in the simple potency of corporate 
> cash, plus hysterical demonization of Bush and Nader, represented at 
> full stretch by Michael Moore, who began the year backing General 
> Wesley Clarke and ended it as a pied piper for Kerry. They came to the 
> Rubicon of November 2 replete with fantasies, about the unknown cell 
> phone vote, the youth vote (which actually remained unchanged from 
> 2000), the galvanizing potential of Bruce Springsteen and Eminem.
>
> Week after week Kerry and his boosters displayed an unmatched deafness 
> to political tone. The haughty elitist from Boston probably lost most 
> of the Midwest forever when he said in the high summer that foreign 
> leaders hoped he would win. The applause of the French in Cannes for 
> Michael Moore's 9/11 was the sound of the cement drying over the 
> corpse of Kerry's chances of carrying the Midwest. Soros's dollars 
> were like flowers on the grave. After the billionairess 
> Portuguese-American Teresa Heinz Kerry said in mid-October that Laura 
> Bush had never held a job it was all over.
>
> If there was a visual premonition of why George Bush would achieve a 
> popular majority beyond challenge it was probably the photographs of 
> gay couples celebrating their marriages outside San Francisco's city 
> hall. America is a very Christian country. In the regular national 
> survey conducted by the University of Chicago in 2002, 53 per cent of 
> the adult population identified themselves as Protestant, 25 per cent 
> as Catholic, 3 per cent as Christians of some other denomination, 3 
> per cent as adhering to "other religions", 2 per cent as Jewish and 14 
> per cent as having "no religion". That's a lot of Christians, and 
> though many of them may have had a mature tolerance for the preference 
> of Dick and Lynn Cheney's daughter Mary, a strong percentage felt very 
> strongly that state sanction of same sex marriage was going way too 
> far.
>
> There was a ballot initiative in Ohio to ban gay marriage and it was 
> probably what helped Bush overcome the smoldering ruins of the Ohio 
> economy and the increasing unpopularity of the war.
>
> October surprises? No candidate was more burdened by them than George 
> Bush. Just in the last couple of weeks, headlines brought tidings of 
> US marines killed in Baghdad and other US troops rising up in mutiny 
> against lack of equipment to protect their lives. The president's 
> brother Neil was exposed as influence peddling on the basis of his 
> family connections. The economic numbers remained grim as they have 
> been all year. And this was just the icing on the cake. You can troll 
> back over the past fifteen months and find scarce a headline or news 
> story bringing good tidings for Bush. History is replete with 
> revolutions caused by a rise in the price of bread. This year the 
> price of America's primal fluid--oil--on which every household 
> depends, tripled.
>
> But Kerry and the Democrats were never able to capitalize on any of 
> these headlines, a failure which started when Democrats in Congress, 
> Kerry included, gave the green light to the war on Iraq, and which 
> continued when Kerry conclusively threw away the war and WMD issues in 
> August. When he tried to a chord change at NYU on September 20 it was 
> too late and even then his position remained incoherent. He offered no 
> way out. More tunnel, no light.
>
> It was like that for Kerry on almost every issue. Outsourcing is a big 
> issue in the rustbelt, yet here was Kerry forced to concede that he 
> had voted for the trade pacts and still supported them. All he 
> offered, aside from deficit busting (which plays to the bond market 
> but not to people working two jobs), was some tinkering with the tax 
> code alarming to all those millions of Americans who play the lottery 
> and believe that if they are not yet making more than $200,000 a year 
> they soon will.
>
> Edwards added absolutely nothing to the ticket. At least Dan Quayle 
> held Indiana back in 1988 and 2002. No one state in the south went 
> into Kerry's column. Gore did better in Florida and West Virginia. 
> Dick Gephardt would certainly have brought the Democratic ticket 
> Missouri and probably Iowa and hence the White House.
>
> The Republicans played, on the ground, to the bedrock members of their 
> party, and got them to the polls. The Kerry campaign conducted an air 
> war from 30,000 feet, bombarding the population with vague alarums and 
> somehow thinking that ABB (Anyone But Bush) would pull them through. 
> There was indeed a lot of popular animosity towards Bush but the 
> Democrats could never capitalize on it. The crucial machinery of any 
> political party is organization, its capacity to rally its supporters 
> on the big day. In this crucial area the Democratic Party is in an 
> advanced state of disrepair. The SEIU wasted $70 million of its 
> members' dues money attacking Ralph Nader. A grotesque amount of 
> energy went into trying to suppress the Nader vote. They did suppress 
> it and this achievement gained them nothing, except, perhaps, the 
> destruction of the Green Party.
>
> It's as grim a day for the Democrats as was 1980 when the Republicans 
> swept the board. What will the Democrats do? You can already hear the 
> Democratic Leadership Council cranking up its message that you can 
> only beat the Republicans by outflanking them on the right. The Nader 
> alibi has gone. The Democratic Party and its leaders have nowhere else 
> to look than in the mirror. They would do well to examine Nader's 
> critiques, but we bet they won't.
>
>
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