By David Green
And so it has finally ended, this lengthy and tortuous election cycle which cut to the core of the contemporary American psyche.
Well, sort of… As of this writing (Wednesday morning), it would appear that we have a president-elect, but not yet quite. John Kerry has not yet conceded Ohio, which means he has not yet conceded the election. We don’t yet have a definitive count of the number of absentee and provisional ballots outstanding, and thus it is difficult to know just how long a long shot is his quest to make up the 120,000 or so votes he is down in that state.
Wisely, Kerry is not giving in prematurely, as we learned four years ago a candidate should not under these circumstances. Nevertheless, clearly it was a Republican night all around, and for the sake of this discussion, I will assume that the presidency will fall to George W. Bush as well.
Two important questions thus remain: How did it happen, and where do we go from here? The former is much easier to answer than the latter. This election victory for Bush was based on several factors.
First is just plain luck, assuming that one isn’t so given to conspiracy theories as to believe that Bush knew 9/11 was coming and allowed it to happen. In any case, this event rescued his presidency from likely disaster, especially given that he would have made most all the policy choices he did, including the invasion of Iraq, even if it hadn’t happened. At the time of the attack Bush’s presidency was already tanking, and would likely have gotten far worse with the Iraq debacle. In short, the difference, in the public perception, between a hero worthy of reelection and a destructive boy king imposed on us by five partisans on the Supreme Court comes down to four airplanes, nineteen hijackers and a bag of box cutters.
The second factor is skill. Bush and his political guru Karl Rove ran a textbook campaign. Any objective analysis of his presidency makes this clear, as he was asking for reelection despite a record of disastrous failure on all fronts. To get people to believe otherwise or better yet, to focus on the alleged liabilities of the challenger – as they did, represents no small achievement.
Third, there was the breathtaking ineptitude of the Kerry campaign. Though he got better as the weeks rolled along, it was too little too late, and the much-ballyhooed “Kerry the Closer” never showed up to seal the deal. More importantly, he let Bush do it instead. Presidential politics today is all about winning the air war of framing and definition. Smart politicians frame the campaign in ways that benefit them, and define themselves and their opponents in the same fashion. Dumb politicians allow themselves to be framed and defined.
Kerry was inordinately dumb. Bush made this a campaign about security, which was his only plausible winning hand. Kerry let him. Bush defined himself as strong and his opponent as weak. Kerry let him. That’s most of what one needs to know to explain the brick wall now attached to John Kerry’s forehead. But what’s remarkable about this is what old news it is. This has been conventional wisdom for decades now, though the message was apparently lost on Bob Schrum, Kerry’s Rove-equivalent (at least in his dreams), who has now lost eight out of eight presidential elections he has run (he was actually part of one which did win – Jimmy Carter’s in 1976 – but he quit in protest before the end). You gotta love this guy, and you gotta love a candidate who would pick him with a record like that.
Finally, there is context. America is feeling threatened (which the Bush camp was glad to accentuate), its media has both consolidated, gone almost completely corporate, and has become substantially dominated by right-wing disinformation machines, and – despite the fury of this election and the gravity of the choice – its public is still remarkably disengaged from deciding their own future. While turnout was up in this election, still nearly half of eligible voters couldn’t be bothered. One wonders what it would take to motivate these people.
More chilling is the degree to which many Bush voters have detached themselves from empirical reality, in favor of imperial fantasy. A survey recently published showed supporters of the president to be dramatically ill-informed about basic factual data such as whether WMD were found in Iraq, or what the world thinks of America. This seems to be a likely result of a frightening brew of outright White House lies, completely biased “reporting” among the Fox/NY Post/Limbaugh set, and public abdication of their role as informed citizens in a democracy. It is the stuff of which Orwell could craft his 1984 dystopia, more relevant today than ever.
What comes next for America and the world is, of course, far harder to read. Much depends on the instincts of the Bush government. Given the bold arrogance which they’ve displayed on the basis of their anti-mandate from election 2000, the smart money has to be on far more of the same for the coming four years, given Bush’s substantial victory in the popular vote this time, and the Republican pick-up of seats in both houses of Congress.
But presidential second terms have a real tendency to go south (ask Wilson, Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan or Clinton), and the sheer hubris of this crowd suggests an appointment with the laws of political physics which could be rather profound. If truth be told, somewhere in the recesses of their demoralized hearts, progressives have secretly wished for a second Bush term on the theory that he should be in the Oval Office when the chickens come home to roost.
And they may be some very foul fowl, indeed. Iraq looks to be in near melt-down mode, and the choices available to the next president will be extremely limited, while the costs in dollars, deaths and the need for a draft will pile high. My own guess is that Bush will follow the advice given to Johnson on Vietnam, and will declare victory and then retreat. If this happens, even in an America seemingly so willfully intent on imperial self-delusion, only so many people will continue to be able to see Bush’s new clothes.
Multiply that scenario across numerous domains – the national debt, cutbacks on social spending, jobs hemorrhaging, global warming, Iranian and North Korean weapons proliferation, the abolition of abortion rights, etc., and one sees the problems Bush faces for his second term. And that is in the absence of a major scandal, an unlikely development in my judgment. All in all, with Republicans in charge of government as far as the eye can see, it is the very conservative movement which may be at risk of total repudiation in the future, rather than one president seeking reelection.
It is also possible that Bush, having now perhaps vanquished the ghost of personal insecurity and paternal inferiority which has clearly haunted him throughout his life, and taking a whiff or two of the “legacy” fragrance likely to be wafting through the White House these next years, will become the centrist he campaigned as in 2000, portraying himself as the great “healer” of America’s deep divisions. After all, he doesn’t have to win any more elections, and he can still keep his base happy with a couple of Clarence Thomas-like Supreme Court nominations. However, given my belief that the Bush administration is fundamentally about power and money, my bet would not be that we’re going to see a kinder, gentler W, but rather just the opposite.
The future for progressives and for the Democratic Party is equally hard to read. Democrats will now pull hair and gnash teeth trying to figure out what went wrong. They might blame the candidate, his politics (if anyone can figure out what they were), the context, or a host of other scapegoats. Chances are they’ll get it wrong, even in the unlikely event that a coherent analysis emerges and can be transmitted to primary voters in 2008.
The short answer to the question is Howard Dean, literally and figuratively. Kerry was the wrong choice during the Democratic primaries, Dean was the right one. Kerry got the nomination, Dean didn’t. Republicans won the election, Democrats didn’t.
It’s not so much Dean the person, who admittedly has his liabilities as a candidate. It’s a matter of conviction. The public craves conviction in its would-be leadership, and will follow a true leader even in directions it knows are profoundly wrong, as long as that person leads. This is why the flip-flop argument was so central to the Bush campaign, and so devastatingly effective. Notwithstanding either Bush’s own series of major flip-flops (global warming emissions standards, the 9/11 commission, the Homeland Security Department, etc.) or alternatively his inane failure to change course where it is so badly needed (deficits, Iraq, etc.), he was partly correct about Kerry: the man lacks convictions on key issues. Kerry clearly tried to finesse his way to the presidency, apparently jettisoning whatever courage he once possessed as a younger man. Voters don’t respect that, and nor should they.
A politician like Howard Dean can be the salvation of both the progressive movement (although he is hardly the flaming liberal he was portrayed as) and the Democratic Party. The latter has spent a full quarter century now in existential melt-down, and losing elections because of it. But depicting the Democrats as a party in search of principles these last decades is too charitable a description. In fact, it has been nothing less than a party which has continually thrown principles overboard wherever it thought that would result in capturing this office or that. The party is a captive of its corporate and other interest groups, and has appeared to voters too often as little more than Republican Lite. No wonder they lose, and no wonder the donkey Brahmins were scared to death of Dean and had him crushed.
In the end, the best salvation for the progressive movement in America will likely be time. Voters who reluctantly chose Bush this time, may soon begin to experience some serious buyer’s remorse, just as German voters did in reelecting the Schroder government in 2002. And, when the conservative movement delivers fully on their agenda, many people may realize how much of a departure that is from their actual preferences (though this election demonstrates the remarkable capacity of many voters to fail to recognize their own interests, or what Marxists call false consciousness).
If American democracy can survive a second Bush administration, including the holy war with Islam it is doing so much to exacerbate, a possible second massive terrorist attack and its further implications for civil liberties and democracy, and the profoundly anti-democratic tendencies of the conservative kleptocracy now so empowered in America – if all these threats can be transcended – a simple demographic factor may swing the ideological pendulum back to the left in this country.
For better or worse, the Baby Boom generation has been the 800 pound gorilla of American politics for four decades now, and will likely continue to be. Figuring out the logic of this cohort’s politics has not been easy, but it seems to me that the thematic thread which can successfully tie together anti-war protest and cultural hedonism with subsequent economic conservatism is simple selfishness. Boomers were the contemptuous left when they were young, not wealthy, and queued up for the meat grinder that was Vietnam. Once the war was over and they had careers and houses, they became that which they had previously loathed. Either way, they profoundly moved America’s ideological center of gravity in their direction.
And they are not done yet. These are the folks about to retire. These are the folks who have spent a lifetime contributing to Social Security and Medicare programs which conservatives will seek to dismantle, perhaps under the pretense of unaffordability, despite the fact that it was their tax policies which have made this so.
These are the folks whose children and grandchildren may be called up for the latest American meat grinder in Iraq. These are the self interested generation who will swing back from reluctant contributors to the American social safety net program to voracious recipients.
They may find that the America they expected to be waiting for them is not there. They may remember the old one of their youth, which took care of the elderly and the infirm and which was a responsible world citizen. And if they do, they may want it back.